Day -38: The Music

Part of playing the role of a dirty hippie male is to always carry with you some means of making music.  Most hippies choose a guitar, because chicks like a sensitive socially conscious man with a guitar.  Other hippies carry the Djembe (hand drum).  Neither of these are bike transportable, and though I have a guitar you wouldn’t catch me dead with a hand drum.  I have a ukulele that I picked up in Kauai that I considered bringing with me, but it wouldn’t take long for that puppy to be weather damaged.

Enter the mouth harp – otherwise known as the harmonica. I have 2 of these bad boys – an M. Hohner Marine Band A scale and D scale basic.  They haven’t gotten much use, primarily because I bought them for somebody else who was hot for them for a while but soon lost interest once she realized that her instrument would get all spitty when she played it.  There are several nice features with the harmonica that make it perfectly suited for travel.  These include:

• Portability – Coming in at about 1″ by 4″ in size, you could easily slide one of these into your cavity and sneak it onto an airplane without drawing attention to yourself.
• Durability – Well, its made out of metal, so its pretty durable.  I think civil war soldiers used these things as replacements for brass knuckles back in the day.
• Tuning – Unlike string instruments the harmonica isn’t going to become detuned.  This is import because I don’t like tuning things.
• Ease of Play – I’ve never actually played a harmonica before, but just spittin through it now I can easily make a chord.  The learning curve is rather short.
• Value – Harmonicas go for something like $25 – $50.  Most other instruments go for much more.  Basically what this means is that I won’t be crying if some backwoods survivalist steals my mouth harp from my bike satchel.