She is really a foreigner, though a cute one, to absolute honesty of conversation.

I'm reading Hapworth 16, 1924, J.D. Salinger's last published story. After The Catcher in the Rye, after Franny and Zooey, and after both Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction, it was published only in The New Yorker in June of 1965, and never collected into a book. I knew someone who had a copy of that issue of The New Yorker, a close friend, now dead by his own hand. We were both Salinger-crazy together. He let me borrow it, the New Yorker, so I was able to read the story in it's original context.

Hapworth takes the form of a long letter, written by a 7-year old Seymour Glass. He's at a summer camp and he's injured his leg. He's using one afternoon of his convalescence to write a letter to his family back in New York City. If you've read some Salinger, you might know that Seymour is a genius. He's enlightened, or he's getting very close. Reading it is resonating with lots of good memories from the early nineties.

Anyway, fuck all that. I went to Guitar Center this morning to information-gather and possibly purchase a firewire mixer. Why do I ever go there? I've never been in there without having to witness terrible guitarists playing loudly and looking around to see who's impressed. God dammit, go get laid buddy. Today it was a bassist, which is better becuase with the lower frequencies, the jarring, misplaced, meaningless notes are less arrow-like and piercing, but it's also worse, because bass was my principle instrument for twelve years and I'm sensitive to lack of care in that area.

It was a real pleasure over winter holiday to get a chance to play guitar with two bassists I can relate to, though in very different ways, Vlindinhauer and Josh.

The guy at Guitar Center, the salesman who attached himself to me when I walked in, barely knew what he was talking about. He had to ask the internet whether the mixer I was looking at sent audio pre- or post- effects and faders. He got so involved with the website he was on that he began talking to me less and less, until eventually he stopped talking to me altogether.

He asked first one, and then another of his fellow salesmen to stand next to him and stare at the internet with him. Together, the three Zombified merchant-peddlers stood close to each other and did nothing but look at the screen. I wandered away after two minutes of this and left the store after ten. Not one of the three looked up from the monitor long enough to see their customer leaving. That place is bizarre.