We live in an age ruled by specialization and learning-curves. Even us artists have contributed to the proliferation of the “Idiots or Dummies Guides” to this or that essential new technology. But there are too many new things, new demands on our time, new skills needed to communicate and survive. It’s impossible to do everything, piano AND guitar, paint AND sculpt, write AND direct, Windows AND Mac, Avid AND Premiere, Photoshop AND Maya, ASP AND PHP, law AND medicine, sales AND service, religion AND science, raise your kids AND protect them, live AND remain sober. You can try, but then you’d likely end up writing a silly general blog on Arts and Humanities and, well, that would really suck wouldn’t it!…    

My daughter just got a guitar from her somewhat visible, on-again-off-again boyfriend of nearly six years. Those who know me well, know of whom I speak, but the less said about that the better. Anyway, the good for nothing (except lots of talent) little shit gave her a pretty decent sounding instrument, so I picked it up and have determined, perhaps for the fourth or fifth time in my life, to teach myself the basics. Actually, screw the basics, I want to at least be a competent “one trick pony”, capable of sitting down and playing a single tune with such practiced accomplishment that most will assume it’s just another manifestation of my creative genius.    

Funny how you can get away with that in music unlike other artistic pursuits. There’s no “Suzuki-method” for visual arts and certainly none for writing, with the single glaring exception of William Shakespeare if traditional scholarship is to be blindly trusted. (Oh yes, we’re going to talk about this… SOON!).    

My wife played the guitar, long ago, back before she and I settled into our respective ’specialties’; me with my various artistic pursuits and she with her weird ones–you know, like competently raising the kids, feeding us, and consistently bringing home the bulk of the money. Says she needs it to like, pay bills and stuff–something like that. I wouldn’t know. Not my specialty…    

Anyway, I can honestly say that faking competency on the ”Guitar” seems to be my final frontier. Of course my problem is, unlike my computer’s ‘hard drive’ and my ’women’, I like my ‘musical instruments’ to be linear, logical, left base to right treble, heighth of note on the page roughly corresponding to the one in my ear. It’s undoubtedly a keyboard predjudice but this too is logical, since I was obviously ”hard-wired” on the piano. Not that I wouldn’t dearly love the same attribute for my bloated, 400 or so gig cyber storage space AND for my less-than-bloated, less-than-400 or so lbs wife, but those who know me well, know that I’m a naturally messy thinker, full of “Suzuki-method” computer talents and interests from as far back as 1991, which means my hard drive, like my brain, quite literally ‘groans’ under my severe non-linear demands and usage. And of course, I doubt further explanation is really necessary on the compatibility of linear logic and my wife. They are mutually exclusive, entirely contradictory ideas. Perhaps even oxymoronic, like ”army intelligence”, “authentic replica”, or the idea that after reading this article, my wife shall, anytime soon, allow us to be “alone together”…  

I think ‘laughter’ is the only thing that doesn’t strictly require a “Dummies” guide, at least for the ‘end-user’. If I were to ever achieve a consistant level of competence to make others laugh, a “Tutorial” would begin and end with this advice; Walk the edge, take chances, be surprising… Come to think of it, the same advice will go a great distance towards enhancing both your marriage and your general creativity as well.  

For those who know me and my wife well… I know what you’re thinking, “Good thing you enjoy creatin‘, Michael, ’cause you ain’t gonna’ be procreatin’ for a long time!”  

“Honey, I said ‘less-than’!… LESS-THAN!!!”

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