Searching The Engines For Acceptance.

"Sitemeter" amuses me.
You know of the widget of which I speak, yes?
The green widget icon thingy on some if not most blogs, that allows us to see track our visitors.

As much as I like the data it provides on towns, counties and countries of my now over 14,000 visitors that grace my silly space here, I like drilling down a bit further to see how they found me, or what link in cyberspace sent them to read my chords or discords.

More often than not the simple detective work reviles that a reader comes via a Google search on some scientific project, or silly quest or question. They end up on "Five string guitar".

Before Speeder met his untimely demise, his antics would grace this blog on a regular basis. Speeder was given his name after a six year old "Guitar Boy in training" informed me that the new puppy in the house was indeed the "worlds fastest dog, so I'm naming him Speeder"
This was about an hour after arrival from Puppy's R' Us or wherever it is little dogs come from.

So when little Billy gets a project in school to find out what the world's fastest dog is, Speeder ends up getting google hit galore.
I can usually tell when a class is given the "find the worlds fastest dog assignment" and I can tell by the number or Google hits and all of them coming from the same community. I had 17 hits and blog visits in one afternoon all from a town in Idaho. All using the same search parameter "What is the worlds fastest dog"
Poor Greyhounds and whippets!
Speeder's picture no doubt graced the halls of a rural school in Idaho that day, and perhaps even upped the requests from kids to "Mom, can we get a Schnoodle?"

Everybody wants the worlds fastest dog.

This space gets a lot of frustrated musicians stumbling here after a search for "how to play a five string guitar".
I wonder if it's a result of a broken string on their Yamaha or Gibson one day; and they can't be bothered replacing it, or can't afford it, or just too lazy to go out and get one.
So might as well get by on 5 out of six strings.
Learn to live with less perhaps?

Hey, that would be my philosophy!
Sorta.

I broke a lot of strings in my life. I lost a "string or two" in my life as well. But I had to learn how to make music without one or two of them at any given moment in my "spit in the ocean" life.

Lost balance and hearing among 81 other things, so just Google how to live a live without them. Life goes on, forward and travels at the speed of life. Might as well figure out how to drive with a flat tire if the race is not going to allow for pit stops.

Loss is part of life. Part of the changes that we embrace and accept.

Figure it out silly! get back in the game. Play on with five of six strings.
Make the music that you want.
Not what others want to hear.
Make your concerto, and become independent of the good opinion of others.

Always with kindness and compassion!

I lived by search engines in my deafness; damned and determined to get hearing back somehow, some way. Silly, as I think back on how I searched sites in desperate attempt to find a magic traditional Chinese herb to restore sound to my world; a root or raw vegetable gruel to give me balance and make me walk straight. The proper needle placement for an acupuncturist to restore my cochlea to it's per-firestorm days.

You can always find the "miracle cure web site"

When sound returned to my auditory nerves via a cochlear implant, I would search the engines of technology in hopes of fine tuning it; getting it better; fixing the mix if you will. I had 5 strings, now I wanted to get them to sound like six! I had to learn to accept the wonderful technology, and what it had restored.
I went from my cone of silence to digital "bracks, and beeps", and I wanted better!
Faster!
Clearer!

Then I got grateful for what I had.
Then,and only then did I accept my new world of amazing technology, and learn to embrace it in a new light.
A grateful light.

I grew a mile.

The world of blogs and on-line forums, connected me with a wealth of wonderful people who, like me, have broken the odd string along the way. Many of these people taught me patience when I grew impatient, and perseverance when I wanted to rip the magnet off my head and crawl back into my cone of silence.

Acceptance and serenity came with time.
Time I had, and time I got.

So, as you see my friends, I have sound back in my life.

It just is a little different than what it was.

Warmest,

David