I look forward to the next time I get to play drums in a band.

I’m not sure when it will happen. Of the drum sets I own, only one is local and it’s been appropriated by the leader of a local steel band (whom I happen to be married to). The floor tom sits in the closet, while the rest of the pieces live on the campus of a nearby school.

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My friend Tyler is almost a year into a round-the-world sailing trip.

However, he’s in the midst of selling his sailboat and buying a different one. A trimaran, acquired in New Zealand. (He did not sail to New Zealand; he got there by plane.)

One of the things I admire about Tyler is that he doesn’t have a lot of rules for himself. He has lived off the grid. He’s lived on the grid. He does what he wants.

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I recently started a new project. I’m not ready to talk about it publicly, but message me and I’ll share.

In this new project, I’m facing all of the terrible and uncomfortable thoughts and emotions.

You know the ones. Questions like: What if this is a waste of time? What if I look stupid? What if I do it wrong?

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A few years ago, there was a bit of misguided revisionism around Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree. The idea was that the tree was so self-sacrificing that she enabled the boy to take and never give, and by the end she was just a stump.

I have four things to say about that: First, she was a tree. Trees don’t need to set boundaries, nor do they have that luxury.

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I’m a guitarist, but not a very accomplished one.

The complexity of electric lead guitar has always eluded me. I didn’t take to it naturally or quickly, and I never found anyone who was able to help me take my skills to the next level.

For years, I thought that if I just worked hard enough, I could play lead. That would have been especially notable in the days when it seemed like you could count on one hand the number of female lead guitarists in history. I wanted to be one of them.

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