Saved by the Guitar

School was indeed a trial of some magnitude - both mentally and physically - for the young rust. My fat friend Nick, shy, bespectacled hovering creature that he was, chummed me through the brittle spaces and clattering invasions of less sensitive souls.

Others were indeed objects for my subjectivity through my early school years. This is no philosophic jargonic shorthand either: I attributed no depth of consciousness to the crowd or the separate individual. To me, my world was populated by Cartesian devil's, metaphysicial automatons puppeteered by a malicious god.

How could these shouting apparitions feel what I felt, love what I loved, understand the mystery of the world in its dark and wild essence.

The emotional and physical turbulence created by the hormonal convulsions of puberty, coupled with the vicissitudes of my formal education, were sublimated and channeled somewhat by the receipt of a gift on my thirteenth birthday.

My father, a keen but incurably inept musician, bought a brand new full size acoustic guitar...for himself really...but presented it to me in a fantastically theatrical manner, with my dear mother raising a suspect eyebrow at this bizarre and quite vulgar performance of paternal interest in my apparently latent, but fecund creative abilities.

My mother knew, of course, daddy was betraying the toe-curling symptoms of a mid-life crisis in all its shameful, sad, grinning idiocy. The poor poor man.
Still, every cloud....

I fear the wretch had seen Elvis perform on the blue fizzing blunted cube that passed for a TV in those days, and yearned to scrape back the palimpsest of moronic accretions and un-sheath the Dionysian stag of youth! Problem is, the stag never really existed - only the frightened little boy, hiding behind the veneer of socially and class prescribed adulthood.

It was me who with my father's 'gift' or phallic substitute, would become an agent of unbridled passion and sublime creativity!

I must put the kettle on now, the chill sea breeze does caress these old bones.