Good morning, fuzzies~
I hope you’ve had a good week and that you’re warm and that the day is treating you well! If you’re traveling, I hope your travels are safe and comfortable, and if you’re staying put I hope that you have a good weekend :3
Anyway, today’s thought is I’d like you to consider “The Gambler” from Kenny Rogers’ perspective.
I started trying to teach myself guitar two years ago. I am not great at it, but I enjoy it and it gives my fingers something to do. And the way I’ve done this, is I wrote some JavaScript so that I can I can break a song down into chords and match those chords to words, transpose them, play an appropriate metronome, and so on. Which means that learning a song entails a lot of staring at the words to it until they become embedded in your muscle memory, and occasionally I find myself going:
“Wait, run that by me again?”
“The Gambler” kind of feels as if it has a lesson, until you play it over and over again and realize that the lesson is just platitudes. And that’s us, the listener. If you’re Kenny Rogers, it’s a story about the time that you were exhausted on a long train ride and some con artist:
- Invited himself to sit with you,
- Told you to your face “say, you look like an easy mark,”
- Immediately then offered some “advice,” which you accepted, because you are an easy mark,
- Drank the last of your liquor and helped himself to a cigarette and your lighter as “payment” for said “advice,” which turned out to be when he:
- Did nothing but explain the rules of poker to you, with all the authoritativeness and technical nuance of an SEO-trap Wikihow article titled something like “How to Straighten a Flush,” and then pass out.
…But not before offering, as parting words, that “the best you can hope for is to die in your sleep.” And then, after having been scammed out of your booze by a drifter nihilist, you wrote a song about it, like you were Bo goddamned Burnham. It is the kind of self-deprecating microfiction that would be right at home on some millennial’s Tumblr, honestly. I’m much more here for it than I was before. This was a good choice.
I picked up the guitar with the aim of learning how to play three songs (none of which are “The Gambler”) well enough that I could be happy with how they sounded strummed as accompaniment. So far I am at 2/3. I don’t know what happens at 3/3 unless the guitar combusts and there’s some kind of new-game-plus condition.
But I think this is the longest I’ve stuck with a hobby consistently?
