Holy mother of awesome!

I bought a new amp yesterday. Well, I put it on layway, at least. Hopefully I'll be paying it off and picking it up this weekend. Because, well, it sounds frickin' sweet! And it had better, for the price. This is my first foray into a boutique, class A amp and I couldn't be more psyched. Unfortunately I couldn't afford to go the Bad Cat route that I would have liked, that was just too much money. So, I ended up going with a Top Hat Club Deluxe, which sounds almost as good. A 1 speaker combo with 20 watts of badass.

And pretty, too. See:



Can't wait to get it home and start playing on it. Especially since the nre gear syndrome is much like the new sneaker syndrome when you were a kid. You know what I'm talking about, right? When you were young and got a new pair of sneakers, and you knew without a doubt that you could now run faster? Well, new gear is much like that in that when you get it, you are convinced you can now play better.
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Speaking of music, can I just tell you what I miss: the joy, the sense of fun that used to come along with playing it. Back when I first started playing, when I first got over that hump of extremely sucking to being OK, music becomes real fun. Your first band is much like your first girl. You never forget her. Usually, especially if you're younger, your first band is with friends. And playing music, writing songs, having fun with them is just such a rush and is precisely that: fun.

The problem is I remember that feeling, but I don't so much feel it anymore. Don't get me wrong, I still love playing. But years of attempting to get bands together, match personailties, match songwriting skills and ideas, conflicting visions, levels of playing, the "business" aspect, expectations of yourself and of and about those you play with, arguments, the scene, etc. These things all drag on me. I wish, however impossible, that I could just do a reboot. Forget all that stuff and just start fresh. No expectations, no pre-concieved notions. The excitement, the desire, the fun. It seems so hard to find these things nowadays that often I just want to say, "fuck it all," and constrain myself to just playing in my room to an audience of my roommate's two cats. Well, at least I'd have a cool new amp to do that with.

Not that I plan to go that route. I still want to get out there, I still want to rock. I just want it to be fun again. That's what I should strive for.