On Knitting and Guitar Pedals

An evening scene:

We’re both in bed. She is lying down with her head slightly elevated and appears quite comfortable. I, on the other hand, am partially reclined, propped up by a poorly constructed heap of pillows, and am not at all comfortable. But I am both tired of readjusting and unwilling to accept that it’s time to surrender to the supine pose.

She is knitting intently; knitting a pillow cover made from the leftover yarn of four knitters; her daughter’s, her own, her mother’s, and her recently deceased grandmother, whose plethora of knitting supplies she recently inherited. It’s a four-generation piece of art that will no doubt become part of our permanent collection, an heirloom that is both new and old, replete with woven meaning.

I, on the other hand, am disassembling my secondhand Ibanez TS9 Tube Screamer guitar effects pedal. It stopped working some time back and no manner of banging it against the floor or the palm of my hand has brought it back to life. So I’m doing what any stereotypical, intelligent and industrious cis-man with access to a screwdriver would do: I’m clawing through the inner components and wiring, truly believing that despite my utter ignorance in the fields of electronics and circuitry, I might be able to fix it.

I’m exploring ever nook and cranny. Two-dozen some odd colorful wires are attached to a small square green circuit board, which itself is covered by two-dozen some odd other circuit-like thingies, and if I can just find the problematic one, the one misbehaving thingy, I can surely justify going to Home Depot to get a soldering iron, so I can come home and watch several only moderately helpful instructional pedal repair YouTube videos, so I can roughly follow what I learned but mostly just wing it, so I can damage another unrelated component, so I can fix that snafu to what TV commentators during the Olympics would generously call an iffy 3.5, so I can get too frustrated and bored at how long the “repair” is taking, so I can begin to internalize the misguided nature of my ways, so I can reassemble the pedal and hope that tomorrow it will work, so I can use the pedal, at most, once this month before I get sidetracked by some other ill-conceived project; or more likely, so I can sit similarly-posed in bed tomorrow evening googling “used TS9,” because let’s be honest. It’s not going to work.

She just dropped a ball of yarn and quickly caught it before it rolled away. I just dropped a tiny screw and did not catch it before it rolled away. I should probably go get my son’s beach metal detector. I’ll definitely find it faster that way.