I recently realized something about myself. It was one of those moments where you’re talking to somebody, and all of a sudden, you see the outline of various patterns in your life shift and fit together into something bigger. Then once you’re aware that the small patterns form super-patterns though, that’s when the real questions come. For me, this time, it had to do with improvisation.

I started playing guitar in highschool. For the reasons everybody starts: wanting to seem cool, wanting to be like some cool friend, shit like that. And of course learning music fits in there somewhere as well. Actually maybe I’m not giving myself enough credit and that actually did turn into the driving force, ultimately. Or maybe I just never really adequately figured out the guitar = cool equation.

Anyway, like a lot of things, I taught myself to play guitar. Really, looking back, this is one of the first instances in my life where I really knuckled down and taught myself to do something pretty much all on my own, and gradually acquired a pretty advanced knowledge of it. I remember years in highschool of just playing guitar 4-6 hours a night. No less than 2 if I had a lot of homework. Homework was cake though. Nonsense. I stopped studying after tenth grade, realizing my grades would only slip a couple points. I spent all my time learning scales and chords and modes and filling myself up with weird theory.

The funny part is that I never got to be one of those guitar guys. Or not in the way that I always saw everybody else being one. What I mean by that is I never had a band, and I never really knew that many songs. It’s always weird when you play the guitar and somebody asks you what songs you know, and you don’t. I was always more into improvisation. Knowing enough about music that you could basically pick up and jump into whatever was going on. At the time, I got pretty far into weird jazz fusion, along with an unfortunate interest in the bloated decadent corpse of “jam bands.” I fortunately outgrew this, and over the years have played guitar less and less.

It’s too bad really. But neither have I missed it too much. I guess I’ve taken up my weird interest in improvisation and in teaching myself in other areas. A year after I started college, I dropped out. I figured I could learn more on my own, and proved myself right. I taught myself computers, and eventually got a job teaching other people computers. Fast-forward a little to the present day. And the thing I realized was that this website, all my work in this direction, it all fits into the over-arching pattern. Of going out on my own with these wild intense forays into certain areas, and making it all up as I go along.

It’s liberating to know that my current lifestyle is neither a fluke or an abberation, but a culmination, or an embracing of that pattern which I am most comfortable with. It’s wild to me how much like those days of learning guitar right now is for me. Learning all the theory, all the chords, scales, technical stuff, etc. But then using that somehow to hone my ear, my intuition, my ability to jump into any situation, understand it, flow with it, and hopefully play something that fits and that we all can enjoy.

It’s a good feeling. Although it makes me wonder what comes next. Uncertainty is no certainty, of course. Making things up as you go is hard sometimes. A lot of times actually. But it does get easier the farther you get into it - the more experience you have and ground to stand on. I can tell I’m at some kind of evolution point with all this. Small bits of light from the next wave have been breaking through more and more regularly. Where it all goes though is anyone’s guess. We’ll see what happens.