I’d like to haul along a guitar to some vacations I have coming up next year. The problem is that I love the guitars I have (a Guild dreadnought and a Takamine parlor guitar, neither of which are financially valuable, but still), and I fear introducing them to the potentially guitar-killing environment of modern air travel. The FAA lets you bring a guitar onto a plane and store it in the overhead compartment — if there’s room, and ‘room’ is at the discretion of the airline. And there’s sometimes a gate agent or flight attendant ready to rain on your parade, no matter what the feds or the airline’s own rules say. Those folks want the guitar in the belly of the plane, where guitars are turned into kindling.

That led me to look for a travel guitar — usually a scaled-down and more gate-agent-friendly version of a typical guitar. I owned one years ago — a Washburn Rover — but that didn’t sound great and had a nearly standard-length neck. I sold it off because I just didn’t enjoy it enough and it wasn’t all that convenient.

You can spend a modest chunk of money on a travel guitar — for example, a kid-size Baby Taylor starts at $400 and heads north from there — but that would defeat the purpose of having an instrument that was 1)playable 2)sounded OK-ish and 3)could be splintered into tiny bits by an airline/camping/whatever adventure without causing me to openly weep.

As always, the Internet is your problem-solving friend, and that’s how I landed on a Yamaha JR2 acoustic. It’s three-quarter size and it’s marketed as an instrument for kids, beginners and/or people with small hands, but it was clear from a little research that lots of people bought them as a beater. It runs about $180 new and it has a lot of positive reviews.

I was looking to save even more money, so I started shopping around for a used model. I came across one at a local Guitar Center through an online search, but when I got there, they did not have the bag that their listing claimed came with it — an important part of the deal for me. A few days later, I located one in a music store near Baltimore, forked over $110 and had them ship it to me for another $15. It had a few modest scratches, but wasn’t beat at all, and now it’s in the house.

It’s as easy to play as you might think, the action on it is great and the sound is a little boxy, but that’s actually kind of cool. More importantly, if it gets crushed, I won’t be.

The Missouri State Penitentiary was a big part of my childhood life. It sat six blocks from my house and was a massive, old-looking place with real stone walls instead of fences. There were towers along those walls, and you could see the guards armed with long rifles in them. It was imposing and scary, although not as imposing and scary as some of the people in it. This was the state’s maximum security pen for the entire 22 years I lived in Jefferson City, and for a chunk of time afterward.

Honestly, I always thought it was as scary as hell, especially when there was an escape or one of a seemingly endless parade of inmate murders — Time magazine once named it “the bloodiest 47 acres in America.” It sat on a steep hillside, and I could look into the center of the prison yard from spots on the outside. Those prisoners were just a few hundred yards and a million miles away from where I stood. Sometimes you could see them waving handkerchiefs to the people outside the walls.

It was the oldest prison west of the Mississippi when it closed in 2004, having opened in 1836. By then, I was more than 30 years gone from Jefferson City, and I hadn’t thought about it much in the intervening time. Large chunks of the prison were torn down and redeveloped within a few years, and the rest began to rot.

Or it did until it was turned into a tourist attraction. Now you can go on a variety of tours through what’s left of the prison. That has never sat entirely well for me, especially since the options include ghost tours and the more deluxe “overnight paranormal investigations.” In the gift shop, you can buy lip balm that comes in a little ball-and-chain holder and T-shirts with the “I Did Time in…” theme.

But I was in Jefferson City with my wife recently to visit family and we were looking for something to do one afternoon. My sister suggested the prison tour. I was hesitant, but I had pretty much shown my wife everything else in Jefferson City over the years, so we decided to take the option.

It’s still creepy, of course, and large parts of it continue to crumble and have been condemned. But the tour, to my great relief, was respectful and informative. The guide knew his stuff and laid out the long history of the place, along with its famous inmates (including Pretty Boy Floyd, James Earl Ray, Sonny Liston and even Emma Goldman). He kept his tone appropriate, even when we were brought to a large, windowless punishment “hole” where lights were left off 24/7 for the prisoners who were thrown in there. He turned off the lights and the utter blindness just descended on you. Imagine living in that for a few days or weeks.

When the guide brought us to the end of a hallway and started showing us display photos of the gas chamber, I knew the tour was almost up. I honestly think that hanging, if done properly (it breaks your neck and kills you instantly), is a more humane way of death than hearing those cyanide tablets hit the vat of acid beneath your seat, creating the gas that would kill you once you inhaled. I imagine some inmates held their breath as long as they could. Forty of them died in that chamber.

To get there, you needed to get back into your car and drive around to the back of the complex — they used to hike people down there but the steep hill turned out to be a problem on several fronts. My sister told me that people like to sit on the gas chamber’s two seats and have photos taken. We decided we didn’t need to see that, so we went to Central Dairy for ice cream and a little soul-cleansing.

I’m still reflecting on how I feel about that tour. Perhaps that was the whole point.

Oh, well, here we are again: Back with the Show, which isn’t the cultural powerhouse it was when it was The Show, but is a bunch better than it was in the years it fell to theshow status. And although there no longer are tryouts that involve 8 bajillion people filling football stadiums that somehow still produced off-key jokers in the Top 10, the regular judges’ brag this year about the depth of talent isn’t wrong.

I’m along for the ride again, of course; I usually go along, even though I don’t recall last year’s winner and can’t remember most of the champs for the last decade or so. This show and the others of its ilk don’t really produce pop stars any more; they produce game show winners who can sing, and it never seems to quite work out after that.

I’m thinking, though, that 2023 might be the year this changes. The country genre is particularly strong on the Show this year, and there are a couple of other performers I think I’d pay to see right now. There also are a couple of scenery chewers we’re all going to have to tolerate for a bit; that sort of performer always has been a pet peeve of mine, but a few of them turned out to be genuine stars after their Show appearances in past years, so perhaps I should keep my fool mouth shut.

Anyway, another year, another ride. I actually think this could turn out to create some good concert broadcasts — and not just some dramatic competition moments — in the weeks to come.

I’ve written dozens of posts about the show in its many iterations for years and years. You can browse through some of them here.