This is true! I did!
Last summer in a desperate need of money (that persists to this day) I sold a number of my personal belongings on ebay and kijiji. Among those belongings was the focus of my illustrious music career.
As we all know from my dog theme song posting, I have zero musical talent. Just the same my parents, being good and nurturing people, catered to my desire to become a famous country music star and purchased me a guitar for my birthday. I want to say that it was my 9th or 10th birthday.
They did it in a horribly misguided way though. You see, I had unwrapped my gifts and they brought me a half full trash bag and told me I was now responsible for cleaning up my wrapping paper mess. Blasphemy! So I started to shove the paper into the bag, but then I started to temper tantrum. You see I was only mildly cranky about having to clean up my wrapping paper. Mike and Tris never had to clean up the wrapping paper on their birthdays! But I was more so upset by the fact that something inside the bag kept poking me and scratching my hand every time I tried to shove the paper in beside it. Not only had they brought me a trash bag, but it was a dangerous tetanus infected trap of a trash bag. As I was starting to cry, and everyone watching me grew increasingly impatient (and no one, I think to this day realizes why, so I am going to make this very clear, I was being cut poked and scratched and it HURT you heartless monsters!) my brother, never discreet about these things screamed at me to look in the bag. There I found my first guitar, and the reason it was scratching and cutting me was that the ends of steel guitar strings are very very sharp. They don't tell you that on country music radio.
Along with said guitar I was given a video cassette to teach me how to play it. I watched the tape once, it went too fast, and I spent about a year strumming tunelessly until my parents got me lessons from some spanish fellow. I successfully made it to the end of my first lesson book and performed in one recital, before losing all interest in playing the guitar and quitting my lessons. Tada!
I went all through junior high school never touching my guitar. I may have continued in this fashion for the rest of my life were it not for an odd little accident.
My parents don't know about this part yet.
We had a tour of the high school, at the end of which we were supposed to select our first year high school courses. During that tour we were to go from class to class, out of those we had shown interest in and written down on our mock schedule for the tour day. At some point someone asked me if I needed directions. I stated "No! I know exactly where I am going!" because I had big brothers in high school and therefore must know everything about going to high school. Of course I got lost, but I didn't want to have to go back to the teacher who had asked if I needed directions because what if he was my teacher in a class later and he thought that I was some kind of idiot and he made me sit in the front and constantly asked me "Now Monika, are you sure you don't need help with this? Remember when you got lost?"
I was not going to let that happen. So I ducked in to what I hoped was the classroom for theater tech. It wasn't. It was the guitar class. I was so unable to give up my 'I meant to be here' charade that not only did I sit through the information session, I actually registered in the class. It was entirely against my will, I felt I had to. I even feigned unbridled excitement at home, telling my parents all about guitar class and how awesome it was going to be.
It actually was awesome. I enjoyed it very much, I practiced at home almost every day and definitely every weekend when I hauled my guitar to and from school in three feet of snow up hill both ways. (This is 100% true, see the school was across the river valley, so I had to go down hill, then up hill to get there, and then down hill and up hill again to go home, and sometimes the snow on the hill drifted, so it was really deep).
Guitar class was when I got my second guitar. How could someone who was so untalented and so disinterested in playing a guitar come in to possession of two whole guitars? Well about a week in to class I was struggling to play my first guitar, and when my teacher looked at it we found that the neck was being pulled away from the body by the tension on the strings. My guitar was literally about to fold itself in half. That meant it would never stay in tune, and my strings were more than an inch from the frets in some places, making it painful and pretty much impossible to play. Dad bought me a new guitar, it was red.
I honestly loved my guitar class. I got an A. But the moment my grades no longer depended on playing the guitar I lost interest all over again in learning to play the guitar. Truth was, in order to get that A all I did was memorize the songs we learned, never properly learned to read music, and would never be able to play anything by ear. It was nothing but robotic finger here, strum, finger here, strum, etc. I bluffed my way all through guitar class, even before I registered.
I pulled the guitar out occasionally throughout high school and even packed it off to university for awhile, where I was too embarrassed to play it, in case someone heard me struggling through Danny Boy or that song from Titanic, then it returned to my closet until I decided to rid myself of the shame and disappointment of my musical failure. My brother Tristan and I smashed my broken guitar in the driveway like rock stars and then I listed my second guitar up for sale. It sold to a fellow in Lethbridge who was looking for a guitar for one of his students, since I was driving to Lethbridge on weekends for flyball I agreed to deliver it.
And that is where this story begins!
Because look, my guitar is for sale on kijiji! I almost want to buy it back. Don't, under any circumstances, allow me to do that.
I was browsing the ads and thought to myself, 'That looks like my guitar, so I clicked on the ad' and low and behold, it is my guitar. Know how I can tell? Because those are my books and that is my tuner. The fact that I needed an electronic tuner should suggest that I had no chance as a musician.
But lots of people use beginner books to learn beginner guitar, and lots of people use tuners because they have no chance at ever being a professional musician. But how many people have a gig bag that was patched up by my mother? (Those strings really are sharp you know, they ripped my gig bag).
That is most definitely my guitar.
Why do I care? Because the ad is full of lies! He is mis-representing my guitar!
"It has only been played a handful of times" That's not true! I played it every day for an entire semester. That is a lot more than a handful. Perhaps he only played it a handful of times, which only goes to show that I was way more dedicated of a musician that he was.
"has been kept in a safe place away from pets, and children." Definitely not true. It was stored in a dog hair filled closet and I took it baby sitting with me sometimes because young children are infinitely impressed when you can play just one song on a guitar. It was also kept in a house with smokers for awhile!
I hate when people misrepresent my things. On the other hand, it's nice to know that someone else in this world sucks at guitar and decided to sell their symbol of failure on the internet as well.
This post is far too long for me to check for typos, so you're just going to have to politely ignore them.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment