Saturday, February 28, 2009
GHOST DIAMOND
GHOST DIAMOND
by Jason Earls
author of Cocoon of Terror, How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Red Zen, & Heartless Bastard In Ecstasy
http://becomeguitaristfromhell.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/zevi35711
The drummer, Neil, hit three cymbal crashes, choking each one by catching the edge of the cymbals, as Ian, the lead guitarist, hit three F power chords simultaneously, fast and sharp – part of the dynamics to the new song his band Hostile Effluvium was working on. Then the drummer stopped playing, stood up from his drum stool and announced, “Wait guys, I’ve got a good idea for a new song.”
Ian scoffed. “But we’ve got to learn this one first, Neil.”
The rehearsal wasn’t going well. Ian was in a bad mood. Worried about his girlfriend acting so crazy lately and maybe even cheating on him. He was also worried about what might happen at the upcoming Battle of the Bands contest they had entered, which was now only a couple of weeks away. Ian didn’t feel like listening to any new song ideas. The bass player, Bob, stayed silent in the corner; he was in a bad mood as well.
“But I’ve got to tell you guys about this new song before I forget the main idea,” said the drummer.
“All right,” said Ian. “Go ahead.” He frowned and took off his guitar, sat down on the floor and crossed his legs.
“I want to write a song about a woman whose husband dies relatively young. Say at 35. He dies of a heart attack. One day his heart just starts beating in his chest like a machine gun and won’t stop. But he keeps on smoking cigarettes and joints anyway and ignores the pain of his fast-beating heart. After 54 hours his heart explodes and all the veins in his head turn purple and burst like fireworks. His wife loses it. She sees him die in the living room while they’re watching a reality t.v. show. She goes crazy with grief as she pounds on his chest trying to get his heart beating again. Finally she takes him to the hospital and he’s pronounced dead on arrival. Her husband always told her he wanted to be cremated so she tells a funeral director about it and they comply and she asks what to do with his ashes after his corpse is burned to cinders. The nice funeral director gives her a few options and the last one involves a company that will make a diamond from the person’s cremated remains. The woman loves the idea and writes the director a check for $10,000 to handle all the details and have the diamond made for her. Six months goes by and the company finally sends her the diamond mounted as a ring and she absolutely adores it, seeing it as a wonderful memorial to her husband who died from an exploding heart at a young age. One night she sits in her favorite chair with the television on in the background, staring at the diamond for hours. She touches it and thinks of her husband. She loves the ring more than anything else because it reminds her of all the wonderful times she had had with her soul mate. And she knows his essence is right there in the ring with her; his mystical essence is inside the diamond; the stone made from the ashes of the man she loved more than anyone else in the world.
“About two months goes by.
“Strange things start happening.
“One night when she gets out of bed for a glass of water she sees an elderly woman wearing a tall white paper hat walking around her house. And the elderly lady doesn’t have normal arms, they’re all orange and gooey and alien-like. The old woman throws the paper hat at the woman one evening with her gooey arms and runs out the front door. The woman just thinks it’s a bad dream. But the next night she says the old woman again, running in and out of her house, carrying torches and thick chains and wearing long fur coats. Then she hears moaning noises and sees men at her window with long pointed noses and bug eyes. At first she doesn’t associate these happenings with the ring. But then the people start speaking to her. They say it wasn’t really a heart attack that killed her husband. They say he committed suicide to get away from his wife. That he actually hated her. They claim he wanted to kill her but he didn’t want to go to prison so he decided to just kill himself instead. They say he left a note in the house explaining everything. They said she should search for the note and read it. Finally the woman gets pissed off and screams at the visitors:
‘YOU LYING MOTHERFUCKERS GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE. FUCK YOU ALL. MY HUSBAND LOVED ME AND I LOVED HIM. HE DIDN’T WRITE A GODDAMN NOTE. HE DIED OF A HEART ATTACK. I SAW IT. HE DIDN’T COMMIT SUICIDE. THIS RING ON MY FINGER IS MADE FROM HIS ASHES. THAT’S HOW MUCH I LOVED HIM. I WANT HIM TO BE CLOSE TO ME AT ALL TIMES. DONT’ YOU UNDERSTAND THAT, CAN’T YOU GET THAT THROUGH YOUR STUPID SKULLS YOU SICK FUCKING GHOULS!’
“And the visitors all crowded around the irate woman. Six of them. White ghosts. They each held up a piece of paper. Each note was folded. She looked at them. Read only a few words. The notes were identical. Creased in the same places. But she couldn’t take the notes. She wouldn’t read them. Didn’t want to believe they were real. So she screamed:
‘GET OUT OF MY HOUSE, GET OUT OF HERE YOU CRUEL PIECES OF SHIT GO BACK TO FUCKING HELL WHERE YOU CAME FROM, YOU’RE NOTHING BUT ROTTEN DICK-SUCKING SECOND CLASS GHOSTS TRYING TO TRICK ME.’
“Then the woman’s finger began to hurt. She looked down at it, all yellow and throbbing. The diamond was glowing red and green. WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING, she thought. So she pulls the diamond ring off her finger, runs to the sink and throws it down the drain, flicks on the garbage disposal switch. The metal and the diamond grind to dust. She turns around. The ghosts had vanished. They were coming out of the diamond ring made from her husband’s ashes. So that’s the song idea I have guys, what do you think? Should we write it up?”
Ian sighed and slowly stood up fromn the floor where he’d been listening to the drummer’s long explanation. “Goddamn,” he said. “It’s a little long, don’t you think? That might make a good novel, but there’s no way we can dilute that down to three or four verses of song lyrics without eliminating most of the details.”
“Well, maybe we can have six or seven verses. Who says we have to limit a song to only three verses? Plus, it’s just an idea. Go ahead and work on it you guys. See where you can take it and what you can come up with. I’m easy to please. I’ve got a killer drum beat I can put to it. And I may have a main guitar riff too.” The drummer started playing a 3/4 drum beat. It had a good groove.
“It’s all right,” said Ian. “But we can’t work on it now. Let’s get back to the other song.”
“So you like it?” the drummer said.
“Sure. We can do something with it. Got a title for it?”
“Yeah, Ghost Diamond.”
“Right on. Now let’s get back to the other song.”
“All right.”
-end-
(Thanks for reading. If you have any comments, or know of any magazines that would like to publish this piece, please contact the author: zevi_35711@yahoo.com. Also, you would be helping out the author greatly if you purchased one of his books from Amazon.com or another online book store of your choice. Thanks again.)
http://www.youtube.com/user/zevi35711
http://becomeguitaristfromhell.blogspot.com/
http://zombiesofthereddescent.blogspot.com/
Bio: Jason Earls is the author of Cocoon of Terror (Afterbirth Books), Heartless Bastard In Ecstasy, How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Zombies of the Red Descent, If(Sid_Vicious == TRUE && Alan_Turing == TRUE) {ERROR_Cyberpunk(); }, Red Zen, and 0.136101521283655... all available at Amazon.com and other online book stores. His fiction and mathematical work have been published in Red Scream, Yankee Pot Roast, M-Brane SF, Scientia Magna, three of Clifford Pickover’s books, Mathworld.com, AlienSkin, Recreational and Educational Computing, Escaping Elsewhere, Neometropolis, Thirteen, Dogmatika, Prime Curios, the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, OG’s Speculative Fiction, Nocturnal Ooze, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens and other publications. He currently resides in Oklahoma with his wife, Christine.
by Jason Earls
author of Cocoon of Terror, How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Red Zen, & Heartless Bastard In Ecstasy
http://becomeguitaristfromhell.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/zevi35711
The drummer, Neil, hit three cymbal crashes, choking each one by catching the edge of the cymbals, as Ian, the lead guitarist, hit three F power chords simultaneously, fast and sharp – part of the dynamics to the new song his band Hostile Effluvium was working on. Then the drummer stopped playing, stood up from his drum stool and announced, “Wait guys, I’ve got a good idea for a new song.”
Ian scoffed. “But we’ve got to learn this one first, Neil.”
The rehearsal wasn’t going well. Ian was in a bad mood. Worried about his girlfriend acting so crazy lately and maybe even cheating on him. He was also worried about what might happen at the upcoming Battle of the Bands contest they had entered, which was now only a couple of weeks away. Ian didn’t feel like listening to any new song ideas. The bass player, Bob, stayed silent in the corner; he was in a bad mood as well.
“But I’ve got to tell you guys about this new song before I forget the main idea,” said the drummer.
“All right,” said Ian. “Go ahead.” He frowned and took off his guitar, sat down on the floor and crossed his legs.
“I want to write a song about a woman whose husband dies relatively young. Say at 35. He dies of a heart attack. One day his heart just starts beating in his chest like a machine gun and won’t stop. But he keeps on smoking cigarettes and joints anyway and ignores the pain of his fast-beating heart. After 54 hours his heart explodes and all the veins in his head turn purple and burst like fireworks. His wife loses it. She sees him die in the living room while they’re watching a reality t.v. show. She goes crazy with grief as she pounds on his chest trying to get his heart beating again. Finally she takes him to the hospital and he’s pronounced dead on arrival. Her husband always told her he wanted to be cremated so she tells a funeral director about it and they comply and she asks what to do with his ashes after his corpse is burned to cinders. The nice funeral director gives her a few options and the last one involves a company that will make a diamond from the person’s cremated remains. The woman loves the idea and writes the director a check for $10,000 to handle all the details and have the diamond made for her. Six months goes by and the company finally sends her the diamond mounted as a ring and she absolutely adores it, seeing it as a wonderful memorial to her husband who died from an exploding heart at a young age. One night she sits in her favorite chair with the television on in the background, staring at the diamond for hours. She touches it and thinks of her husband. She loves the ring more than anything else because it reminds her of all the wonderful times she had had with her soul mate. And she knows his essence is right there in the ring with her; his mystical essence is inside the diamond; the stone made from the ashes of the man she loved more than anyone else in the world.
“About two months goes by.
“Strange things start happening.
“One night when she gets out of bed for a glass of water she sees an elderly woman wearing a tall white paper hat walking around her house. And the elderly lady doesn’t have normal arms, they’re all orange and gooey and alien-like. The old woman throws the paper hat at the woman one evening with her gooey arms and runs out the front door. The woman just thinks it’s a bad dream. But the next night she says the old woman again, running in and out of her house, carrying torches and thick chains and wearing long fur coats. Then she hears moaning noises and sees men at her window with long pointed noses and bug eyes. At first she doesn’t associate these happenings with the ring. But then the people start speaking to her. They say it wasn’t really a heart attack that killed her husband. They say he committed suicide to get away from his wife. That he actually hated her. They claim he wanted to kill her but he didn’t want to go to prison so he decided to just kill himself instead. They say he left a note in the house explaining everything. They said she should search for the note and read it. Finally the woman gets pissed off and screams at the visitors:
‘YOU LYING MOTHERFUCKERS GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE. FUCK YOU ALL. MY HUSBAND LOVED ME AND I LOVED HIM. HE DIDN’T WRITE A GODDAMN NOTE. HE DIED OF A HEART ATTACK. I SAW IT. HE DIDN’T COMMIT SUICIDE. THIS RING ON MY FINGER IS MADE FROM HIS ASHES. THAT’S HOW MUCH I LOVED HIM. I WANT HIM TO BE CLOSE TO ME AT ALL TIMES. DONT’ YOU UNDERSTAND THAT, CAN’T YOU GET THAT THROUGH YOUR STUPID SKULLS YOU SICK FUCKING GHOULS!’
“And the visitors all crowded around the irate woman. Six of them. White ghosts. They each held up a piece of paper. Each note was folded. She looked at them. Read only a few words. The notes were identical. Creased in the same places. But she couldn’t take the notes. She wouldn’t read them. Didn’t want to believe they were real. So she screamed:
‘GET OUT OF MY HOUSE, GET OUT OF HERE YOU CRUEL PIECES OF SHIT GO BACK TO FUCKING HELL WHERE YOU CAME FROM, YOU’RE NOTHING BUT ROTTEN DICK-SUCKING SECOND CLASS GHOSTS TRYING TO TRICK ME.’
“Then the woman’s finger began to hurt. She looked down at it, all yellow and throbbing. The diamond was glowing red and green. WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING, she thought. So she pulls the diamond ring off her finger, runs to the sink and throws it down the drain, flicks on the garbage disposal switch. The metal and the diamond grind to dust. She turns around. The ghosts had vanished. They were coming out of the diamond ring made from her husband’s ashes. So that’s the song idea I have guys, what do you think? Should we write it up?”
Ian sighed and slowly stood up fromn the floor where he’d been listening to the drummer’s long explanation. “Goddamn,” he said. “It’s a little long, don’t you think? That might make a good novel, but there’s no way we can dilute that down to three or four verses of song lyrics without eliminating most of the details.”
“Well, maybe we can have six or seven verses. Who says we have to limit a song to only three verses? Plus, it’s just an idea. Go ahead and work on it you guys. See where you can take it and what you can come up with. I’m easy to please. I’ve got a killer drum beat I can put to it. And I may have a main guitar riff too.” The drummer started playing a 3/4 drum beat. It had a good groove.
“It’s all right,” said Ian. “But we can’t work on it now. Let’s get back to the other song.”
“So you like it?” the drummer said.
“Sure. We can do something with it. Got a title for it?”
“Yeah, Ghost Diamond.”
“Right on. Now let’s get back to the other song.”
“All right.”
-end-
(Thanks for reading. If you have any comments, or know of any magazines that would like to publish this piece, please contact the author: zevi_35711@yahoo.com. Also, you would be helping out the author greatly if you purchased one of his books from Amazon.com or another online book store of your choice. Thanks again.)
http://www.youtube.com/user/zevi35711
http://becomeguitaristfromhell.blogspot.com/
http://zombiesofthereddescent.blogspot.com/
Bio: Jason Earls is the author of Cocoon of Terror (Afterbirth Books), Heartless Bastard In Ecstasy, How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Zombies of the Red Descent, If(Sid_Vicious == TRUE && Alan_Turing == TRUE) {ERROR_Cyberpunk(); }, Red Zen, and 0.136101521283655... all available at Amazon.com and other online book stores. His fiction and mathematical work have been published in Red Scream, Yankee Pot Roast, M-Brane SF, Scientia Magna, three of Clifford Pickover’s books, Mathworld.com, AlienSkin, Recreational and Educational Computing, Escaping Elsewhere, Neometropolis, Thirteen, Dogmatika, Prime Curios, the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, OG’s Speculative Fiction, Nocturnal Ooze, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens and other publications. He currently resides in Oklahoma with his wife, Christine.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Play a Few One-Note Guitar Solos
Play a Few One-Note Guitar Solos
By Jason Earls, author of How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Red Zen, & Heartless Bastard In Ecstasy
http://becomeguitaristfromhell.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/zevi35711
Occasionally you should consider playing a one-note solo on your electric guitar. I'm serious. You should play a solo consisting of only a single note treated in many different ways. Why? Because simplicity in music (and in life) is important and highly effective; and what could be simpler in musical improvisation than playing a solo consisting of only one note? Also, it was Einstein who said that things should be kept as simple as possible but no simpler, and they don't get much smarter than Einstein. Minimalism can be a nice effective idea when used moderately in music. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great philosopher, was a minimalist and also a rather laconic speaker since he thought that whatever cannot be expressed clearly should be dismissed in silence; and he reasoned further that things in the world that can SHOW themselves, yet cannot be spoken about constitute what is “mystical." But I seem to have gotten away from talking about one-note solos, so I shall return to that subject:
You can have your single-note solo last for as long as you like. Four bars, eight bars, twelve bars, sixteen bars, or more; and the background chords and accompaniment can change behind you or underneath you as much as is necessary, plus you can insert plenty of dynamics into the note as well. I recommend that you experiment with other musicians in your band in having them change chord progressions or transpose the riffs into different keys behind your one-note solo, or direct them to do anything you want really, while you maintain playing that single note on your electric guitar and hold it throughout the entire solo.
Add vibrato. Pick the note repeatedly; fast or slow. Go in and out of time with the rhythm of the tune. Stop playing the note briefly. Add space and plenty of breathing room. Bend the note a little, but not too much (use microtonal bends - quarter steps or less, smears I believe they are called) because you never want to stray too far from the single tone you have chosen to express yourself with. Mainly you should concentrate on that one note while attempting to instill as much energy, emotion, spirituality, passion, yearning, tension, persuasion, release, and everything else you’ve got inside your heart and mind, pushing it into your one-note solo; execute it while incorporating whatever you have boiling inside of you.
And when choosing the note for your solo, make sure it is the absolute BEST NOTE that you can find. Actually, it must be the PERFECT note that fits (or goes against) the song you are playing, because it will be the MAIN note of the solo.
What could a single note solo be compared to in real life? Are there some comparisons we could make? Of course there are.
Sometimes people have an entire meal consisting of only one dish, Benjamin Franklin wrote in his autobiography how he moved to a new town when he was a young man and could afford only a loaf of bread for his single meal of the day; and a truck driver I once worked with went into a grocery store on his lunch break and purchased a single package of bologna and ate only that for his noon day meal; he had no bread, no mustard, no cheese, no mayonnaise, no pickles, no relish, no ketchup, and nothing to drink either - he only had the bologna which he took out of the package and folded in half and bit into with his sharp false teeth.
Are these things like single note solos? I guess they could considered similar, in a way. It just depends on how you observe the situation and analyze it. And your viewpoint of the world and the people around you.
Also many punk bands do not play electric guitar solos at all; so if you decide to play a one note solo, you can consider yourself to be a slightly more sophisticated musician than those in punk bands.
Another reason for playing a single-note solo is that it may help your ideas improve. Years ago (and even to this day) when I was first learning about improvisation, and practicing my guitar a lot, I would notice that whenever I would practice every day, playing for many hours, my ideas during improvisational solos would become noticeably stale and uninspired, as if I were merely playing the same ideas over and over. But if I did not practice much during any particular day, or even skipped a few days of playing altogether, even though my technique would decrease considerably and I would play rather sloppily, whenever it came time to improvise, my ideas would be fresh and exciting and exuberant and alive and it would seem like I was playing entirely new melodies that had never existed before. So when your improvisations start to go stale, remember to play a few one-note solos, and you may get some good improvisational ideas for the next songs you play.
Another thing that might be considered similar to one-note solos is the word 'abacot,' which is a word that exists in dictionaries but is not in fact a real word; it was simply a misprint that happened many years ago and lexicographers kept copying the same mistake over and over again. How could a one-note solo be considered similar to the word abacot? Well many musicians probably do not think a single note solo is a "real" solo, in a legitimate sense, because it isn't complicated or sophisticated or impressive enough, just as abacot is not considered a "real" word, although it is still listed in many dictionaries.
But one-note solos can be quite expressive if they are approached in the right way. Actually that is the challenge I am trying to convey to you here in this article. I want to encourage you to make your one-note solo interesting by adding other things to it: Phrasing, conviction, picking technique, fingering, incorporation of various attitudes, different methods of attack, manipulation of tone, stylistic subtleties used in as many different ways as possible to make the single note solo sound fresh and passionate and exciting. Good luck.
Source:
"On Soloing," How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Jason Earls, Pleroma Publications, 2007.
-end-
(Thanks for reading. If you have any comments, or know of any magazines that would like to publish this piece, please contact the author: zevi_35711@yahoo.com. Also, you would be helping out the author greatly if you purchased one of his books from Amazon.com or another online book store of your choice. Thanks again.)
http://www.youtube.com/user/zevi35711
http://becomeguitaristfromhell.blogspot.com/
http://zombiesofthereddescent.blogspot.com/
Bio: Jason Earls is the author of Cocoon of Terror (Afterbirth Books), Heartless Bastard In Ecstasy, How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Zombies of the Red Descent, If(Sid_Vicious == TRUE && Alan_Turing == TRUE) {ERROR_Cyberpunk(); }, Red Zen, and 0.136101521283655... all available at Amazon.com and other online book stores. His fiction and mathematical work have been published in Red Scream, Yankee Pot Roast, M-Brane SF, Scientia Magna, three of Clifford Pickover’s books, Mathworld.com, AlienSkin, Recreational and Educational Computing, Escaping Elsewhere, Neometropolis, Thirteen, Dogmatika, Prime Curios, the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, OG’s Speculative Fiction, Nocturnal Ooze, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens and other publications. He currently resides in Oklahoma with his wife, Christine.
By Jason Earls, author of How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Red Zen, & Heartless Bastard In Ecstasy
http://becomeguitaristfromhell.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/zevi35711
Occasionally you should consider playing a one-note solo on your electric guitar. I'm serious. You should play a solo consisting of only a single note treated in many different ways. Why? Because simplicity in music (and in life) is important and highly effective; and what could be simpler in musical improvisation than playing a solo consisting of only one note? Also, it was Einstein who said that things should be kept as simple as possible but no simpler, and they don't get much smarter than Einstein. Minimalism can be a nice effective idea when used moderately in music. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great philosopher, was a minimalist and also a rather laconic speaker since he thought that whatever cannot be expressed clearly should be dismissed in silence; and he reasoned further that things in the world that can SHOW themselves, yet cannot be spoken about constitute what is “mystical." But I seem to have gotten away from talking about one-note solos, so I shall return to that subject:
You can have your single-note solo last for as long as you like. Four bars, eight bars, twelve bars, sixteen bars, or more; and the background chords and accompaniment can change behind you or underneath you as much as is necessary, plus you can insert plenty of dynamics into the note as well. I recommend that you experiment with other musicians in your band in having them change chord progressions or transpose the riffs into different keys behind your one-note solo, or direct them to do anything you want really, while you maintain playing that single note on your electric guitar and hold it throughout the entire solo.
Add vibrato. Pick the note repeatedly; fast or slow. Go in and out of time with the rhythm of the tune. Stop playing the note briefly. Add space and plenty of breathing room. Bend the note a little, but not too much (use microtonal bends - quarter steps or less, smears I believe they are called) because you never want to stray too far from the single tone you have chosen to express yourself with. Mainly you should concentrate on that one note while attempting to instill as much energy, emotion, spirituality, passion, yearning, tension, persuasion, release, and everything else you’ve got inside your heart and mind, pushing it into your one-note solo; execute it while incorporating whatever you have boiling inside of you.
And when choosing the note for your solo, make sure it is the absolute BEST NOTE that you can find. Actually, it must be the PERFECT note that fits (or goes against) the song you are playing, because it will be the MAIN note of the solo.
What could a single note solo be compared to in real life? Are there some comparisons we could make? Of course there are.
Sometimes people have an entire meal consisting of only one dish, Benjamin Franklin wrote in his autobiography how he moved to a new town when he was a young man and could afford only a loaf of bread for his single meal of the day; and a truck driver I once worked with went into a grocery store on his lunch break and purchased a single package of bologna and ate only that for his noon day meal; he had no bread, no mustard, no cheese, no mayonnaise, no pickles, no relish, no ketchup, and nothing to drink either - he only had the bologna which he took out of the package and folded in half and bit into with his sharp false teeth.
Are these things like single note solos? I guess they could considered similar, in a way. It just depends on how you observe the situation and analyze it. And your viewpoint of the world and the people around you.
Also many punk bands do not play electric guitar solos at all; so if you decide to play a one note solo, you can consider yourself to be a slightly more sophisticated musician than those in punk bands.
Another reason for playing a single-note solo is that it may help your ideas improve. Years ago (and even to this day) when I was first learning about improvisation, and practicing my guitar a lot, I would notice that whenever I would practice every day, playing for many hours, my ideas during improvisational solos would become noticeably stale and uninspired, as if I were merely playing the same ideas over and over. But if I did not practice much during any particular day, or even skipped a few days of playing altogether, even though my technique would decrease considerably and I would play rather sloppily, whenever it came time to improvise, my ideas would be fresh and exciting and exuberant and alive and it would seem like I was playing entirely new melodies that had never existed before. So when your improvisations start to go stale, remember to play a few one-note solos, and you may get some good improvisational ideas for the next songs you play.
Another thing that might be considered similar to one-note solos is the word 'abacot,' which is a word that exists in dictionaries but is not in fact a real word; it was simply a misprint that happened many years ago and lexicographers kept copying the same mistake over and over again. How could a one-note solo be considered similar to the word abacot? Well many musicians probably do not think a single note solo is a "real" solo, in a legitimate sense, because it isn't complicated or sophisticated or impressive enough, just as abacot is not considered a "real" word, although it is still listed in many dictionaries.
But one-note solos can be quite expressive if they are approached in the right way. Actually that is the challenge I am trying to convey to you here in this article. I want to encourage you to make your one-note solo interesting by adding other things to it: Phrasing, conviction, picking technique, fingering, incorporation of various attitudes, different methods of attack, manipulation of tone, stylistic subtleties used in as many different ways as possible to make the single note solo sound fresh and passionate and exciting. Good luck.
Source:
"On Soloing," How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Jason Earls, Pleroma Publications, 2007.
-end-
(Thanks for reading. If you have any comments, or know of any magazines that would like to publish this piece, please contact the author: zevi_35711@yahoo.com. Also, you would be helping out the author greatly if you purchased one of his books from Amazon.com or another online book store of your choice. Thanks again.)
http://www.youtube.com/user/zevi35711
http://becomeguitaristfromhell.blogspot.com/
http://zombiesofthereddescent.blogspot.com/
Bio: Jason Earls is the author of Cocoon of Terror (Afterbirth Books), Heartless Bastard In Ecstasy, How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Zombies of the Red Descent, If(Sid_Vicious == TRUE && Alan_Turing == TRUE) {ERROR_Cyberpunk(); }, Red Zen, and 0.136101521283655... all available at Amazon.com and other online book stores. His fiction and mathematical work have been published in Red Scream, Yankee Pot Roast, M-Brane SF, Scientia Magna, three of Clifford Pickover’s books, Mathworld.com, AlienSkin, Recreational and Educational Computing, Escaping Elsewhere, Neometropolis, Thirteen, Dogmatika, Prime Curios, the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, OG’s Speculative Fiction, Nocturnal Ooze, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens and other publications. He currently resides in Oklahoma with his wife, Christine.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Flying Quadrunners
Flying Quadrunners
By Jason Earls, author of Red Zen, Cocoon of Terror, & Heartless Bastard In Ecstasy
http://becomeguitaristfromhell.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/zevi35711
The quadrunner was not new. He’d bought it used for $1600 after the previous owner had wrecked it. The small headlights in the front were shattered, the plastic covering over the front tires had been broken and was hanging. The left rear tire was slightly bent and squeaked whenever the brakes were applied. But it didn’t take much effort for Frank to fix those things; and $1600 for a used four wheeler was a lot better than $7000 for a top-of-the-line model. Frank had borrowed the money from his uncle and had already paid him back over half the total amount.
Now, on a lonely Saturday afternoon, Frank was hanging out in his garage, playing some gutbucket blues on his battered Harmony acoustic guitar, and thinking about taking out his quadrunner with Blare, his best friend in the world. Frank’s wife, Sarah, had been excited when he’d first gotten the four-wheeler but now that the new had worn off she was jealous of the contraption and didn’t let him go riding very often. Frank played the intro to the song “Pretty Woman” on his Harmony acoustic while thinking about jumping hills out by the lake with his friend Blare riding behind him. He grinned and strummed a few chords as he imagined all the fun he could be having on his quadrunner at that precise moment instead of being bored hanging around his garage. Next, he played a little bit of ‘Ride of the Valkyries.’ Frank had worked out his own classical interpretation of the song and loved performing it on his acoustic. Mainly he was a gutbucket blues guitarist, but he had a nice fingering laid out for Ride of the Valkyries and could even play the backing chords and main melody simultaneously using the higher strings; it was almost his favorite song and he loved reading biographies of his hero Richard Wagner in his spare time. Frank smiled and played the main melody awhile longer before remembering how badly he wanted to take out his quadrunner.
“Screw it, I’m going in to tell her I’m going riding today,” Frank said.
He carried his guitar in the house, playing a little solo in the higher register of his fretboard as he walked. He had cut away a lower portion of the body near the fretboard so he could reach the higher frets with ease and practice his soloing ability.
Sarah was sitting on the couch, playing one of the video games that went with their cable television package when Frank came in.
“I’m taking my four wheeler out riding today with Blare,” Frank announced in a monotone voice. “I’m gonna go call him now.”
“No you’re not. I want you to stay here and watch the kids while I go shopping with my mother.”
Frank rolled his eyes and set his guitar against the wall. “No way, Sarah. I’m gonna go ride my four wheeler with Blare. You’ll have to find somebody else to watch the kids. I haven’t been riding for months now. I bought that quadrunner to use, not to just let set out in the garage and rust away.”
Sarah continued fingering the remote control, playing her game and not looking in Frank’s direction. “You ride that thing constantly. Just last weekend you stayed out with Blare all night long drinking beer and getting plastered. You didn’t even come home until six in the morning.”
“That wasn’t last weekend, I haven’t been riding in a month!”
“Oh, quit your whining, Frank. I’m sick of it. And I’m sick of hearing about that damn four wheeler.”
Frank picked up his guitar. He took a deep breath and exhaled, trying not to lose his temper. He picked a few notes, but soon his hands did not move and one of them was gripping the fretboard tightly in a death-grip. “What the hell did I buy that quadrunner for if you’re never going to let me ride it!”
“Just shutup, Frank. My mom will be here to pick me up in thirty minutes. So go out there and lock up the garage and get your ass back in here and be ready to watch the kids.”
Frank’s hands were squeezing his guitar tighter now and he was grinding his teeth. He turned around quickly and walked out the back door. He went through the yard past the old blue plastic swimming pool for the kids and the withering tomato plants. Frank wasn’t going to listen to her this time. He couldn’t let her keep controlling every aspect of his life. When he reached the garage, his temper finally got the best of him. He grabbed his guitar by the neck and hit it against the side of the doorway, the body shattering with wood flying in every direction. He hit it five times until he was holding nothing but the neck with four strings attached. Breathing heavily, he looked down at the fretboard of his guitar. Now he didn’t even have an instrument to entertain himself with on this boring Saturday afternoon. Plus, it had been the first guitar he had ever owned and now it was smashed to pieces.
He looked over at his quadrunner. It was setting in the center of the garage. What a beauty. Everything that had been broken on it when he’d purchased it was now fixed. It was gassed up and oiled and ready to go. But his wife wouldn’t let him ride. What a goddamn waste. Paying $1600 for something he couldn’t even use, half the amount still unpaid.
“To hell with this shit,” Frank said. He pulled his keys out of his pocket, went out to his truck, pulled it back toward the garage slowly without revving up the engine. Then he pulled the silver ramps down and loaded up the quadrunner and idled out of the driveway, coasting down the street. Once he was four blocks away, he floored it, racing toward Blare’s house, grinning and thinking about what a great time he was about to have riding his four wheeler.
* * *
Boom, boom, boom. Frank pounded on Blare’s front door, looking in the window screen. “Hey, Blare, I brought my four wheeler! Let’s go riding!”
Blare came running around the corner, his work boots falling heavy on the linoleum floor; he had a perplexed look on his haggard face (he was 26 years old but looked almost 40 for some unknown reason, probably bad genetics). “What’s going on out here? Frank, is that you?”
“Yeah. I snuck away from the wife and I’ve got my quadrunner loaded up. If we want to get in some riding time we’re gonna have to hurry, she could be here any minute looking for me and she’s gonna go apeshit if she sees my four wheeler in the back of my truck.”
Blare pushed open the door and stared at Frank’s four wheeler with a serious and somewhat disgruntled look on his face. And Frank didn’t take his eyes off Blare the whole time. Frank considered Blare to be his best friend in the whole world. He really looked up to him – for making more money than him, for having a good-looking nurturing wife who loved him, for having a more expensive quadrunner, for being three inches taller than him, for keeping his body weight at a constant 185 pounds of firm muscle and lean sinew, for having a full beard when Frank could only grow a small amount of peach fuzz on his chin, for knowing how to take his quadrunner apart and put it back together again in under two hours, for being able to make extra money installing remote control car-starters in vehicles. But he couldn’t play the acoustic guitar like Frank could. That was one thing he had on Blare. Almost nobody could play gutbucket blues like Frank could. Especially on his Harmony guitar. But that was busted to pieces now. Thanks to his wife. The bitch. Still, Frank would get another acoustic guitar from a pawn shop soon and he would remain the best gutbucket blues player in the area and also play Ride of the Valkyries occasionally since that was his favorite classical piece. Frank kept on staring at his friend, noticing that Blare had on his usual green coveralls and a fresh chew of Red Man in his mouth. He looked at some of the grains in Blare’s teeth.
“Come on in,” Blare said. “I just need to change into an older pair of boots. I can’t get mud on these work ones.”
After Blare got his other boots on they went out the back door and into the garage and started working to load up Blare’s quadrunner into his own truck. It was almost a brand new Yamaha four wheeler, much faster than Frank’s, but he didn’t care. He was just glad to have somebody to ride with. They went back in the house and grabbed some beer, barbecue corn chips, and a package of hot dogs and went out and got in their trucks and peeled out of the driveway. Frank couldn’t believe his wife hadn’t shown up yet.
It only took ten minutes to get to the lake. That was their usual riding spot. They rode on the dry banks and since the water level was really low there was plenty of space. The weather on this day was also perfect for riding. A little chilly but pretty sunny for early November. The sky was clear and light blue with only a few long white scattered clouds near the horizon. The lake was surrounded by red clay hills with white blocks of granite dotting the sides. An attractive landscape. But they only had a couple of hours of sunlight left.
Frank turned on his radio as he headed toward the lake and the Ride of the Valkyries theme was playing. He became excited and blasted the volume and screamed out the melody to the music as he drove, following behind his best pal Blare.
They arrived at the lake, parked their trucks, got out and stood looking around for a few minutes. Blare grabbed two beers from his cab and they guzzled them down. Then they got busy unloading their four wheelers. After Frank grabbed his red racing helmet with the big lightning bolt running down the center and Blare grabbed his pure black one, they fired up their quadrunners and revved them for a long time, just to let any people in the area know they were there. The engines were loud and Frank grinned at the powerful sounds as his ears popped. Then they took off riding over the sand, the tires gripping and throwing it around as they turned and swerved. They headed toward the far end of the lake, far away from their trucks. Even if Sarah drove out now and saw their pickups, she wouldn’t be able to see Frank if he was riding on the other side of the lake.
Frank felt slightly cold even though he was wearing his new camoflauge jacket he’d bought at the dollar store for only $15. Blare always wore insulated coveralls, so he never got cold. They chased each other around the lake, ramping little hills and yelling back and forth, challenging each other to do different stunts and revving up their engines and sliding around in the sand.
“Hey Blare, I bet you can’t do this!”
“Shutup, Frank. I’m the best at that.”
“Look at that little car tire, I’m going to flip it up on its end by riding over it.”
“No you won’t.”
“Hey, let’s start a fire and set up a ramp and jump it.”
“Nah, that’s too crazy for me.”
Just a few of the sentences they yelled as they rode around.
An hour and a half drifted away.
Frank forgot about his wife and her constant nagging and manipulative controlling behavior, he forgot about his problems at work and his stomach ulcers. He forgot about everything as he rode around with his best friend, Blare. He felt wonderful and free and happy and was having a blast.
But at one point he climbed a small hill that led to the highway and at the top he accidentally gunned the throttle and when he hit the pavement of the road his four-wheeler tipped back but the bar at the rear of his seat saved him from going all the way over on his back. He skidded across the highway, riding a wheelie, with sparks shooting up behind him from the bar scraping across the pavement. When he went off the other side of the road he quickly regained control and applied his brakes. He stopped with his front tire only about two feet from a 60 foot drop-off to sharp rocks below. Frank put his feet down to brace himself, his quadrunner lightly idling, and looked over the edge of the cliff. It scared the shit out of him, a rush of adrenaline flooded his veins. He had almost went over and killed himself. It was almost dark too. Daylight had drifted almost entirely away but he could still see most of the land because of the full moon shining. The danger at almost having died was still with him and one of the ulcers in his stomach pulsated and sent out a large quantity of burning acid. He rubbed his stomach and chest until the pain went away.
After almost soaring over the cliff and losing his life, Frank noticed Blare riding toward the edge of the lake below. His newer Yamaha quadrunner looked so cool shooting along the bank that he decided to join him. “I wonder if my quadrunner looks that cool,” Frank thought.
The lake had gotten even lower this year. You could barely swim in it anymore. The excessive summer heat had almost dried up the entire mass of water. Frank looked at the water level. “Goddamn global warming,” he said as he leaned over and raced toward Blare. A rush of fatigue suddenly swept over Frank, he could feel it start in the back of his neck and descend toward his feet, stopping briefly at his thighs which were beginning to develop serious cramps from riding. But when he hummed some of the Ride of the Valkyries theme he started to feel more energetic.
He caught up with Blare who was riding a wheelie and Frank popped one and they both rode side by side, holding their wheelies, and smiling at each other broadly. A strong bond developed between them at that moment. They landed successfully and started veering off toward the center of the lake.
Weeks earlier, a small mud ramp had naturally formed near the middle of the lake. Only a foot and a half tall and four feet wide, it was a mound of dry mud that was enough to send a fast quadrunner flying dangerously high into the air.
Blare was the first one to hit the mud ramp. He zoomed up and flew over twelve feet in the air. Then Frank hit the small ramp and started his high ascent. In mid air, they each left their quadrunners from the whipping centrifigal force and their bodies slammed together fast and hard. They were knocked unconscious and flipped around in the air with Frank landing head first down in the mud, while Blare landed flat on his stomach. The mud was still somewhat wet even though the edge of the low lake was still a long way from where they had landed, and most of the other surrounding mud was fully dried. Unfortunately, the mud that Blare and Frank had both landed in was a rare type of quicksand and when Frank hit head first he immediately began to sink. And so did Blare.
Down and down, deeper and deeper, a slow steady submersion of their bodies into the thick, stinking, algea-drenched mud took place. And their quadrunners sank too, although a little slower. The slurping, sucking sounds of the quicksand consuming the metal and plastic was loud and disturbing. When Blare awoke from being knocked out, he pointed his knees downward in an attempt to crawl out, but his legs were quickly captured by the devouring quicksand and down he started to go. Frank went even faster since when his head hit, his body was aimed like a slim projectile pointing down into the mud (before Frank’s body fully submerged, the last thing he heard was the Ride of the Valkyries theme playing in his mind as his soul floated off into the pleroma above). It didn’t take long for the powerful muddy quicksand to consume both of them and their quadrunners too, which they both dearly loved.
They were completely buried after only a few minutes and their four wheelers were totally out of sight as well; and the mystery of what happened to the two men would remain alive for many months since they had told none of their family members where they were going. Their riding trails quickly vanished as well since it rained a few hours after they had died slow agonizing deaths in the muddy quicksand. Only their trucks were visible.
But the next summer, when the lake had dried even more, an elderly gentleman was digging around quite deep into the lake with a small shovel, and he chanced upon Frank and Blare’s bodies fully petrified from the weird algea native to the area. The old man called 911 and a small bulldozer extracted Frank and Blare’s petrified corpses and both of their families consented to have them donated to the town museum, where they were put on full public display. Many researchers and scientists came from other states to view and study the specimens and take samples of the miraculous algea still clinging to their bodies that had helped fully preserve them and petrify their constitutions into a rock hard state.
-end-
(Thanks for reading. If you have any comments, or know of any magazines that would like to publish this story, please contact the author: zevi_35711@yahoo.com. Also, you would be helping out the author greatly if you purchased one of his books from Amazon.com or another online book store of your choice. Thanks again.)
http://www.youtube.com/user/zevi35711
http://becomeguitaristfromhell.blogspot.com/
http://zombiesofthereddescent.blogspot.com/
Bio: Jason Earls is the author of Cocoon of Terror (Afterbirth Books), Heartless Bastard In Ecstasy, How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Zombies of the Red Descent, If(Sid_Vicious == TRUE && Alan_Turing == TRUE) {ERROR_Cyberpunk(); }, Red Zen, and 0.136101521283655... all available at Amazon.com and other online book stores. His fiction and mathematical work have been published in Red Scream, Yankee Pot Roast, M-Brane SF, Scientia Magna, three of Clifford Pickover’s books, Mathworld.com, AlienSkin, Recreational and Educational Computing, Escaping Elsewhere, Neometropolis, Thirteen, Dogmatika, Prime Curios, the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, OG’s Speculative Fiction, Nocturnal Ooze, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens and other publications. He currently resides in Oklahoma with his wife, Christine.
By Jason Earls, author of Red Zen, Cocoon of Terror, & Heartless Bastard In Ecstasy
http://becomeguitaristfromhell.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/zevi35711
The quadrunner was not new. He’d bought it used for $1600 after the previous owner had wrecked it. The small headlights in the front were shattered, the plastic covering over the front tires had been broken and was hanging. The left rear tire was slightly bent and squeaked whenever the brakes were applied. But it didn’t take much effort for Frank to fix those things; and $1600 for a used four wheeler was a lot better than $7000 for a top-of-the-line model. Frank had borrowed the money from his uncle and had already paid him back over half the total amount.
Now, on a lonely Saturday afternoon, Frank was hanging out in his garage, playing some gutbucket blues on his battered Harmony acoustic guitar, and thinking about taking out his quadrunner with Blare, his best friend in the world. Frank’s wife, Sarah, had been excited when he’d first gotten the four-wheeler but now that the new had worn off she was jealous of the contraption and didn’t let him go riding very often. Frank played the intro to the song “Pretty Woman” on his Harmony acoustic while thinking about jumping hills out by the lake with his friend Blare riding behind him. He grinned and strummed a few chords as he imagined all the fun he could be having on his quadrunner at that precise moment instead of being bored hanging around his garage. Next, he played a little bit of ‘Ride of the Valkyries.’ Frank had worked out his own classical interpretation of the song and loved performing it on his acoustic. Mainly he was a gutbucket blues guitarist, but he had a nice fingering laid out for Ride of the Valkyries and could even play the backing chords and main melody simultaneously using the higher strings; it was almost his favorite song and he loved reading biographies of his hero Richard Wagner in his spare time. Frank smiled and played the main melody awhile longer before remembering how badly he wanted to take out his quadrunner.
“Screw it, I’m going in to tell her I’m going riding today,” Frank said.
He carried his guitar in the house, playing a little solo in the higher register of his fretboard as he walked. He had cut away a lower portion of the body near the fretboard so he could reach the higher frets with ease and practice his soloing ability.
Sarah was sitting on the couch, playing one of the video games that went with their cable television package when Frank came in.
“I’m taking my four wheeler out riding today with Blare,” Frank announced in a monotone voice. “I’m gonna go call him now.”
“No you’re not. I want you to stay here and watch the kids while I go shopping with my mother.”
Frank rolled his eyes and set his guitar against the wall. “No way, Sarah. I’m gonna go ride my four wheeler with Blare. You’ll have to find somebody else to watch the kids. I haven’t been riding for months now. I bought that quadrunner to use, not to just let set out in the garage and rust away.”
Sarah continued fingering the remote control, playing her game and not looking in Frank’s direction. “You ride that thing constantly. Just last weekend you stayed out with Blare all night long drinking beer and getting plastered. You didn’t even come home until six in the morning.”
“That wasn’t last weekend, I haven’t been riding in a month!”
“Oh, quit your whining, Frank. I’m sick of it. And I’m sick of hearing about that damn four wheeler.”
Frank picked up his guitar. He took a deep breath and exhaled, trying not to lose his temper. He picked a few notes, but soon his hands did not move and one of them was gripping the fretboard tightly in a death-grip. “What the hell did I buy that quadrunner for if you’re never going to let me ride it!”
“Just shutup, Frank. My mom will be here to pick me up in thirty minutes. So go out there and lock up the garage and get your ass back in here and be ready to watch the kids.”
Frank’s hands were squeezing his guitar tighter now and he was grinding his teeth. He turned around quickly and walked out the back door. He went through the yard past the old blue plastic swimming pool for the kids and the withering tomato plants. Frank wasn’t going to listen to her this time. He couldn’t let her keep controlling every aspect of his life. When he reached the garage, his temper finally got the best of him. He grabbed his guitar by the neck and hit it against the side of the doorway, the body shattering with wood flying in every direction. He hit it five times until he was holding nothing but the neck with four strings attached. Breathing heavily, he looked down at the fretboard of his guitar. Now he didn’t even have an instrument to entertain himself with on this boring Saturday afternoon. Plus, it had been the first guitar he had ever owned and now it was smashed to pieces.
He looked over at his quadrunner. It was setting in the center of the garage. What a beauty. Everything that had been broken on it when he’d purchased it was now fixed. It was gassed up and oiled and ready to go. But his wife wouldn’t let him ride. What a goddamn waste. Paying $1600 for something he couldn’t even use, half the amount still unpaid.
“To hell with this shit,” Frank said. He pulled his keys out of his pocket, went out to his truck, pulled it back toward the garage slowly without revving up the engine. Then he pulled the silver ramps down and loaded up the quadrunner and idled out of the driveway, coasting down the street. Once he was four blocks away, he floored it, racing toward Blare’s house, grinning and thinking about what a great time he was about to have riding his four wheeler.
* * *
Boom, boom, boom. Frank pounded on Blare’s front door, looking in the window screen. “Hey, Blare, I brought my four wheeler! Let’s go riding!”
Blare came running around the corner, his work boots falling heavy on the linoleum floor; he had a perplexed look on his haggard face (he was 26 years old but looked almost 40 for some unknown reason, probably bad genetics). “What’s going on out here? Frank, is that you?”
“Yeah. I snuck away from the wife and I’ve got my quadrunner loaded up. If we want to get in some riding time we’re gonna have to hurry, she could be here any minute looking for me and she’s gonna go apeshit if she sees my four wheeler in the back of my truck.”
Blare pushed open the door and stared at Frank’s four wheeler with a serious and somewhat disgruntled look on his face. And Frank didn’t take his eyes off Blare the whole time. Frank considered Blare to be his best friend in the whole world. He really looked up to him – for making more money than him, for having a good-looking nurturing wife who loved him, for having a more expensive quadrunner, for being three inches taller than him, for keeping his body weight at a constant 185 pounds of firm muscle and lean sinew, for having a full beard when Frank could only grow a small amount of peach fuzz on his chin, for knowing how to take his quadrunner apart and put it back together again in under two hours, for being able to make extra money installing remote control car-starters in vehicles. But he couldn’t play the acoustic guitar like Frank could. That was one thing he had on Blare. Almost nobody could play gutbucket blues like Frank could. Especially on his Harmony guitar. But that was busted to pieces now. Thanks to his wife. The bitch. Still, Frank would get another acoustic guitar from a pawn shop soon and he would remain the best gutbucket blues player in the area and also play Ride of the Valkyries occasionally since that was his favorite classical piece. Frank kept on staring at his friend, noticing that Blare had on his usual green coveralls and a fresh chew of Red Man in his mouth. He looked at some of the grains in Blare’s teeth.
“Come on in,” Blare said. “I just need to change into an older pair of boots. I can’t get mud on these work ones.”
After Blare got his other boots on they went out the back door and into the garage and started working to load up Blare’s quadrunner into his own truck. It was almost a brand new Yamaha four wheeler, much faster than Frank’s, but he didn’t care. He was just glad to have somebody to ride with. They went back in the house and grabbed some beer, barbecue corn chips, and a package of hot dogs and went out and got in their trucks and peeled out of the driveway. Frank couldn’t believe his wife hadn’t shown up yet.
It only took ten minutes to get to the lake. That was their usual riding spot. They rode on the dry banks and since the water level was really low there was plenty of space. The weather on this day was also perfect for riding. A little chilly but pretty sunny for early November. The sky was clear and light blue with only a few long white scattered clouds near the horizon. The lake was surrounded by red clay hills with white blocks of granite dotting the sides. An attractive landscape. But they only had a couple of hours of sunlight left.
Frank turned on his radio as he headed toward the lake and the Ride of the Valkyries theme was playing. He became excited and blasted the volume and screamed out the melody to the music as he drove, following behind his best pal Blare.
They arrived at the lake, parked their trucks, got out and stood looking around for a few minutes. Blare grabbed two beers from his cab and they guzzled them down. Then they got busy unloading their four wheelers. After Frank grabbed his red racing helmet with the big lightning bolt running down the center and Blare grabbed his pure black one, they fired up their quadrunners and revved them for a long time, just to let any people in the area know they were there. The engines were loud and Frank grinned at the powerful sounds as his ears popped. Then they took off riding over the sand, the tires gripping and throwing it around as they turned and swerved. They headed toward the far end of the lake, far away from their trucks. Even if Sarah drove out now and saw their pickups, she wouldn’t be able to see Frank if he was riding on the other side of the lake.
Frank felt slightly cold even though he was wearing his new camoflauge jacket he’d bought at the dollar store for only $15. Blare always wore insulated coveralls, so he never got cold. They chased each other around the lake, ramping little hills and yelling back and forth, challenging each other to do different stunts and revving up their engines and sliding around in the sand.
“Hey Blare, I bet you can’t do this!”
“Shutup, Frank. I’m the best at that.”
“Look at that little car tire, I’m going to flip it up on its end by riding over it.”
“No you won’t.”
“Hey, let’s start a fire and set up a ramp and jump it.”
“Nah, that’s too crazy for me.”
Just a few of the sentences they yelled as they rode around.
An hour and a half drifted away.
Frank forgot about his wife and her constant nagging and manipulative controlling behavior, he forgot about his problems at work and his stomach ulcers. He forgot about everything as he rode around with his best friend, Blare. He felt wonderful and free and happy and was having a blast.
But at one point he climbed a small hill that led to the highway and at the top he accidentally gunned the throttle and when he hit the pavement of the road his four-wheeler tipped back but the bar at the rear of his seat saved him from going all the way over on his back. He skidded across the highway, riding a wheelie, with sparks shooting up behind him from the bar scraping across the pavement. When he went off the other side of the road he quickly regained control and applied his brakes. He stopped with his front tire only about two feet from a 60 foot drop-off to sharp rocks below. Frank put his feet down to brace himself, his quadrunner lightly idling, and looked over the edge of the cliff. It scared the shit out of him, a rush of adrenaline flooded his veins. He had almost went over and killed himself. It was almost dark too. Daylight had drifted almost entirely away but he could still see most of the land because of the full moon shining. The danger at almost having died was still with him and one of the ulcers in his stomach pulsated and sent out a large quantity of burning acid. He rubbed his stomach and chest until the pain went away.
After almost soaring over the cliff and losing his life, Frank noticed Blare riding toward the edge of the lake below. His newer Yamaha quadrunner looked so cool shooting along the bank that he decided to join him. “I wonder if my quadrunner looks that cool,” Frank thought.
The lake had gotten even lower this year. You could barely swim in it anymore. The excessive summer heat had almost dried up the entire mass of water. Frank looked at the water level. “Goddamn global warming,” he said as he leaned over and raced toward Blare. A rush of fatigue suddenly swept over Frank, he could feel it start in the back of his neck and descend toward his feet, stopping briefly at his thighs which were beginning to develop serious cramps from riding. But when he hummed some of the Ride of the Valkyries theme he started to feel more energetic.
He caught up with Blare who was riding a wheelie and Frank popped one and they both rode side by side, holding their wheelies, and smiling at each other broadly. A strong bond developed between them at that moment. They landed successfully and started veering off toward the center of the lake.
Weeks earlier, a small mud ramp had naturally formed near the middle of the lake. Only a foot and a half tall and four feet wide, it was a mound of dry mud that was enough to send a fast quadrunner flying dangerously high into the air.
Blare was the first one to hit the mud ramp. He zoomed up and flew over twelve feet in the air. Then Frank hit the small ramp and started his high ascent. In mid air, they each left their quadrunners from the whipping centrifigal force and their bodies slammed together fast and hard. They were knocked unconscious and flipped around in the air with Frank landing head first down in the mud, while Blare landed flat on his stomach. The mud was still somewhat wet even though the edge of the low lake was still a long way from where they had landed, and most of the other surrounding mud was fully dried. Unfortunately, the mud that Blare and Frank had both landed in was a rare type of quicksand and when Frank hit head first he immediately began to sink. And so did Blare.
Down and down, deeper and deeper, a slow steady submersion of their bodies into the thick, stinking, algea-drenched mud took place. And their quadrunners sank too, although a little slower. The slurping, sucking sounds of the quicksand consuming the metal and plastic was loud and disturbing. When Blare awoke from being knocked out, he pointed his knees downward in an attempt to crawl out, but his legs were quickly captured by the devouring quicksand and down he started to go. Frank went even faster since when his head hit, his body was aimed like a slim projectile pointing down into the mud (before Frank’s body fully submerged, the last thing he heard was the Ride of the Valkyries theme playing in his mind as his soul floated off into the pleroma above). It didn’t take long for the powerful muddy quicksand to consume both of them and their quadrunners too, which they both dearly loved.
They were completely buried after only a few minutes and their four wheelers were totally out of sight as well; and the mystery of what happened to the two men would remain alive for many months since they had told none of their family members where they were going. Their riding trails quickly vanished as well since it rained a few hours after they had died slow agonizing deaths in the muddy quicksand. Only their trucks were visible.
But the next summer, when the lake had dried even more, an elderly gentleman was digging around quite deep into the lake with a small shovel, and he chanced upon Frank and Blare’s bodies fully petrified from the weird algea native to the area. The old man called 911 and a small bulldozer extracted Frank and Blare’s petrified corpses and both of their families consented to have them donated to the town museum, where they were put on full public display. Many researchers and scientists came from other states to view and study the specimens and take samples of the miraculous algea still clinging to their bodies that had helped fully preserve them and petrify their constitutions into a rock hard state.
-end-
(Thanks for reading. If you have any comments, or know of any magazines that would like to publish this story, please contact the author: zevi_35711@yahoo.com. Also, you would be helping out the author greatly if you purchased one of his books from Amazon.com or another online book store of your choice. Thanks again.)
http://www.youtube.com/user/zevi35711
http://becomeguitaristfromhell.blogspot.com/
http://zombiesofthereddescent.blogspot.com/
Bio: Jason Earls is the author of Cocoon of Terror (Afterbirth Books), Heartless Bastard In Ecstasy, How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Zombies of the Red Descent, If(Sid_Vicious == TRUE && Alan_Turing == TRUE) {ERROR_Cyberpunk(); }, Red Zen, and 0.136101521283655... all available at Amazon.com and other online book stores. His fiction and mathematical work have been published in Red Scream, Yankee Pot Roast, M-Brane SF, Scientia Magna, three of Clifford Pickover’s books, Mathworld.com, AlienSkin, Recreational and Educational Computing, Escaping Elsewhere, Neometropolis, Thirteen, Dogmatika, Prime Curios, the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, OG’s Speculative Fiction, Nocturnal Ooze, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens and other publications. He currently resides in Oklahoma with his wife, Christine.
Friday, February 13, 2009
What is Sack Posset?
What Is Sack Posset?
By Jason Earls, author of Cocoon of Terror & Heartless Bastard In Ecstasy
http://becomeguitaristfromhell.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/zevi35711
In Bill Bryson’s book, Made In America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States, he writes that Puritans were in the habit of imbibing an alcoholic concoction known as ‘sack posset.’ Bryson wrote that the drink was consumed in large quantities at social gatherings such as weddings, christenings, and funerals; and that the ingredients were an unappetizing mixture of curdled milk plus whatever type of intoxicant was at hand (mainly beer or wine), thus proving that Colonial Americans were quite adventuresome drinkers in the category of potent potables. Bryson went on to claim that almost no one drinks sack posset today.
However, through the magickal and fearsome powers of the internet, I googled ‘sack posset’ after reading about it in Bryson’s engaging book and found many traditional recipes for the “drink” popping up left and right. One typical recipe ran thus:
Two pints of cream; one pint of gooseberry wine; some “sack” which is a dry fortified wine with brandy such as Port or Sherry; eight egg yolks with only four whites; a few blades of mace; biscuit crumbs; and sugar. It goes on to list how the cream and mace are boiled together, then the wine heated as the eggs are beaten and whisked in, next cream is added and stirred until a thick
custard is produced, finally sugar is used to sweeten the entire mixture. (The source of this recipe is listed as the book, English Housewifry, published in 1764.)
Hence, the recipe above makes sack posset out to be more of a custard than an unappealing drink made from curdled milk and leftover booze. Shortly after finding this recipe on the internet, I then found a definition of sack posset that further confirmed the custard theory:
Sack posset: a custard made from wine and cream.
-Rare Receipts for Cookery (1654)
A little more searching and a different (more modern) variation of the sack posset recipe made it seem highly similar to a typical egg nog drink with brandy and sherry added.
Concerning Bill Bryson’s version of sack posset, when I consulted the online version of Webster’s 1828 English Dictionary, its definition for ‘posset’ was this:
POS’SET, noun, Latin: posca,
Milk curdled with wine or other liquor.
And in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary of 1913, one of the definitions for ‘sack’ lists it as a dry wine and goes on to say the word comes from the Latin, ‘siccus’ meaning dry or harsh.
So it appears Bryson did not investigate sack posset beyond merely looking up definitions for the two main words – that seemed to be plenty enough research for him.
But it seems he got it wrong since he’s so outnumbered by the numerous recipes for the custard version. Concerning custardlike recipes, a rhyming poem written by Sir Fleetwood Fletcher for making sack posset was printed in the New York Gazette in 1744, some lines of which are:
SACK-POSSET
“... O’er flaming coals together let them heat
Till the all-conquering sack dissolves the sweet.
O’er such another fire set eggs, twice ten,
New born from crowing cock and speckled hen;
[... many lines omitted here ...]
Then covered close, together let them dwell
Till Miss twice sings: You must not kiss and tell.
Each lad and lass snatch up their murdering spoon,
And fall on fiercely like a starved dragoon.”
Now there’s a poem. Murdering spoon. Crowing cocks. Starved dragoon. Wicked. What is a dragoon anyway. A foot-soldier who uses a horse for transportation. Cool. You can’t beat that. I bet those dragoons did get pretty hungry out there. Even hungry enough to eat a sack-posset custard. You betcha. I wonder what else they would eat in times of war. Who knows. Probably anything. Anything they could find. I’m rambling again. I better shut up.
When mentioning Bryson’s original “curdled milk + alcohol” definition of sack posset to a wise elderly gentleman who has resided in my hometown for nearly his entire life, he related to me the curious habit of certain men in our region of the south who would sit around on slow evenings consuming large quantities of cottage cheese while drinking copious amounts of strong beer. He thought this was quite similar to Bryson’s primitive recipe for sack posset and I must say I was compelled to agree with him. Actually, that combination sounds quite appetizing and I think I’ll have some of the ‘beer/cottage-cheese’ type of sack posset soon but also make the custard variety to see how they compare and I’ll write another article summarizing my results. Good idea. Wish me luck.
-end-
(Thanks for reading. If you have any comments, or know of any magazines that would like to publish this story, please contact the author: zevi_35711@yahoo.com. Also, you would be helping out the author greatly if you purchased one of his books from Amazon.com or another online book store of your choice. Thanks again.)
http://www.youtube.com/user/zevi35711
http://becomeguitaristfromhell.blogspot.com/
http://zombiesofthereddescent.blogspot.com/
Bio: Jason Earls is the author of Cocoon of Terror (Afterbirth Books), Heartless Bastard In Ecstasy, How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Zombies of the Red Descent, If(Sid_Vicious == TRUE && Alan_Turing == TRUE) {ERROR_Cyberpunk(); }, Red Zen, and 0.136101521283655... all available at Amazon.com and other online book stores. His fiction and mathematical work have been published in Red Scream, Yankee Pot Roast, M-Brane SF, Scientia Magna, three of Clifford Pickover’s books, Mathworld.com, AlienSkin, Recreational and Educational Computing, Escaping Elsewhere, Neometropolis, Thirteen, Dogmatika, Prime Curios, the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, OG’s Speculative Fiction, Nocturnal Ooze, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens and other publications. He currently resides in Oklahoma with his wife, Christine.
By Jason Earls, author of Cocoon of Terror & Heartless Bastard In Ecstasy
http://becomeguitaristfromhell.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/zevi35711
In Bill Bryson’s book, Made In America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States, he writes that Puritans were in the habit of imbibing an alcoholic concoction known as ‘sack posset.’ Bryson wrote that the drink was consumed in large quantities at social gatherings such as weddings, christenings, and funerals; and that the ingredients were an unappetizing mixture of curdled milk plus whatever type of intoxicant was at hand (mainly beer or wine), thus proving that Colonial Americans were quite adventuresome drinkers in the category of potent potables. Bryson went on to claim that almost no one drinks sack posset today.
However, through the magickal and fearsome powers of the internet, I googled ‘sack posset’ after reading about it in Bryson’s engaging book and found many traditional recipes for the “drink” popping up left and right. One typical recipe ran thus:
Two pints of cream; one pint of gooseberry wine; some “sack” which is a dry fortified wine with brandy such as Port or Sherry; eight egg yolks with only four whites; a few blades of mace; biscuit crumbs; and sugar. It goes on to list how the cream and mace are boiled together, then the wine heated as the eggs are beaten and whisked in, next cream is added and stirred until a thick
custard is produced, finally sugar is used to sweeten the entire mixture. (The source of this recipe is listed as the book, English Housewifry, published in 1764.)
Hence, the recipe above makes sack posset out to be more of a custard than an unappealing drink made from curdled milk and leftover booze. Shortly after finding this recipe on the internet, I then found a definition of sack posset that further confirmed the custard theory:
Sack posset: a custard made from wine and cream.
-Rare Receipts for Cookery (1654)
A little more searching and a different (more modern) variation of the sack posset recipe made it seem highly similar to a typical egg nog drink with brandy and sherry added.
Concerning Bill Bryson’s version of sack posset, when I consulted the online version of Webster’s 1828 English Dictionary, its definition for ‘posset’ was this:
POS’SET, noun, Latin: posca,
Milk curdled with wine or other liquor.
And in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary of 1913, one of the definitions for ‘sack’ lists it as a dry wine and goes on to say the word comes from the Latin, ‘siccus’ meaning dry or harsh.
So it appears Bryson did not investigate sack posset beyond merely looking up definitions for the two main words – that seemed to be plenty enough research for him.
But it seems he got it wrong since he’s so outnumbered by the numerous recipes for the custard version. Concerning custardlike recipes, a rhyming poem written by Sir Fleetwood Fletcher for making sack posset was printed in the New York Gazette in 1744, some lines of which are:
SACK-POSSET
“... O’er flaming coals together let them heat
Till the all-conquering sack dissolves the sweet.
O’er such another fire set eggs, twice ten,
New born from crowing cock and speckled hen;
[... many lines omitted here ...]
Then covered close, together let them dwell
Till Miss twice sings: You must not kiss and tell.
Each lad and lass snatch up their murdering spoon,
And fall on fiercely like a starved dragoon.”
Now there’s a poem. Murdering spoon. Crowing cocks. Starved dragoon. Wicked. What is a dragoon anyway. A foot-soldier who uses a horse for transportation. Cool. You can’t beat that. I bet those dragoons did get pretty hungry out there. Even hungry enough to eat a sack-posset custard. You betcha. I wonder what else they would eat in times of war. Who knows. Probably anything. Anything they could find. I’m rambling again. I better shut up.
When mentioning Bryson’s original “curdled milk + alcohol” definition of sack posset to a wise elderly gentleman who has resided in my hometown for nearly his entire life, he related to me the curious habit of certain men in our region of the south who would sit around on slow evenings consuming large quantities of cottage cheese while drinking copious amounts of strong beer. He thought this was quite similar to Bryson’s primitive recipe for sack posset and I must say I was compelled to agree with him. Actually, that combination sounds quite appetizing and I think I’ll have some of the ‘beer/cottage-cheese’ type of sack posset soon but also make the custard variety to see how they compare and I’ll write another article summarizing my results. Good idea. Wish me luck.
-end-
(Thanks for reading. If you have any comments, or know of any magazines that would like to publish this story, please contact the author: zevi_35711@yahoo.com. Also, you would be helping out the author greatly if you purchased one of his books from Amazon.com or another online book store of your choice. Thanks again.)
http://www.youtube.com/user/zevi35711
http://becomeguitaristfromhell.blogspot.com/
http://zombiesofthereddescent.blogspot.com/
Bio: Jason Earls is the author of Cocoon of Terror (Afterbirth Books), Heartless Bastard In Ecstasy, How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Zombies of the Red Descent, If(Sid_Vicious == TRUE && Alan_Turing == TRUE) {ERROR_Cyberpunk(); }, Red Zen, and 0.136101521283655... all available at Amazon.com and other online book stores. His fiction and mathematical work have been published in Red Scream, Yankee Pot Roast, M-Brane SF, Scientia Magna, three of Clifford Pickover’s books, Mathworld.com, AlienSkin, Recreational and Educational Computing, Escaping Elsewhere, Neometropolis, Thirteen, Dogmatika, Prime Curios, the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, OG’s Speculative Fiction, Nocturnal Ooze, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens and other publications. He currently resides in Oklahoma with his wife, Christine.
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