The Power of Doing Nothing

The 1980s were an interesting time to be learning to play rock guitar, specifically in the hard rock (or "hair metal") sub-genre. As the music itself began shedding the more jam-based cliches of the '70s bands, two budding superstars began coming to prominence:  Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen. When Rhoads was killed in a plane crash in 1982, with only two albums under his belt that featured exceptional, innovative playing, that cemented his status alongside Hendrix, a "what else might he have done" type of thing. Van Halen, of course, kept plugging away, and by 1985 was easily the most heralded player of his generation.

At the same time, the pedagogy changed dramatically, as tabulature became more standardized, and instructional magazines and books were everywhere. No longer did you have to sit around while your stoner cousin showed you the wrong chords to Stairway to Heaven, and tried to dope his way through a poor approximation of the solo. You could just read along and figure it out -- and after learning a couple dozen songs that way, would have enough ear training to do tabs on your own.

This quickly turned into some of the more adept students taking standard scales (major and harmonic minor, and their respective modes), graphing them in patterns across the fretboard and up and down the neck, and then "sequencing" them, much like you would find in the J.S. Bach violin partitas and sonatas, which he composed primarily as learning tools for his children.

I switched from bass to six-string in 1984, and by 1987 was neck-deep (pardon the bad pun) in these magazines and scale manuals. It was not unusual for me to call in sick to work, and spend the entire day with a stack of material, drilling and practicing relentlessly. The results paid off, and I was playing some pretty top-drawer stuff for the time. But more and more, it started to feel somewhat like a fourth-grader drilling on multiplication tables. You definitely learn the process and the theory, and can become wonderfully quick at it, but it doesn't take you very far in applying it.

So in 1989, King Crimson guitar wizard Robert Fripp comes along with a column in Guitar Player magazine, and it was notably without the requisite "here's how you play three-note-per-string Locrian mode patterns all the way up the neck" tabs. In fact, Fripp's first column culminated in the wonderfully gnomic advice to just sit there in a chair, without a guitar, and do nothing for thirty minutes or so, ignoring the involuntary thoughts and fidgets that will occur during that time.

Doing nothing, Fripp advised, can be very difficult. It's much harder than it seems.

Boy, was he ever right. Being a twenty-two-year-old galoot in a hick town with no concept of meditation or anything of that nature, this was beyond perplexing to me. And difficult. And it took a long time to get where I felt like I could see the benefit and the point of that advice.

But he was right.

Mueller Time; Or, It's Beginning to Smell a Lot Like Fitzmas

Obviously, the report has finally dropped, and obviously, anyone who thinks they know anything specific is full of shit.

My completely uneducated guess is that supporters and opponents of this human centipede of an administration will each be disappointed in different ways:

• There will not be a clear path of evidence to directly convict Trump on an impeachable offense.
• There are other investigations in motion, and Mueller of course wisely farmed out as much as possible to multiple federal districts, meaning that there is certainly more to come from those investigations, and Trump and his family and associates are going to be extremely lucky if they all manage to get through it with assets and freedom intact.

Some important takeaways, based on what we do know:

• Dozens of indictments, six guilty pleas, and several convictions.
• Paul Manafort (campaign manager #2, and the person who tapped Pence for VP) didn't get the thirty years he deserved, but seven years is a lot for someone who turns seventy in a week.
• Flynn (National Security Advisor) still has to allocute, and has given plenty of testimony and (one presumes) evidence as part of his plea deal.
• Rick Gates (deputy to Manafort) is still working with investigators.
• Felix Sater is scheduled to testify on March 27th. He knows everything Michael Cohen does, and probably more.
• Roger Stone's trial is later in the year. Stone is apparently deep in debt, and not wanting to take a nickel in Club Fed for Agent Orange.
• Steve Bannon and Tom Barrack turned over a combined five thousand pages of documents to House investigators last week.
• These are all key players, as is Michael Cohen, and now Elliott Broidy (who, along with Cohen, was one of the RNC finance chairs for the 2016 campaign), whose offices were raided last week, and who has already done time for this sort of thing.

Bottom line:  whether or not there's a "smoking gun" in the report, anyone who still says there was nothing is clearly on someone's payroll, and would have said there was nothing even with a smoking gun.

And the House committee, regardless of what we're permitted to hear and see of the report, will continue their collective spelunking of Fatboy's voluminous crooked ass. Tax returns, financial records, the "charitable foundation," the bank and insurance fraud committed in his loan applications, all the real estate he's been using to launder bratva money for the past decade or so, that's all still in play.

That's the other thing about the report -- it's not the end, it's the beginning. It will be a road map to the corruption and criminality baked into the entire apparatus, every player and every move they made. If even half of it's true, it's way too much to sweep under.

The real question, and the real challenge here, is whether it will move any cultists. Of course this is purely anecdotal, so feel free to disregard, but I've made it a point to ask my Trump-supporting friends -- none of whom are so far in as to, say, attend a rally, and at least a couple of them voted for Obama at least once -- what it would take for them to change their mind about their support for him. War, recession, proof of collusion and subversion?

It's a vague, open-ended question with some subjectivity, and therefore not easy to answer regardless, but still, it's troubling to note that none of them seemed worried about any of the Russia stuff, and all were happy with the economy. The thing to be most worried about here is that every one of the aforementioned players mentioned above could be convicted on concrete evidence, and a lot of them just won't give a shit. They'll flip on Fixed Noise and soak in whatever nonsense they push about the Dummycrat of the week, and that'll be that.

It's something to keep in mind as the perpetual campaign starts kicking into higher gears as 2020 inches closer. By definition, the cultists are completely impervious to evidence, to clear patterns of erratic behavior and sheer incompetence. When nothing matters to forty percent of the electorate but being assholes, you have a deep systemic problem that just might never be undone, and in fact might get worse.

I'm not worried about King Joffrey's idle jabber about the military, cops, or bikers -- the first two groups swear oaths that most of them actually do take seriously, and the latter group consists mostly of rapidly aging puds who won't ever get into a one-on-one fight.

What's more worrisome is the clear threat of more instances of politically motivated stochastic terrorism. The two most recent instances in the US -- the van-driving nutjobs who sent pipe bombs to prominent Democrats, and the Coast Guard lieutenant who was stockpiling weapons and drawing up plans -- were fortunately too inept to pull anything off. Sooner or later you'll get one who figures out how to pull it off.