It’s frequently just one wire that separates joy from despair. This was first made evident to me in Princeton E-Quad basement lab, where a lab partner’s elaborate breadboard was tagged with a note from his quasi-evil partner saying “Moved one wire, have a great weekend!” The wire in question was of course the most obvious — the power lead — and in the days before we snapped pictures with our cell phones to document simple life configurations, this was the thinnest acceptable terminator line.

I’ve turned that lesson of looking for the most obvious defect into a small hobby of buying and refurbishing guitar effects pedals. After a few years of looking at densely packed modern pedals, I’ve drifted to the vintage 1970s and 1980s bigger boxes, packed with all manners of tubes, AC power supplies, radio-quality passive components and a tone that is usually unmistakable once restored to working order. If I can close the decades long feedback loop on good sound and help those pedals return to the hands (and feet, literally) of musicians who are both nostalgic, cash strapped and stuck at home — then I’ve wielded the soldering iron of power for good measure. I’ve hit the point where the business is self-sustaining; I’m not going to retire on it but I’m not losing money in the truest definition of a hobby. …

It’s been nine months of Zoom bass lessons — enough time to gestate some new ideas for getting the best, simplest rig together to be able to take a lesson, play along with a music source, and occasionally jam with some remote friends.

Here are the problems:

• I want to be able to play my bass and have a studio microphone so I can talk to “the other end” — whether I’m counting beats or singing intervals in a lesson or talking to the drummer (not that drummers listen but still)
• I need to be able to hear what’s happening on a Zoom lesson, and mix that output with my own inputs — Zoom doesn’t feedback your own microphone so you need to remix local monitor with remote end. …

This is a story I submitted ten years ago to a fledgling sports magazine as part of a sports fiction contest. Neither the magazine nor story did very well, but the shinny hockey pictorial essay in the November 29 New York Times made me revisit it, update it, and decide to share it on the day that indoor hockey has been postponed in New Jersey. We will all hold onto our game faces a bit longer.

February

“Less than a gallon of blue paint” is the answer that pops into my head. My left hand is holding a red Borgata $5 chip on top of my two pocket cards while my brain muddles through a series of math problems to focus my attention away from the growing pot in the middle of the poker table. “How much paint do you need for the blue lines in a hockey rink” is the latest question I’ve conjured up. My head has gone into its own helmet-less hockey rush: two lines of one by eighty-five feet, painted in two coats is just shy of 400 square feet, which is what you’d get out of a gallon of good paint. …

I am a list maker; it helps me put boundaries around projects and set short term priorities. It’s also useful for organizing long-running projects, whether house maintenance or thinking about how I’ll approach my Movember campaign. Starting at the head of the year, I make notes about men’s cancers, mental health, and personal stories that motivate and inform my involvement with my singular fundraising effort for the year. Along with my leather journal of ticket stubs and concert notes, it’s something upon which to reflect.

At the peak of pandemic concerns, cancelled summer plans, a sore lack of live music, and considerations of our new reality, I found out my cousin David was being treated for prostate cancer. It was a gut punch. I didn’t add much else to the Movember list, because that news inverted my scientific order of the universe. …

Advisory boards are a great opportunity to meet people with completely divergent interests, experiences and backgrounds. You’re herded together in a nice hotel room or around a polished corporate conference room table (when such things are allowed), the saddle point of some common institution intersecting your very different skills parabolas. Our love for technology and Princeton brought Rishi and me together on a half dozen occasions and I was always impressed by his seeming ease of being an arbiter of online king makers, taste makers and makers in general.

This past year, in the course of assembling my annual themes and notes for Movember ramblings, Rishi shared a painful, personal, and deeply moving story about his brother who died from a combination of addiction, depression and over-influence of the culture of king makers. Rishi calls out the “great man theory,” that those who will lead are cultural unicorns. Rishi’s self-awareness, inspection of the technology and social fabric that amplified his brother’s issues, as a real life projection of Masha in Cory Doctorow’s “Attack Surface.” …

Frank Zappa and I have a complicated relationship, made perhaps a bit more personal this week. His music is vulgar, obtuse, jazzy and free, but full of stereotypes and tropes that were difficult in the 1970s, let alone half a century later. Listen to his guitar playing, and sense the boundaries of rock and roll that the Mothers of Invention pushed, and there is latent genius.

I keep intersecting Zappa, a few times a decade, always in clusters. After friend and former roommate Bill completed my basic Zappa education with late night play-throughs of “Joe’s Garage,” things were quiescent for 20 years. Around an industry event, a Sun co-worker and I were discussing crazy walk-on music and the topic of Zappa came up; turns out her uncle was one of the Mothers of Invention and she had been in the penumbra of some musical bright minds. …

I read 15 books in the summer quarter, possibly a record (one of them was novella length, and one was a clunker, which kind of even out). For the first time, more than half of my reading was by women authors, and half was not science fiction. …

I came to love Talking Heads tangentially and like many things it involved a girl. A classmate who loved Talking Heads was funny, snarky and post-punk before that was a thing, and only went to hear a particular club band because their repertoire included “Life During Wartime.” Enough late nights in the WPRB basement studying LP sleeves introduced me to the rest of their catalog, and an appreciation was born. …