My husband, as I might have mentioned before, is a capital L Libertarian. He is consumed with the problems we face not just as a country but as a world. He believes those problems only grow greater with a larger government that wants to mandate belief and opinion, and to him there is no difference between one side which would mandate one set of thinking and rights and the other which would mandate the opposite set of thoughts and rights. Its all a matter of perception - and to a very large extent, I agree. I tend to the humanistic side of things, I care about people, I care about women and children and minorities, I care about those who suffer the most under the heavy hand of poverty and discrimination and violence. We discuss this a lot. Even where we have laws and agencies and systems in place, we still have people who are hungry, victimized, isolated and discarded. So we talk about ideas and beliefs and I sometimes think he lacks compassion and he often thinks I have too much of it. But the ideas, they flow.
We like music at my house. We are not "musicians," but we enjoy singing together and playing around on our guitars. Over the course of twenty some years, SG has written a handful of songs. A couple of months ago, on a day where I was off on a horse and the kids for some odd reason were remarkably quiet and occupied, he sat down and he wrote a new song.
He couldn't wait to play it for me when I got home, and he kept playing it and refining it and toying around with it over the next several weeks, to the point where it became a permanent earworm for me. At that point I started picking up harmonies and making suggestions. He took his guitar to a local Libertarian phone banking event and played it for his buddies there. One of his friends told him there was a recording studio locally that wasn't too expensive and that he should see about getting it put on disc there.
The next thing you know, we're in the recording studio, laying tracks. After he put down his guitar and vocals and I added harmony, the studio owner went over the whole song and added drums, bass, fiddle, mandolin, and the next thing you know we have a song.
Its not terribly professional, we know we're not *that* great or anything, but he -- WE -- are proud of it.
So the next step of course is to put together something with images or video and upload it to share. Except that's where I'm supposed to really get involved.
As I'm moping around the house and SG is packing for his road job, he suggests that we could get together on Skype or on the phone for a few hours a week and work together on compiling and editing said video, at which point I think I sort of went apeshit for a few minutes. Because with him gone and the timesuck of working and commuting and kids and animals and you know, the general WTF that is my life when I'm alone, I'm going to have SO MUCH TIME for that project.
Even so, I hope it gets completed and soon so that he can get it out there.
So many of us end up in careers out of necessity and lack of opportunity that we might not have otherwise pursued. Its a nice thought that America is the land where anyone can do anything if they just want it badly enough, but in the real word that's not quite true. My husband was not built to be an I&C tech or a valve tech, he thinks and walks and talks like a writer or a professor. He has ideas he wants to share and a passion to express them. He has spent an unbelievableamount of time studying ideas and theories and the structure and framework of society. Being married to him is like having a compendium of world history AND an encyclopedia in your pocket. An innocent question can lead to a 45 minute off-the-cuff discourse which includes names, dates and other historical accuracies along with a complete dissection of the event and its repercussions down the line.
I look at him in the throes of many such discussions and all I can think is "This man is in the entirely wrong line of work. He needs to be doing something with this knowledge, with these ideas."
Even if I don't fully share his vision of what our country should be like, I fully support HIM. I think he's pretty incredible.
Even when he leaves me trying to hold all the balls in the air for six weeks.
