No Practice Makes Perfect:
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One Saturday morning, perhaps early afternoon, I awoke to a
knocking at my door. It was a neighbor from down the hall who needed a hand
carrying a new bed up stairs from his pickup parked in the front of the
building. Ok man, I said as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes. Aside from your
typical “hey how’s it going” in the hallway, I had never spoken to this man,
nor did I care to. I found his request a bit odd but I found him a bit odd to
begin with, and I am a Minnesotan, so intrinsically, I like to help people.
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Wow, is that a martin? Um… yeah he replied as he glanced at
the dusty guitar with the gold “Martin” writing across the top neck.
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Awesome, I’ve never known anyone that has one of those but
heard they were the best. I clumsily explained to him that I was an extreme
novice guitar player that didn’t know much of anything. As it would so happen,
this guy was actually an all right dude and had for a dozen years been gigging
around the country before a stint in rehab and subsequent career as a
counselor. As I left that day he gave me one of those seminal golden nuggets
that I’ll never forget.
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After telling him I had a lot of practice ahead of me he
stopped me and said, oh no, you’re not practicing your playing. Don’t ever call
it practice man; you are playing, he said.
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It was almost like a light bulb, yeah all right that’s good
info I said. Over the years I have learned to hide my uneasiness or
misunderstanding of complexities in becoming a man of few words and a dusting
of confidence.
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Many years have passed, I never really did ‘learn’ how to
become a guitar player, but I have learned how to make the sounds come out of
my guitar i.e. play that ish! After that day, I never practiced playing ever
again. I just did what I did and played what I played for me.
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Interestingly enough I’ve never wanted to learn many songs
written by other people. That may require practice! Plus, I never wanted to be
that guy at the party that played Stairway to Heaven to impress people or John Mayer tunes to woo the
ladies. Not that there is anything wrong with those tunes or those that know
how to play them, it just isn’t for me.
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Instead, most of the time I’m content to putz around playing
short little bursts of sonic bursts of creativity. I never would have imagined
when I picked up the guitar that it would become one of the sparks that keeps
me going.
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Walking is the new Sitting,
~Nefarious Norman
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