You Can Go Back

When's the last time you saw your soul
When't the last time you played your role
When's the last time you felt the way
You were really meant to?

I wrote that. Sorry. I wrote it about 14 years ago, when I was 17. See, I was in a band. I play guitar, but I'm not very good. I never have been. I have a facility for languages, but though I've tried to learn how to read music around 5 times in my life, I can't do it. I'm not bad at playing by ear though, which is what gave me the idea for this post.

I started out on piano when I was around 12. I was determined to get a drum set, but my parents used the 3 genius arguments of "No," "Fuck no," and "You can't play drums on your own, you'd be better with something you can do melody with." So for my 13th birthday, I got a guitar. I still have it. It's my sweet baby, and she sings the blues or whatever hackneyed phrase people are using to describe their love for their instruments these days. I do love that damn thing. It's a little beat up, but that's given it character and a sweeter sound over the years, like me. I don't mean that. I sound like crap recently because I haven't played in months, except for filling in on bass for a cover band last weekend.

I wanted to post about looking back on previous stuff because I've recently done that with some of my older work. Specifically, I found an old anthology of essays I wrote and some old mp3s of my former bands (I wrote some songs, and was the singer due to my aforementioned suckage at guitar). It's taught me a few things:

1. Every few years, I look back on my recent life and realize I am completely full of shit. Don't believe me? Picture how you acted or spoke when you were dating in high school. Picture your orientation week in university, if you went to one. Picture how you wanted to act at your first job versus why you got fired from there.
   
   This is why I have some insecurity about how I act most of the time, and tend to not take myself very seriously. I'm introspective enough to the point that I know that 2 years from now, I'll look back and, again, think that I was completely full of shit in my current mindset.
    
2. You would not believe how full of shit you were in high school. If my early lyrics are any indication, I was super-angry about something. I wasn't particularly sure what it was, but I definitely had a lot to say about it. I wrote one called "No ID" that I think was about how much it sucks to not be able to drink legally? Wrote that when I was about 16. The lyrics above are from a song called "Never". My songwriting prowess will be best illustrated by the fact that, only a couple months later, I attempted to title a song "Never Again". Holy fuck, so full of shit. There was another about "smiling through the pain", where "the pain" was never defined, but since I was about 17 at the time, I'm now going to assume it was blue balls or something equally stupid.
   
   On the other hand, I was forced into summer school for my English class because I had developed a bad habit of not doing any of my assignments while still acing tests, and the weighting of them gave me a shitty grade. In that class, we talked about a dozen or so different types of essays, and had to create an anthology of each type over the summer. I called mine Make It Real (again, so full of shit), and I found it a couple of weeks ago along with some writing I did in university. Know what? It's actually pretty good, even still. So while I realize I was completely full of shit, I at least had occasional moments of clarity.
    
3. Just because you're rusty, that doesn't mean you can't regain that sense of fun. I love writing. I do it all the time, whether it's on here, Twitter, and the occasional instances where I can clean up my thoughts enough to put them on Facebook (I also have some pretty sweet recipes over there and rarely use multiple forms of the verb "to fuck" when writing). I find writing, and the associated editing process, helps me organize my thoughts. I can't count the number of times I've read something in on a newspaper website that's pissed me off enough to start writing about it, only to realize partway through that I either don't know enough about the subject to write objectively, or now know enough about it to no longer give a shit.
   
   Two weeks ago I re-learned about 20 songs in 5 days. I had a 3-hour practice with a band on Friday, then did a 2-hour show with them on Saturday. Luckily, they were the most laid-back group of musicians I've ever met. I could not swear, under oath, that they all stayed awake for the entire time we were playing. So yeah, I/we screwed up a few times, but the thing I took away from it was: It was fun. I miss playing music. I want to get back into it. I don't want to start some dad-rock band or anything, but I think I could definitely take away from my busy schedule of laying on the couch watching TV to bust out the occasional tune on that old acoustic.

Oh, that's the other thing. I had an electric. Loved it. I had pedals, a giant amp...I could be loud when I wanted to be. But over the years and economic ups and downs, half a dozen moves including cross-country, and an overall reduction in the desire to play, my electric and amp and pedals are now someone else's. I hope they're enjoying them.

Still have that acoustic, though. It's been 18 years together now. And no matter how full of shit I think I'll be in a few years from now, I bet it'll still be there, waiting for me to butcher another chord or spend another hour getting a riff to sound just right.

What are you waiting for the right time to get back to? It's time. Let me know.