Nine-Down

I'm home from my ninth chemo treatment. I don't feel too awful. I'm tired and drained and I can already feel the Neulasta tickling my bone marrow with its cold dead fingers, but I don't feel too awful. It's too early to say, but it seems that the Zithromax they prescribed me is starting to take the sharp pulsing edge off my toothache, which at the Chinese buffet today had risen to about 11 on the pain scale. (How I wish, when the paramedics had asked me what my pain was when I was having a heart attack, that I had replied "Mine goes to eleven." But alas, "Like, ten" was all I could manage.

I filled out a "pick your top five rock guitarists" thing on Facebook today. The guitarist that I think most impresses me, and has impressed me for a very long time, is Ronnie Montrose. I find him speedy yet tasteful, technical yet artistic, and even when he's playing music that I don't really like, I'm always struck by his personal guitar schwartz. So I typed "Ronnie Montrose" into the application, and got bubkes. No Ronnie Montrose. Oh, I could add Ronnie Montrose, assuming I had a previously unpublished public domain image of him to upload... In the immortal inarticulate snort of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, "Pfui!"

So I moved on to Ville Friman, one of the guitarists for Insomnium, a metal guitarist of refined taste indeed. Not crushingly heavy, and he doesn't "shred" as the hair metal people would say, but he's highly adept at that melancholic metal sound that I find more and more appealing with each passing medical emergency... Err, I mean "day". But they no more had Ville Friman than they had, say, Ronnie Montrose.

Oh, I get it now, we're supposed to pick people like Zak Wylde (spelling?) or Edward van Halen or (God save me) Slash. But come on, guys, what sort of world is it when they have Sammy Hagar (I checked) and they don't have Ronnie Montrose?? Or Chris Burney? Or James Young? Or... Oh, never mind.

Thinking about matters like this makes my chemo seem less onerous, but it isn't very instructive, is it?