February.  What can you say.  I find myself in the same pattern.  Up late, then trying to sleep, after sleeping most of the first day off, and then, the second day off, still, immune system off, exhausted, cough, sleep, a mood to match, low.

So I find myself watching Moonshiners.  An addiction to Tinder and Bumble.  Swiping, like it's a video game.  Five minutes later, is anything new on Facebook.  In my loneliness...  Google news.  But, I am tired, and the immune system is fighting something unknown, flu shot under the belt already.

 I read The Tools, by Phil Stutz and Barry Michaels.  As suggested by a co-worker.  The tools themselves make a bit of sense, self-help sort of way. But I watch Jimi Hendrix youtube stuff.  Documentaries. Guitar talk.  How to play Little Wing.  Fender Hendrix Strat reissues, that's another two or three hours.

The whole story of the man himself, while he had many lovers, people who appreciated him, there is the side of how taken advantage of he was.  Very sad.  The people who managed him, really just buying and selling him, sending the money off shore.  Such that by September the 17th, 1970, he was rather depressed, and with a sense that powers were working against him, murderously, as if it were Shakespeare's time.  The last few concerts, Isle of Wight, the shit show in Germany, the audience mad at him, and Jimi, "I don't give a fuck.  Boo me if you want..."

But to a writer, it's tone.  It's the way you grab the neck, the way you strum, the way your fingers clamp, aim, moving around.  The solid thunk, such as only the independently minded guitar player, as Hendrix was, would produce.  Tone, tone, tone.  You see it live, a player integrated, become at one, with the instrument.  A separation that is the uniqueness of a player's tone.  Hendrix had it.  He had a sound.  It's in his fingers, his strumming hand thumb, but also, in him.  Unmistakeable.  Original.


There are stories, when he went to New York after, what they call, the Chitlin' Circuit, played no longer with the Isley Brothers, but with Little Richard.  But there in the background, too flamboyant.  He wins a talent show in Harlem, one assumes at the Apollo, but he's fired by Little Richard, has to pawn a guitar, and he ends up downtown in the Village, playing the Whiskey A Go Go, something like that.  But, he has no place to live.  According to the story, he ended up sleeping in alleys there sometimes, with rats running over him.  And cockroaches, at one point, "took his last candy bar."

There was he discovered.  Women loved Jimi.