Unexpected side-effects may include …

[First published 3rd Feb 2012

After my several weeks of beslingification, I had noticed that my left hand seemed considerably worse in the PD department than once it had been. Weaker. Slower. Stiffer. Shakier. Hang on … shakier? Yes. The tremor seems to have begun. It manifests at, well, sometimes rather inconvenient times. Damn inconvenient times. But it certainly manifests.
This afternoon, I delivered one of what I suspect will be many guitar lessons to a fellow twitterer who just happens to live stateside. Ah, the joys of skype. The usual stuff, but luckily to someone with an ear, a brain, and some serious motivation. So, nothing too onerous. Yes, my left hand is getting worse, it doesn’t quite ‘get’ the strings perfectly any more. I doesn’t quite skim over the fingerboard like a swallow. The notes don’t really come out right.
Naturally, at one point I tried to play something to my pupil, and tried a Paco Pen piece I use to know, selecting a bit from the middle which is rather cool. I get to the bit where my third and fourth fingers are on the fifth fret and my first on the second, and a wee judder knocks my fingertips off the strings. Hmm. So I pick up my steel-string, retune it and start to play … with only two fingers on he board it’ll be fine, surely? The first knuckle on my second finger starts to collapse and straighten at speed.
This operation seems to have triggered an acceleration of symptomatic decline in my fingers.
The fact is, there are now two more tunes that I can’t play. Two more boxes unticked. Two jam jars filled, as a friend of mine pointed out today, with bits of dead me, like Seth Brundell in The Fly. Not only am I falling apart, but I am recording its falling.
This blog is effectively a museum. A museum containing the bits of me which don’t work. Eventually there will be more in it than in me.
But by then, it will be too late.

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