Hardest Things: Guitar and Marriages

Two related thoughts (I assure you): it is hard to realize that you must learn to play the guitar by learning an immense amount of patterns that, if broken, sound bad.

It is also hard to realize that the ideal so often romanticized, that we have a true and singular "meant to be" significant other, is not true.  We don't.  We can't just pick up the guitar and make up the rules, just like we'd like to but can't copy a foreign language without learning it first (and by the way, once you learn it, you lose that damn cool essential foreign aspect, because you know--almost all of a sudden--what people are saying, so it goes from tremendously romantic to tremendously mundane, although still intractably special in a different sense (and I have a lot left to learn, no doubt)).  Every guitar solo follows a pattern.   And every relationship is hard work--worthy hard work, that is, to turn someone into a special someone, although less like a drug, and also hard work to open oneself to that other person.

And even though I haven't changed my guitar strings in years, I was only a little out of tune just now, when I picked the old instrument out of the case and strummed it into merriment and balanced [idiosyncratic] bliss/== my own.