Black Friday, Caribbean Night, The Best Watch Grading System Of All Time, Dear Marie

I spent most of the weekend either watching John build his LEGO Porsche 911 Finish Line kit or moving various two-wheeled devices around the garage and/or basement. But that doesn't mean I made it through the weekend without buying anything. I'm not an AdBusters subscriber, you know.

The above photo represents the first real impulse guitar purchase I've had in a while. And it just goes to prove how racist I am --- because it was all about color.

Long-time readers of this forum know that Gibson USA reversed their controverial 2015 model program in a "Special Run". Prior to doing that, however, Gibson bowed to pressure from their biggest customer and inventory holder --- Guitar Denter, er, Center --- by creating the "Studio Deluxe III". It was produced to pre-2015 specs. The wiring is unique to this model and it includes a 10dB active boost for the '57 Classic humbuckers.

On Friday, I wandered into GC to buy some strings and I saw a heavily-flamed "Caribbean Night" model on the wall in the Platinum Room. Most of these Studio Deluxes don't have much figure in the top but this one was different. It was remarkably aqua-finished (my phone can't capture the true color of it for some reason) and it played very well. It had a small ding on the back of the neck --- they don't call the place "Guitar Denter" for nothing --- but we cut a nice deal on it and I brought it home.

The last time I tried to buy a new Gibson it was an ice-blue 2014 Standard and I only kept it thirty-six hours. This one sounds and plays much better. The neck is thin-ish but I can live with it. But that color! It just leaps off the wall. I'm glad to have it. And I'm net even for November, guitar-wise, since I sold a guitar three weeks ago.

So, I've been shopping for a few Christmas gifts and I was looking at various pre-owned (read: used) watches on eBay and I came across the above graphic in a Tokyo listing of an Omega DeVille Prestige. Many watch-obsessive use the TimeZone Watch Grading System but I kind of like this Japanese one.

Speaking personally, when I was a kid I was somewhere between grade "S" and "A". When I broke my neck, I dropped down to "B", also known as "There is the wound of the degree made of the everyday life, but use does not have any problem." Right now I'm hovering between "BC" and "C", "It becomes the junk product."

And yet... There are times that I feel ageless, an unchanging fifteen-year-old surrounded by people who are getting older all the time. Something odd and upsetting happened to me last night. Through a sequence of events that would be too boring to relate here, I happened to see a current picture of a woman I fell in love with a long, long time ago. I hadn't seen her in twenty-five years. Nor had I seen a single photo of her. I had the occasional report about her life from a mutual friend, but that was all. I knew where she lived, but it never occurred to me to meet with her or even put myself in a position to see her. I wanted to remember her as she was when we were almost children.

We had a few months together, a long time ago. There was more to it than our friends realized, or than we ever admitted to anyone else. But nothing came of it in the long run and she disappeared before I turned twenty. She doesn't even appear in my dreams the way other women do, insistent and fleeting, desperate and dissolute. But there she was, on my phone screen. Somebody's wife, someone's mother. I wouldn't have recognized her, really. Not on the street. My mother once said to me, "At twenty you have the face God gave you; at forty you have the face you give yourself." True for me, and true for this woman, smiling at me from my Instagram feed. Yet there was a time that I would have killed for her, or died for her. I looked at the picture for a long time and waited for that desire to swim back up from the depths, to take hold of me as it once did.

It did not.

Perhaps it was meant to be, that I would see her that way on a pain-wracked Saturday night. And perhaps she occasionally thinks about me, and maybe she'll find this. This is for you, my long-lost crush, my story writer, the foundation on which I built my desire for other women at other times. For our long afternoons on your bed, and the times we stumbled down the icy Slant Walk in the dead of winter, the snow-imposed silence frightening us into conspiratorial whispers, your face in my coat. I hope your life has brought you more joy than it ever could have had you chosen me.