hehe, i remember leaving a cache by the side of ther trail down to waipio valley, hawaii, which consisted of my treasured 'whole earth catalog' and a reel-t-reel tape recorder somene had turned me on to a few nights earlier in berkeley... it was a relief, as i'd been carrying it on my head for a couple of miles...

hope someone got good use from that!

i save old guitar strings, my dystopian horror vision is running out, and no wire factory to replace them.

gutting cats again...the things people do to get great sounds.

i also collect cheapish acoustic instruments,,, like a sight-unseen acoustic bass guitar for €130 offa ebay...it works...

life without good bass lines....unimaginable...

picked up the umpteenth percussion instrument from the fair trade shop, a maraca from ghana, the other day in castiglione del lago.

as another sign that my subconch is preparing for peak oil, i lost my car that day.

i walked around for two hours trying to find it, but the streets were like a mobius strip, and i thought i was going insane, no really this time...

finally broke down and went to the traffic police, whose first question was: 'are you english?'

cultural aha moment...

apparently it's always the brits who space where their cars are parked!

food for rumination, when the blushing stops.

travelling, guitar is my best friend, and mandolin doesn't take up much extra space, considering what it gives in return.

getting the baby grand piano into the chestnutpicker's cottage was a real pain, about took off the pergola in the process, a small price for having that sound in the middle of the woods.

the drum set in the living room is a bit invasive, but you get used to it...

good company is our greatest human need, and voluntarily eschewing 'consumer goods' (aka 'subsumer bads') gives more loft to life, to borrow the mongolfier analogy.

possessions do dull the mind usually, unless you chose them well and use them wisely.

planned obsolescence, a throwaway attitude to everything, these are a sad byproduct of our extreme ignorance in the so-called first world, aka corporate global plutocracy.

tripping around the third world gives one a whole new attitude about the material plane.

it's embarassing to think what we take for granted, and what it costs the planet.

wildly superfluous the bulk of it, and it causes so much envy and greed, status-seeking through pointless, futile, energy hoggery.

in my culture my lifestyle is that of a 'failure', economically, but when you see real poverty, the whole artefact of western consumer culture is revealed for what it is...a ridiculously vertical concoction, as befitting a testament to human folly and hubris as the manhattan skyline.

i got it when i was 18...we had supermarkets in london where the doors opened automatically (really new in 1969); and all the fruits and veggies looked like little cloned bot-simul-replicas, reasonable facsimilies...

and in morocco the fruit and veg markets were a sensory paradise, everything looked, smelt and tasted soooo gooood.

and i thought....we think we're AHEAD of these guys...the whole sorry lie capsized in on itself...terminal overload...cog-diss alarm, my god, what is in that koolaide?

so if you're walking in the woods and you hear post-apocalyptic chords filtering through the leaves, let's hope you know how to tune pianos!

if your pack is full of guitar strings, you can share my chestnuts!

if your heart has lucre as your god, keep walking... it's may be firewood to you, but to me these instruments are seeds for a new civilisation, and my ipod bit the dust after a month.

my old baby guild i picked up for $100 in '75 sounds better each day, as does the old j45 that i found for $250 in '80.

i'm told they're worth $1000's today, yet i don't even think about it.

what they are is the perfect marriage between time, love, great craftmanship and sound materials...

and you can take that to the bank....

er, not....

great diary and comments, you are a very amusing bunch of humourists, the kind you need to stare down peak oil with...

and de, i knew you're an optimist...

me too, better crazy than right in my case.

the traffic cops helped me find the errant veehicky, and i got to ride in the patrol car, whee.

mo'ron' moments

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty