A guitar on the horizon

As planned, I got up very early this morning in order to get some work done. I’m not finished yet, but it’s going very well so far. I was in the kitchen around 7:30am, plodding through my eggs and toast, and Sascha, the resident German metalhead for our dorm, came in. We were both surprised to see the other up so early. He said he’d been out drinking last night and crashed around midnight or earlier, so he’d slept plenty. We spoke for a bit, then he said he had a large breakfast planned, and needed to run across the street to the grocery store.

He wasn’t joking about that breakfast. It was phenomenal! Schnitzel, egg noodles (I don’t know how else to translate what they are), a kind of omelette, some toast, and a 1.5L bottle of Mezzo Mix, which is a very popular drink here, a mix of orange soda and cola. Nice.

So we talk about music, concerts—we’ve both decided not to go to the überexpensive Dream Theater and Symphony X concert, despite the throngs of girls that’d surely be there—and what we had planned for the day. I’m working on my laptop in the kitchen, with music playing softly while we breakfast and converse. An acoustic Opeth song comes on, and he immediately interrupts me, says, “You played that. You played that song on my guitar, didn’t you?” He was right, I did, several weeks ago when we were drunk and hanging out in his room. I couldn’t believe he recognized the song so quickly, especially given that he didn’t know it when I played it in his room the first time.

He compliments my acoustic prowess, saying most metalheads are all about heavy distortion and compression and can’t do shit without an amp. I agree that most are that way, at least the n00bz. We begin talking about how we should play more together, and how I need to pick up a guitar and all that, and how badly we each want to get good at drums.

Sascha offered to spend the day guitar shopping, so I can scope out how much it might cost to pick up an axe and amp. He said we could sometime soon pick up his drumset from his friend’s house and install it in the basement of our dorm building, so we could play with each other.

This is shaping up to be the greatest year in history.