Taverner (55,048 posts) http://www.democraticunderground.com/1018491697
Never abondon "childish things"
Part of me wonders why I didn't touch a musical instrument for over ten years. When I was a kid, I couldn't get enough music. Classical, Jazz, Stevie Wonder (thanks mom) and The Beatles. Or anything else that would play on my kiddie record player.
This continued through high school. I never was that "good" at playing, but I could write music by 10 and as a kid would experiment on the piano and just write 'stuff.' This continued through the guitar for many years later.
When I did Peace Corps, I got myself a 12-string and brought that overseas. I still have it, albeit weathered and sun bleached in places. When I was learning the Thai language, for some reason it kick started a creative part of my mind where I literally wrote over a hundred tunes. They are scattered all over in notebooks and cassette recordings.
Then, when I returned home, I didn't touch the guitar or any instrument. I kept my beloved 12-string in a box in storage. "Childish things," I thought, "certainly an adult trying to survive in Oakland doesn't do such things." At the time I was trying to impress my wife to be, and I didn't want to appear as any kind of slacker.
After graduating from grad school, I celebrated by buying a Fender Strat and a Tube amp. I was given a signing bonus and thought this was a good time to pick up the guitar again. I played it a little, but put it away as well. So it sat, and my world went from vivid colors to a greyish black and white. Color tones and hues lost all meanings.
I still listened to music and spent probably thousands trying to find something new, something relevant. Fast forward a bunch of years, and I have kids, a home, all of the accoutrements of suburban life. But I did not feel alive. Pain was just something that happened to my body.
Thinking back, I hadn't cried in all that time either. I was a zombie, sleepwalking through life, connecting A to B.
Then a series of events took place which eventually led me to take the guitars out of storage and start to play them. I was in a dark place, and when I played music, that was the only time I ever felt alive. Truly alive. As if I had relevance, and wasn't just another bloated sack of organic material waiting to be buried and ingested as worm food.
I was a zombie.....
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