In My Room

It's the waiting that's the hard part, isn't it...

The time before my hip-replacement surgery has been passing with a weird combination of glacial slowness and the inexorability of a supertanker. Just a week ago, I had a whole week to wait, and now I have a whole thirteen hours to kill. It feels like both an eternity and an instant.

Narcotics add immeasurably to the strangeness. Yesterday I was reading in bed, and closed my eyes for a few minutes, and began to have incredibly vivid and bizarre imaginings, dreamlike but not a dream. Since I was completely awake, I could control the images that were roiling in my head: Now think about sex, I told myself, and zoom up came these hyper-real pornographic eyelid movies. Now think about flying. Now think about going to work but forgetting to get dressed.

I really understand junkies.

In order to make the time pass this weekend, I whipped up this little number in the studio. I think it sums up my emotional state pretty nicely.

Play "In My Room" (pops).

For no particularly good reason, I wanted to use every electric guitar I own in this piece. Maybe I just wanted to feel them all in my hands one last time, I don't know. I'm playing the lead part on my beautiful blonde Epiphone Sheraton (my favorite guitar, I think, when all is said and done -- it looks a lot like the guitar John Lennon played during the rooftop concert in "Let It Be"). The second lead (the Carl Wilson voice, if you like) is my Epiphone Les Paul, a sunburst-finish beast. I don't know why I don't use this axe more often; it's just that the Sheraton is such a playable, seductive thing that I always reach for it when starting a recording. The tremelo doo-wop arpeggios are supplied by my Japanese Stratocaster, which I've given Fender Noiseless pickups and a much better pickup switch than the piece of junk it came with. I don't play this one much because the Floyd Rose whammy bar it came with makes it a major pain in the ass to tune, and my picking style often pulls it sharp.

I'm particularly fond of the double-stop bends in the second phrase of each verse ("I can go and..."). That's one guitar, no overdubs, man. I bend the A string a whole step, and the D string only a half-step. Your astonished applause humbles me. Thank you. Thank you very much.

All right. Twelve hours, now, before I depart for the hospital. Needless to say, no bloggage will be forthcoming until at least Wednesday, but I'll be taking copious notes when I'm not being flensed or hammered at or stretched or lectured to. Morphine drip. Morphine drip. Morphine drip....

Now think about walking without a cane...