Old Wounds, Slow Weekend, More Painting

I called off work on Monday. I’d been having lower back pain for a few days, which culminated Friday with a dull ache in my upper right leg and down to my knee. At first I thought I’d pulled a muscle in my leg, as I didn’t really have a lot of pain in my lower back. I was just stiff and figured it was residual pain from moving my oldest a week and a half before. But by Saturday I was pretty sure that pain was from my back. If I wore my back brace that pain subsided. So I knew my back was the source of that ache.

Good times.

Once you have a serious back surgery it seems that the rest of your days you’re monitoring every back ache and pain. You’re looking for the moment when you re-herniate yourself and you’re back on an operating table, going under the knife so docs can either slice another piece of a disc away, or fuse some discs together completely. They told me that there’s a 25% chance of re-herniating your back in the first year after a discectomy. If you make it the first year that chance goes down like 5 or 10%. It continues to fall from there, so it’ll have been 8 years the end of March since my surgery.
I think I’m in the clear.

But even the most non-paranoid person always has the little twinge in the back of their brain saying “Oooh, my back is sore. Did it happen?” Well me being 100% full-on paranoid that thought follows me around everyday. I lift safely, have a front pocket wallet, and if I think something is too heavy I don’t touch it. I think back prior to my back surgery and remember all the stupidly heavy crap I used to pick up. No back brace or lifting with your knees, just dead lifting a couple hundred pound crate of titanium or cobalt chrome at work because I didn’t want to grab the fork lift. Or even at home picking up a box full of books because I was too lazy to empty it or wait for another adult to help me. I’d like to go back in time and bop that guy in the head and say “What’s a matter with you???”

What’s the saying, “Fuck around and find out”? Well I found out.

So I stayed home yesterday and didn’t do any lifting. I did some writing and then worked on a new painting. It’s another collage/acrylic piece, and another of the ‘jazz heroes’ paintings. This one is Bill Evans. It took me awhile to really get into Bill Evans. I’d had Live At The Village Vanguard and On Green Dolphin Street for years and have really enjoyed them, but for a long time Evans just seemed a little too old school for me. I was heavy into late 60s/early 70s stuff. Adventurous Electric Miles, guys from the ECM label, and Mwandishi-era Herbie, as well as his funky Headhunters stuff. Bill Evans seemed so tame and “white guy jazz” to me. Even Dave Brubeck had some swing and groove to him. Evans? I don’t know.

Well a couple years ago I picked up some RSD releases that were live recordings of Evans. One was live from 1973, the other from 1979. I was completely blown away by the fidelity of these live recordings, and especially the beauty of these songs and Evans’ subtleties in his playing. I’d begun to appreciate the cool jazz of Miles, digging into his late 50s/early 60s output, and since Evans was the pianist on Kind Of Blue his style and vibe was all over that record. I still dug the adventurousness of electric and fusion jazz, but I didn’t think Bill Evans was a square anymore. I knew the guy was a musical genius and remained a traditionalist till the day he died.

I’m currently reading a book about Bill called The Big Love : Life and Death With Bill Evans by Laurie Verchomin. She was a Canadian waitress that met Bill Evans at a club his trio was gigging at in 1979. He became infatuated with her and she with him, despite her being 22 and he was nearly 50. The book covers her year long affair with Evans, which would be his last year of life. It’s a stunning book, despite being a pretty sad tale which sees Evans deteriorating drastically from heavy cocaine use and suffering from a number of illnesses, including crippling depression due to his older brother’s suicide.

So yeah, I thought Bill deserved to be memorialized on my wall.

The weekend was pretty quiet. I spent Saturday afternoon doing some rearranging downstairs, cleaning up what was left in the oldest’s bedroom. I converted it into a craft/works space for my wife. She enjoys sewing and has made quilts for two of our kids, as well as my mom. She’s trying to make one currently for our 20-year old, but hasn’t had the space to really work on it. Well now she does and we now both have our own spots to be creative, which is a great feeling honestly. I’ve got a spot for writing and working on music, as well as a spot for painting.

I also got my guitar rig set back up. For months it’s been kind of a mess, one amp in one room and another amp in another room, with guitars kind of strewn everywhere. Everything is now centralized back in the music room. Feels good, picking up a guitar and running it through pedals and amps again. I’m embarrassed to say how long it had been since I picked up a guitar. Been at least a couple months. I don’t like going that long. Playing guitar may be similar to riding a bike. You get back on and you can still do the thing, but you’re not riding at optimal speed and you get tired quicker. Guitar is like that. It’s all still there, but without the physical aspect the hands don’t move as quickly as they used to. I’m hoping to fix that now.

That’s it. That’s all she wrote. We’re heading down to our oldest’s place this weekend to drop off a new desk my wife bought for them, and I’m going to look at the turntable I gave them to use down there. They say it seems to be lagging in speed, so there’s a couple fixes I can do. Hopefully I can get it back up an running. It’s a belt drive, so it could be that or you can also fine tune the AT LP-60 with a small screwdriver in two small holes on the bottom of the player. We shall see. I’ll probably hit Upland Brewing while we’re down there and grab a couple 4-packs of my favorite NEIPA ‘Juiced In Time’. My wife signed me up for a frequent buyer’s club, so I don’t want that to go to waste.

Have a good week, folks.