Let me tell you about my friend Jack, (well okay his name isn’t
actually Jack per say, it’s just that he can do so many things, and so I
consider him to be somewhat of a Jack of all trades (even though all trades is
a little bit of a stretch.) But he can do a great many things, more than me,
and some of the things that he does/has done are things that I myself wish I
could do. He is that friend many of us have who inspires us to do more, that
friend we aspire to be more like.
(Don’t worry this is going somewhere.) It took me much time and
money to find my preferred artistic outlet, at first I thought sketching and so
I bought a nice sketchbook and some decent pencil sets. I tried it out but it
just didn’t fit, and so I leave the sketching and drawing to my cousins. A
couple years before I had been told that playing guitar was a good way to meet
girls, and so for that Christmas I got a guitar. But I didn’t want to put in
the time it would take to learn guitar from the instructional vhs tape it came
with. Then the next October I went to this concert, I mean it was just there
two local bands, but one of the bands was Jack’s current band. But this is not
the first time I meet Jack. They were a great band, so I would go and see them
play whenever I could, and I would try and promote them to the best of my
ability, not for Jack’s sake but because the music was great. Also what helped
our friendship was that every two or three weeks him and his then girlfriend
would go to the movie theater where I was working. At that time the two tickets
that got them in was $18.00 and when paying with a $20 bill it would leave him
with a toonie/townie? (I’m Canadian and I’m not even sure) And after a while he
started to give me the change, not because I’d ask for it, but because I think
he started to recognize me from his shows, or just because he felt like it, I’m
not sure. Then one day I found him on Facebook, added him as a friend, which
resulted in a growth in our friendship. But then he moved away and I missed the
music. About a year after that, my little brother found my old guitar and
expressed an interest I learning how to play it. So my mom arranged to get him
lessons, and after like two or three weeks which equaled out to around 2 or 3
lessons, I felt a little excluded, I felt the desire to fill the artistic gap
again, and to remember my guitar playing friend, it was a perfect idea and so I
as well started guitar lessons. But I only ended up taking them for about a
year (probably closer to around seven months at once a week,) and because my
desire to play guitar was renewed. For Christmas that year I got a new nice
adult sized guitar. I still enjoy guitar, and was re-inspired by Jack to give
it a real shot, by that I mean photography of course, my primary artistic
outlet.
Another thing about Jack is that he has self e-published two novels. As
I think I’ve mentioned before I am a story teller at my core, and so writing a
novel is a dream of mine. Now I’ve just started actually reading it because
before this Christmas I didn’t have an e-reader. But I have read a previous
semi-unedited version of the first novel and that was great. So I am really
excited about reading this published version, as well as reading the second
novel in his series. And in that way I aspire to be like Jack.
Besides his musical talent and his writing ability, Jack also does
good. Jack also helps run a decently sized youth program in Edmonton. Now I’ve
been involved in helping with a youth program in the past, but that was mainly
helping with rides and providing minor supervision. So I didn’t have any type
of major role in it much.
Music
Books
To be clear, he does all this while maintaining a steady job designing
kitchens and seeming to keep up a social life. And in conclusion jack is
awesome and I wish I was a bit more like him.
Post Script: Despite this post being the first where I include a
tangible link to whom the person the post is about. I still hold firm that I
don’t openly tell people that I chose to write about them. I should also
mention that there is really only one more of these that I plan on writing, and
that I haven’t even started it.
