An Axe to Grind

This afternoon I was simultaneously excited and disappointed as my new guitar arrived. Before I tell you why, first a little bit about this guitar, or rather, how I came to be expecting it in the first place.

Impulse is a dangerous thing. Like crack. Except you don’t need to find a dealer to get in trouble with impulses. And even if you did, you’d be all, “Hey, I’ll trade you this stereo for some impulse. Don’t worry, it’s not stolen. It’s my Dad’s.” But enough about you.

So on an impulse a couple of weeks ago, I bought a cube of wine at Target. A cube, you ask? Yup. A cube. It is, indeed, in the shape of a cube, and the phrase “cube of wine” sounds so much more dignified than “box of wine.” Even though a cube is a box. Kind of like the way all squares are rectangles, but all rectangles aren’t squares. If they were, Huey Lewis could’ve written a song called “Hip to Be Rectangle.” But he didn’t, so I’ll just get back to the point.

This was an impulse buy, this wine cube. So, no harm done, you say. What’s the problem?

Well, when I was drinking this impulse buy a recent evening, I stumbled upon a near-$500 guitar on sale online for $129.99. And, as they say in the bible, impulse begat impulse (only for “impulse” substitute in some old-school Hebrew names). Buzzed significantly off my impulse wine, I bought an impulse guitar.

So why the disappointment when it arrived? Well, I had two press conferences to cover, and the guitar arrived via UPS literally two minutes before I was set to leave. I didn’t even get to tune the thing before I had to leave for several hours.

It reminded me, all too painfully, of the day I got my first guitar. That axe, a P.O.S. glittery blue nightmare, came into my possession the very night of the Commack Middle School eighth-grade dance. All I could think about as I slow danced to Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road” or bounced to “Jump” by Kris Kross was how much I wanted to play my new guitar.

It was the same this time, except substitute a stuffy-nosed Roy Williams for any of the aforementioned craptacular songs. But I survived, got home, plugged in and tuned up, and all was well. And it turned out that maybe these impulses were a good thing, not at all wiggity-wiggity-wiggity-wack.