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I wasn't very kind to my first guitar, but it took all the abuse fairly well. It was a Sears Harmony semi-hollow acoustic made in the '40s & given to me by an ex-girlfriend's mother. I gave it away to an older guy that was an honorably discharged 82nd Airborne Ranger that helped me out for a couple of months once. This guy had a million stories. He had ended up in the Army because he got involved with a sting operation for stealing cars back in Arizona where he was from & one time he stole this car that was chained to a chain link fence. So there he was driving a hot car with a section of fencing in tow haha. That was the night the police got him & he was able to join the military to escape charges. The weird thing is that I know another guy who is my age that is a good friend & he also got involved stealing cars down (in Florida) before he was forced to go into the military. He got involved by being approaced at a strip club & was given the keys to every car he stole because it was some sort of inside job. He wanted to be a Ranger, but ended up at Caisson in DC as one of the Old Guard. This is a prestigious company that ceremonially bury the honored dead at Arlington & other national cemeteries. He told me all kinds of horror stories about the military. The Old Guard ride the horses & they've got huge Clydesdales too & one of them got spooked by a fast food wrapper blowing along & ended up trampling my friend. In what seems like something out of Homer's pratfalls on the Simpsons, a wagon wheel also ran right over his head. He was in the hospital for a long while with multiple concussions, breaks & bruises. He also got rheumatoid arthritis after that, for which he receives no compensation from the Army because even though he was injured on the job, he had been in trouble, so the Army used that as an excuse just to dump him. One time he went AWOL for six months & lived in a cabin in Maryland that some people that he had met at a Waffle House just let him use. Wow, I'm really going off on tangents today.
As for breaking stuff, these first two I regret, the last one not so much.
The last time I broke something I was drunk. The handle to the oven on my stove was loose & even though I had tightened it a few times before, it kept falling off everytime I would try to open the oven door. So, I go to open the oven where I've got some fish baking & the handle comes off again & somehow, since I was wasted, I ended up touching the inside of the oven door & burning my hand a little. I grew furious thnking about how much money I pay for this place & how much work needs to be done & took the handle (the long bar that opens oven doors) & started beating it on the tile floor & fucking up the flooring pretty bad. I bent the handle up into a twisted, mangled mess.
When I was in junior high, I got pissed about something & took my 19" black & white television & threw it across the room. It landed on the far edge of the bed just right so that it bounced right into the wall & the picture tube blew. I already had another tv, a 13" black & white that I played Atari 2600 on (no shit hehe), so I just used that one for tv too after that & told my parents that the other tv just gave out.
I really am a "good" drunk, but there's this other time I'm remembering when I was wandering out of one bar & through the alley into another bar. It was about ten years ago. I had been in a bar previously & noticed this guy in there that was a real jerk who had tried to get up in my face about some bullshit where a friend of mine had gotten the guy's number & called him for drugs. I had nothing to do with the whole thing, but he blamed me because he knew I knew the guy & had figured I had told the guy his business. Anyway, he had gotten up in my face a couple of times before & I had just diffused it & nothing had happened. Both times I had friends with me. On this day I was out with a friend who had wandered off & I was wandering to all the different bars around downtown. As I left one bar, the back door guy wasn't on his stool & something possessed me to grab the stool. I went outside with the stool & threw it against a brick wall, breaking it into a few pieces. Then I picked up one of the stool legs & went into the back door of the other bar & directly in my line of sight was this dude at the end of the bar & I was going to kill him. Anyway, he just sat there with a look of shock on his face & kind of feebly threw his hand up to protect his head as I came towards him & then I intentionally swang high & broke the stool leg on the corner of the wall. It was a bar I had gotten kicked out of before too because of a particularly crazy & disruptive girlfriend, but they let me come back. Anyway, the owner of the bar was right there & he said & did nothing & the whole bar got quiet. I grabbed the guy by his collar & made him stand up & then I cursed him out. I then left & I started to get scared that someone was going to call the cops on me for a few minutes there, but I went right back in there the very next night & no one said one word to me about it. That was the last time I ever saw that guy around downtown, let alone at that bar.
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