30 years ago a woman planted bulbs around our house. The Magic House we call it; it has a great view and a calmness that heals you. The bulbs grew these tall pink flowers and long green leaves that overflowed out of the middle. I have no idea what they are. A lily maybe? I suppose I could look it up but it wouldn’t change the story. They lived here a while and then we moved in. In a year we will have lived here as long as she did. At some point, she still had a bunch of bulbs left and one day she dug a hole and put all she had left into it. They would start there and live there rather than die in a box. Every year or so she would dig one up and plant it somewhere and she told us we should dig 'em all up and finish planting them around the house. We replanted a few but honestly we sort of forgot that part of the story after a while. Every year the long green leaves would grow out and all of a sudden, near my birthday, they would bloom all around the house. Of course, we always got a good bunch under the eucalyptus tree from the pile of bulbs that were buried there.

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What would you say to your Dad today if you could?
For twelve years I have been asking this question on Father's Day at Fark.com.
It has been so "cathartic" for so many, myself included. Each year I seem to gain something from the words of strangers. It lifts my heart. It has been so long now, that it is hard to remember his voice, his face. It is now a collage of real memories and old photos and context. His voice a whisper in my ear. His absence still the only consistent part of our relationship. 

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This is silly but, there is something about going to the dump with your son. It's a ritual by now. We get a trailer full of junk and off we go. The stinky dump with the huge tractors on sheepsfoot wheels climbing over the pile of American over-packaging castoffs and old broken toys and shower doors. CRASH! The squeaky sound of the tractor, the gaggle of geezers unloading trailers of yard waste and couples with their remodeling demolition piles so proud of their working together... High Five! Adorable, right?

Today was oddly fun.

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For the most part you need to prepare yourself for YouTube comments. Internet comments in general are a mixed bag of nice, inspiring, insane, rambling, hateful, hurtful and silly. I have fared fairly well with most of the negativity restrained to the quality of my playing or the length of my hair. *Shrug.

It’s silly how a comment can just make your day though. I let the negativity slide off but man I love the positivity and feedback with fans that instant comments brings. It is totally worth the trade off. I have been playing few shows while recovering and boy do I miss a live crowd. I need some applause stat! lol!

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Well shit, I did it again. I overdid it. The trouble is, in my head I’m still 19. My body, on the other hand, is 62. In my zeal to get a little camp trailer remodeled and ready for a weekend in the mountains, I missed a chance to go away for a weekend in the mountains. Everything took longer than expected; everything was heavier and I just ran out of gas.

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We are really lucky to live on the shore of a lake. It’s beautiful most of the time and the wildlife is amazing. For 20 years or so, we held an annual event we dubbed Jam at the CAM.

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Have you ever been detained? I have, when I was a child. I spent a year and a half inside a facility for kids. I wasn’t ripped from my mother’s arms; they bullied her to sign the petition. It was as traumatic as you might think for a 12-year-old. It unequivocally wrecked me for years afterwards, with much therapy and growing up to get past it.  

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What a wonderful day! I got to be alone at home for a little while, carving in wood out in the sunshine. I played some guitar. I played my Dad his song. I realized something.  For a long time, I wondered if he would be proud of me. I realized I don't care anymore. Atlas has shrugged and the world is off my shoulders.

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This will be the eleventh year we have been posting this thread on Fark.com.
It has become an amazing thing.
It has been called "cathartic" by many. 
It's time to get it off your chest.
Say the things you would have, could have, should have said...
if only you could. (Clickable links to past years' threads below.)

Here's this year's FARK Father's Day thread.
Click the link below to join in the conversation.
Dear Daddy, what would you say to your Dad today if you could? What did your kids say to you?

Link To Last Year's Thread

The 10th Annual "What would you say to your Dad today?" FARK Father's Day thread. This thread is older than your nine-year-old

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What’s the biggest bird you’ve ever seen in the wild? I live by the lake and it is like wild kingdom down there. We have huge herons and egrets and pelicans. Big birds, bigger than the biggest Thanksgiving birds, nearly six-foot-tall birds, some with seven-foot wing spans, all feeding in my yard and flying in my airspace. How cool is that?

We watch them hunt and pair up and make more big birds. They live a really long time too. First, we had a dad and now two of his sons that live in the neighborhood and have been here for 9 years or so… They know us.

They like our tall trees, some of the strongest branches in the hood. They have totally wrecked the roof of our ancient gazebo. They are simply too heavy for 1x4s with dry rot.

Still not the biggest bird I’ve ever seen.

When I was younger, much younger, a friend and I went for a hike in northern San Diego County in the friendliest village called Fallbrook, out in the boonies east of acres of empty land that belongs to the military. Aint nobody out there, it is untouched California and it is gorgeous.  We had a couple of beers and some local weed and you could drink water out of the creek. We set out and followed the creek for a ways. At one point we looked up and there was a spot on the wall of the canyon where a rock fell out and it looked like you could sit up there.

It was an easy climb and we were the kind of friends that could sit in silence for hours and we did. We sipped the beers and just sat there.

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{there is a video below you can listen to while you read #NoAutoPlay}

I don't care what you believe in or whom, but there is a thing that happens on Sundays that is pretty special and it should happen more. Every Sunday people from all walks of life gather together and sing. Old people, young people, enlightened people, deluded people, rich people, poor people, happy people, sad people, all kinds of people, people that don't know each other, they all get together in a room and sing songs. Forget for a moment the topic of the songs. Forget religion and politics and economics and problems of the day. 
They gather, they sing. People smile, people are encouraged, people are inspired and people are healed just a little and the rest of the week is bearable.
Sundays.
If, on every other day of the week, people sang together more... that would be cool.

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I have some spotty memories of my very early youth. It was a long time ago.

I can remember a few special moments from when I was very young. I remember a moment on my dad’s shoulders. Young enough to be in diapers, probably, I sat on his shoulders as he walked through the burned-out shell of his restaurant. It was the first time I heard him cry.

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It happens to everybody, I know. I just don't like it when it happens to me in such a silly way.

We're a musical family and we are insanely supportive of each other. My son is a rock star in the Bay area and he has a show and release party this weekend. Lots of new songs and a whole other set waiting on mastering for their release. Our musical family includes close friends who also write, perform and release new music. This is a special show for some of them as well. Supporting bands are releasing CDs or planning exciting things we will be a part of.

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You know what I do? I’m such an idiot. You know what I do? I forget how good I have it. I bellyache when things don’t go my way. I bitch when the coffee gets cold. I whine about my double-vision and having to look like a friggin pirate now, but you know what? I should seriously STFU.

It hit me the other night in the rain. The Magic House does it again. The sound of the rain on the roof, the reflections in the lake, the cool winter smell of the wind off the mountain. It healed me. Looking at it with one eye didn’t make it any less beautiful. Getting older, it seems, let me take a few things for granted. I got complacent. I let little things get me down, stupid things.

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As many of you know, I have had some medical issues recently; double vision all of a sudden to be specific. Both eyes work OK, just not at the same time. I have been alternating an eye patch to do stuff. One eye sees better far and one better close up. I have three pairs of glasses for prescriptions including a computer use range. I also have a pair of glasses that completely blurs one eye so I can sort of just wear those and not look like a pirate all the time.  The optometrist was concerned that I might have had a stroke and advised I see an MD. I did and though he is not convinced I had a stroke he wants me to see an ophthalmologist and get an MRI. Well, this could be interesting.
I got the call today and have appointments for the ophthalmologist and an MRI. However, because I was a steel worker I have to have x-rays first. Apparently they don’t want to be liable if the machine pulls a shard of metal through my brain or something. I have worked with a lot of metal over the years and it isn’t entirely unlikely that there are metal bits floating around in me.

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WOW for the last ten years we've been posting this thread on Fark.com. What an amazing thing.
It has been called "cathartic" by many. It has become "a thing." Get it off your chest. Say the things you would have, could have, should have said... if only you could. (Clickable links to past years below.)

Here's this year's FARK Father's Day thread.
Click the link below to join in the conversation.

The 10th Annual "What would you say to your Dad today?" FARK Father's Day thread. This thread is older than your nine-year-old

Link To Last Year's Thread as part of CSB (cool story bro)
The 9th Annual "What would you say to your dad today?" Fark Father's Day thread. Bonus: New dads, what will you tell your child today?

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We live on the lakeshore. My back yard is a roughly 3,000-acre natural freshwater lake. Sounds great, right? It is mostly, then there is the California drought which essentially added 100 yards of stuff to mow and a really long walk uphill from the shore. We actually love it. Living a watershed lifestyle is awesome, aongside a natural habitat for an astounding variety of wildlife. We have Great Blue Herons with 6-foot wing spans that stand 5 feet tall that have been here longer than us and some we have watched grow from hatchlings. We get these Snowy White Egrets that are so white they shine. They're always so clean and white even when the lake is a little green.

Something to listen to while you read. (new window)

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Something to listen to while you read. (new window)

(Stassi's such a bitch!)

OK, this is silly, I know, but it made me smile. I was checking the weather on my Nexus 6, a Google phone. On my phone if I swipe left from my home screen I get a news feed based on my interests. I am, obviously, interested in 12-string guitars, music stuff and guitarists in particular and I get a lot of stuff like that in my feed.

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I get this question a lot so I thought this time I would make a post about it so I can explain why I do what I do when I amplify or record my twelve-string guitar.

When I record, I prefer to use a Blumlein Pair. The mics that do that best are kind of expensive. With "affordable" mics - really, any high-quality mics that can go down to 30hz - I find this system works well. Place one up close in the sweet spot and one up high about 45 degrees to the front, stage right. I functionally use the same EQ and Comp/Lim as below but add it in post; recording raw is better. I might flavor the sound in my headphones temporarily to help me sing. then perfect it in post.

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I want to talk about right hand finger-picking technique for a minute. I watch a lot of videos online and I see a common problem that is holding a bunch of you back. Please let me fix that with a thing I learned from my early years of Flamenco guitar lessons.

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