People with lots of different hobbies don’t make sense to me. I was born to plod, to do one thing over and over again. For the past forty years or so, that’s been writing. But, for a good long while, writing overlapped with playing music.
I chose a tough instrument on the day Mrs. (not Ms., she’d remind us, but Mrs.) Strickland let the seventh graders pick one out of the battered and chipped collection at my junior high. Everyone else went for something loud, like the trumpet, and I wound up with a cello. After many years of lessons and string quartets and recitals, I started listening to the local college radio station, and around the same time I broke into the high school copier and made my first zine, I switched to the bass.
Music doesn’t come naturally to me. That’s to say, I can get so-so at playing it, but it’s a long, painful slog. With the cello that meant five million scales, and the same was true for the bass. My bass teacher was a heavy metal guy who wanted to teach me about mixolidian and phrygian modes before I could play a Ramones song. I wasn’t great, and I fucked up a lot, but every music teacher I had was kind enough to push me to keep going.
But I kept hitting plateaus. It’s like this with writing, too. You have to write a lot before you form a distinctive voice that’s not just an amalgamation of your favorite writers, and then if you stop writing for a while, you have to find your way back to it. Genre is hard, too, because sometimes you’ll start in one form (poetry, for me) and end up discovering you’re catastrophically bad at it, so you’ll try something else. Once I started writing essays, my mind locked in and my voice soared.
Instruments are much the same. You have to find the right one that works for you, your body, your hands, your brain. The cello, for example, is an amazing instrument that is insanely hard to play, kind of like what I imagine writing a novel would be. The bass is fun and makes you want to move your butt, but sitting and playing it alone is tedious, perhaps like being a playwright but never having a staged reading. So I hung up all my instruments in my twenties, put my head down, and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote.
Cancer, of course, disrupted everything, and much of the post-active-cancer-treatment life is just a carousel of anxiety, depression, and wondering what the hell is next. After cancer, you can’t go back to who you were or the way you used to see the world because cancer is always following you around like a wolf, so you thrash around trying to decipher what’s distracting enough to keep you busy without being retrograde.
Of course, I’m not giving up writing, but I have been covering the same topics for over a decade and don’t currently feel much urge to go back to them. Much of this newsletter is what musicians call woodshedding, a place to practice and share ideas with all of you, which sounds pretty self indulgent when I write it down like that. But every writer does this. Essayists, in particular, we practice ideas. Montaigne used the word “essai” because it means “to try,” and that’s what we’re doing here. We’re trying.
But it was also clear that I needed to try something new, so about three or four months ago I bought a guitar. For a while I tried learning from YouTube but there are five million white guys on YouTube trying to teach people how to play guitar, so I picked a guy in India and a woman in Australia, but I could play maybe two chords and I could not play them back to back. I am now rounding out a month of guitar classes with an IRL teacher and getting way better than I ever would have relying on a screen. YouTube can give you the basics, but without live feedback on how you’re playing, it’s essentially masturbatory.
After I could play a few chords back to back, one of the first songs I attempted to learn was David Bowie’s “Five Years.” Most likely, this was the result of being stoned and googling “easiest songs on guitar,” but also, cancer is a five year situation. I’ll be on cancer meds for at least five years, most cancers come back in the first five years, although unfortunately the kind I have could come back any time, even decades from now. Five years means something different to people in cancerland, and David Bowie also died from cancer. But Ziggy Stardust was a formative album for me as a young punk who was kind of embarrassed to like melodies, and best of all, the song only has six chords, and I could play all of them.
As of this writing I’ve been playing “Five Years” for a month and there’s a bridge section where Bowie goes from A minor to C to G to C to D to A minor to G to C or some other coo coo combination (the man was on d-r-u-g-s). I could play the verses fine, but the bridge would send me crashing down every time. So I played it over and over and over again and was singing along, for which I apologize to my spouse, neighbors, the city of Oakland and God because my “singing” sounds like a whale being strangled, but at some point everything clicked and I was playing it in a kind of thrash version, shouting “five years!” like a deranged 54-year-old who’s just realized she can now play a new instrument.
Writing is hard. Writing will always be hard, lonely, often boring. Writing pays nothing and as Auden said, writing “makes nothing happen,” but it will always be a necessity in my life, the way I find my way into and out of every question. But playing the guitar? It’s just pretty fucking fun.
