Do you accept Shane MacGowan as your personal savior?

Well, yes. Here's an example of the artistic spirit that can be fostered as people do what they will do. One can enjoy some wine, hang out at a pub, and be not an aggressive bullying prick but a musician forwarding a venerable traditional culture.

I finally went out and did it. I bought a decent amp for my acoustic. I got a microphone, one of those internet deals, a very decent Shure SM58 complete with cord and microphone stand for a hundred bucks. And now, no longer testing out the confines of the backyard in the middle of the night, my attempts at music reverberating off of brick walls, hoping not to be called out by an angry sleepy neighbor (which has happened), trying to hear how I sound, now I have a way to hear myself, which is enormously beneficial as far as staying in pitch when you sing.

And, come to find out, going through my Pogues song list, I don't sound half bad, which amazes me, as I had the opinion that I couldn't really sing all that well. Of course, it's a matter of finding the range your comfortable with, and pleasantly, for me anyway, my range isn't that far off from Mr. MacGowan's. And maybe it has something to do with the nature of the music played by The Pogues, which is basically traditional Irish. It's a music of the people, a folk music. It's not meant to be fancy or overproduced. You grab an instrument and you play, and probably pretty much anyone with half a mind for it can come up with something.

We don't, I think, get to pick out our talents and what we're exactly good at. But a love of something, a form of art, a way of making it, can lead us to try it ourselves. We might find out we're not Chekhov when we sit down and try to write our own story, but then again, the main thing could well be just letting it happen, if it is something you're given to do.

And so for years and years, I loved that music. Timidly, I started to play it. "Well," I thought, "I'm not harming anyone. It's within my rights to try and practice..." Okay, the cat doesn't like it, and runs from her sleepy chair to a hiding spot in the bedroom. Okay, maybe not at 4 AM in full volume, the lawyer, every bit a lawyer, comes out on his deck, 'stop.' Okay.

Give yourself a shot at it. Try it out. Have a little fun, and you may end up surprising yourself at the level of quality.

And so, a guy who has a beer, as one does in college, gets a little creative. Tries writing, tries poetry, and somewhere deep inside, the gut instinct, the desire to play music, Irish music fused with rock n roll.

But.. "Are you mad? Look at MacGowan, and what's he's done to himself. It wasn't just wine and beer and pot. It was acid. It was, quite regrettably, heroin too. Okay, that is true. He wears the years of abuse of a musician on the road.

On the other hand, you might say he has been prescient about the crisis young people in Europe, in London, in Spain, in Greece, in Italy, are facing, having not been left with much and not much in the way of opportunity. It's a situation that brings to mind a number of Pogues songs. "So thanks for sweet f*** all..." Indeed, his music offers a refuge from shallow consumerist materialism in favor of embracing solid and grounded human emotion.

People will be people. They will drink wine and dance and make love and find pastimes to relax themselves. As with everything, it's the attitude they bring to it, good or bad.