Diet and Exercise, Part II

I just realized it's February, so I think I missed the window to entirely to reorder my life's priorities and make myself a whole person (finally!) with the start of a new year. Everyone knows that if it's in February, it's no longer a Resolution and you deciding to stop eating gluten or whatever now is not a serious proposition by a serious person. You might as well hire a public relations firm to issue a press release announcing "this is the thing I'll be failing at."

Of course your Official Resolutions you'll be failing at as well, but that's expected. The difference is we all acknowledge the sincerity of the delusion behind it. The emotional cycle has a universally recognized downward stroke leading into and through the holidays, of pressure and loneliness and disappointment and regret all manifested in the shape of those really big Costco pies and a decorative sock full of Sour Patch Kids. No one furrows their brow confusedly at the concept of the bottoming out that happens between Christmas and New Years Eve. It's such a universal concept, it transcends even religion, so non-Christians in America can know it as well. It's a pothole of regret so ecumenical, it's become secular. Like the Fourth of July, but with high-fructose corn syrup instead of fireworks. The New Years Resolution is just the dead-cat bounce gravity grants us at the point of impact.

I went back and looked for evidence of what kind of immediately dismissible nonsense I had committed (lol) to last year, and I was surprised to be reminded that I was actually foolish enough to put it in print. So let's check in with the Me from '23. Have I:

1) Learned to speak French or

2) Become a competent guitar player?

If you haven't just skimmed the first two paragraphs to get to the more easily digestible list section, like a practiced reader of internet things would have, then you already know the answer(s): of course not.

I did seriously go to Duolingo for a while. I finished a couple of lessons. If you need to know how that's going, the last six or seven times I've logged on, it has said "Welcome back, we missed you!" And then it immediately flashed over into an unskippable 40-second ad for some screen-tapping game app guaranteed to further degrade my ability to concentrate on something like Duolingo.

As for guitar, I did decide to pay for online prerecorded lessons. It turns out that YouTube is absolutely lousy with Millennials who swear they have boiled down guitar to a series of easy modules you can access for the low price of like $90 for 2-4 hours of content. OR you can do what I did and sign up for the subscription model for one of these young men (they're almost always men) for $15/month (cancel any time!) and try ALL the modules. That's right, I've decided to play the optional Try To Remember To Cancel The Recurring Subscription Charge life mini-game again, the same one that still surprises me when I find out I've had access to Paramount+ and/or Peacock streaming services all this time. But now it's in the direction of bettering myself as a person as opposed to just being able to watch, like, Star Trek Strange New Worlds whenever I want, so it feels like there will be more integrity to that passive contribution I suddenly remember six to 18 months from now. I'm sure I'll feel good about it.

I took enough of the lessons from one of the modules to learn some really important things about myself as a guitar player. First, that I'm better at it than I thought I was (which is a relief after 30 years of plunking away) and second that to get better at it in a meaningful way, I'd have to really try.

What's in the way is basically music as an idea. What I do now with a guitar is all noise-based. Not that I'm some great tone mimic, I mean I just try to brute-force the tool to sound like the thing I'm trying to recreate. If I can, close enough, great, let's move on to the next thing with the exact same parameters! But it turns out I'm learning that there's a whole world of instrument-human interaction that is subtle and actually creative. But you can't really access it until you know what you're doing, which means actually figuring out what notes are what and where they are on the fingerboard. And I dunno you guys, I don't think I remember signing up for a bunch of goddamned math.

I can do it if I want to, but I will tell you without being entirely a cop-out, I'm not sure I have the type of brain for it. I topped out at trigonometry in high school, with a barely passing D. But I did great in geometry the year before, so maybe the kind of spatial and logical capacity is in there somewhere, it's just the relational parts that rely on what is rote, fixed, that's the fight. I do honestly struggle to remember the basic notes all the open strings are tuned to in standard tuning. I can do it if I really think about it (EADGBE? I hope that's right. I'm not googling it, for authenticity's sake), but it does genuinely take an effort to conjur.

Is it outside my capacity or is it just outside of my interest? Laziness is just facing down doing something you don't really want to do, in the end. I'm not finding a ton of dopamine in remembering what the relative minor of A major is, but I can say at least that the concept of a relative minor is in my head now, which wasn't before I parted with my first $15 for lessons. So that's not nothing.

I can tell you I'm not ready to give up yet because I did the thing most Americans will do when they are set on a hobby: I bought something for it. In this case, it was a $200 Squier Sonic Telecaster. It's the first guitar I've bought in 15-20 years, and everyone knows that when you go out and buy more equipment (especially something you definitely didn't need as it's redundant with something else you already have), that's the same as commitment, success guaranteed. I also bought a guitar stand so I could keep it out and handy, because I heard having an accessible guitar you don't have to dig out of a closet is a big part of getting into a practice routine.

It just arrived today. Have I practiced with it? Well, I opened it and tuned it up. Sounds great! And it looks great. The Indonesia-made Squiers have come a long way. And now I have that classic Fender single-pickup sound to go with the Epiphone Les Paul humbucker bargain guitar. It's really going to round out the repertoire of phrasings, chords shapes and styles I still don't understand and probably never seriously will. It looks great in my downstairs office space. It really says something about me, in the same way that the philosophy books I've never read on my living room bookshelf do. Like almost exactly the same thing.