A Thing That Doesn't Exist

One of the tenants by which I try to live is, "If you have cats, keep your chicken well-hidden."  So, I never put chicken breasts under my pillow because the cats are smart enough to find them and try to dig them out as I sleep.  It's a simple cause and effect principle that works in my favor.  But as the cats would understand it if they could read this, it doesn't work in their favor.

Usually, I find myself in situations that are more-comparable to that of the cats.  Because I tend not to think the same way as larger groups (nothing against larger groups, we're just different), I often find myself isolated;  an outlier, to borrow a term from Malcolm Gladwell.  Here's a good example—I like candy bar called a Violet Crumble.  It's delicious, but unusual.  For this reason, they are not easy to find outside of large cities.  Most folks would rather have a Snickers, so that's what stores that sell candy bars stock.  This isn't a "poor me" complaint.  It's just how things are.

Many of you know that I play the harmonica.  Thank you.  Thank you very much.  You're too kind.  This is the whole reason I brought up this dismal subject.  Harmonicas are the Violet Crumble of the musical instrument world.  Fewer and fewer music stores sell them and the ones that do charge full price because there's no real competition that would bring the prices down.  It's a dying instrument.  I have a very hard time finding the particular harmonica I like, the Hohner Chrometta 10, let alone finding it at a good price.

So, I've taken to experimenting with less-expensive harmonicas.  You can get a pretty good diatonic harmonica (the little one you're used to seeing cowboys and prison inmates play) at places like Target.  They usually come with a beginning harmonica book and sound pretty good.  Because they're diatonics, you can't play sharps and flats on them;  that pretty much means you can't play anything that wasn't written by Stephen Foster or sung by Ringo Starr.  But, I like the constraint that limitation puts on me—necessity is the mother of invention and all.  So, I went a step even lower in non-pedigreed harmonicas;  I purchased a toy harmonica with a plastic cover.  It's actually in tune, but you really have to use a lot of wind to get a tone out of it—the exact opposite of what would be good for a child.  I can still bend notes, but I really have to work hard to get a nice tone out of it.

I'm not going to switch solely to toy harmonicas anytime soon, but it's a nice thing to have in my repertoire.