You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Instruments unused. Melodies silenced, chords quieted, beats unheard.
There is a drum set upstairs. My eldest son hasn’t banged on them in 5 years. He use to take lessons. He is no Neil Peart, but he had a little talent. Now the skins sit in a room, a magnet for dust, a place for the occasional fly to land and survey a quiet platitude.
There is a guitar in my youngest son’s room. He hasn’t strummed it in months. He use to take lessons. His teacher said he had no passion. I guess the teacher was right. Now the guitar is a paper weight, an object of his musical defection.
Why are things so quiet? Where is the desire?, the spark, the creative juices that run through their veins?
Honestly, the boys have no spark. They are not driven from within. Without a muse to guide, they are hollow vessels floating on a meandering tide.
I have two guitars. I play them every week. I suck. I know a few chords, all at the top of the neck. I should be better after all these years, but I’m not. My fingers still zig when I need them to zag. When I try a riff I look like a drunk with a seizure disorder.
But I still like to make noise, even if sometimes it sounds like a rocking chair rolling over a cat’s tail.
What’s up with my progeny?
I know they have my DNA. I see me in both of them. I know they both like music, though I can’t quite figure how the youngest gravitated to rap. He’s white like a new snow in Montana. He’s got as much rhythm as a washing machine over loaded with lead.
Regardless of what music the boys like, the question I keep coming back to is why not play? They both have the opportunity, but neither seizes the moment.
My youngest would rather play video games on the internet. My oldest son would rather go to movies with his buddies.
There’s something sad about opportunity wasted.
Something inside me suddenly wants to scream “Starving kids in India would die to play that ax.”
Instruments sitting in a corner of a room gathering dust is sad. It feels like a crime scene where the victim is creativity. I want to string up yellow tape around his drums like a scene out of CSI.
The guitar, the drums, they want to be played, they want to be strummed they want to be banged and blown.
A silent instrument is like a pen with no ink, no paper. It’s a sail boat on a day with no wind.
Isn’t there a message inside them that needs to be expressed? A silent instrument is an insult to the universe. It was designed to illicit feeling, passion, emotion. When it sits there like a coat rack, The Gods of Rock and Roll are pissed. Somewhere Beethoven is rolling over in his grave.
An instrument played creates an auditory rainbow somewhere in a stormy sky. Notes played in one part of the spectrum absorb into the ether of existence and super charge a dark void a world away.
Music is ambrosia of the soul. Nothing this free, this legal, can so instantaneously transport you mentally, emotionally, physically from one state of mind to another.
I hate that my boys have let their instruments die, banished to a quiet scrap heap of uselessness.
I see my guitars in their stands. They are like soldiers, stoically waiting for their chance to cross enemy lines.
When the electric calls to me, I respond. I crunch a power chord full of amps and angst. The electric likes the thick choppy sauce funneled through its tiny dirty amp.
The acoustic is sweeter, more refined, ready to resonate with precision.
They both have their own sound, their own style and grace.
Sometimes I type the words on this page as if my key board is a piano. I play the tune in my mind and it ends up on the screen in words and thoughts. Perhaps the sentence structure has rhythm? Perhaps the mood I’m describing has a melody? I know when the writing is good, it feels like musical ambrosia.
So enough typing. Time to crunch a three chord AD/DC riff.
Life’s Crazy™