| Nov. 26th, 2009 @ 11:10 pm Would you put me inside your TV tonight, cause you're treating me like a rerun |
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Fight Club was released over ten years ago. I remember going to see it on opening day. The big draw for me at the time was going to a movie where I got to watch Brad Pitt get the shit kicked out of him. I didn't glean much from the previews other than Brad Pitt being abused, and I had no clue who the hell Chuck Palahniuk was.
At the premiere, they gave out these little memorabilia: a large, rectangular button with the Fight Club soap logo on it, and a tiny, hotel-sized bar of soap with the Fight Club logo on it. I was bemused at the time, and I probably would have chucked both items in the nearest bin if the film hadn't absolutely blown my mind through the back of the theatre.
Ten years on, I still have both the button and the bar of soap. The button looks brand new, and you can still smell the soap through the wrapper. It's kind of amazing to me that both items have survived intact through the past decade and all the changes I've seen.
That button and that piece of soap have followed me from Washington to Illinois, Illinois to Washington, Washington to Ohio, Ohio to California, California to Ohio, and Ohio to New Zealand. The vast majority of that time they spent perched atop my Marshall guitar amp. Given that I had to sell that in Ohio, they're currently just hanging out on a bookshelf in my office near my autographed copy of Fight Club.
There's a lot of crap in my office like that. Items of purely sentimental value that I've trucked with me all over the world. Novels. Comic books. Action figures. Some of this stuff, like me, is over 30 years old.
I've been something of a collector for most of my life. From childhood on into my early 20s, it was all about toys. Star Wars, Star Trek, Transformers, He-Man, a dozen other little-known and seldom-seen 80s franchises courtesy of the kid-friendly triumvirate of Mattel, Kenner, and Hasbro. In my early teens I started building model kits, and again Star Wars and Star Trek dominated the scene.
In the late 90s I started collecting swords and knives. I had nearly a dozen various sharp, pointy objects, one of which was almost as tall as I was. I sold them all in order to move to New Zealand.
Then I started collecting more adult fare: guitars and guns. Given the expense of those new hobbies, I only managed a handful of purchases for each - four guitars, three guns. Enough to cover all scenarios. The guns ended up being a poor investment indeed, particularly the AR-15 rifle which I only took out and fired on two occasions despite spending more than $1200 on it. No one ever said I was good with money.
The guitars, on the other hand, have brought me far more joy.
My first guitar, purchased around May of '98 for about $300 in a package deal with a tiny 10" Marshall amp, was a Squier by Fender, Stratocaster model, left-handed, black, with a white pickguard. Because I was in the Hot Topic phase that everyone my age went through in the late 90s, I put a bumper sticker on the pickguard that said, "Kneel down and obey, ordinary boy." That guitar was okay, especially for a "starter" guitar, but I could never get exactly the right sound out of it that I wanted. I also fucked up the nut for the low-E string by using heavier strings than the nut was cut for, so the low E was constantly going out of tune and slipping off the neck near the headstock. Because of that, this guitar eventually ended up being my Drop-D tuned guitar, and I only used it for those songs. I ended up selling this guitar off when we left Ohio for the last time, mostly because I rarely ever played it after getting the other three.
About a year after I bought that guitar, I found a left-handed Fender Jaguar on the website of some guitar shop in Tennessee. I dropped $800 on it without hesitation. When it arrived a week later, I could have strangled the idiot delivery guy; no one had been home to sign for it, so he'd just left it at my front door, in a big box with a guitar logo on the outside. It just screamed, "PLEASE STEAL ME." Somehow, it stayed on my porch. I opened the box, and there it was, my baby: left-handed, sunburst pattern Fender Jaguar. I have always cherished this guitar so much that I'm almost afraid to play it - it's just too awesome. It went through a few years of being tuned to E-flat for songs that called for that tuning. Now I mostly keep it locked up except for when I want to play something surfy-sounding.
In a guitar shop in Kennewick, I found a left-handed acoustic-electric that I bought for around $450. This guitar sounded pretty sweet, especially when I plugged it into the amp and put a little crunch into it. The low E buzzed like a motherfucker, though, and I never got around to fixing it. It's currently hanging out at my mother-in-law's place in Vegas, because we didn't have room in our baggage to bring it to NZ. Considering that it's been through hell and back as far as environments go, and acoustics are far more sensitive to that sort of thing, I'm kind of afraid this guitar might not be playable anymore even if I bring it here. It's something I'll have to check out the next time we visit Vegas, which probably won't be until 2011 or something.
About six months after finding the acoustic, I found the holy grail of left-handed guitars, the guitar I'd been looking for since I decided I wanted to learn to play: a left-handed Jag-Stang. On the forums at jag-stang.com I found some guy in Olympia who was willing to sell me his for $500. My friend Max and I drove clear to the other side of Washington State to meet him. I handed him $500, and he handed me this workhorse of a guitar. Unlike the Jaguar, I have no fear of fucking up the Jag-Stang. The paint was already chipped when I got it (Jag-Stangs are rather notorious for shitty lacquer jobs), but other than that, the construction on this guitar feels so robust that I feel like I could do anything short of launching it off my roof and it would still survive. This is my main guitar and will probably remain so for as long as I'm capable of playing.
Like the Fight Club button and soap, two of those guitars have followed me all over Earth as well, and they'll continue to do so, even though between 2003 and the middle of this year I hardly played them at all. If I'd actually spent the whole ten years I've owned guitars dedicated to playing them every day, I'm sure I'd be a hell of a lot better at it than I am now. If I told someone with a lot of guitar experience that I've played for ten years and then they heard me play, they'd probably feel sorry for me. But you know what? Fuck it. I never started playing guitar with any grand delusions of rock stardom. I started playing because I knew that music was an emotional outlet like no other, a way for me to translate feeling into sound, to transmute rage, loneliness, or even joy into something tangible, something people could share in - whether they wanted to or not, at 3 A.M., through thin apartment walls…
I don't really collect much of anything physical anymore. iPhone apps, I guess. Truly lame in comparison to guitars for sure, but probably a level or two above the Star Trek action figures currently staring at me from my bookshelf. |
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