6/25
i'm thankful to have put a set of light gauge strings on my acoustic guitar, after like probably more than a decade of using medium-heavy or heavy gauge strings on every guitar every time for no real thought-through reason at all, beyond "the tone will be better," which is maybe true except the tone is not better if your fingers are always barely straining to hold down the strings because they are heavy.
i'm thankful that when d and i went to brunch yesterday, having walked several miles from our house, i stopped at a building near the restaurant which had a dumpster so i could throw away my spent seltzer can. i'm thankful that though i was disappointed when i got closer to the dumpster and saw a sign on it that said "scrap metal only, no trash," i stepped closer so that i could see if that was really the case or if actually people were using it as a dumpster and so my can wouldn't disturb the balance of the ecosystem.
i'm thankful that when i got close enough to peer over the edge, i saw that though there were a few chip bags or cigarette packets here and there, the dumpster was mostly filled with these huge piles of endless twirling ribbons of metal, some of it copper-colored, other endless shades of gray, all of it glinting in the morning sun. i'm thankful that though there's nothing i could think to call them besides ribbons, we think of lightness as being an essential property of a ribbon, whereas these were all clearly so very heavy, unmoved by breeze.
i'm thankful to have brought my empty can into the restaurant and to have snuck it and d's into the bar trash can while we waited for the maitre'd. i'm thankful that though i couldn't convince d to approach the dumpster before brunch, because i am often trying to get her to do things that she has no interest in and this is a necessary defense mechanism, after we had eaten and had a cocktail and were about to head back home, she agreed to check it out and said, mildly awed, "well, i couldn't have expected that" and that she was glad she had looked, which made me happy.
i'm thankful this afternoon to have been listening to front row seat to earth by weyes blood, whose music s recommended and which feels old, not in the sense of acoustic fingerpicking and the obvious external signifiers of the old-fashioned (i'm thankful for the mumford and sons song that was playing in cvs when i went to pick up my medicine today and the way that singing along quietly to the chorus made the pharmacist happy), but in the sense of when you describe someone as being an old soul and you mean that in them, there is some sense of an accretion, that the soup of them is richer than what most of us have. i'm thankful for people like that, and for songs.
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