Anyone who has ever tackled a project without much prior experience will tell you that things never go according to plan (unless you are exceedingly lucky, or you happen to discover a hidden talent for whatever it is that you are doing, in which case the rest of us hate you!).  Sooner or later, a mistake is made or an unanticipated challenge presents itself.  Confronted with such frustration, most folks devolve into more base human behaviors: screaming and/or crying, throwing things, or even destroying the entire goddamn project in a fit of rage (I have been guilty of all three over the years, sometimes in succession).  Knowing all of this, I should not have been surprised by what I encountered as I entered the final stages of completing the Cosmic Fern guitar. 

Yet, the Cosmic Fern project had become the center of my universe for most of a year. My dining room table, and much of the home surrounding it, resembled the approach to a black hole: a chaotic swirl of tools, painting supplies, and hastily cast-off detritus, growing evermore concentrated as it is sucked into the unknowably dense center of “the project.”  Perhaps all my efforts would ultimately equate to passage through some theoretical gateway, a guitar-shaped Einstein-Rosen bridge, to an undiscovered universe of higher understanding and satisfaction, where projects always go smoothly.  However, at the time, all signs pointed to the contrary: a Sisyphean endeavor that continued to tap into a seemingly unplumbed reserve of profoundly galling obstacles with each step.

Accordingly, the Cosmic Fern continued to dole out consternation: While attempting to address the blushed finish on the headstock, I sanded through some of the black paint, necessitating a new round of touch-up and sealer coats before the lacquer could be applied—wonderful!  After carefully priming the body cavities with conductive paint, I discovered that the cavities were abnormally tight, risking grounding shorts and making otherwise simple wiring much more difficult than it needed to be—fantastic!!  Naturally, the neck pocket of the body had to be so irregular that fitting my beautiful custom Warmoth neck would evidently require a custom neck pocket shim, at least a minor in structural engineering from MIT, and a pinch of Petsch brand improvised sorcery—super!!!    

And then there was the incident on the deck.  It was a beautiful Friday in early October—the air was cool and dry, the skies were clear, and there was an ever-so-slight breeze. I was finally prepared to spray the final coats of lacquer on the Cosmic Fern’s body, and one could not ask for more ideal spraying conditions. Leading up to this point, it had occurred to me that I would need to shave and level the plastic body binding to not only eliminate its numerous chips, crushes, and cracks, but also to clean up any overlapping paint.  Of course, the shaving and scraping would create lots of dust and plastic excelsior that could potentially contaminate the final finish.  In an effort to protect and stabilize my paintjob, I had already sprayed a number of sealer coats on the painted body, which allowed me to safely scrape and sand the binding and then vacuum and wipe away the dust.   After hours of careful scraping and sanding the night before, the body was now fully prepped for its final finish, and I will admit that a sense of great self-satisfaction settled on me as I began to spray.  I should have known better.  I was in the middle of spraying a coat of lacquer when the screws holding the junk neck that I was using to manipulate the body during the finish process failed. There was a truly cinematic slow-motion shift in the space-time continuum as the body of the Cosmic Fern ripped away from the junk neck, plummeting from eye level to meet the concrete deck with a dreadful SMACK! It bounced on impact, flipped, and then smacked again on the other side. 

Remarkably, there were only two f-bombs dropped when the Cosmic Fern fell. The first came as I frantically tried (and failed) to catch the body, painfully crushing a fingernail into the tip of my finger in the process. The second came as I desperately tried to salvage the lacquer-covered body without handling it too much, all while contending with a bleeding right hand and a stubborn flying bug that was simply determined to dock in my nostril (in retrospect, the comedy of this scene would probably have been worth a fortune on YouTube).  Working quickly, I was able to thread some wire through one of the neck screw holes such that the now concrete-kissed body could hang to dry. I was unable, however, to muster the emotional fortitude to immediately assess the severity of this cataclysm.  Rather, I sequestered myself in the darkest teaching studio, where I despondently strummed on a 000-18 in crumpled posture with my face literally drooped on the guitar’s side.  I’m not sure if I’ve ever felt more defeated in life than I did that day (picking up on this, the staff gave me wide berth, while tentatively offering what encouragement they could).  As I sat there stunned and incredulous in the darkness, I pondered the meaning of this disaster. Why did it have to happen? What had I done to deserve it?  Which deity could be deriving amusement by sprinkling my artistic quest with such ironic torture?  Was this project simply destined to fail?!

 After a night spent stewing in depression and metaphysical quandary, I finally summoned the courage to evaluate the damage inflicted by the deck the next morning. I was relieved to discover that the situation was not as bad as the sound of the impact had suggested. The binding was boogered up and impregnated with bits of gravel, but the body and the paintjob had survived with little ill effect (likely thanks to liberal application of sealer coats!).  With some careful touchup and additional sanding, I was soon able to resume spraying the finish.  

A couple weeks later, having struggled with wiring challenges, poor neck pocket geometry, nail-biting body drilling, finish woes, poor-fitting hardware anchors, and all of the myriad challenges that the Fates could conjure, I completed work on the Cosmic Fern in a final manic push late one rainy Saturday night.  With well-earned glass of E.H. Taylor Small Batch Bourbon in hand, I gazed at my creation. My labor of love had finally come to life on a cluttered repair bench, without any fanfare or grand presentation. I was alone in what seemed like a defining moment in life, but my exhaustion had left me incapable of comprehending any great significance.  Meanwhile, the distant periodic hiss of tires on wet pavement, along with the passing chatter of late-night restaurant patrons on the walkway in front of the shop, suddenly emphasized the fact that the world outside had already moved on—it was unaware of, unaffected by, and likely disinterested in my struggle to create the Cosmic Fern.  

Over the following days, I continued to consider these epistemic matters while acquainting myself with the Cosmic Fern—though I was intimately familiar with it in so many ways, it was still new to me as an actual guitar!  Ridiculous as it may sound, I maintain that musical instruments have distinct personalities that become increasingly evident as they are used. Indeed, one must take time to get to know an instrument and to understand what it has to offer.  The most charismatic instruments are like charmed mythical implements, with a will and destiny of their own.  I came to realize that the Cosmic Fern is a guitar that was destined to test me in the most profound manner.  It represents all of the personal growth I had to achieve in order to endure a succession of technical and emotional trials, all of which proved necessary in transforming my fantasy into a reality.  I suppose such metamorphosis is ultimately inherent in any artistic effort—at its completion, the artist cannot be the same person that they were at its inception.  And, in this respect, any piece of art contains a fraction of the artist’s soul.  The 20-year-old me, who impetuously began the project without any real inkling as to the skill and commitment it would require, is forever enshrined in the Cosmic Fern. He is also accompanied by all the subsequent versions of himself leading up to the present; and, together they saw this uniquely challenging project through to completion.  

True to its nature, the Cosmic Fern has continued to test me since its completion.  First off, I somehow managed to overwrite (and thus lose) the first version of this article.   Then, a bit of tragic irony perversely nullified the lost article. In late December, only two months after its completion, the Cosmic Fern was stolen from my home, along with a number of other guitars. I immediately noted the Cosmic Fern’s absence as I surveyed my raided music room, but I was surprised by an unusual calm that came over me.  It dawned on me that suffering the injustice of having something so personally significant come and go out of my life in the blink of an eye was the guitar’s final test.  At one point in the carving process, I had shown the body to my friend, Billy Gewin, who immediately recognized the project for the time vortex that it was and then jokingly suggested that I just cut bait and cathartically burn the guitar.  Now, it seemed that the catharsis had been thrust upon me, and there was nothing I could do but come to terms with harsh reality and say, “Damn. I once made this beautiful thing, and then, like Kaiser Soze—poof!—it was gone.”  Fortune smiled on me, however, and incredibly the Cosmic Fern returned to me the very next day, when it was recovered at a local Guitar Center location. Standing there in the Guitar Center showroom, I was dumbstruck to be reunited with a part of me that I never thought I’d see again.  Moreover, the Cosmic Fern had survived being guitarnapped without a case surprisingly well, with only a small section of binding chipped out and some minor bruises (maybe they dropped it on a deck).  

I’m now pleased to say that the Cosmic Fern is back in my possession for the foreseeable future. With some damage not of my doing, one hell of an origin story, and a headstock finish that stubbornly insists on remaining blushed, it will forever remind me that we have no control over the occurrence or outcome of life’s trials.  Rather, we can only seek to profit from what our challenges teach us and then find contentment in the growth that results.  As the Cosmic Fern testifies, the reality is that imperfection in this world is as inevitable as it is beautiful, despite our best efforts to prove otherwise. Ultimately, nature does not care, life will go on, and that, my friends, is okay. – L. Petsch, January 2021