ObscuraJournal 4/13/26

I bought a guitar.

A Fender Stratocaster Player II.

Call it a midlife crisis.

I made some promises to myself. First, I needed to forgive myself so I could buy the guitar. I have this terrible guilt complex that I'm working on shedding from my life, and one of the symptoms of that is that I punish myself when I make costly mistakes. Like, years ago, I was in a serious bind, days within becoming homeless and I needed fast cash. I hocked my guitars at the local pawn shop, punishing myself to never buy another guitar because I was such a fuckup. That little condition has been nagging at the back of my mind for years now, and frankly, fuck that noise. I'm a very responsible person now, miles away and ahead of that irresponsible doofus without a lick of sense.

But this new guitar comes with conditions.

I promised that if I plunked down the money that I would play it. I'm rusty as hell and my fingertips are fucking killing me right now, but that's to be expected when you don't play guitar for almost 15 years.

The other promise was if I took up guitar again it would not hinder my writing. You know how sometimes you pick up one thing and you completely forget about the other thing you were doing. Well, I can't do that. If I'm able to play guitar, then I can write.

The last promise is that I have to accept things change, I cannot control everything, and there's no reason to feel guilty about things if life throws me a curveball.

I will be working on my WIP this week. Truth be told, the last couple of weeks have been rough on that front, but I needed some time to let the story flow through my imagination a couple of times. I wanted to check out in the world to see if there was anything even remotely similar to what I'm trying to do. The good news is there's not. Which means I get to make it all up as I go along.

Did I mention that I have blisters on my fingertips?

Typing this is a bitch.

peace&love