Listening to The Rides and the wind outside.  My writing brain isn't working.  Slipping into a bit of depressive fog.

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Starting to wonder if I should end this blog and start another with a different focus--or maybe get more serious about reinvigorating Ask/Tell.  I'm not sure, at the moment, what to do.  So I'll let things steep.

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Each of these sections is taking an embarrassing amount of time to write.  Read each "bullet" as a significant pause.

"Read each 'bullet' as a significant pause" strikes me as a pretty good line.

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Now I've started listening to Mole City by Quasi.

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I've been trying to listen to lots of different kinds of guitar music, hoping that some sort of inspiration or insight will take place.  Sigh.

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In terms of guitar practice, the book Zen Guitar by Philip Toshio Sudo has inspired me and given  hope.  It's a book that would be interesting even to people who aren't torturing their fingers like me.  A taste:

"Through the frustrations of learning a new skill, we learn humility--how much we don't know.

Through the exploration of knowledge, we learn openness--a willingness to try new things, to see things from another person's perspective.

Through playing with others, we learn generosity--how to share and contribute to the good of the group."

(100)

Those things seem really important to me.

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Yesterday I wrote a short piece about what I'm reading for Eileen Tabios' new blog Eileen Verbs Books.  In thinking about it today I realized how much I left out: the book I just quoted from, for example, not to mention the stack of books on the floor by my bed.

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Here's another Zen Guitar quote I like:

     "The Way of Zen Guitar requires responsibility and truly giving of one's self.  Only through accepting our debt to the world and giving something back does our song have any meaning.
       The Japanese language is again instructive here.  The very word for human being, ningen, suggests a connection to the surrounding world.  Nin means person, while gen means 'space.'  In other words, we only become human--a ningen--in relation to the space around us."

(98)

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Thanks for listening.  I feel a little better than when I started this post.

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