I don’t really want to write about nonsense, I just couldn’t think of a better title off the top of my head. It’s a little weird to title an essay before actually writing it, but I guess, in the best of circumstances, the title would help to focus the essay to come. This blog is meant to be about freewriting anyway, so what the hell, here I go.

Lately I have been writing a lot about my guitar playing. I guess this is a reflection of the fact that I have been practicing a lot, especially paying attention to my bottleneck playing. I really love the sound of the National guitar - it screams and howls and cries just like I imagine a guitar should sound like. I wrote yesterday about Fred McDowell. My ideal guitar sound would be somewhere between his playing and Muddy Waters’s playing, but with a modern electric sound. Derek Trucks is one ideal, especially given his melodic genius. It’s really touching to see, on video, how much B.B. King enjoyed Trucks’s playing. That’s about all anyone needs to know about it - the great B.B. King lovingly approved. That’s the kind of guitar playing that lasts.

As for my own bottleneck playing, I struggle with intonation and timing, but it’s all me. It may still sound derivative, but I don’t mind really. I’m just trying to catch a fire from the old guys. I would love to be able to gig with a small group, rocking it like Son House through a Fender Twin (early Son House, not the guy from the 1960s). In fact, just an amplified, overdriven National Duolian with a drummer and a singer, no bass - the National puts out a lot of bass as it is. That would be the stuff of a really rocking group.

So here I am again writing about my guitar playing. Let me try to re-focus this post a bit, bringing it back to the main concern of writing. The entire purpose of this blog is to improve my writing by investing more heavily in freewriting. In fact, this last sentence is a good example of how I should proceed with freewriting since, if I wasn’t so focused on freewriting I would have edited the “investing more heavily” phrase. It seems awkward to me, but I’m committed to moving forward rather than to writing in that old start-and-stop fashion (even though I seem to be doing a lot of starting and stopping while writing this post). I just need to keep on putting it down and moving on.

I’ve been thinking about a fantasy of running into Derek Trucks on a flight sometime, just talking about stuff. Trucks strikes me as someone who is extremely well educated, even if he never went to school. That’s the kind of student I would love to work with - a kind of one-on-one student/teacher relationship, reading some things together and writing a bit in conversation with one another. I’d love to have students like that - people who are invested in the idea of education rather than simply getting a degree as a job qualification. I guess I am an old-school kind of teacher who values the discourse of teaching above anything else. I would love to be a part of someone’s education, helping people one by one to realize their own ability to educate themselves. Education, for me, is something one does for oneself because of the desire to learn. That’s the real gift. At some point we don’t need our teachers, only access to a library or a bookstore or something similar. That’s the real purpose of education - to produce self-regulating learners who take responsibility for their own education and move forward with a passion for knowledge.