Contemporary Society – Page 2 – Lessons from a Stone

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.

Leaving Colorado

“Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to”

As an eleven year old boy growing up in the shadow of the Adirondack Mountains of Northern New York, my father took my eight year old brother and I “Out West” to experience the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. More than fifty years later and my recollections are as if we’d headed West just yesterday.

For much of my adult life, I have romanced the trip in such a way that, in my mind, it bears a strong resemblance to some lauded period piece using a masterfully directed “coming of age” manuscript. The time was the early seventies when much of the world was still fresh and new.

My dad was a NYSDOT engineer in Albany, but both he and my mother were from very small towns in the heart of the Adirondacks. Just before I was born and before settling in Albany, my parents spent a period of roughly five years traveling the country but spending most of that time where my dad worked as a young project engineer in Oregon, Colorado, and New Mexico. It seems that “wanderlust” is in my DNA.

By the time my sister was born in 1964 to the Albany region, my parents and I had moved twenty-two times all over the country. My brother would be born the following year and we would spend our youths about twenty miles north of Albany and ninety minutes from the childhood homes of our parents, where much of the extended family lived. The Adirondacks are gloriously beautiful and I learned the ways of an “Adirondacker” along with hunting, fishing, and skiing, from my father and grandparents.

During those twenty -two moves when my dad was chasing his own wanderlust, I was born in Oregon and for a few days, it was just my mother and me. Later, when I was just two or three, I have memories of our homes in Tucumcari, New Mexico and Wheatridge, Colorado. I think I fell in love with the West at about the same time I was learning to walk.

When that special summer came along and we did our trip West, my eyes were never so wide open. I feasted on the trout we’d catch each day and drank in the mountains, taking sustenance from the different landscapes we encountered. Every few days we’d head into a town to clean up, grab a room at a little hotel, and scope out a diner where we’d ask to have a supper of our own fish, cooked up on the grill. My dad had the trip planned out to include remote places like the Madison River near Ennis, Montana and the Wind River, near Lander, Wyoming. He veered from the beaten path and we’d backpack into sections of river he wanted to try, and fish remote beaver ponds with mountain backdrops so beautiful that a person might forget to breathe!

The early seventies were an excellent time to experience life on the road. I clearly remember being in downtown Ennis when it wasn’t much more than a ranching community and spotting a girl who appeared to be my age, perhaps a year older, making a call from a phone booth I was approaching. My father and brother were still at the restaurant we’d just eaten at and while they ordered dessert, I went out to reconnoiter the town. Just as I was coming up on the phone booth, the girl ended her call stepping out onto the sidewalk as if a meeting between us had been predestined. I asked her if she’d like to join me and a moment later she was showing me the sites. I’d never before met a girl from “Out West” and could immediately tell that she was different from the eastern girls I’d encountered. Very pretty, with long, flowing blonde hair and a strong sense of independence. I hadn’t yet had my growth spurt, so we were about the same height. A year or two later and I’d have been over six-feet. We’d been together for just twenty minutes, or so, when I spied my father and brother walking toward us. I knew that once the girl and I parted ways I would be in for a good razzing from my dad and brother who was not yet old enough to appreciate the fairer sex. I survived the rousing and, I don’t know why, but we never again brought it up. I think my dad knew that for an eleven-year old boy, fast approaching twelve, I’d had a special experience. And I did. I’m 62 now and still, on occasion, think of that girl and how I’d decided then and there that my someday wife would be from somewhere out west. Twelve years later I met my first wife in Colorado. True to a promise I’d made with myself after that trip and upon graduation from college, I’d taken everything I could squeeze into my little red Honda Civic and with $1,800 in my pocket, I drove West and landed in Denver. Like me, my wife was from the northeast and, again, like me, skiing had become the most important thing in her life. She’d just graduated from the University of Colorado that year and was working in the ski industry as a marketing rep for Winter Park Resort. Before our divorce some eleven years later, we skied all over the Western US. What is it they say …”all good things…”.

I would remain in Colorado for another twenty years having a robust career in the oil and gas and mining industries. The first thing that came to mind upon waking each morning was just how fortunate I’d been to see my boyhood dream of living in the Rocky Mountain West come to fruition. It wasn’t easy maintaining a professional career and chasing the lifestyle of a mountain athlete for over almost three decades. Along with finding success in my work, I’d become an elite cyclist and skier and wanted to continue chasing the dream I’d created. For thirty years, I was up by five AM and worked long hours, capped-off by a ride or long run on my way home each evening. I had little time for anything else. I remarried a few times and ultimately realized why I wasn’t such a great mate. It takes two to make for a successful marriage and I can’t blame every disastrous result completely on myself, but I was extremely hard working and hard playing, with a strong desire for solitude, individuality, and independence. As my current wife, and the one I’ve known the longest will attest, I simply never found the right girl until she stepped into my life fourteen years ago. She was right!

About six months after she’d left her job as an engineer working on the Space Shuttle program in Houston to be with me in Colorado, we found ourselves immersed in the carnage of the “Housing Crisis” recession, which impacted people from all sorts of professions – including mine in the field of natural gas pipeline and facilities engineering and construction. I lost a very good job as a project manager in Cortez , Colorado, overseeing operations on opening the new Paradox Basin play. Though I was well connected in the industry as it exists in Colorado and New Mexico, I concluded that I could only be out of work for six months and that this job search could take that long. I dug in for the most important job search of my life and, after four months I’d had a couple of interviews in the Denver area, about a seven hour drive to Durango and a couple of interviews in Salt Lake, which would have kept me within six hours of my daughter. But times were hard for a lot of people. After not landing any of those jobs, I’d searched the last two months as they rolled by, still hugely averse to moving out of the area, I was at the end of my rope and I took a job in Pennsylvania and hoped for the best. There was a new shale gas play that pulled engineering types from all over the country, some of whom I’d known well and some were just acquaintances. This helped because I then didn’t take my job loss so personally. Being laid-off had happened to so many of us and so many of us were forced to leave our Colorado homes. Combined with lifestyle reasons, I was vehement about never leaving my eleven year old daughter behind. Doing so was the most difficult thing I’d ever have to do, and I knew it. I was at war with myself while making the decision to move so far away.

Though the parenting arrangement had both her mother and me as working partners, with her mother at least having to make a small monthly child support payment, she never made a contribution. This meant that I was not only paying on behalf of my daughter, but was effectively paying alimony, as well. Though I brought this to the attention of the courts, nothing was done about it and she was allowed to not have a job and use a good portion of my payment to live on. On what I was paying , my daughter should have easily had her needs met. The courts had mistakenly calculated my end to be far (about 50%) greater than it should have been and I had no luck in getting the courts to recalculate the apportionments using my actual income as opposed to the amount that had been used in error. There had been no provision for alimony in the agreement, only child support, but on it went, my paying for both ex-wife and daughter and working 60 hour weeks to get the job done. The only means I had to continue making that kind of money was to take the job in Pennsylvania, so I did. Aside from the hardship of having to leave my home of thirty years, the offer was solid and, for a time, I was able to keep my ex-wife off my back. To say that I was being pulled in diametrically opposed directions would be a huge understatement. Every time I would call to speak with my child, her mother would counter by saying she was unavailable. I tried my luck on my daughter’s cell phone, but by then she was only allowed to use it in the presence of her mother. I had no means of staying in communication with my child so I called the Colorado Family Support office in Durango to file a complaint. I’d tried the courts one last time, but it was clear that it was a waste of time and emotional energy. My ex-wife simply continued to not return any calls from the Family Support office but there were no repercussions for her abuse of the system.

I loved my daughter very much and she’d spent a large chunk of her first eleven years on earth with me. We were pals and I made sure to steer her into the sports and activities that had given me so much joy. I also attempted to imbue my set of values and it all seemed to be sinking in until I was forced to leave. I ended up with a terribly painful ulcer and my back problems became so debilitating that I literally couldn’t keep my mind straight. What a horrible way to start a brand new, high-profile job. I have since had six surgeries to keep me from landing in a wheelchair and haven’t seen my daughter in fourteen years. With my back spiraling out of control, I ran into years of extreme pain and could no longer travel. Like two small ships in a huge, stormy sea, my daughter and I have drifted and my greatest hopes of having her be a big part of my life have been dashed.

I cannot express into words what was lost in that move from Colorado to Pennsylvania. In the beginning, I spent night after night with dreams of Colorado coming so fast, I’d cry myself to sleep. It was as if photos of my daughter were pasted under my eyelids and when I closed my eyes to sleep at night, there she was. I could do nothing but cry a river. Today, my daughter and I are at such odds that we can’t look upon any single issue and see it the same way. I get solace from the knowledge that I had eleven wonderful years with her, and in so doing, taught her my values. She went to college and has made a good life for herself right there in Southern Colorado. This has made things easier as a significant part of what I’ve wished for all these years is that she could continue to grow up and make a life for herself there in the bosom of the Southwest.

Ultimately, my wife and I moved to Texas, where she is from, going to Texas A&M and getting (and paying for) a B.Sc in aerospace engineering and going to work for the following fourteen years at NASA, at the Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake. Upon returning to the area, she again went to work for her old employer, no longer reporting to NASA but taking a job in the oil and gas industry for BP, at its North American headquarters just outside Houston, as a technical writer. Three years later, she secured an excellent position with a large engineering firm in San Antonio. We reside in Central Texas where she can work from home and has been for the last four years. She should be able to retire with me in another five years, or so. We have a wonderful home on some property and live a very rural and quiet existence with our three wonderful dogs. I had one surgery in Pennsylvania and had my sixth surgery, here in Texas, in 2023. I still suffer from immense pain and remain as active as I can to keep my back problems at bay. Still, it is a good life full of exercise, working on our home and property, and playing guitar which has helped keep me going after saying goodbye to a lifetime of mountain sports and activities. It is my hope that my adult daughter and I can find our way back to some kind of healthy relationship, but I no longer blame myself for having to leave Colorado so she could stay in it. Her college was paid for and I believe I’ve done everything in my power in attempting to stay in touch. Perhaps the winds of fate will one day blow us together.

That transition from my known Colorado life to Pennsylvania and the unknown was without question, the most trying period of my life. I got through it by the skin of my teeth but learned a lot about life. I don’t know how I did it and, even with all the positives to counter the negatives, I know I could never bear something like it again.

-End