Further thoughts along the same line as an earlier post. I just realized that I didn’t specify that these guitar lessons were jazz lessons. I figure it’s a little important to the narrative I was trying to build because that tends to be a bit more demanding, in terms of what you need to execute on your instrument, than singer/songwriter stuff. That difficulty caused some serious overthinking, which was ameliorated by the thought “to play the guitar, you have to play the guitar.” But since I have the benefit of text formatting down here, I’ll say it thusly:

To play the guitar, you have to play the guitar. The gist of it was that there isn’t anything that you should do that you aren’t doing anyway – just play the instrument as best you can and keep learning. This holds for solo work and ensemble work. I assume the mindset holds for most things you can get up to unless it’s like, surgery or something. That has a high enough margin for error that you maybe shouldn’t take my advice for that.

Also, I’m noticing that the typeface of that typewriter doesn’t really play so well on a screen. It looks great on paper. The machine in question (a Lettera 22) is really fun to work with but I might not use it as much if it produces stuff that’s difficult to read. It did make the phrase “stuck in a rut” look a lot like “stuck in a rat” which is kind of funny and also a rough predicament.

Don’t get stuck in a rat, if you can help it.