A Desert Sun Yellow Guitar Lost Along The Way

Now there’s a title that’s sure to wreck some page layouts.

Thanks to forgetting about blogging for a day, I’m a day behind now, so I’ll be combining two prompts into one post. This works out well, because I don’t want to respond to one of them anyway.

The first prompt from two days ago started with SDWeasel over at Unidentified Signal Source: What is something you have lost along the way that you would love to have back? Can be serious or frivolous.

The frivolous answer that I scribbled down at the start of the month was: “I threw away a bunch of physical computer game boxes and media during one of several moves. I sold all of my Amiga stuff as well. I’ve sold and/or thrown away some musical gear I wish I had back.”

One piece of musical gear in particular was a gorgeous desert sun yellow Ibanez RG550 electric guitar that I bought from eBay in the late 90s that I desperately wish I hadn’t had to sell very soon after it arrived.

The serious answer would involve, you know, dead loved ones, the innocence and idealism of youth, the slightest shred of hope that the country isn’t already in the opening phase of costly civil wars and economic devastation such that within six months I won’t have access to money or food or electricity, let alone Internet, things like that. The usual stuff.

The Book of Jen led us in yesterday’s prompt: Tell us 5 facts about yourself.

That’s a big ol’ negatory on that one. What is this, a job interview? Anyway I’m pretty sure you can glean five facts about me from the other posts I’ve written this month.

Okay, here’s one fact that I reveal under some duress: To circumvent copyright strikes, all of the music that appeared at the start of the live streams I did in last year’s Blaugust was original music that I wrote and recorded in the 90s. The instrumental piece I chose for August 4th is called Casualties of War, which happens to be the only thing I recorded in which I used the aforementioned desert sun yellow Ibanez guitar.

I let the song play for a long time at the start of that video as a memorial to the victims of several disturbing news events of that day. (That video is unlisted now because of all the understandable copyright claims on the game Brutal Legend.)

The problem with revealing this embarrassing factoid is that every time I listen to my old music, all I hear are playing and recording and mixing mistakes and those imperfections in recreating the music in my head render the entire track worthless. Unfortunately I would have to re-record everything to fix those mistakes and I can’t play guitar much any more because of lack of practice and thumb pain. Also I don’t have much of a home studio to record in anymore. Something else lost along the way, I suppose.

Meh. That’s it. A post that is neither entertaining nor informative.

P. S. WordPress updated its editor in the last couple of days and they somehow made it even less appealing.

P. P. S. I can’t wait to see how badly a tall portrait image will fail as the “featured image” for this post.

P. P. P. S. Ibanez apparently now sells a new version of the desert sun yellow RG550 under the “Genesis” line. Sweetwater and Amazon both sell it for $999. I’m pretty sure I paid less than $700 for mine. It could have been a useful investment for when we all need to start bartering for food soon.