I don’t listen to music like I used to. As a teenager, I would fall asleep to Metallica’s black album, Led Zeppelin, The Tragically Hip, and a random shuffle of the 6 CD deck. While I wouldn’t have had an answer to ‘what’s your favorite band?’, I could have quickly run down who I was listening to at the moment.

Through Spotify, I’ve been trying to build up a habit again. To find music that moves my pulse rather than music that works as wallpaper. Gary Clark Jr. The War and Treaty. Less Radiohead and more Eric Gales.

I’ve largely pulled back from writing about education and found music (specifically playing guitar) to be a retreat, recapitulating some of the ways that music saved me from boredom in high school, though boredom is no longer my greatest risk.

 

 

One more day of vacation tomorrow

might be the worst Sunday night sleep

a list with small

steps is just what I need:

freshly shave the fuzz I’ve allowed to grow in

over my head

make a green curry and save

enough for lunches

have good intentions about exercise

clear out my email congestion

put meetings into my calendar

get groceries for my 8:40 a.m. cooking class (accomplished!)

remember to enjoy making the curry

 

I’m quite good at getting things done, but less so at putting life into the kind of boxes that prevent spillover from one thing to the next. I won’t forget meetings; the thought will wake me up at 3:00 in the morning. As I head back to school, I also need to make a new box for my own exercise. I’m always skeptical of the tricks that promise to wallop more productivity into our lives. Do I really need to be doing chin-ups on the underside of my desk when I have a 5 minute break? Maybe I do.

 

 

 

 

 

Since venturing into building guitars, I’ve been looking at everything in my neighborhood (well the wood, anyways) with possibility: that could be a guitar body. The other night, I successfully pulled a piece of mahogany that had once been a fireplace mantle out from a bin a few streets over while I was out walking my dogs. Inevitably, a neighbor is renovating, tearing out the old, sometimes right down to the bricks and foundation.

I’ve got one guitar behind me so far. It was a few weekends of cutting, drilling, sanding, dying, and polishing. I created extra work through my mistakes, and I know where they all live in my guitar, though they are only cosmetic. The guitar sings.

I spent an hour this evening turning the mahogany fireplace mantle into a guitar body. The drone from my tools cut off my Spotify playlist intermittently. “American pills will wreck ‘n kill … automatic weapon …  twitching … 50-foot wall of addiction, man do you, do you …” I work in my basement between our laundry machines and the door to the long and narrow strip of backyard. A layer of red sawdust built up over the white tiles and my feet in my Birkenstocks as I routed the cavities and removed layers of wood.

I coughed for nearly ten minutes when I finished, red dust and phlegm. A hot shower got the last specks out of my beard and a cold beer helped my dry throat along. Now I can hardly see the line where the two piece of wood are joined in the middle.

 

Benjamin Doxtdator, Brussels, Belgium