You can get used to pretty much anything. All kinds of suffering and discomfort become less distressing as you spend more time exposed to them. You can only stay scared for so long; you can only feel agony for a limited time. After a while it all just gets tiresome. In fact, I'll bet that Satan's greatest challenge is keeping eternal damnation interesting. How long can burning in a sea of fire hold your attention? After a while, do the damned get really blasé about being eaten alive by little ice maggots? Do they find that drowning in spiny-legged spiders just gets old after a while? I'll bet they do. In fact I'd be willing to bet that the devil's powers aren't all that focused on recruiting new victims because he's got his hands full finding ways to keep it fresh for his existing doomed souls. Eternity may just weigh as heavily on the Prince of Darkness as on his unfortunate houseguests.

Accordingly, a steady diet of grueling and/or frightening mountain activities has not taken away their ability to scare or exhaust me, but I've gotten pretty accustomed to it. The suffering and the fear just aren't as bad as they could be because damnit, I've been there before - they know me in that town and they know how I like my coffee. As you'd expect then, the universe recently decided to throw me something new to keep me off balance and uncomfortable. God bless variety.

I've never had any musical inclinations; as a little boy my mother enrolled me in piano lessons and kept me there, against my will, for about a year. The lessons ended abruptly when, after a year in which I had shown disturbingly slow progress, my instructor suddenly came to the startling realization that I couldn't read music - not at all. It abruptly became clear one fine day that I'd been faking it by watching her facial expression as I went to put my fingers on the keys and judging right placements from wrong by her response. At this point my mother was pulled aside for a quiet consultation and it was agreed that piano lessons were something best saved for more responsive or promising children. I was suddenly, and blissfully, un-enrolled from piano lessons, never to return.

At other points during my childhood I was briefly exposed to things like guitars, recorders and electronic organs and quickly demonstrated an inability to play them that was matched only by my distaste for even trying. As I grew older I learned to keep a safe distance from musical instruments and musically inclined people. It was all working out just fine until recently.