Those of you who are faithful readers will recall that earlier this month, I participated in the Linden Tree Coffeehouse Winter Potpourri, which is sort of like the Hunger Games, except with guitars. I kid, I kid – although it is a competition, where the audience votes on the performers, not one of the acts was terminated with extreme prejudice, at least not while I was around. The winner was Mike Laureanno, from Fall River, and the runners-up were Mark Zelermyer and – drum roll – me! To be fair, it was a “virtual” tie for second, where I came in almost second and the Linden Tree folks weren’t about to split hairs, but I’m not complaining – I never win anything (I mean, I never enter anything, either, but that’s not the point, or, well, maybe it is the point, but don’t interrupt my train of thought). The almost-second-place prize was a pretty good one, too – I’ll be opening for Joe Jencks in June.

So I’m not complaining. But I will tell you a secret: I forgot to vote.

My wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, bought a ukulele on a whim the other day. She was in Arlington Center, walking past Wood and Strings, and she thought, “I want to buy an instrument”, and went inside to explore her options. First the clerk suggested a mandolin, but SWMBT has some strength issues in her fingers, so that wasn’t a possibility, and then the clerk suggested a banjo, and SWMBT said, “Oh, no. My husband would divorce me.”

As my faithful readers are aware, I’ve got an album I’m currently wrapping up (that’s the verb that’s used for all stages of production, by the way). My engineer and producer is the estimable Doug Kwartler, omniinstrumentalist and gracious man about town. I’m very happy with how things are sounding: they sound like me, and I was reminded recently that this is not, by any stretch, a foregone conclusion.

Many years ago, my wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, and I went on a driving vacation to Nova Scotia, where we visited, among other lovely places, a historical village called Louisbourg, where you park your car and take a bus to a restored 18th century town. As we got off the bus, SWMBT grabbed my arm and pulled me to the back of the line, because she knew there was a reenacter at the town gate who picked on some unlucky visitor to question them about the nature of their curious clothing – the “what is this internet you speak of” sort of nonsense. (But the joke was on them, because the folks who restored the town didn’t use period-appropriate carpentry techniques.)

I may have told you about my percussionist, David Troen-Krasnow. I met Dave in my old band, Agent 13, which you may recall we discussed in your last lesson. Dave is a fine, fine musician, and he keeps “busy”, by which I mean he’s in at least two other bands in addition to playing with me, and he’s constantly looking for another one. Maybe he sleeps? Maybe.

Which bag, you say? Well, the one I couldn’t sing my way out of when I was in my band, of course.

Now, this is incredibly solipsistic of me – my band, at its peak, had 8 people in it, and I barely touched a microphone, and with good reason. But I’ve been listening to our old tapes, and I’m sticking out like a sore, well, bag.

So I was taking my walk a while back, returning from dropping off my car at the dealership to have the backup camera software updated due to a recall (they say write what you know, but I’m definitely not writing about that). And, as is my wont, I was reading a book as I walked.

My wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, reviews books on Tweeter, and the other day she reviewed a novel, which she’d checked out of the library, entitled “Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta”. What struck me about this book – which I did not read because it’s a novel which has Deep Thoughts, and I’m only interested in Shallow Thoughts, because I’m old and impatient and lazy – was its embrace of profanity in the title, which I can assure you, he says in an aggrieved tone, would never have appeared in the library when I was a boy. The times, as they say, have changed.

“Sitzfleisch” is the German word for, well, sitting on your ass – long enough, in fact, to get something done. It means persistence, discipline, stick-to-itiveness, and it’s something that I do not have.

Our fridge died the other day. It wasn’t particularly dramatic – there was no overwrought moaning, a promise to see us in heaven, etc. – just a tiny puddle of water that indicated that the compressor was no longer really compressing and it was time to send it out to the farm with the other dribbling refrigerators for a nice, long rest.

We’d gotten 20 years of loyal service out of that fridge, and people tell me we were lucky. But in my world, refrigerators last a lot longer than that. Why, back in my ancestral home in Cleveland, my grandmother’s upstairs apartment was grandmother-free for decades, yet her refrigerator sailed on – it was still running when my father passed away, more than fifty – fifty! – years after we bought it. And when my wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, sold her aunt’s house the year we got married, there was a fifty-year-old fridge puttering happily along in the kitchen.