Hanging up my guitar

Many years ago, probably back in 2000, I was a fresh student studying in Ikram College. Back then the hostels did not have internet connection nor any computer network. When students were not studying, they relied on what they had in hand to entertain themselves, for me it was my PC, my friends, going out or Magic the Gathering (it’s a card game). One day, one of my hostel friend brought his guitar over and lent it to my room mate (or my neighbour who’s also my friend, I don’t really remember where the guitar ended up with). The guitar had only 3 strings as the rest had snapped. It was a derelict ancient and abandoned guitar (I’m being absolutely unnecessarily redundant here), but it was adequate enough to produce “music”. My friend taught us a few simple samples from some Nirvana song.

Try, try, try, try and try. I got it right. I managed to play that part of the song. It was easy. It was poison. Deep was this poison that it lead me to buy a guitar. I bought a Hofma guitar (subsidiary of Yamaha) worth RM170. Was it a good deal? I don’t know. There is a saying, “your first guitar is always a rip off, but you’ll still love it”. The statement makes sense considering a person wants to learn how to play a guitar wouldn’t necessarily know how to differentiate a good guitar from a bad one or even know if the guitar is priced inexpensively. Regardless I loved my guitar.

There’s a saying that guys would learn how to play a guitar for 2 main reasons. The first being interest, the second being girls. My interest waned through the years. I found myself not touching my guitar for months. I do not remember the last time I played my guitar properly. Heck, the only time I remember touching my guitar was to move it to a different place. I do not know how to play many songs. The song I could probably play to completion would be “Best I ever had / Grey Sky Morning” by Vertical Horizon. It’s a sad song which I like. At one point I knew how to play “Tears in heaven”. Crap…. Usually what I do is learn a song, get to a difficult part, then lose interest. It always has been that way and I know myself well enough that I don’t really have such enthusiasm anymore.

No interest? What about girls? Guys can woo girls with their skill in guitar. I tried my hand at it. I wrote a song, played and sang it. I gave a girl the recording. The song was actually stuck in hiatus. The growing feelings I had for the girl was the push of motivation that I needed to complete the song (can be found in my blog if one digs deep enough). I gave it the recording to her as a valentine’s day gift. We got together soon after.

Love is a fickle thing. Being a pessimist that I am, I did not put her name into the song lyrics. One reason was to make it general, so it could be sung to anyone. Another reason is that the song would lose it’s meaning if the relationship with the girl did not work out. Did not work out indeed. I am single at the time of writing this post. Suffice to say I have no interest and I have no “girl”.

So what happens now? I’m thinking of keeping my guitar in the store room, I could probably sell it off or even donate it somewhere.

Guitar performances? Count me out, I do not practice regularly enough to play the guitar well anymore nor do I have the passion.

Writing this makes me feel I have lost something. The decision has been made, but I think I would truly feel the loss once my guitar is no longer with me….