In Which Our Heroine Ruminates on Annoying the New Neighbors

Last night, as I was belting out all six verses of American Pie for the second night in a row, I started to wonder what my new neighbors would think when they realized they were moving next door to the Go Go Guitar Girl. My previous neighbors--the inimitable Pellegrino, Ursula and baby Carmine--moved out about a month ago. (May they R.I.P. in their new upstate home.) I expect their replacement tenants to make their entrance this very weekend.

I should back up. Pellegrino et. al. have been the pea under my mattress ever since I moved into this building, two long years ago. Their ability to sense my presence in the backyard--even if I was only stepping out briefly, to release an errant cockroach or shake out a tablecloth--was so uncanny, and their efforts to bully me into weeding the garden for them so relentless, that I had developed a deep and abiding fear of running into them in the hallways. When I realized I didn't have enough chairs for my Thanksgiving dinner, I even threw my brother in law to the wolves and made him go next door to ask if they had any to spare.

So when, on a recent Saturday morning, I saw a mattress walking down the stairs in front of my front window, I got hopeful. Could they be moving out? I was on the phone with SNM at the time, and she told me not to be stupid--they were probably just getting a new mattress. But later that day I came home to find Pellegrino moving a refrigerator out into the hallway.

"We move," he said with a big smile.

"Oh, that's too bad," I said, with an even bigger smile. "Do you know who's moving in?"

"Ah, yes. Two gaiss."

"Two guys?" I asked, imagining two stinky college boys throwing keggers on my back porch.

"You know. The gaiss."

The clouds broke, and my heart leapt: Gays! Hurrah!

"You no worry," Pellegrino continued, assuming I was as intolerant of alternative lifestyles as he . (This was, after all, the man who had orchestrated the ousting of the transgendered dancer from the second floor the previous fall.) "The gaiss, they clean. You know."

Oh, I knew. Did I ever.

My fantasy life kicked into overdrive. Me, sitting between my new gay best friends on their comfortable yet stylish couch, watching marathons of the L Word whilst stuffing my face with handcrafted appetizers and wine procured from their most recent jaunt to Napa.

Me, throwing lavish parties on my new canopied back porch overlooking the English-style rose garden they had landscaped with the help of a revolving cast of boy-toy handymen.

Me, playing my guitar for a crowd of their closest friends, one of whom would just happen to be an A&R guy at Nonesuch Records and who would absolutely insist I come in to record a demo.

Oh, the life I would lead living next door to the gaiss!

It all came crashing down when I dropped off my March rent at the cafe run by my landlord, MF. As I handed him the envelope I put on my saddest face, feigning devastation at the loss of the G. family from the building. MF shook his head sadly. When I asked--perhaps too eagerly--when the new tenants would be moving in, he said they hadn't found any yet.

"But--but--Pellegrino said--," I sputtered.

"Na, na," MF replied. "We find someone else. We find you someone nice."

I knew exactly what he meant.

No gaiss, no rose garden, no wine parties. No A&R courtship for the Go Go Guitar Girl. Just loud music all hours, sports on Sundays and keggers with kiddies in the backyard.

Wherein She Joins Chords and Rhythm

If you've read the previous post, you have an idea of the state I was in last night when I picked up my guitar. I wasn't expecting much, frankly. Usually when I'm frustrated I find it hard to concentrate on playing. But I was, it turns out, pleasantly surprised.

I started by working on my fingerpicking. I'm trying to get my right-hand fingers more dexterous, more able to respond individually. It's hard. You don't realize how infrequently your ring and middle fingers move without the other fingers. I think the only time I really move my middle and ring fingers independently of the others is when I type. The fact that I can type with some amount of speed and accuracy gives me hope that one day I'll be able to fingerpick like a champ. But for now, I simply practice picking one string at a time--thumb, pointer, middle, ring. Thumb, pointer, middle ring....

Then I decided to practice my strumming patterns. I only know two, really. But somehow, without really intending to, I managed to put one of them together with the song Where Will I Be by Emmylou. Suddenly the song actually sounded like a song, with rhythm and timing and everything. It was a very organic process, totally unexpected, and it gave me a real shot of hope that someday my guitar playing will stop sounding like chopped hamburger--that someday, it will actually sound like music!

In Which She Whines About Her Weekend

This was, by all accounts, a crapass weekend. First, the full moon (here she goes again) arrived at 4:38pm on Friday. At 4:45pm I was in the President's office trying to explain how, with one five-minute phone call, my author had so royally fucked up our publicity plans that we are now at serious risk of having hundreds of thousands of copies of the book and nobody to sell them to.

Subsequently, I was late getting to the Shambhala Center, where I was supposed to be meeting my staff for the Level I weekend I was coordinating. I arrived in a whirlwind of negative, unsteady energy, which was not to be stabilized for the rest of the weekend.

Blame the moon, blame Mercury and his damn need to go retrograde all the flippin' time. Or do what I did, and blame yourself. Let all that blame settle into your lower back so that, mid-way through Saturday night dinner with S. and A., you begin to feel the bottom half of your body go completely numb.

Wherein She Relates the Good News

The fact that I haven't written in over a month notwithstanding, the Go Go Guitar Girl is making definite progress on her goal of learning to play guitar by the time she is 30.

Yes, I'm still practicing regularly and have increased my repertoire to include such timeless classics as:

American Pie
Jack & Diane
Mary Jane's Last Dance (though this one sounds pretty crappy without accompaniment on the harmonica, and I'm just not badass enough to play that....yet)

Other evidence of improvement:

1) I took my guitar on vacation (to New Hampshire);
2) I have learned a little minute-long blues riff that sounds pretty darn good;
3) I'm working on several new and innovative strumming patterns;
4) I'm memorizing the notes on the 5th and 6th strings;
5) I'm doing all of this without ever taking a real live lesson.

It doesn't look like I'm going to be taking a lesson anytime soon, in fact. I gave up trying to set one up with Bryan a month back because my schedule was so hectic. And just this afternoon I ran into him at the Shambhala Center and found out that his studio hours are limited to weekday afternoons, which, alas, are far from convenient. So if I want to get instruction I think I'm going to have to forge new alliances.

But who needs paid lessons when you've got About.com? Honestly, I'm learning a ton from that little site and I haven't shelled out a dime for it. Behold the power of annoying banner advertising.

In Which She Comes Back, By Popular Demand

That is, if you can consider the two Stacys in my life to be "popular demand." Personally, I do, and since it's just me and the Stacys reading this, I suppose it's only our opinion which counts.