music: Miles Davis- ‘Round About Midnight
I don’t own much stuff by American standards. Besides a couple boxes and drawers full of old relics in Milwaukee, my bicycle and car, and a few assorted odds and ends, I can fit all my worldly possessions into a 9’ × 12’ bedroom. I think that’s pretty cool, as I sit in my room surrounded by pretty much everything I own. I’m rolling on a backpacker’s mentality: only carry what you need (or really, really value) and be sure to use everything you carry. I may not have that much stuff, but the stuff I have is pretty important to me. I rely on it a great deal, count on it being in working order.
I’ve recently been making efforts to take more ownership of the things I own. If at all possible I’d rather fix or build stuff on my own than take it to specialists. Part of this is simple economics. Living where I do and having the job I have doesn’t leave a lot of spare change in my pockets. The other part of this is more ideological. I’m not a big believer in leaving things on the shelf and letting them collect dust if they are meant to be used. My camping gear is worn and patched and grimy at this point (except my whisperlite stove, which is a replacement for the old and grimy one sitting somewhere in a TSA warehouse in Honolulu. Thanks for keeping us safe, guys), but I know I can rely on it because I’ve used the stuff enough times in all sorts of dramatic conditions to know it inside out. I started in on my car under Ron’s tutelage last spring. I’ve been doing my bike for a while. My bed, while creaky, is homemade. Even many of my books are all marked up with notes in the margins. All this has been coming to a head as of late, when some very important material items have been on the outs as far as proper functioning is concerned.
Sometimes we don’t have the tools necessary to do a job properly. This goes for physical tools as well as mental know-how tools. One of the things I use the most and value even more, and the one thing I’ve been afraid to work on is my guitar rig. I’m only a novice when it comes to wiring and electrical work, and only a little beyond that when it comes to woodwork.
After about a year and 3100 miles on the road, though, my guitar needed a setup. This is a mysterious ordeal to many guitarists, even the ones who give a damn about their instruments, where a technician or luthier somehow realigns the guitar to optimal playing specifications. It’s like taking your car to the shop for its 30,000 mile checkup: you aren’t completely sure what has transpired between this skilled technician and your stuff, but you get it back and you can feel the difference. I couldn’t help but think, though, that something was amiss when someone says “oh, well, your neck is out of relief and i’m gonna have to go ahead and get in there and adjust your truss rod. No, no, it’s not dangerous to the instrument but it’s a bit expensive in terms of labor, might have to charge you fifty for it.” Sounds legit, but a quick internet search will reveal that a truss rod adjustment takes no more than two minutes and is as easy as giving an allen wrench a 1/4 turn in the right direction. That someone would charge $50 for this is completely stupid. So instead of dropping off my guitar with some stranger to undergo this magical process of getting set up, I found a excellent guy named Chris on Craigslist who not only does a setup on your instrument, but also teaches you how to do the setup while you sit there. And the whole thing costs $50. Amazing turnaround time, quality work, and more valuable still, a little lesson in self-empowerment. Way cool. I was feeling so empowered that I decided to install strap locks on my Gibson this past weekend, complete with taking an electric drill to its beautifully finished wooden body. There were tense moments, downright harrowing moments for that matter, but by day’s end two small holes were drilled in exactly the right spot, the strap locks were installed, and my guitar became less of a showroom item and more of another tool that I may use in order to make music. (I say that, of course, because I took a big divot out of the back trying to get a stripped screw out of the thing.)
Two weeks ago, my mp3 player finally gave up the ghost. I use that thing almost on a daily basis, and not just for consumption of music. I use it as a portable hard drive, a medium through which I can disseminate my own music, as well as a music player. The kicker is that it was the second one to go in as many months, as the display on my trusty nomad jukebox 3 finally blinked off. As I use my mp3 players for high quality digital recording (production, not just consumption!!) my options were pretty limited as far as what I could go for. Ebay came through: I ended up getting an identical iRiver h120 to the one I had previously. And between the old and new ones, I managed to cobble together a bigger, better iRiver than I had even before, plus I saved the time and headache of transferring all the music onto my new iRiver by just popping the hard drive out of the old one and putting it into the new one. All this, of course, requires that one be willing to open the thing up and tinker a bit. Thanks to “misticriver.net” I was able to stumble through the process with very little difficulty. Add rockbox to the equation and I have ways of customizing a lot on the software end. (And as an aside to any mp3 player user, including iPod users: rockbox is amazing. Look into putting it onto your music player if you can. You’ll be very, very glad for it.)
I employed the same ethic towards truing my rear bike wheel a couple months back. I managed to get it fairly straight, but realized that some spokes were wrenched very tight and others not at all. That all caught up with me this week when I popped two spokes on my back wheel and completely taco’ed the thing. That one, given the tools at hand, was beyond my capabilities and I had to bite the bullet and buy a new wheel. I’ll be giving my bike an overhaul some time soon when I have a minute, adjusting the breaks to be a little tighter on the new rim.
Lesson learned, though: if you’re going to do a job yourself, you need the proper tools. The actual physical tools you use are important, but more than that is the knowledge of what to do with them. Thanks to resources like Chris up in Petaluma, I’m able to take more ownership of the few important things I own. Too often we Americans outsource the care and feeding of all that is important to us, so much so that we lose the ability to deal with it all personally. It gets harder to personally deal with all your stuff in this manner as the amount of stuff you have increases, but it’s very much worth it. Or else, as the line goes, the things you own end up owning you. This sort of education began in earnest at Chowdahaus in Boston, and continues in full force to the present moment. The battle against entropy continues, but not without some of the necessary tools. As always, gettin’ there.
Posted by davidtaus at April 10, 2007 12:33 AM | TrackBack