Ohayou, Boredom

It was 2008, I was in the middle of Ohio, and I had absolutely nothing to do.

Most hobbies start that way, I think--that mundane postponement of persistent boredom. The greater the boredom, the greater the need to remedy it. And Ohio was pretty boring.

Though there wasn’t much to do, there was one potential escape, however: an electric guitar I had picked up from my friend while I was in New York. A few years ago, she had brought it to the church we both went to; she was walking towards the building’s dumpster when I saw her.

“Wait, where are you going with that guitar?” I said.

“I’m dumping it. It takes up space and it doesn’t work,” she said.

“If you’re just going to throw it out, I’ll take it,” I said. “How much do you want for it?”

A quick trip to the ATM and fifty dollars later, I was the proud owner of a broken 1997 Made in Mexico Sonic Blue Stratocaster.

I was already familiar with the guitar at that point. YouTube was still in its infancy then. Lacking that as a resource, most of my college days involved parking myself as a semi-permanent fixture at the local Barnes and Noble and taking copious notes on every guitar manual, instructional, and tutorial I could lay hands on.

“Wonderwall” was still beyond my level of expertise, but I made marginal progress once I was armed with a friend’s acoustic-electric Ibanez. I affectionately called that guitar THE BEAST on account of how the guitar did the shredding instead of me--my fingertips ended up bruised and bloody. But THE BEAST was a temporary loan, and while I was glad to toss that thing back into the fiery chasm from whence it came, it meant I had no way to practice. The Stratocaster, then, was a fantastically-timed stroke of luck.

The remainder of my college term, and the few years after, was unfortunately the opposite. Immediately after I graduated, the Great Recession hit with the subtle touch of a freight train. My job prospects as a Political Science major with zero marketable skills would have made employment difficult under normal circumstances; in the context of a once-in-a-generation recession, my prospects became downright dire.

I managed to eke out a position at a Barnes and Noble on the other side of the city (not the one I frequented during college), and spent almost a year trying to scrape out a living during one of the most economically depressed eras in recent memory. There’s not much to say, except that granite floors were difficult to sleep on, and subsisting on fast food and ramen wasn’t as glamorous as coming-of-age Hollywood serials made it out to be. The only thing that kept me sane was playing that broken Strat (unplugged, of course), trying to wheedle notes out of an instrument that I still had very little knowledge of.

I had just woken up one day at 10 AM, still groggy from my 12 AM closing shift and hours-long commute back home, when I received a phone call.

“It’s us,” my parents said. “We’re driving over there to pick you up and drag you to Ohio with us.”

“Wait. Why?” I said.

“You have no job prospects there!”

“And I’ll have more job prospects in the Midwest, in a random suburb in Ohio?” I asked, incredulous.

“Of course,” they said, confident enough in their economic assessment of Ohio’s employment market that they put Ben Bernanke to shame. “Plus, New York City is a lair of sin, and we don’t want you being corrupted.”

How could I argue with that logic?

It wasn’t long after that conversation that they drove eight hours to Queens, ready to unceremoniously uproot and deposit me into the hale and hearty paradise that was the Midwest.

It was a move that made me miserable, of course. I was strapped for cash and barely had enough disposable income to pay the subway fare to get to work, but heck, it was New York City. The place had parks haunted by people aggressively challenging you to chess with the same inexplicable determination of the assailants in a Pokémon game. It had hundreds of pizzerias, each claiming to be the original birthplace of the American Pizza Pie. It had pigeons so tame that you were in danger of accidentally adopting them if you didn’t close the door quickly enough when carrying in groceries. The place had character.

What did Ohio have? The dubious distinction of being a swing state in the past few presidential elections? (Sorry, poli-sci major.)

What was worse was the fact that my entire social circle consisted of people in NYC--my best friend, who hung out with me as I did laundry, watching movies on his laptop all the way from pre-soak to tumble-dry; and my other best friend, who got me into guitar in the first place, showing me the ropes of basic cowboy chords. They were both like brothers, and they would both be in NYC while I was stuck in Ohio.

It certainly didn’t make the transition easier.

So that’s why I was bored, and desperate to boot: without a job or a support structure, in a city with all the eclectic character of a hypoallergenic blanket, I had to do something. Anything, really.

And that’s when I decided to try and fix my Strat.

Lutherie--the art of making and/or fixing instruments--wasn’t a term I was familiar with, not yet. I knew that the guitar was fixable. I just needed to figure out how. I didn’t have my own car, so the library was out of the question. I didn’t have access to any kind of periodicals or encyclopedias. So my only resource was the Internet.

The Internet wasn’t quite as robust back in 2008 as it is today. We still weren’t very far removed from the garish primary colors and criminal autoplay of site-embedded MIDI found in GeoCities. But the information was out there, and I eventually found it: wiring schemes, and a page titled “Star grounding! Quieting the beast, shielding a strat." And for the next month, it was my personal Bible.

Repairing the Strat involved things I had absolutely zero exposure to. It meant soldering, which was foreign to me--mucking about with superheated liquid metal seemed like a quick path to an early and painful termination. Electronics seemed similarly opaque--I was a poli-sci specialist who dealt with human psychology, economics, and governance theory, not the predictable, cut-and-dry behavior of electric current. And while I was trained in the rough-and-tumble crucible that was elementary school arts and crafts, I never applied those skills with the methodical precision that lutherie required.

But I was motivated. I raided the kitchen for some aluminum foil, to shield the Strat’s inner cavity in a modified Faraday cage. I scrounged through the toolbox in the closet, searching for the precious adhesives I needed as if they were off-season truffles. Worst of all, I had to borrow my parents’ car and drive to that beloved mecca of all things electronic--Radio Shack.

That’s not a knock against Radio Shack, by the way--it’s a knock against driving there. I only spent a year driving to high school in Connecticut before moving to NYC. For the uninitiated, the public transportation infrastructure in NYC is so good (or conversely, traffic and available parking space is so bad) that there’s very little reason to drive. That meant my driving skills had atrophied--a car was less a symbol of freedom, and more a roll cage to protect my vulnerable squishy innards from being puked up when I inevitably crashed and burned.

The drive was nerve-wracking, but the wares at Radio Shack were as varied and useful as I could have hoped. I raided what I could with my meagre income--what money I had left from Barnes and Noble was only lightly burnished by aggressively selling all of my videogames on Ebay.

And that was it. A psychologically grueling drive, weeks of research, and a desperation to do something about my situation, all led me to perform the crudest bonesaw surgery on my beloved Strat. The stakes were high, as I probably didn’t have the money to fix things if I botched my lutherie attempt. But as I settled in and got started, a potpourri of electronic guts on the table around me, I realized something.

The entire process was calming. Satisfying, even.

There was something surprisingly zen about the experience. I'd heard my competitive sports friends talk about the “zone” before--that ineffable feeling of heightened self-control, blanketing your perception and removing distractions, granting you a sense of empowered detachment where nothing can go wrong. This felt almost the same. Minus the adrenaline spikes and possibility of physical injury, of course.

It took a week to fix the Strat. When I thought I was done, I put everything back together and plugged it into an amp. There was a brief moment of asphyxiating panic--what if I did something wrong?--but once I turned on the amp and strummed, there was the sound of the Strat coming through the amp, clean and clear.

It was a moment of glorious triumph, especially given my current situation. Without a job, my friends far away, and stuck in a monotonous suburban hellscape, I felt powerless. But fixing my Strat? Taking it apart and bringing it back to life again? It gave me a sense of control at a time when I had almost none. It was exactly what I needed then.

My situation ended up improving--I left Ohio for a job opportunity elsewhere in the Midwest, met new people, kept in touch with old friends. But one of the few things I carried with me was that experience of fixing and rebuilding my Strat. As time went on (and my income managed to bypass minimum wage levels), I graduated from simple rewiring to assembling whole electric guitars from scratch--and a new hobby was born.

Take that, boredom.