Go Read This Instead...

I have been going through one of my own personal seasonal changes.

From time to time I have to do some mental spring cleaning. I don't know how to explain it.

Depression is part of it, and it's brutal, but I learned long ago that when the dark times hit me, that's when I need to take stock and praise God for all of my blessings.

The result ends up with me pulling out of the funk, but the journey is not very enjoyable. It's filled with humongous ups and downs.

I know that there are people in my life that I love and want to help, but I cannot. It sets me reeling.

Song lyrics mean different things to different people, but as I tried to go to sleep last night, this song was on my ipod and some of the lyrics nailed pretty much how I feel right now. It's from a song called Freefall (from hand to hand) by the band Stavesacre:

Sleepless eyes open wide
before Heaven I stand again
If there's no winning this war tonight
I was wondering if you could steady my spinning head

And trusting gets harder now
I wish you were here beside me
My failures my fears and doubts have been haunting me
I'm just not who I thought I'd be

Freefall
weightless and terrified
On I go crossing over from living to so alive
And purified I know weeping is cast for the night
And joy...

So here's a link to an old post that y'all might not have read; it's called Help Someone Whenever You Can, Or, My S&H Green Stamps Guitar.

Comrade Stalin Gore

It's tough being a conservative these days.


It was years ago that I realized that the Grammy's and the Academy Awards were "strangely" being won by folks with ultra left political leanings. (Photo credit: Cornelius Poppe/European Pressphoto Agency)

So the Grammy's and the Oscar's have long been a big yawn to me; whoever makes the biggest politically leftist movie or music CD gets the Oscar or Grammy (see Green Day).

(And now that Bruce Springsteen has put out a new CD with the E-Street Band, and that it has politically left lyrics that have the critics feeling all warm and fuzzy inside, I predict a big sack of Grammy's for Mr. Springsteen in next year's Grammy love-fest.)

Whoever makes the biggest public splash with his leftist views in his personal life tends to win an Oscar for best actor. (See Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon)

But one might hope that awards that have had respect in the past wouldn't get caught up in and destroy the respect they've earned in the past by bowing to such base politically motivated voting.

Alas, the once august Nobel Prize has suffered what it probably a fatal chink in it's armor.

Awarding Al Gore and the UN Climate group who are screaming and preaching the evils of man-made global warming proved once and for all that even the once respected Nobel Prizes have followed suit and just become a politically liberal rubber stamps on leftist world politics.

So Al Gore, the biggest hypocrite of the young 21st century has an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize under his belt.

He preaches one way of life and then lives another, non environmentally friendly lifestyle.

Al Gore is a massive hypocrite of the Church Of Global Warming. He tells his flock how to live and act, while living and acting in the opposite way in almost every aspect of his life.

Congratulations to the Nobel Committee. You've proved that you are just another once proud group who have been corrupted and used as a bully pulpit for the far leftists of the entire world.

I won't say congratulations to Al Gore. He's a dangerous man in my opinion, and if I might give another personal observation, I believe he's pretty much the embodiment of evil; the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing.

Besides, was it just me, or did the "looking far into the future" photo that was shown of Al Gore in the Peace Prize announcement look an awful lot like the old Soviet pictures of Stalin, Lenin, Chairman Mao, and the murderous thug Che Guevara?

I truly believe that every human alive has, at one time or another, been hypocritical; that we have each said one thing and done another.

But most people learn from and adjust their lives to not do that again. It's human nature to both screw up and then make it right again, you know?

However, when you have someone like Al Gore, whose hypocrisy is now documented in great detail, winning Nobel prizes in spite of this, the Nobel Prize becomes tainted beyond repair.

At least the voters in the Nobel group have shown their allegiance, and we now know about it and can ignore these awards from now on. Just like we ignore the other, once lesser awards for music and movies.

We knew something was screwy in Norway when Jimmy Carter won one of the darn things, but this is 100% proof that the Nobel is a hollow award.

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I feel so dirty after talking about Al Gore, that I'm going to spread some cheer here with a couple of pretty pictures from my part of Florida.

The Hope Chest

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and assume that not everyone knows what I mean by "hope chest."

If you do know, bear with me, ok?

Sometimes when women are young, they and their parents start what is known as a hope chest. This is simply a gathering of, buying of, some of the things that a new bride will need after she's married and moves off. Because, unless you are a trust fund baby, you'll need all the financial breaks you can get when you're a newlywed.

Sainted Mother however, actually started such a collection for me. We called it my hope chest. Hey, I take jokes really well, but a guy having a hope chest in Louisiana is a situation rife with possible jokes.

Sainted Mother, having had four kids, was pretty good at bargains. And at her grocery store of choice in Monroe, Brookshire's, they often offered good quality silverware, and dinnerware, and so forth, as a reward for spending beaucoup money. (Choice of grocery store is a solemn thing, not to be taken lightly.)

It just so happened that, three of the four above mentioned children were boys, who had hollow legs. How can teens eat so much? Jeesh, it's embarrassing to think about now.

Anyhoo, Sainted Mother dutifully collected said silverware, dinnerware, and kitchen items over a period of years.

Hey, they really were good quality things, and they were free, so I don't blame her. Heck, it was the next best thing to S&H Green Stamps, which had kinda died out over the years. And if you are going to spend hundreds of dollars per month on groceries, you WILL take the freebies too.

Flash forward to when Lovely Wife and I were dating. We had been dating a while, and it was a little while before our engagement, but I was over at her house and her Mom mentioned her hope chest. Her stuff was literally in a big chest beside her bed.

I mentioned that I had a hope chest too, and her family all got a big kick out of that, then we let the subject die.

Well, sometime later, when Lovely Wife (to be) was over at our home, Sainted Mother told me to show her my hope chest stuff.

I went and dragged it all out and showed her the utensils, silverware, plates, and all that stuff. I distinctly remember that Lovely Wife seemed completely underwhelmed.

Of course I thought it was that it was too early to talk about such things and that I had probably scared her by Mama and I doing that.

Then, next time over at her house, she says, "Come with me. I want to show you something." And we went back to her room.

She clears off her bedside chest, opens it up, and starts to pull out her hope chest dinnerware and silverware.

Guess what?

She had the exact same stuff that Sainted Mother had saved for me over the years. Same plates, cups, etc., with all the same patterns. She had the same silverware with the same pattern on the handles, everything.

It was surreal.

That was why she was so quiet at my house; she was stunned and kinda freaked out that we had all the same stuff for when we got married.

And like I said, this was before we were even engaged, so it scared her.

It's funny to think about now, and when we talk about it, you can tell that she still recalls how scared she was when she saw I had all the same hope chest items she did.

And when we finally were married and out on our own, we had PLENTY of plates, saucers, knives, forks, etc., and when we broke some over the years, it didn't really matter, because we had so many to begin with.

I mean really, didn't she know that it was a sign from God that we were meant to be together? (hee hee)

Actually, I think it was that very thought that scared her into silence that night.

Good times, good times.

Help Someone Whenever You Can

Or, My S & H Green Stamps Guitar
I believe that most anyone, barring a handicap, can learn to play a musical instrument. Sure they may not ever have that spark that makes a Jimi Hendrix or Mozart, but they can nonetheless learn the mechanics and enjoy making music.

I fall into the latter category. No innate genius with regards to music, but I have learned to play the guitar. I'm a pretty decent strummer and can noodle around some fill notes and such but I have no illusions that I could ever be one of the greats.

I started playing guitar in my mid-thirties and am self taught, so there are huge gaps in my knowledge of guitar playing and music theory. I don't aspire to making a living playing guitar, so I probably don't have enough get-up-and-go to push myself to the absolute best I can play.

Enough background. What I would really like to talk about today is trying to help people when you see that they need help and you are in a position to help.

What the heck does this have to do with playing guitar, you ask?

This. From the time I was a small child, I was drawn to stringed instuments like the proverbial moth to a flame. My mother loved lullabys and had an LP of Brahms. One of my earliest memories was of her playing this record and it making me cry. I would have been about four years old then. I used to sit in the hallway of our home in Vidalia, Louisiana when I was a bit older, and hope that my older sister would play 'Paperback Writer' by The Beatles so I could hear George Harrison's opening guitar riff to that song.

And when I was about ten, I talked my parents into getting a guitar for me.

My mother was a collector of S&H Green Stamps. The grocery store would give them out with every purchase, and over time we filled up books of the green stamps and she would trade them in on lamps and stuff like that. Heck, our house was probably half furnished with S&H Green Stamps items. Bless her heart, she got me a guitar with those things.

It was an acoustic guitar and I plunked around with it and tried, but with no lessons, well you can guess that I didn't learn squat. But when we moved to Monroe, Louisiana a couple of years later, my parents let me start taking lessons at Zeagler's Music. That only lasted about three months, I just couldn't get the hang of learning to read music. I just wanted to play, but the reading music thing was just boring to me.

But what really stopped me more than anything was the Mount Everest action on my guitar. Man, it was murder pushing the strings down enough to fret a note. Even after building up calluses, this guitar proved too difficult to play for long enough to really learn anything anyway. So, in my thirteen year old impatience, I quit taking lessons. I had other things to think about anyway, what with having hit puberty and all, so...

Regardless, I still craved guitar. Most of my favorite music, even 'til today, is guitar heavy. Regardless of what genre, I love the particular groups that are guitar heavy. I would see someone play guitar and I would stand in rapt attention. I'm not a jealous person, but I would come closest to being so when someone was wailing on a guitar.

Now that I'm grown and can play guitar, and also adjust the various features of a guitar, neck, intonation, etc., myself, I just have one question:

Why didn't my childhood guitar instructor, or the people at the music shop, at least recommend that my guitar be adjusted for easier play? If I still had that old guitar, it would take me about twenty minutes to file the nut slots at the head of the guitar to make it play easily. The main reason I quit as a kid was that the guitar was so stinkin' hard to play. BUT ANY PLAYER WITH HALF A BRAIN COULD HAVE SEEN IN THREE SECONDS WHAT NEEDED TO BE DONE TO MAKE THE GUITAR PLAYABLE, AND MY TEACHER AND THE MUSIC STORE PEOPLE WHO HAD THEIR HANDS ON MY GUITAR AT TIMES, NEVER ONCE SUGGESTED THAT THE GUITAR COULD BE ADJUSTED.

It took me until I had almost finished my engineering degree, over twenty years later, to get the courage to try again to play. And the first guitar I bought was a pleasure to play and easy to learn on. A total revelation.

Now, in any aspect of life, when I can help someone, I do. Whether it be adjusting a guitar for a friend's kid or whatever, I do it. I lost over twenty years wherein I could have been playing guitar and getting better, simply because I was too young and ignorant of the possibility of tweaking my S&H Green Stamps guitar, and because the knowledgeable ones who could have helped make the guitar better, didn't bother.

I'm not blaming them, and I have absolutely no animosity to anyone about this. I'm still ten years old when it comes to guitar and love to play what I can and to hear others who can REALLY play.


I just wish someone would have helped me out. Because even as limited as my playing is now, if I saw someone with a guitar like my childhood one, I would immediately tell them to take it to a pro for $30 or so and they could have a much better instrument. Hey, I would do it myself for free if they trusted me enough to do it.

But I have learned to help people with even the little things wherever I can. That small help could pay HUGE dividends over the years.