My First Guitar Lesson

I'm not sure if I've ever met anyone who has cycled through as many hobbies as I have. From the average (rock collecting!) to the odd (flying RC planes!), my collection of hobbies is a long one, at least compared to the average person my age. Nowadays, the reason I pick up hobbies is so that I can perfect them and never touch them ever again. I'm not sure why I do this. I suppose it's out of boredom, and I also suppose that it says a lot about me. But I haven't always been this way.

Before I hit high school age, I'd cycle through hobbies because I wasn't sure what I'd like, similar to most people in my peer group. I hadn't yet realized that everything interests me, and rather than take on several hobbies at once, I decided to go through them one at a time.

The first two were very, very normal: soccer and the Boy Scouts. No disrespect for those that stayed with either outside middle school, but a lot of us that were with you originally couldn't exhibit enough interest in either to keep up a good rapport with our coaches and Scout master, and were usually punted from the group.

Aside #1: I know this didn't happen to everybody. I'm not stupid. I'm just acting as if this very specific instance has happened to everybody, to imply that it's happened to me.

After failing at these two prospects, my mom and step-dad assumed that me being interested in sports or being a lifelong good Samaritan weren't likely futures for me,

so they bought me a guitar for my 13th birthday.

Being something of a guitar aficionado in another life, my step-dad didn't skimp out on purchasing me an instrument of fine quality. He bought me an Epiphone Les Paul Mini, complete with amp and guitar-and-amp-carrying guitar-and-amp case.

Note: Pictured above is the EXACT set that I had, except I'm pretty sure the amp had some sort of stencil across the front of it.

It was literally everything a budding player could want. It didn't have any scary pedals or weird bars sticking out of the guitar, it was the most basic of instruments for those with the most basic level of interest in playing it. And the fact that it carried the Les Paul name meant something to anyone who knew anything (or thought they knew anything) about guitars.

In addition to this gift, I also was given assurance that my mother would sign me up for a lesson in playing my newly acquired instrument, once my step-dad had taught me some form of basic string-plucking so I didn't go off embarrassing myself in front of a professional.

After doing so, three months later, I was signed up for my first lesson at my local Guitar Center. Walking into that store on the day of my first lesson (with my mom by my side, naturally), I was nervous and nearly shaking. We'd shown up early, so we were asked to sit in a tiled area attached openly to both the store and the hallway connecting the individual soundproof rooms where the actual "teaching" was done.

Sitting across from me was a girl who was approximately my age, who was holding the case for what was either a viola or violin. It was obvious just by looking at her that she was comfortable in her surroundings, as if she'd sat in that same chair dozens of times over the years, breaking it in to the point of maximum comfortability. While I, the "fresh meat," as it were, shifted uncomfortably in my plastic chair, the hard curves unknown, my feet not touching the ground, hands groping the neck of my guitar through its nylon carrying case. We were different beasts, she and I.

Minutes went by until a man turned around the corner, clearly having come out of one of the personally-sized rooms. He called my name, and I followed him back into a room with a number on its door. He shut the door, and introduced himself as Thomas. He was tall and buff, and to some people he might have been considered ruggedly handsome. His shoulders were double the width of his hips, likely as a testament to what appeared to be a Samoan heritage. He essentially had the ideal physique for a linebacker or a refrigerator, a variable man and woman's best friend.

Regardless, he was here to teach me, and teach me he did. Sort of. We spent the first 15 minutes of class with me awkwardly playing the three to four base chords I'd learned and actually remembered in the last few weeks, with me promising that I'd learned more but couldn't recall it at the moment.

Aside #2: I also remember a particularly embarrassing moment. in which I picked at the strings at the point between the nut (at the top of the neck) and the fret posts (where the strings are "strung" in, essentially), and claimed that it sounded just like a "creepy piano" tinkling. I hope that more than most of you understand exactly what I'm talking about, and understand how painful and jarring recalling this is for me right now.

After pretending to know more than what I actually knew about playing the guitar in front of someone who taught people how to play the guitar for a living, he pulled out his own instrument and began fooling around and playing a few dumb tunes. Being a dumb kid, I was amazed by his clear mastery of the guitar arts, and mentally bowed down to his talent and made him my master.

Aside #3: I really fucking love(ed) Star Wars.

"What kinda music do you like?" he asked.

"Uh, blink-182 and The Offspring are pretty cool" I replied, knowing that the latter of the two would be impressively considered "adult" taste for a 13 year-old (it wasn't).

"Aw, blink-182! They're that band with the song that goes..."

At this point, Thomas the Guitar Instructor launched into the most melodramatic rendition of "All the Small Things" by blink-182 that this planet has ever seen. Kind of. He sort of knew the lyrics, and the tempo was a little off, and the chords sounded a bit funny, but he got the general idea of the song down. Even more, he was very clearly impressed with himself for remembering (most of) the song.

Unfortunately, this was at a point in time where rabid blink-182 fans like myself had sort of formed a backlash against that particular song, because it was their most popular one, the single song that every person who had heard of the band had heard of. The least exclusive track in their catalogue. Every major band in history has had this exact situation occur to them at some point in their careers.

Here was my teacher, the man to whom minutes earlier I had dedicated the future of my musical life to. Singing my least favorite song (at the time) by my favorite band, out of key and absolutely terribly. I'd never seen someone I respected so highly, so quickly, fail so miraculously and without a single ounce of grace.

The rest of our hour-long session was spent with Thomas trying to tune my guitar with a digital tuner, before giving up on technology and attempting to use his voice. It didn't work.

I never went back. Aside from learning a dozen or so songs in the years since then, I've also given up on playing the guitar. My heart was just never in it.

My former guitar now resides in the closet of my little brother, stored there in hopes that he'll one day use it, become great with it, then buy me a house as thanks for inspiration.

The Metallica Story

Throughout middle school, I was obsessed with Metallica. I'm not embarassed about this fact at all. I am, however, VERY embarassed about the type of Metallica fan I was. You see, Metallica is one of those bands whose entire discography is filled eqally with albums that are hits and misses. I was unfortunately one of those rabid hyper-fans that was drooling over everything they'd ever done, including the absolutely abysmal "Garage, Inc." It was that bad.

Around the peak of my obsession, Metallica released their album "St. Anger." For those of you that don't know what this means in relation to the Metallica canon (if you will), I'd like you to think of your favorite band or musician that has more than five albums out. Now think of that artist's most generic, shitty, uninspired album (as a whole). That's what this album is for Metallica. Except this album was made during a period in their career where every member of the band wanted to kill one another in the most violent way imaginable (as shown by the sub-par-but-still-worth-a-watch documentary "Some Kind of Monster"). Even more, the entire band was fresh from famously suing Napster, after which bassist Jason Newstead left (for an unrelated reason). Their minds were probably on other things while recording this.

Regardless, I worshipped anything these four horsemen decided to hammer out, and listened to the album incessantly with my terrible blue Walkman CD player and ill-fitting headphones that made the loud parts (i.e., the whole album) sound like it was playing through a tin can. But I didn't care, terrible-sounding Metallica was better than no Metallica at all. After playing the album dozens of times, a certain song on the album stuck out to me more than most. Entitled "Sweet Amber," the song seemed to be about a girl that was pretending to be a kind person, or something. Anyways, I thought the song was badass.

Aside #1: I was so obsessed with this album that I still remember that "Sweet Amber" was track number eight on "St. Anger." Despite the fact that you may not believe me, as I'm writing this, I am nowhere near an internet connection, nor do I have this album on my laptop or anywhere nearby.

The summer after the album was released, I was spending a weekend at my dad's house when he and the neighbors threw a sort of impromptu block party. Friends invited friends, and soon people that we had never met were showing up.

Aside #2: I know that saying that strangers were at this party makes it seem like things got out of control, but I assure you, they didn't. This was a party of adults, not college students.

I was hanging out with the group of kids that were around my age, sitting on our next-door neighbor's front porch. J.T., the large, greasy, bespectacled mouth-breather that was the son of the house's owner (and my best friend at the time), was petting one of his many dogs, talking to a boy named Richard that lived a few houses farther down the street. Sitting next to Richard was a skinny, brown eyed, brown-haired girl that I would later find out was his cousin. I was sitting in a wooden rocking chair adjacent to her side of the couch that she and her kin were on, trying not to stare at her. I was still, of course, at the age where I was completely unaware of how to flirt with girls, avoiding her glances and subsequent smiles by feigning a weirdly creepy fascination with another one of the house's smaller dogs that was sitting on my lap. The two sons of the neighbors on the other side of my dad's house, Cody and Austin, were sitting on a pair of fold-out lawn chairs, eating chips.

After a few minutes, the four other males on the porch decided to go into the house to get drinks, leaving Richard's cousin and I alone and sitting less than three feet away from one another. Anyone that has ever been remotely social at any point in their life knows that forced, awkward social interaction was inevitable at this point. So it happened. And it wasn't that bad. She was easy to talk to, and laughed at my jokes interjected into our polite preteen small-talk.

Aside #3: Looking back, I'm not sure if she was laughing at my shitty jokes or the fact that my voice was shaking as I was telling them. Either way, she found it charming, and I was obviously far too inexperienced to tell the difference.

I looked inside during a lull in our banter, and saw that the four boys had decided to sit in the living room and play Gamecube. Opting to not join them, the girl and I decided to walk over to my dad's house to get some food. On the short walk over, we continued to talk to one another, talking about unimportant and benign things. Though I was not good at reading most signals, I was picking up strong flirtatious vibes from her. She'd gone from laughing at my aforementioned "shitty jokes" to adorably giggling at even the most muted of my responses. I had an admirer, it seemed. This realization only propelled my interest for her, and she jumped from "cute girl" to "the girl I'll tell my friends about after the summer's over."

We entered my dad's backyard to find a large group of people milling around a grill, my dad's friend Bob making cheeseburgers for the crowd. We each requested one, and put our condiments on our respective patties while standing side-by-side in the warm garage. This was the most romantic thing that had ever happened to me at this point in time, and I didn't know how to react. After anxiously eating while standing in the humid space, she grabbed me by the hand and lead me to her father's truck, parked outside my dad's house. She opened the back hatch, and we climbed in. Sitting indian-style next to each other, we both looked up at the still-darkening sky in silence.

"You're not like anyone I've met before," she said, still looking up.

I wish I could say that I swept her off of her feet and suavely shot back a witty retort that made her fall madly in love with me, but I did nothing of the sort. As far as I can recall, we sat there in silence after this admittance, too afraid to talk any more. Before I knew it, she was bustled into Richard's parent's van, leaving me with nothing but a bruised heart and her first name: Amber.

I never saw her again, or really ever talked to Richard as far as I remember. But to this day I can't even listen to Metallica without thinking of that sweet girl Amber that I met when I was a kid.

My First Date

When I was in the ninth grade, I was a douchebag. I was constantly yearning for attention from my upperclassmen, while also feebly attempting to "get laid;" a combination of goals that no female with a brain stem found inherently attractive. I hadn't experienced anything sexual outside of my failed blowjob from Ashley the previous summer, and was beginning to get anxious. Not from sexual repression, but from the sort of oozing bog of loneliness that those like myself find themselves sinking in when young and filled with angst.

Thankfully, this slump didn't last long, and by that October I'd already set my sights on the next girl I wanted to pursue. Her name was Megan, and she was a junior at my high school. She was sort of tomboyish; the type of girl that would always wear her hair in a ponytail, who would come to school in a different band t-shirt every day. She wore all-green Chuck Taylor high-tops, and she was the most attractive girl I'd ever seen. Needless to say, I was smitten.

I'd managed to enter her social circle through a few mutual friends we had, and began talking to her at school on a regular basis. She was incredibly flirty, a trait I hadn't yet learned to protect myself against at such a young age. We eventually made plans to hang out beyond the confines of the school walls, with her offering to drive me to the mall to "hang out." Not well-versed on teenage relationship etiquette, I assumed that this was to be the first of many actual dates. I was thrilled, and told my parents all about it over dinner that night. My mother was excited and began fussing over my hair, offering to take me to get it cut after school the next day, hours before Megan picked me up. I took her up on her offer. We went, and I ended up getting what I thought was a cool hair cut. I walked out of the barber shop feeling confident with my new look, excited to show it off.

Aside #1: I should mention right now that at this age, I had no friends that drove, and didn't (and still don't) drive myself. This was a sort of monumental moment for me, being the first time I was actually allowed to be driven in a car piloted by a teenager. Sadly, this detail is probably what set this mall "date" apart from my previous, parent-driven mall "non-dates" in my young mind.

I spent the next few hours nervously picking out clothes that I felt suited the evening, trying on several dress shirts before settling on a "cool and collected"-looking black turtleneck my mom had bought for me, paired with my favorite jeans and a brown leather jacket that I'd received three Christmases earlier (that was three years too small). In my mind, I looked awesome. I thought of myself as a sort of James Dean-ish character, and was positive that she'd immediately want to make out with me upon seeing my outfit.

Of course, she didn't. But that didn't bother me, because I'd have the whole night to win her over with my unmatched wit and charm. Except I didn't have any wit and charm. Nervous and unwilling to fail, my first mistake was made shortly after getting into her car. After exchanging greetings, her eyes lit up.

"Do you like ska?!" she asked, grinning.

"Er. Well...yeah, I like ska," I replied, nodding my head.

Aside #2: This is the only time I've ever said the term "I like ska" in my entire life.

If she were more intuitive, she would have realized that I'd very clearly never heard ska music before, and was completely lying to her. But, her excitement clouded her perceptions, and she excitedly pushed a tape into the stereo. The sound of horns started blaring through the speakers as I awkwardly bobbed my head along at a pace that was nothing like the one in the song, pretending to enjoy myself. Megan, however, was drumming her steering wheel furiously, singing along with a sort of crazed fervor that only ska fans are capable of.

I was terrified. Having never driven with a teenager, I was completely unaware that most of them act like fucking maniacs when behind the wheel. After a few minutes of hiding my fear and feigning interest in the music, I began to feel itchy. You see, I hadn't taken a shower since I'd gotten my hair cut, for fear that I wouldn't be able to make my hair look as cool as the barber had.

Aside #3: You've all done it before, shut up.

Of course, this meant that I had residual hair clippings sprinkled over the back of my neck and shoulders, irritated by my unfortunate clothing choice. Trying not to look too obvious about it, I began rubbing my shoulders against my seat, soothing my uncomfortability. It started out with a sort of gentle rub, but over the course of the next few minutes it evolved into a sort of free-form homage to the way bears shamelessly scratch their backs along tree trunks. Nothing subtle about it.

I'm not sure how long she was looking at me before I noticed, but I think any amount of time is plenty in this situation. Luckily, we'd arrived at the mall, and the loud-ska-fused-with-weird-tension-in-the-air bubble that had been growing in the car was popped. We parked, and started walking through the mall. Stiff-legged, nervous and still itchy, I followed Megan as she buzzed about from store-to-store happily, not noticing my discomfort. But then, somehow, we were holding hands. I'm not sure when it happened, or who made the first move, but I remember being in the kitchen wares section of a department store when its significance to the future of our relationship dawned on me. This adorable girl that I liked had looked past my weird display in her car, and still liked me. It was monumental. In my pubescent mind, this was a symbol of great things to come.

Eventually we began heading towards the exit to the mall, still hand-in-hand. I'd forgotten all about my itching issues, my mind dreamily focused on thoughts of Megan and I's future together. In the parking lot, her cell phone started ringing. Her hand left mine when she picked it up, but I didn't even care. We'd have all the time in the world to hold hands.

Aside #4: If you think I'm some sort of obsessive weirdo at this point, remember that I was young and filled with hormones. I don't know what the fuck I was thinking half the time.

After she finished her call, she told me that we were going to turn around and visit one of her friends that worked at the Cheesecake Factory in the mall. He was on his smoke break, she explained, so it wouldn't be long. I cooly remarked that it wasn't a big deal, and we started walking the other way. Oddly, her pace had picked up dramatically, and she was now power-walking towards the restaurant. I thought it was really charming that she wanted to see her friend so bad, and didn't try to keep up.

I saw her friend before she got to him, and something in the back of my mind threw up a red flag. He was over six feet tall, goateed and wearing a cook's apron. If that hadn't set off an alarm in my mind, the way they hugged would have.

Imagine, if you will, the most obnoxious hug that you've ever seen, where one party picks the other up and twirls them around while making unintelligible "happy" noises. It was like that, but with an added side of soul-crushing heartbreak as her lips met his in mid-hug.

Of course. A boyfriend. Her hand-holding must have been a mark of friendship, not of any sort of attraction. My hours of preparation were wasted. I mumbled a half-assed greeting to my new nemesis, jamming my hands in my jacket pockets angrily. They decided that he was going to walk with us to her car while he was finishing his break, so we turned around for a second time. As a way to show my frustration with the current predicament I found myself in, I made sure to walk on the other side of the parking lot aisle, shoulders hunched. They didn't seem to notice. His hand was occupying the same place in her hand that mine was just minutes earlier. Seeing this made me try to brood harder, so that the end result was me looking like a pissed-off hunchback with bad taste in leather jackets.

We arrived at her car, which she didn't unlock until after kissing him for a solid ten seconds on her side. Quickly, I sat inside and crossed my arms, pretending I was cold (not seething with anger). She continued to kiss him, the both of them plainly visible through the driver's side windshield. His tall figure was craned over her small one, arms around each other's waist/shoulders (respectively). The minutes dragged on forever.

Aside #5: I'm really not sure how long I was sitting there staring at them, but I'll hope you'll forgive me for using the cliche "it felt like forever in just a few minutes" line.

Finally, their embrace broke and he departed. She opened the door to the car and sat inside.

"Sorry, I didn't know he was working tonight," she explained, starting the car.

"You didn't know your boyfriend was working tonight?" I asked, genuinely confused.

"Oh, he's not my boyfriend. He's just...my friend," she replied.

My Megan, a whorish cocktease. It all made sense (but for real this time). I shifted my body weight in a way that showed that I clearly didn't approve of the situation, and she understood the message I was conveying.We didn't talk the entire drive back to my house. Ska music came through her speakers, but at a much more acceptable volume than before. She wasn't drumming along, or singing loudly. Her hands gripped the small grey steering wheel until her knuckles went white. There was a sort of angry and confused tension in the air, until I arrived home. Immediately after she pulled up to the curb, I flung the door open and unclicked my seatbelt. I said a rushed goodbye, slammed the door, and started to walk slowly up to my front door, fishing my key out of my pocket. I was nearly there, when I heard Megan blare her ska music before peeling out and driving away. I had a lump in my throat as I entered my house, finding my parents waiting for me in the living room. After a few questions answered with no enthusiasm whatsoever, they got the hint and let me go to my room to feel sorry for myself.

I didn't see her much after that, and aside from dating one of my friends for a few weeks, never was really forced to interact with her.

I learned a lot of valuable life lessons from my first (and only) date with Megan. But what really breaks my heart is that she didn't even notice my cool hair cut.