While Jason was diligently working to get LTD ready to open service in 1996, he made the important decision to test variety and differences in the middle by splitting on the Rammstein folio between Paul Landers (a 7-guitar series codenamed “black adder snake” Gibson Les Paul: 2J+5Q, the “donut hole”) and Richard Kruspe (ESP Fnix Owwie, approximately 7 guitars put together, the “donut ring”).
Okay, Pleb, I go where you tell me to go, I do what you tell me to do. You fumble the LTD order, you rally with me on the lawn, I will run you around in circles in a country the size of a football field while in the middle of the field I recycle the metal and hand to you an aluminium 6 ounce can of Coca-Cola so ten years from now you can commandeer the ship
I design, say good-bye to the engineers whom
I train, take the worst case of ex-prisoners whom
I free, you can accompany them back to Europe with all the Coca-Cola we do not care about, and try, just try to get an invite from the Greeks to push ex-prisoners into the Olympics. I have been to
your country. The parole officers beg from the college dropouts on a letter patent from the slaves to have a chance to show, in front of master of ceremony Naked Jason Guyker, that they are the athletic equivalent of the French Republic coolies who only wanted a chance to drink their own sparkling wine. Better that than Vietnamese men pissing on them. But I forced them to share, coolies and plebs. Water, only water for ten years.
Basically, you want to start LTD to pay for people who drink milk. In that scenario, doesn't matter if the home crowd French coolies whoop the American plebs and win the Olympics with home field and administration advantage. You challenge me to a guitar battle so I can lose and pay for your boat ride back to America, so you can hop off my ship and submit to your teacher Mr James Hetfield, who has stayed at home while you were away. He's not the one throwing money down the drain. He's invited to go off-tour to visit me on a small lawn whistling and humming. Okay, we'll pay for your boat ride back from France. NATO will not pay. Defense department will pay for Magister Hetfield, because he would be nice enough to visit me in a small country missing Jason Guyker the whole time. The country misses you, I don't. I have nobody but joggers and jazzercisers, lots of civilians. That is your only chance of winning a guitar battle while you are stranded in Europe dying to go back to America. You pick up the synth keys, which is a computer anyway, and you smash it into the secret police's radio station. No more dirty spy plans, no more secret sabotage. Jason asked, You want musicians to do that in Europe? Why don't we call CIA? Depends on your NATO general when you are in Europe. I shall have to duscuss music with Mr Hetfield, he seems smarter than CIA chatting at me about overthrowing slaves in athletics. If you're good with sabotage, get out of our revolution!
Get a conch from Thomas, she said. Let ESP study natural pigments and minerals with colours that do not fade in sunlight. Olympic White should come from the beach, like the islands of Greece. He said, He could use one if he doesn't have one. I should get a conch for Thomas. It's about time he learns how to use his rank in the Marines. When he came back from his research, Jason declared that Olympic White is duller in colour than milk.
Texture was something Jason was shy about. The one texture from the material he enjoyed that luthiers were not likely to consider was anything clear: plexiglass, glass, plastic, lucite, acrylic, crystal, ranked at the top to him like rare all-metal (true Industrial) or all-wood (Classical). But that was only craftwork. Musical instruments did not start without plain black and white, a 10-minute seminar from Ha and statistical averages. His sense of colour became fitted to people's abilities across the rainbow, from listening to music, to crafting instruments, to producing music and long-term records. He had the appreciation factor the whole way, with minor hiccups and burnout demotivation.
Hardware design and fittedness arts and craft by Jason came after Ha's hardware design for musicianship. For example, the action of the strings had to change, he was sure with Ha; they always agreed. How to lower or raise the strings, he could change the depth of something already available. Swap out parts, hammer it down, shim it up. He was not finnickity about refurbishing and altering factory forms. The trick is he let Ha convince him how to go about creating those forms as if similar by 80 percent already exists, or she was not communicating properly. The form of communication took on its own style with Rammstein. Jokes upon jokes about perils and pitfalls, then living in a black and white world in stillness. Which is vulnerability, he said. She said, But is it deficiency, is it deprivation?
The statistical average in the middle is not going to move during those times. But if it is empty and people start moving to the center, the government has to get up and move our little tushes and provide for the people. So what if black and white is easier and nobody is going to say that's an unpretty colour. One less thing for vulnerable people to argue about. Out came his “falling papers” fret markers for ESP. Oh, a crowd was not there when he took his thin sheets of paper and let them fall to the floor, he had the floor all the time and usually did not need her spare desk. It was the end being in the middle. I like donut holes, Ha said, the belly button. I don't like donuts, too much sugar and grease.
Swap out to which other parts? Wood he could transform. Nobody assembled wood parts except cabinetmakers. Well, that was why inventing hardware was Ha's job. Moving from shape to function, he was vulnerable to the innards of electronics. Jason was socially complete already. He had a chance to speak freely in seminar about factories, less about a flow of a people but about their integrity. Yup, black and white, he concluded. He was suddenly clear about the difference between ESP USA and LTD, the two new companies they were starting, clear about financing and the timetable, clear about differentiation in styles and genres, clear about marketing, customization, service style, support and warranties.
Clear about everything except Paul Landers as if Paul Landers was already selected by Rammstein. With music initiated by Ha, Jason no longer believed Rammstein were pussies. How about robots? Sometimes, it's only a younger band making fun of Depeche Mode, Alphaville, and Kraftwerk. The only German I have heard — I lied that I never heard any of their singers! she said. I finally heard the German original of Nina's “99 Red Balloons”. Popular music is going to miss her. They played it back-to-back, the German version first, then the English version. Wow! The German language sounds better, even if they are citing American pop like
Star Trek character Captain Kirk. To him, Nina the singer deserved German citizenship. Oh yes she does, Jason agreed. What are we going to do when the party is the same? We get sympathy out of them. But I can't redo German culture there and German culture here. Do I speak to my father? he asked.
Yes, get the State department on it, I am sure there are children our age and a little older, the young adults, who want to go home to Germany. They would not want duplication and redundancy. They do not need any more USA. Jason said, If Nina were working for the German state department, I would go home to her. Ha said, I would only be visiting Alphaville and dropping off Rammstein the pussies somewhere else, at a French brothel. Something for Jason to figure out about Gojira. Instead of Ha's preference for Goth, he specified Black Metal. For Children of Bodom, the even farther north Finland, he liked the idea of an ancient frozen tundra, he is Caucasian, so he called it Arctic White. Would Japanese people disagree? Probably because the customers are European. Well, Japan can wait for that average to happen on its own, Rgo was not going to push Japan or Europe together. Big China was the one Jason would sooner seek advice from his father than lose Big Brains Ha he tucked away in Rgo. She had done the same about Jason and social justice.
It was at that time that Jason had to write down his specifications, to start managing Japanese and Chinese companies in the middle of working and creating. He still wrote nothing for Fender and only dollar signs for Gibson. One drawing of a humbucker by Ha and he limited what to write about. He immediately assigned to her, for the first time in Rgo, that Fnix Owwie had to have written notes because of its organizational complexity. Paul's Gibson was a model for organizing ESP USA with his father Jack, Fnix Owwie was the central Frankenstein Ha and Thomas had to ignore to organize non-Metal music so Jason could do LTD creatively without relying on his Rubik's cube so much. Without that Rubik's cube, every Rgo guitar to be made by their OEMs was a master's degree in political economics. Sometimes decisionmaking was only homework, not changing policies. And so they stumbled through the winter without a break for sports, a winter dominated by Rammstein falling into their laps. Ha joked about those puppies. If they're spayed and neutered, I'm sending them back.
