As long as I know how to play air guitar, I know I will survive.

I can't honestly claim to have a vast number of useful skills, in fact I am often overly forthcoming about my deficient abilities in life. But for my smorgasbord of physical and mental shortcomings, there's one thing that I really take pride in and that's my astonishing grace on the air guitar. My roots with the instrument are deeply embedded in my experience as a 1st and 2nd grader back in 1986-87 when I was just another slack-jawed onlooker, fanning the young egos of the 5th and 6th graders skilled enough in the art of cool to play in real-live air bands at recess.

In the rural hills of Vancouver Island, we were just a little sheltered from the electric society of the 80's just to our South. With just 2 channels on our television, my early years were limited to a thin assortment of programs, primarily consisting of hockey, Canadian news, the occasional cop drama ("In the Heat of the Night" for example), ancient repeats of The Wonderful World of Disney, and a weekly recap of popular American music known as Video Hits; which I believe later morphed into today's VH1. I fondly remember in profound detail watching with my Dad and brother Geoff, the half hour of heavy metal and love songs each week. The hair was wild, everybody wore make-up, and those neon colors were vivid even through the flat airwaves of the area and through our hand-me-down television.

My experience with the guitar has been futile at best, full of excessive purchases and minimal results. There are no true musicians in my immediate family, and aside from a former-rockstar uncle in Ottawa, my un-immediate family is rather unmusical. My fascination and appreciation for music of all types began in the crowd around those air bands. For 15 magical minutes we would watch the coolest of the older kids bang out mad rhythms with pencils on a text book, dance with broomstick microphones, and graciously dance their fingers across the make-believe frets of a meter stick. The music; something in the tempo of Van Halen blaring from a ghetto blaster, was a secondary attraction to the visual magnificence of the act. I’ll never forget the day my brother (who usually hovered around the 80th percentile of cool kids) kept tempo on a text book for one of the new bands. It was that very instant, which I clearly revive when need be, that I realized the musical spice might just be pulsing through these Braden veins after all.

Just 19 short years later, here I sit listening to my proud iTunes collection, belting out one hell of a guitar solo to Cake’s interpretation of the classic “I Will Survive”, reaching deep into the very nerves of my youth and appreciation of music to pour grace into every note and chord of this gorgeous song. Wow! What a gift!