2 - Interlude

"You're being too mean." 

Who said that? Was it you? Yes you, short guy in the shadows, i know you're there. No sense hiding. 

The figure noticeably slunk forward, then hesitantly walked toward Bottle's desk. That's me, by the way. Skip's not here to fix my habit of slipping into 3rd-person. Miss that guy. 

"You're being too mean," repeated the shadowy figure. 

Oh, it's you. Narcon [snap] marzipan [snap snap] Narzon. Sorry i called you guy. Don't the Auditors have a thing against gender distinction? 

"That is true," said the shadowy figure. Nevertheless, i am who i am. Not exactly legion. 

Good for you. Shake it up, break the mold, you do you. I'm being mean on purpose, it's what i call meta-rhetorical sarcasm. I liked that Chet Atkins album a lot. I love the sound of people playing guitar. Good, bad, left-handed, with or without all the strings, it's my favorite instrument. What i don't like is having to filter off the whole rest of the world to appreciate one guy's schtick at the expense of everyone else. I also don't like technical perfection at the expense of musical expression. Some of this stuff is extremely challenging to play, but it's musically meaningful and it sounds cool. 

"Why am i here?" 

Good question, i ask myself that one a lot. I imagine i needed to imagine someone to tell me i was being too mean so that i could more easily point out what it is i'm being mean about. I only said one sarcastically mean thing about the Public Image Ltd. of Chet Atkins, and every other negative thing i said was about the mental car crash that happens when you try to examine the object through the murky prism of marketing. Chet Atkins Guitar Genius is not an album by an artist trying to express some ephemeral idea or even just entertain some people on a Friday night. It's the product of capitalizing on someone else's talent/hard work to make a profit for yourself (as opposed to profiting from applying your own talents for the much larger benefit of everyone). That's not inherently good or evil, but it's so so easy to take the evil path and so so hard to constantly check yourself and stay on the good side of the traffic conventions when the cars behind you are road raging and passing just to get there 3 minutes faster. What we've got here isn't so much a failure to communicate as it is the hard sell of lifestyle marketing for pander profits. Coincidentally (which in case i never properly explained means two unrelated but structurally identical things happening at the same time), there's a line so thin it's almost invisible between Ethnomusicology and Cultural Appropriation. Ask the guy who doomed those Romanian villagers, he'll tell you. The former is intended to be a form of appreciation and intellectual discovery, the latter is exploitation for profit. If you're out fishing, i'm a professional fish hook finder. 

Country, even more so than Rock which certainly has its own problems, has a nasty habit of being quite charming on the surface, but sneaking a whole lot of racism, sexism, entitlement, and hypocritical moral outrage through the back door. Bottles and bumpkins get along just fine, it's the bigots i got no patience for. Belief doesn't make it true any more than disbelief makes it false. 

"How can you possibly tell the difference?" 

You can't. See, the good guys often hide the good things they do, which makes them smell suspiciously like bad things if your sniffer isn't properly calibrated. There's the obvious bad guys pretending to be good, which makes the good guys being honestly good look super suspicious when they're just being nice. Then there's the Nicklebacks, those are the good guys doing bad things because they mistakenly think they're good, so we end up both laughing but they're laughing "with" while i'm laughing "at." Then you got the bad guys who are honestly bad, and half of them try to contain it as best as possible so they end up accidentally being pretty tolerable. I may have missed a couple combinatorials there, but you get the idea. 

"I'm not sure i do. This all feels like that nasty fuzzy logic thing humans do." 

No, no, no. I see what you're saying, but this is just Outback Steakhouse [snap] no rules just right [snap snap] regular logic logic with all the complementary illogic reinserted. 

"Why do you keep snapping?" 

Do i? Probably helps me think linear or some junk. Too many processes with poorly coded garbage collection. Memory leaks all over the place. You aren't actually here. You're still back on the other side of reality being an Auditor, i'm just imagining you're also here distracting me. Stalemate kind of thing. Don't worry, i'm not here either. I'm like the avatar or something. The real me is a quiet, polite, gets along with everybody kind of guy on the outside. Horrorshow in here, but it has to be to counterbalance all the garbage other people say out in the real world. Shell so thick it's practically impenetrable. Some people might mistakenly think that's two-faced, but most everything i say in here gets run through a tact filter and several layers of politeness fiber. Can you hear them? 

"Hear who?" 

The Hortons [snap] i mean minions. They're brownianing their way back to the scene of that Queensryche album [snap] mindcrime [snap snap] the bunker like moth to old linen. 

"No." 

Right, no imagination you got there. Sorry. Are you the one who sent the musk ox after the tweety birds? 

"What?" 

No? Interesting. Foot's on the other hand, i guess. Don't mind me, it's mostly gibberish. Nice talking to you, but i gots more albums to chew on, and the next one's a real doozie. Don't hesitate to not need me for anything, but i'll be here if i need you to need me. Toodles.

3 - Guitars Unlimited