I guess it's a sign of the times. Hardly a day goes by that somebody doesn't ask, "Why do these guitars only have four strings? And why are they so big?" Uhm, that would be a bass guitar. "What makes them different from a regular guitar?" You're joking, right? They're tuned much lower. They have a lower sound. "Does anybody play them, like professionally, or are they just some kind of curio item?" It suddenly dawns on me that they may actually have never seen one before. Pop bands these days are all dancers and hoppers. You never even see the backup musicians. Sigh...

"Why does this guitar have so many strings?" Uhm, that would be a 12-string guitar. Here we go again... How do I sell instruments to people that haven't got a clue what they're looking at? I could understand somebody questioning the hurdy-gurdy; but these are educated adults that don't know what a bass guitar is.

My daughter graduated kindergarten yesterday. She's still struggling with the reading, but she can skip. I almost flunked kindergarten because I could read encyclopedias and novels, but I couldn't skip.

So much for economic recovery. Guy returned a book this morning. A fifty dollar book. I accepted it without question, though I wanted to scream. That was the only thing I sold on Thursday. The rest of the week wasn't much better. Today, four sets of guitar strings. That's it. Twenty bucks. Takes $400 a day just to keep the lights on. It's also too late to salvage anything for the fall rental season. It's only ten weeks away. I need 25 grand in new instruments to make it - and about six weeks to get them ordered. I have, let's see - about a twenty-fifth of that. It ain't gonna' happen. No profitability this year. And I won't make it 'til next year. I think that pretty much means the game is over. How to exit gracefully? Can't. I've got a five year lease. Just have to ride this thing into the ground.