I don’t get it. How come the top string is bigger than the bottom string? And what are all these little machine knobs for? My fingers hurt!

Oh, hey. You know, you’re never too old to learn in this crazy world we live in. I like to think of every day as a journey of discovery. Just this morning, I lifted myself out of the sack and discovered that someone left the bathroom tap running all bloody night. Then I waded into the kitchen and discovered a three-foot gap in the floorboards, big enough to drop a pickle barrel into. And I don’t mean one of those consumer-style barrel-like jars they sell in the specialty shops … I mean a real goddamn hogshead. Almost fell into the son of a bitch. Now THAT would have been some discovery!

Well, in these days of social isolation, when you’re locked up inside your domicile for days at a time, you need to find distractions of one kind or another. And it tends to go that the longer you’re locked away, the more elaborate the distractions need to become. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) spent the first weeks of his isolation building simple Lego structures. (I mean real simple, like a thing that looked like three Legos plugged together.) By week three, he had moved on to erector sets. Now he’s taking spare bricks from a less well-maintained section of the mill and he’s building some kind of edifice, slapping cheap-ass mortar between the bricks in a kind of ham-handed (or ham-clawed) fashion. Hey … Marvin builds things. That’s what I’ve discovered.

Me, I decided to immerse myself in music. I pulled out a Lenny Breau album and began to think it may be a good idea to pick up my old acoustic guitar from time to time. Of course, when I did, I realized that I hadn’t changed the strings in about three years, so it sounds a little thuddy. Somehow I don’t think new strings would make that thing sound more like Lenny Breau. So I actually started playing the freaking thing. That was week two. Week three, I was on to the fiddle. Week four, I took a drumstick to the fiddle to see if it would make a decent percussion instrument, since I was such a failure as a fiddler. (If I had been the Fiddler on the Roof, I would surely have ended up the Fiddler face-down on the Pavement.) Now I’m eying the glockenspiel. It’s either that or that dulcimer like gizmo Matt used to have – the thing no one could freaking play, no how. Still … it’s a challenge!

Yeah, you’re right. I have to get out more. This mill ain’t big enough for the one of me.