The New Metrotoy

I have been, on occasion, known to play the guitar. The reaction, when I play, varies. My music has been known to evoke mild amusement, and sometimes broken sobbing--particularly from people in the same room.

Nevertheless, I perservere in the face of this Philistinism. However, it has occurred to me that a few lessons probably wouldn't go amiss. Being known as "The Jack Benny of Guitar" is wearisome after a time.

However, there is a minor issue regarding lessons. It's time. Or rather, it's about time and the general lack thereof. I do not believe that Mme Metro is sincere in her threats to leave if I find "just one more" activity, but there has been a sort of suitcase-y atmosphere about the place lately.

She's really not being fair, I think. It's not as though I'm overcomitted:

1) Two to three nights a week for poker.
2) Four nights a week in rehearsal and performance (A Midsummer Night's Dream)
3) Sailing, swimming, and generally hanging around beaches.
4) Oh--and work (There are surely better ways to spend eight hours a day, but my shot at hippying around North America in a VW microbus is on hold until I have a pension because, well, I like to eat, quite frankly. And even more so if I have been ingesting certain hippyish substances, so the Doritos fund must be fed).

Mme finds most of these pursuits not at all entertaining, and has occasionally expressed an interest in me dropping one or several activities. She complains that the housework, which apparently came free with purchase of house, isn't getting done, and implies that this is my fault.

"How can it be?" I answer with my usual unerring logic: "I hardly ever have time to do any!" Furthermore, it seems to me that since I'm mostly not home to mess the place up, the responsibility for cleaning it should lie elsewhere. Not with Mme, necessarily, but I have noticed that those bloody cats mess the place up all the time, and not only do they get away clean, but I am forced to clean up after them!

However, my physician has warned that the ringing in my ears may become permanent if I advance this theory again within the hearing of my wife.

My alternate reply--that staying out of the house more would alleviate the pressure to clean it, somewhat, has not, thus far, met with diplomatic politeness.

I have explained endlessly that there's plenty of time for us to share through the winter months, when it gets too cold for the beach. I mean, it worked for Persephone, didn't it?

In any case, it seems nothing will suffice but that I limit myself to the few activities listed. Though I keep buying the odd lottery ticket, purely at random (because they tell me the winning ticket will be a random one) in an effort to spend more time at home during the day.

So guitar lessons, as an added activity, are out, rather.

So the other day Mme and I went to Future Shop to buy a digital camera (did I tell you the Kodak bit the dust two days following purchase? We bought a Canon SD1100--great little unit). And standing along the back wall was this little number:



It's a Yamaha EZ-AG. The equivalent of an instrument with training wheels. Perfect for the thumb-fingered learner (namely me). It has LED chord buttons that demonstrate where your fingers need to go. Poifect!

Price: $180 or so. On clearance. Soooo ... not. Terribly. Cheap. At a time when money is tighter than the Bush administration around a courthouse.

So the other day I tried looking it up at futureshop.ca, hoping to find a web special. God. Help. Us. Their search engine is a search engine like Stevie Wonder is a marksman. For the vast majority of queries it tenders the reply: "Your search for "" returned no results. Please piss off."

Okay, I added that last bit. But it is a site guaranteed to try the patience of a saint (Why do people think saints were patient anyway? Most of them were so impatient to get closer to a god that they persuaded people to send them to meet him ahead of schedule in a variety of excessively nasty ways). Suffice it to say that futureshop.ca's web lackeys have a lot of work ahead of them if they give a $#17 about actually serving the customer.

However, there's a dark cloud wrapped around every silver lining. I contacted a Future Shop lackey, after stumbling through trying to describe what I wanted. I asked him a few lame questions. Then just as I was about to hang up he said:

"if you take the demo model, you can have it for fifty bucks."

Gentle reader, the store was closing in an hour, and I live forty minutes away, plus a local construction delay. However, I secured the deal for the following day. At $50, Mme Metro was reluctantly persuaded to allow me to invest in my future rockstar status object. And so yesterday we picked it up.

Today I know ninety percent of the chord shapes for "Hard Day's Night." I love this gadget.

It came without peripherals, but the Yamaha support site seems friendly enough. Perhaps I'll post a song or two out here once I figure out the software ...

Hey! Where ya going? Come back here!