I have a bunker. I don’t have a man cave. I have a bunker. Impenetrable. It’s not a place to ride out any apocalypse. Well lit with little natural light. I have no cans of peas stacked in a pyramid or jars of preserves with those red and white checker boarded fabric shiny lid things. I hate vegetables and do not care much for preserves. I’ll eat the odd banana but they have a pretty short shelf life, so for preppers I guess bananas would be pretty useless unless they are in the form of a preserve. I don’t think you can stock up on canned bananas. I don’t know. This is neither here nor there.
In my bunker I have guitars, amplifiers, miles of cables, a PA system, books, CDs, computer, flatscreen, microphones, stands and a ceramic shark head to keep vigil. I make music here. The outside world has no business in my bunker. There’s just no room.
Guitars always crap out. Cables always short out. For years when I had a guitar go south on me I’d bring it in and have it repaired. If a cord shorted I’d toss it and buy another one. Now, I am not a wealthy man of leisure. I don’t light my fancy big city cigars with crisp one hundred dollar bills. I light my cheap cigars from cheap disposable lighters. So I taught myself to solder, to read schematics for changing out electric pickups, to straighten bent guitar necks, to demystify intonation and to make my own guitar cables from scratch. The money saved goes into empty preservative jars so I can buy more guitars, bigger amplifiers and big city cigars. What takes a good guitar technician a few minutes takes me days of frustration, false starts and burnt body parts. One day I soldered my hand to a microphone stand. Try sleeping with a microphone stand soldered to your hand. I defy anyone out there to not toss and turn.
I bought a DIY guitar kit that I was to build and finish myself. Paint and everything. It came in parts. The telecaster styled body and neck came as two different pieces of maple. Unfinished. All the electronics came in a bag. It was the most frustrating project that I had ever undertaken. But I finished it. The guitar is the ugliest damn thing I’ve even seen. It works, however, and is actually playable. Sorta. Plugged in it sounds like a charging rhino coming in hot and furious at fifty paces to inflict terrible physical damage to anyone in its path. It doesn’t stay in tune. The volume knob is where the tone knob is supposed to be but what the hell. Other musicians are afraid to come near it in case the ugly guitar is contagious. This makes me happy. I look at the guitar and it makes me laugh. It hangs in my bunker right along really expensive guitars.
Whether it’s a basement, a shed, a spare room, a garage where the door doesn’t fully close, we all owe it to ourselves to carve out a sanctuary. What you choose to do in your sanctuary is beside the point (I mean, you know, within the confines of the law and such.)
Comments are closed.