Chirp

Okay, you can't fool me. Call it "anecdotal evidence" all you want, but I know the truth through the scientific method. First, you see, you observe something that seems to be a pattern, and from it you devise a theory. Then you test that theory over time, to see if it holds up. Through this, I have cleverly deduced one of the great unknown conspiracies:

The batteries in smoke detectors have little timers built in so that they will always start to die between 1:00 and 4:00 in the morning, thus waking people up when they start to chirp very loudly and making the general populace tired, cranky and iiritable. (And, apparently, unable to spell.)

As I'm sure you know, most good smoke detectors these days are wired into building power, and this is a good thing--but you always want them to have battery backups, because if the fire takes out building power, you don't want to lose your smoke detector at that very critical moment. Batteries are, therefore, a good thing. But you know how it always works out: the battery starts to go, and the smoke detector is programmed to start chirping so that you know to replace the battery and keep yourself from, you know, burning to death in a fire. But I'll bet you've observed it, too: the chirping only ever starts at some godawful hour of the morning. And "chirp" is the gentle way of describing a most ungentle sound.

Now one might be inclined to think this is all just coincidence, until you climb out of bed and try to remove the battery. The one I wrestled with last night was plugged into the wall through a plug that held tight like a squid with a bottle of fish in its tentacles. Plus it had this little tab that extended right over the battery compartment--you simply could not change the battery without first unplugging the unit, which was kinda sorta impossible. Plus there's the fact that the smoke detector is high up on a wall, and if I were something less than 6'3" it would've been pretty well impossible.

By this point, I was really incredibly awake.

Eventually a pair of pliers did the trick, though I'm amazed I didn't destroy the unit in the process. And now the unit sits on a counter, unplugged and unbatteried, and I'd better hope a fire doesn't start near the front door in the next few hours or I'm toast.

Insult to injury: even after you've removed the battery, the damn thing still retains a charge for a while. It still chirps. Larry David had enormous fun with this in the first episode of the new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and of course I watched and laughed and then, not two weeks later, lived through the same scene in real time.

But I just wanted to, you know, warn people. About this great conspiracy. Now let us all turn our attentions to the pernicious question of why.

Is It Progress?

I have now owned a guitar for two weeks, and I have been practicing at least a little bit every day. And so far...

...well, so far I still suck.

See, the frustrating part is that it's such a huge thing to learn because the guitar is more flexible than I'd realized. Chord fingerings for the left hand to learn, and not just a few of them--I've seen chord books for sale that advertise "1,000 chords diagrammed!" The techniques of strumming and picking for the right hand. The infinitely tricky separation of the right hand from the left hand. Learning to read tablature. Learning to read chord charts. Learning to read musical notation. A metronome to keep me on track rhythmically. Not to mention the necessity of actual physical changes that are required: the growth of callouses on the fingertips of the left hand so that there isn't so much, you know, pain when I play. ("I got blisters on my fingers!" shouted John, and now I get why.)

But it's been two weeks, and I've been practicing regularly, and I've learned to play five of the principal chords (A, C, D, E and G) pretty well. There are a couple very simple melodies (played on just two strings, involving only three frets) that I can now make my way through decently. I can sit down with tablature or a chord chart and work it through, slowly, but I can do it. But that's about it.

I still can't put any of those five chords together--I've been trying for days now to shift from A to D and back again, and although I'm slightly better than when I started, it's still pretty horrible. (The fingers just keep ending up in bad places for the D chord, and when I try to play it at speed I always get at least one dead string and another one buzzing badly.) Considering that this shift from A to D is part of only Lesson 2 of a course I'm taking, it feels pretty discouraging.

But perhaps part of the problem is that I'm trying too many things at once. When I purchased the guitar I bought a DVD and book for the Hal Leonard method. And while I like the book, the DVD jumped almost immediately into reading notation on staves, at which I am really terrible. So I poked around on the internet and found a course almost universally recommended called Jamorama, put together by a New Zealander named Ben Edwards, and it only cost $40 so I bought it. And I definitely like it, but that's the one where I'm already stuck on Lesson 2, with dozens of lessons still to go. Then I bought a book containing lots of guitar chords, along with scales and arpeggios, all nicely diagrammed, so part of my practice now involves slowly working my way through, say, the C scale.

It's definitely possible, though, that all that is part of my problem. I'm doing a little out of the Hal Leonard book, a little out of Jamorama, a little scales work, and so forth. I'm not following any one course systematically, I'm trying to design a scattershot program on the fly without any idea what the hell I'm doing. Which is probably exactly why all I can see at the moment is the vastness of the task, instead of just focusing on, say, nailing the transition from the A to the D chord.

I ain't quittin' yet. No sir. I mean hey, I've got these fresh callouses on my fingertips, so that's one thing I've succeeded at. Time and repetition, and there they are, just like they're supposed to be. It would just be silly to quit now.