Disclosoholic What?

In 1992 I was a high school freshman and one of my closest friends was a junior. He introduced me to Sonic Youth and the Pixies, and eventually, to smoking (which I totally forgot about until just now). I really thought he was the smartest, coolest person I’d ever met. Anyway, when he signed my yearbook that year, he wrote: “Dear M, Love makes you full of shit. Trust me, I know. With love (which makes you full of shit), C.” Flash forward fifteen years and love still makes me full of shit. You see, I spent the weekend listening to every R.E.M. album I own. It was wonderful: I sang, I shimmied, I waved my arms artistically while I danced, I got a little weepy while listening to “Fall on Me” and even changed the ring tone of my phone to that song. But what kept coming up while I was listening to album after album was how many of their songs I used to know how to play on the guitar. I remember serenading my college friends—Paperback Writer among them—to “Superman”, “Begin the Begin” and “Country Feedback.” Not only did I used to know at least 2 songs off of every album, but I knew how to play Pixies and Nirvana songs, as well as the songs I wrote. So whatever happened to all of my guitar playing? I sort of fell out of it as college wore on and I no longer lived in a dorm room (where guitar playing seemed to be as natural as drinking an entire pot of coffee at 4 a.m. to write a paper on Shakespeare). By the time 2001 rolled around and I experienced all kinds of heartbreak, I wrote one last song. I was barely able to play any of the songs I used to know, although if I picked at it long enough I could remember some of them. A year later I moved to Alaska and took my guitar with me and still I never played it. There was one night in very early 2004 when I played half a song for a friend of mine, but that was really about it. So it’s not that surprising that the following year, right as I was about to move back to the Lower 48, when I was in love (which makes me full of shit), I gave my guitar away. Just like this: “no, no, you keep it (he had been borrowing it)—it’ll mean more to you than it will to me.” What? And now here I am, eighteen months after that, no longer in love (which makes me full of shit) and missing my guitar (her name was Lotus Blossum). I can’t remember the lick that opens “Begin the Begin” or even anything I’ve written, but I feel sort of empty, sort of not like me, to no longer even have a guitar. I don’t know. I was hardly good at it (one of the reasons it faded from my life), but I liked it. Playing it took my mind off things and gave me an outlet to express emotion. I’m not sure if it’s a great investment for me to buy another one, though. There are many things I need that are far more pertinent to my everyday life, and it’s not like I could ask my family for one for the holidays (they’d want to know what happened to the one I already owned, and then I would have to explain that I’m a fool when I’m in love). Oh well. In the meantime I suppose I’ll keep listening to my R.E.M. before putting them safely back into the vault, and possibly meditating on the way love makes me full of shit.

Posted by miXi on Wednesday, November 15, 2006 at 2:10 PM | Permalink