Aging – Lessons from a Stone

Backing Down: Not on my Worst Day!

Recently, I was forced to relearn an important lesson, a lesson that originated from within my DNA and reinforced many times over from numerous life experiences. I am sixty-four.

It began innocently enough while my wife was out walking our three dogs on a trail we’ve made that follows our fenceline on all four sides. She came in and told me of a fellow who was mowing the property just across the road. I had just had abdominal surgery to rid me of an undiagnosed infectious mass of fluid that had been growing behind my liver and had hospitalized me several times over the past two and a half years. I was just getting to the point where I could walk around with a cane but I hadn’t been able to walk outside for over a month and was unstable and still in a lot of pain.

Some Context Leading Up to That Day

The surgery I am referring to was the last stop on the train to resolve a serious illness that I had been battling for over two years. To say the least, it was an invasive surgery and involved shifting my organs to look for more infectious material, some of which had to be cut away. I lost a liter of blood and required a transfusion, both things unforeseen in anything the surgeon might run into while being able to finally view the extent of the problem. I did not know how it would have been possible for me to acquire such an obscure illness unless it was connected to an emergency gall bladder surgery that I had gotten several years before.

The gall bladder surgery was performed at one o’clock in the morning, sometime back in 2019, and not by a surgeon qualified to perform that type of surgery. After weeks of trying to get me to go, I was literally on death’s doorstep by the time my wife was able to get me in the truck and en route to the closest emergency room. It was only then that I learned of how bad off I truly was. My gall bladder had turned necrotic and the surrounding area was gangrenous. This led to an advanced case of sepsis. I didn’t know who or where I was and couldn’t name the president of the United States. After that woefully messy surgery I was hospitalized for nine days until my blood was cleared for release. As bad as the surgery and overall experience had been, I was thankful. There was no doubt that they had saved my life. It was my fault that the problem was allowed to progress to such a state.

Not long after returning home from the gall bladder surgery, there had been some signs that my innards were still in distress and my wife called the hospital surgeon’s office on a number of occasions to inquire about the pain and bloating I was experiencing again and was told that those were normal symptoms after a surgery like mine. After six months had passed, the pain had lessened but the bloating gradually continued until it looked like I was pregnant in the week leading up to an emergency, twenty-one day hospitalization in January of 2023. That stay included pumping four liters of nefarious, infected puss from my abdomen and then an “all hands on deck” rush to diagnose the root cause. By the time I went home, my blood had been studied ad nauseum, a cornucopia of cultures had been grown, I’d undergone every type of imaging there is, and still, I remained without a diagnosis. In other words, it was still with me and would be returning.

I was assigned to a lauded infectious disease doctor and went on a two year odyssey to diagnose the problem and, with some luck, save what was left of my life. Sooner or later , this infection was going to kill me, the bacteria were that pernicious. Without knowing where the fluid was coming from, there was no way to stop it from leaking into my abdomen inviting another round of infection and accelerated fluid buildup requiring three more trips to to hospital to chase down the infection and drain the fluid. At one point, I was married to an external fluid drain (an ugly bag and a catheter) for four months. There were three other drain installations but for just one to three months. During this time but unrelated (I think), I was diagnosed with high-grade bladder cancer. For the cancer, it’s been sixteen months and three surgeries and I’ll be in treatment for what looks like some time to come. It looked good for seven months, but I’d been told of its return just days before the incident.

It is all of this that I was carrying on my shoulders that day.

The Incident

Effectively, I had been unable to attend to our country home and property for about four years. For a perfectionist who’s always taken pride in taking care of my things, I’d begun to lose my mind. Because we have three wonderful dogs and an inordinate number of rattlesnakes on our Central Texas property, my biggest priority is in keeping the grass cut. If I don’t get to it in a few weeks, the brush begins to take hold and the native grasses will grow to three feet. It had been over a month since I’d been able to mow it with the field mower. I was about to bust with anxiety over not getting to it. But I’m the type of person who’s grown highly accustomed to doing virtually anything and everything myself. If you live in a subdivision, mowing isn’t that much of a chore, but on four acres of Texas brush country, it can be. You need the appropriate (expensive) equipment and there are lots of potential hazards to pay attention to.

I asked Genie to run over and see if the guy had time to swing by to discuss our place when he was done with his current job. I had a pit in my stomach and I hadn’t even spoken with him. It was in the heat of the day and there’s no way I could hobble around and show him everything. The main thing was whether he had a mowing setup that could handle tall grass and undulating, somewhat rough terrain. Though it looks pretty when mowed, it’s not a golf course. His equipment checked out and, since I knew he didn’t have insurance for his one-man business, I asked him “If you’re out there and you somehow have a failure with your equipment, does that come out of your pocket, or mine?”. He said what I was hoping he’d say, “Mine…I would never…”. Since I couldn’t show him the property and the potentially now hidden obstacles, I showed him pics of the various sections of the property so he could see what it looked like just after a mowing. This is where he grumbled something like “I don’t need to see no stinkin’ pictures”. I quizzed him on it and, in an aggravated voice said “I’ve been mowing for ten years” and yada yada. I told him that “that had nothing to do with it and that he’d realize the relevancy after he mowed over one of three old, six inch stumps obscured by the now tall grass…stumps that I had pointed out clearly”. He grumbled some more as he walked towards his truck. I almost put it to an end there. He sat on the tailgate of his truck wasting time. I said, ‘do you want the job or not?” He said yes but that he’d first have to run the few miles down the road to get gas. It was 99 degrees and I could see the signs of heat exhaustion creeping up on him. I suggested that, since he’d just done that job across the way that I’m sure he was feeling the heat and probably pretty tired and that he show-up in the morning, fueled up and ready to go. I asked him again for a price, either a not-to exceed or an hourly rate so I could figure out how much I was willing to spend. He got in his truck to get gas and said he’d give me a price when he got back and drove away.

With the surgery and ridiculously painful recovery, I hadn’t been out in the mid-day heat (approaching 100 deg that day) and I could feel my strength waning, but I think I was the better off between us. I went into the house to wait and it was right at an hour when he got back from gassing-up just three miles down the road. I didn’t mention it, only asked for a price. He still didn’t have one so, without wanting to over-expose myself with this guy, I offered to pay him $120 for three hours and we’d take a look and adjust things if necessary. I showed him my rig and said that it takes me between three and four hours to do the whole property. His machine had a heavy duty deck and actually had the same engine as mine.

After two and a half hours he came back and loaded his machine before we did our agreed upon walk around. He said he was done and had been out there for five hours. This wasn’t the first bald-faced lie I’d heard that day. No one had ever been brazen enough to look me in the eye and expect me to acquiesce to such a lie. That was it. My patience, which had already been tested to its absolute limit that day, left my body and I felt something very powerful take its place: immediate and unadulterated adrenaline-assisted anger. He’d already been speaking to me in a much louder, more aggressive tone for the past twenty minutes. I kept my tone cool and unflustered, with each word being spoken firmly and measured in terms of not elevating the sound of my voice to match his. I kept my wits and readied myself for what was coming. “That’s the third of three seriously bad lies you’ve told me today and all I want from you now is to pack up your shit and get the fuck off of my property…NOW!” He approached me so that his face was no further than six inches from my face. He started to scream something and no sooner than his spittle hit my face, I shoved him so hard that he barely stood, backpedaling at speed to keep from falling until he slammed into the open driver’s side door and crumpled to the ground. The distance from where I shoved him to where he now lay was between twelve and fifteen feet. I don’t know where that power came from. It was a power I had known during my more youthful years but power that shouldn’t have been there before the stitches from my surgery had been pulled and I was still half out of it from the immense abdominal pain which remained. At first, I thought I might have opened the surgical wound or tore an abdominal muscle, but there was no time for that now. I heard “I’d come right back at you if you didn’t need that cane and hadn’t just gotten out of the hospital!”. I replied “don’t let that stop you!” He threatened me by saying “I should go home, grab my gun. and come back and put some holes in you!” I laughed and said “try me! Or, how ‘bout the one that I’m sure is in the glove compartment of your truck, eight feet away.” This is one of the poorest counties in Central Texas, and both open and concealed carry are legal here. You can bet that people of all persuasions either have a gun on their person or, if they don’t plan on being far from their truck, there’ll be one under the seat or in the glove box. He didn’t respond but just sat there, propped up by his truck door huffing and puffing until I walked over to him “Now, unless you want to continue, I told you to get the fuck off of my property!”, but, I added “I don’t ever want to see you out here again, you dumb son-of-a bitch!” After getting into his truck, I gave him $140 because it was hot, and he was very hot, and I was still happy to have the mowing checked off my list for a week, or two. Plus, temporary emotions aside, it was the right thing to do. If he had finished it, I had planned on giving him $200, which is the amount he said he would have changed as he peeled out of our driveway, flipping me off and screaming obscenities as he went. This was a sixty-eight year old man acting no differently than a four year old. Somewhere during the scuffle, he yelled “twenty years ago, me and some brutha’s used to kick serious ass on white boys like you!” I had not wanted to bring race into the conversation, so I let it go unchallenged. But I couldn’t help myself from laughing in his direction.

After all was said and done, I went inside only to have my wife castigate me for “losing my cool”. I told her that I wouldn’t consider myself a man if I hadn’t. My insides were churning over what had just happened. She hadn’t been able to hear my voice but had heard his as she watched from the front door. I said “that ought to tell you something.” When he got so far into my personal space, yelling at the top of his lungs, that by itself was enough for me to legally defend myself. He obviously didn’t realize it, but getting that close to me had put me at an advantage and being up against my chest gave me numerous options and some strong leverage. The danger had grown to be imminent and there was no more time for thinking, only acting by giving him the hardest shove I could muster in the condition I was in.

As a younger man, even into my fifties, I’d had more confrontations than I can count. A few were pretty serious, but, because of my back problems and health issues like I just described, my body has paid a steep price and I had lost more than half of my strength and mobility. For an athletic, forever on the move, and well conditioned guy, this has been very difficult to handle. There is no way to describe what your body and mind go through in the seconds before an imminently dangerous encounter with another human being. Every fiber of muscle is receiving all the adrenaline your adrenal glands can pump out. Primal chemicals are released from your brain and mind and body come together in a vastly heightened state, so much so that it would be impossible to not react with all the resources you can render. For me in my condition, I had no choice but to hold my ground, dispense with the cane and repel this person, hopefully hard enough to put an end to things and “defuse” the situation. It had been a long time since I’d experienced that kind of adrenaline rush and it felt damned good to feel so alive and in control! I actually told him as much and thanked him for his contribution.

After things settled and the house quieted, I told my wife that I was proud of the way I handled myself and wouldn’t change a thing except for listening to my gut during those hours earlier and asking him to leave before he even got started on the job. This was the lesson I was reminded of that day and will be my only regret from the day of the incident. After collecting herself and hearing me out, my wife apologized, said that she was proud of me, and thanked me for protecting our home and family, particularly in the condition I was in. Our family is comprised of she and I and our three wonderful dogs, whom I’m sure would have been only too pleased to have gotten a piece of this guy. All I had to do was call out to my wife to let them out. They would have heard the entire thing and been chomping at the bit the entire time. It never occurred to me because I’m sure I was wanting to keep them out of harm’s way. If there were a time for him to go for a gun, which I am certain was just a reach across his seat away, that would have been it.

What is that old expression, “all’s well that ends well”. That’s what it had boiled down to. Of course, it crossed my mind that he could very well show up at any time only this time it would have been with sons. buddies, or both, But, in the course of our not-so-friendly dialogue, I had left him with something to think about, and that was that nothing would make me happier than for him to come busting through my front door on the darkest of nights. He knew damned well that I’d be lying in wait with my own arsenal and dogs at the ready. I never mentioned having guns of my own. That wasn’t necessary. Everyone in these parts is well-armed. On top of that. I grew up around guns, hunting, and shooting. We were taught to never let-on about the family guns, even to good friends. There was no reason to and it only provides fodder for that information to fall into the wrong hands and gives those of the criminal sort a reason to break in and steal what you’ve got, and what they want. In the 70’s, long before people would do anything to get their hands on prescription drugs, gun theft was the root cause of many a break-in.

It’s over now and with any luck, I will never again have to deal with such an event. We live a quiet, extremely rural life and I intend to keep it that way.

What Advantages Might Adults Have Over Learning to Play Guitar at an Early Age?

Originally Posted on Quora

I’m glad someone (or something) finally got around to asking this very question. I don’t believe in the theory that starting anything that requires a lengthy and difficult learning curve is iinherently easier if begun at an early age. While the theory has been around forever, it has also been riddled with holes. The further back we step in time, the more value can likely be assigned to the theory, but our youngest of generations are very different from those who were in the same place forty or fifty years ago. Time has steadfastly moved forward but it could be argued that our young are not learning commensurately with the speed of change. The requisite skill sets have not kept up with the complexities involved in moving today’s ball down the field. It is my belief that getting started early, whether at guitar or any musical instrument, offers only the opportunity to have more combined time to learn over the course of a given lifetime and become highly accomplished at a relatively younger age – given the same amount of learning time.

For me, in particular, once I retired and made the conscious commitment in time and resources to become a solid player of both the electric and acoustic guitar, I knew precisely what I was signing up for. I’ve been at it, in earnest, for fifteen years now. Granted, I have been consciously proactive in living healthy and remaining active to mitigate the inevetable aging process and learning to play guitar is one of the things I subscribed to those fifteen years ago, to keep my brain functioning at the same level, if not higher, than I found it, awash with exhaustion and burnout from a demanding career in large project engineering.

But, after engaging in some smart things to remain smart, I recovered and have gone on to spend this period of my life working on my “creative side” by taking up writing to augment the guitar playing (on average, I play for sixteen hours a week and dedicate about the same number of hours to writing. I spent about an hour a day reading about things that interest me, which does not include the news or current events. I could say that my life post-retirement life has, almost to a fault, has been about learning. I do not recall having the wisdom to thoroughly “apply myself” at a much younger age. Since I’m sure that I’m not alone with having such a midlife epiphany, this would mean that our learning process takes years to develop and (prodigies aside) learning difficult things when we are very young comes far more organically than we’re constantly informed.

I cannot speak to childhood prodigies who, almost as if by magic, are fortunate enough not only to have some sort of major proclivity at something, but who have someone they’re close to be aware of it and point them in the right direction. And, I can only speak to learning guitar as my instrument of choice, but, just like anything else, there is a range when it comes to prodigies. I think it is safe to say that it they’re surrounded by music, perhaps dad is a lead guitarist for a very good local band and mom teaches piano, and, between them they have a large music collection from which to listen and play to, then any offspring they might have is invariably going to have a leg-up on the local competition. Perhaps prodigies are not so much born as such as they are steeped in a musical environment that gives them wings at an early age. I suspect that it’s nearly equal parts of having their brains wired a certain way at birth and soaking in that musical cookpot set swaying over a gentle fire. Again, I do not know enough on the study of childhood prodigies to fully comprehend the mechanisms behind it. But if we limit the conversation you young prodigies getting an early start, then of course they hold the vast majority of players starting at any age at a complete disadvantage. But these tiniest of tiny circumstances have little to do with my overall comparison.

This has all been leading somewhere because, at least for me, I don’t think I would be any farther along in my playing, if, say I began at 12 and was now 27, as opposed to my actual age of 64, with the same 15: playing years under my belt. I would put my own ability to think and learn up there with any of the younger people I meet. And, it’s not just me. I’d bet my last dollar that my 55 year old aerospace engineering wife could be counted on for the same thing, as could many of my professional friends of a similar age. I would guess that there are many middle -aged people who feel precisely the same way. As I’ve said, the cross-section of young people of today is simply not the same as those of the same age bracket three generations ago I see on a regular basis that without their smartphones, they are ill-prepared to supply answers to even the most rudimentary of questions, let alone have the thinking and, therefore , learning ability (and mental discipline) to take on something as daunting as learning to play a musical instrument.

The question asks “Why might adults have an advantage over younger people when learning a new instrument, like the guitar?”. My shorter answer is that adults have myriad advantages over younger people at learning many things, and they’re not confined to learning how to play a new instrument. If a child never learns strong “thinking” abilities (this takes years) they will be forever disadvantaged when it comes to “learning”.

The Yin and Yang of Guitar Forums

Collings AT-1 Dark Burst, Courtesy of Eddie’s Guitars

I was about to undergo my fourth back surgery and knew I was going to be laid-up for a couple of months, so I was setting myself up with things to stay busy until I’d recovered enough to re-engage with my usual activities. I’d wondered about these online guitar platforms such as the Unofficial Martin Guitar Forum (UMGF), Acoustic Guitar Forum (AGF), TDPRI (Fender Telecaster discussion group), and several others, so I did a little homework and became a member of the “Big Three” and signed on to a few smaller communities just for good measure. As you’d envision, they are essentially online chatrooms formed in the mid-to-late 2000’s, at the beginning of the beginning of the social media craze. As opposed to sites like Facebook and Myspace at the time, these were guitar-centric organizations intended for the express purpose of providing a space for guitarists to commune and post questions and answers about guitars. UMGF and AGF are for acoustic guitar players and TDPRI is primarily for electric guitarists who mostly play either a Fender Telecaster or Stratocaster. There are sites that are geared toward most of the major manufacturers, though, for a number of reasons the manufacturers themselves do not own the sites and seldom contribute. The owners of such sites are typically guitar afficionados who take it upon themselves to invest in and build platforms that function as a place where guitar players can exchange information, ask the forum questions, or provide the forum with answers or solutions to problems. Essentially, to have passionate, open discussions on their faorite topic. There is also a place on each site to buy and sell guitars and related gear, talk specifically about vintage guitars, review various makes and models, post sound-clips and favorite guitar videos, and discuss famous players and their styles and techniques. There is typically a cornucopia of information as guitarists help each other make decisions on what guitars to buy and what is the best available technology in related gear.

The year was 2019 and these forums had already been around for ten or more years before I joined at a time which proved to be the beginning of the end. People had begun to jump ship and spend their time on more socially driven social media forums such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The guitar forums were in a constant state of flux and people inexplicably began leaving in droves, defaulting to the most strident members, people who tended to be older and less inclined to leave the sanctity of their beloved forums or the warm and comforable nooks in there homes where they sit, tending to these sites at all hours of the day and night. I stuck with it for several years as it was still a place where I could contribute knowledge both as a long-time player and gear fanatic. I’d become an expert on “boutique” guitar manufacturers and vintage acoustic guitars, along with curating my own fairly significant collection of both acoustic and electric guitars. To me, this great hobby of mine was much more involved than just playing guitar and learning to be a better guitarist, it became something far more intensive and that meant learning everything I possibly could about guitars, from the origins of the first stringed instruments centuries ago to to modern guitars of today and everything in-between. Before retiring, I’d had a rewarding career in engineering and project management and, for many of those years, I’d been a competitive endurance athlete for which I was now paying the price with a rapidly degenerating spine. My lower back was going to hell in a handbasket forcing me to leave many of my beloved activities behind. By the time I joined these forums I was all but done for physically and would be needing some alternative oulets if I were to save my sanity.

I wrote my first blog just days before the 2019 surgery, followed by another blog the next day, but I was so focused on my recovery and the potential for getting some of my activities back, that I dropped my attention from the blog altogether. It would be four years and several brushes with death over some other severe health problems before I would pick up where I left off. My entry into the world of blogging started innocently enough. I would write a perspective on a new guitar I’d acquired, or write about my favorite guitar influences. There might be a simple post on what strings I use and why or which “boutique” brands I believe to be at the top of the heap. Boutique guitars are typically made by smaller builders with fewer employees who are talented and disciplined enough to use “Old World” processes, techniques, and tools while eschewing the use of automation in the construction of very finely crafted guitars. In other words, companies who employ skilled luthiers in making these guitars predominantly by hand, without the obvious production benefits behind using high-tech tools and machinery. There is a lot of space on these forums which is dedicated to comparing the various boutique brands against the best production guitars made by companies like Martin, Gibson, and Taylor. Aside from writing about guitars, I’ve written pieces nature, music, social issues, endangered species, some of my adventure trips, watches, cycling, skiing, what it’s like to be caught in the crossfire of the opioid crisis, and a host of other topics.

It was before I started my own WordPress site to become more formally engaged in writing that I was at all focused on guitar forums. For the first year, or so, I enjoyed contributing to these forums but somewhere into the second or third year, I began to notice a shift in the kinds of responses I was getting, which had gone from friendly and gracious to argumentative and downright combative. This is where you need to have an understanding of the inner workings of these forums. While there are ten’s of thousands subscribers, there are cliques that form and will come together like a beehive in order to defend any one of their group who seems to be having trouble over a particular topic or is doing battle with the posts’s author (the OP, or “Original Poster”) or someone else in the thread. If you are a poster and are having differences with another member, the next thing you know, there are a half-dozen other members rushing to the aid of the one and you find yourself in the sights of a clique. Put differently, what were once satisfying replies and comments to a particular post I’d written were now belligerent personal affronts. I believe what happened was that the site’s “trolls” were OK with me as long as I wasn’t answering more complicated questions, before I upped my game and had begun accruing more and more followers. It seems that I had unwittingly wandered into their territories and they wanted to put an end to it before they lost all-too-important “street-cred”. These kinds of negative responses weren’t targeted at me alone, but anyone who was writing at a higher than average level, both in terms of content, but also in terms of writing itself. For me personally, I’ve always enjoyed writing and, over many years, have become quite comfortable with the subject matter surrounding guitars. I had no difficulty in taking these people on and found it easy to put them in their place, without the use of foul lanquage or meaningless put-downs. But things got uncomfortable during my third or fourth altercation with one of UMGF’s most prolific and longest standing members, when he decided to really let me have it and got so worked-up that I believe he would have shot me if the whole of the internet didn’t stand between us. After the second or third communication between us, he began writing childish but incendiary insults and lobbing them over the fence. I had called him out and he had all-too-willingly answered the call. Before the trouble began, the post had fostered a good number of contributors and was an already lengthy thread with dozens of replies, so we’d already attracted many onlookers as well as the site’s moderators and the site administrator, himself, who shut us down and closed the post so that it was no longer accessible to anyone, including me. What happened in the next twenty-four hours is the real travesty. The administrator had edited the entire thread from the point where the argument started to where he had ended the post. He then reposted the thread. He had done much of his editing by deleting most of what I had to say and leaving out the ugliest comments made by my opponent, cleaning-up his mess while making me appear to be the uninformed aggressor. I wrote the administrator directly and gave him no quarter while delivering both barrels. He must have felt the sting because by the next day I’d been rewarded by having my membership revoked. I’d known that this was a possibility beause I’d read about being blackballed from other members of these sites, so this came as no surprise, nor did it come at a great loss. I certainly wasn’t about to let it get under my skin. But it made me wonder how the two people, the senior member and the administrator, could have become so close for the one to so clearly take the side of the other. There are similar alliances all over these sites, often between long-standing and prolific contributors and their “followers” who tend to gain confidence once taken under the wing of a well-known member. It’s probably not dissimilar to prison gang rivalries where a less powerful, more timid inmate takes a submissive stance with a given leader (or,”shot-caller”) and does things to prove himself worthy of joining in exchange for the “protection” of the leader and his henchmen. On some of these sites, a senior member may have been around since the forum’s inception and thus has the abundant gratitude of the site’s management and even its owner(s). Some of these folks will have gained such notoriety as to have thousands of followers at their beckon call…good little foot-soldiers in the fight over who’s more knowledgable, the relative newcomer or the tried and true old-timer. These senior contributors with ten or fifteen years of membership behind them tend to be of an older crowd and enjoy the status they feel within he fabric of the forum. To their credit, they are almost invariably highly knowledgable and better that average as writers whose aim it is to get their point across. Virtual friendships and allegiances between people who have known one another for firteen years online, but who have never actually met. Somehow, I just don’t “get” this but it is a dynamic that exists on every forum I’ve contributed to, When these battles come to a head, I’ve been swarmed by as many as a dozen “insurgents” borne out of a simple disagreement between two forum users. I couldn’t passibly keep up without typing so fast as to set my keyboard ablaze, so I choose the most eggregious offenders and take on their comments along with those of their leader. I am sure that this topic would be great fodder for psychiatric experts to tear into. The “why” riding the undercurrent of ill-fated personality types and their inevitable engagement when situations like this arise. In retrospect, I’m surprised at myself for getting as angry as I did at the time. Not unlike road rage, the root of the problem between the two parties is really quite foolish but it escalates disproportionately to the the reasoning beheind it. In my own defense, it wasn’t just the one thing that got me riled enough to don armor and step onto the battlefield, but the downward trend these sites were experiencing because, aisde from those particular moments while in the heat of doing battle, I got a lot of enjoyment out of reading an untold number of posts and contributing a fair number of my own. There’s was a lot of “good stuff” to be found there. But, as someone famously once said, “all good things come to an end”.

This same thing happened to me on another of the preeminant forums. I guess I must have a problem. ;-). Perhaps that problem is that I refuse to allow these trolls to control any of these forums by fear. Many people are fearful of putiing themselves out there only to be criticized by others. I have done my best to give them a voice even if it’s not a popular opinion that they’re attampting to peddle. The problem is that the more these forums become places where people attempt to validate themselves and the site’s seemingly continue to promote their “Good ol’ Boy” networks, the more people are going to leave and take their guitar-centric worlds with them. The greater problem is that once these forums reach extiction, there will be no place to go the obtain free advice on complex, guitar related issues and nowhere for the many thousands of us who enjoy belonging to a like-minded, music based community. I find this to be unfortunate because I enjoy helping people, whether it’s about which guitars bring forth the best overall value or what kind of guitar strap to use. More complicated questions are always welcome, and haing a place to write an essay regarding tonewoods and which ones work best for differing applications, is quite satisfying. In this respect, I know that I am not alone, nor am I alone in hoping that one day there will be a resurgence of such platforms. Unfortunately, there may already be too much damage done as to how I feel about these forums for me to regain the intense interest that I once had. Unless these forum owners soon do an about face to entice their members from moving on, the mass exodus from their sites will continue and I don’t see these sites as having enough articifcial intelligence to save themselves. The fact is, these guitar forums are already on their way to mass extinction and I believe they will continue to lose members because they are clearly making no efforts to keep them. In the conext of my own experience with these sites and being an extremely knowledgable resource who is forever eager to share that knowledge, it is the rest of the membership who are penalized when I’m forced out of the picture by management. If people are afraid to share their vast knowledge for fear of retribution from some silly “gang leader”, then it is the site administrators and owners who are culpable for allowing this kind of negative atmosphere to exist while on “their watch”. It is these people who owe ex-members an appology for not meeting their expectations of providing a safe environment for people to air their collective knowledge openly without having the “other shoe drop” when they’ve lauched yet another solid, well-informed post that speaks for itself. It is the job of the site’s owner(s) and administrators to maintain such a space which was their intention when launching their creations in the first place. There are obviously greater reasons behind the loss of popularity of similar forums all over the internet. Do people only want topical knowledge on a given subject or are there others out there, people like me, who lament the loss of site’s where significant amounts of information can be found and exchanged?

2011 Fender “Telebration” Series Reclaimed Old Growth Redwood Telecaster

It was something to do during the recovery periods associated with the number of major surgeries and health setbacks I’ve had during those same times. Now, I obviously have my own dedicated space, in part, to write about music and my love of “all things guitar”. I also contribute to a number of guitar-centric platforms on Quora.