acoustic-electric

When Raina was dating Jakob Dylan he would play her his songs on his guitar and she would listen patiently, then ask him to play his dad's songs. He would oblige this with a light smirk, playing Highway 66 with a Dylan accent that fell below average. He told her once when he was a boy he saw a spider who had made a web in his dad's acoustic guitar. Raina wrote a story about this for her high school lit mag.

Acoustic-electric guitars are often bought by first time guitar owners who can't decide. Little do they know, an acoustic body can't ever feel very sexy when it's going electric. Raina bought an acoustic guitar because she felt it connected her more with the outside.

Raina had a good idea: once when she was giving Jakob a blowjob she stuffed a cupcake in his mouth right when he started to cum. "Was that like the best orgasm ever?" She asked him after. Jakob broke up with her in the following weeks, but it was O.k. My acoustic-electric guitar has lived with me for 9 years. At first I was bad, then I got good, now I'm bad again, but not as bad as at first. The story in Raina's lit mag went like this:

The Spider in Dylan's Acoustic

One virgin morning, the dawn sneaked into Dylan's bedroom window, and as usual the window felt satisfaction in being just an ordinary window. The light in the window made an angle between the window blinds and was like an arrow pointing into Bob's eye. He took a big hand and blocked out the light, and everyone was asleep in his house. Baby Jake Dylan was especially asleep and drooled a wet patch onto his pillowcase.

Except a spider was awake and working. A spider who had gotten cold in the outside and had crawled in through the open inch under the window. This spider was not one of the spiders who had been born in the house, in the spider colonies in the attic. This spider still remembered what a great wind he used to feel in the outdoors and strived to find that wind. The air in Dylan's acoustic-electric smelt like trees and after the spider once fell in there by mistake, shortly after he decided he must live there. When Dylan picked up his guitar to play, his upbeats and downbeats, his strumming hand, made a nice wind for the spider to feel. Then Dylan didn't use that guitar for awhile. He used his other guitars. He had many guitars because he never threw any away, and because people liked to give him them as gifts. He even had one signed by Patti Smith.

One day, Dylan plugged his acoustic into his amp and played pentatonic scales just for practice. The spider's web inside the guitar stretched from the top of the guitar to the bottom. It wasn't just a one ring web, it was a multitude of rings that the spider had spun in his free time. One of the strands of the web was dangerously close to the output for the amp. When Dylan plugged in and gave the guitar a preliminary strum, an electric current ran through the wires inside the acoustic body. The spider's web carried the current and struck dead the poor spider. Right as the spider was dying, he thought ironically, that this was like the time Dylan played electric at the folk festival and everyone in the audience went crazy. The spider thought, this is like that, this is like that, and then he curled right up and fell to the bottom of Dylan's acoustic-electric. Baby Jake Dylan woke up, because he was sensitive to all creatures on the earth, but then he didn't know why he had been awakened, and he fell back to sleep.

That was the story and Raina's teacher loved it. She had in fact been invited to the concert that Raina mentioned in her story, but she had felt sick that day and hadn't gone. Same thing with my dad almost, he had a ticket for Woodstock and went there to meet up with his cousin, but he couldn't find his cousin in the crowd. Then Joe Cocker was playing on stage and he says he's always hated Joe Cocker's voice. So he left Woodstock and history went on without him.

Raina herself didn't play much guitar. She felt it difficult to be a woman in the arts. Her bookcase and her cd pile were filled with male artists. Her teacher urged her to continue with her writing, but after the spider story she found it impossible to come up with any other ideas.