Mule

Why the 'Pegamule'? My friend Jack came up with the idea for the inside label for our guitars. A very pleasant mule and maple leaves turned into an anti-Apple Pegasus-mule in space standing on top of the earth.

So this summer I was contemplating how to make checking out my guitars at shows more interactive. I started texting my friends Tony and Charlie in our comical disaster of a group text.

“I want it to flap it’s wings, have glowing eyes and blow smoke out it’s nose.” As good friends should they urged me on towards what would be at least very entertaining few months.

Speaking things out loud. In your head it's just your secret without any responsibility. It could disappear after your phone goes off and your life will be complete different. It’s fascinating and terrifying. Maybe it’s just adolescent peer pressure kicking back in. Maybe they’ll like me. I think speaking ideas is more like a cosmic fork in the road. A chosen timeline that alters the course of your humanity. It’s rolling the dice and Jeff answers the door instead of Abed. We were all just doing normal stuff until we heard the words, “How do we make it fly?”

Months later I'm talking to my friend Steve about this idea and he says, “I know a guy.” He shows me videos of Ivan Iler, speaking like Zeus himself, turning steering wheels and making scrap metal elephant trunks lift, mermaids swim, and foxes chasing rabbits. And he lives an hour away from me.

This video is from the night I went to help my new friend Ivan finish the sculpture before the truck showed up. By “help” I mean “bring beef jerky, Haribo gummy bears, and beer.” Ivan spent sleepless weeks bending rebar and bicycle parts, planning gear ratios, counterweights, and basically building a moonshine still in the base because the smoke machine was overheating.

We finished at 2 A.M. exhausted, with crushed blood sugar an happy hearts. I was hauling 600 lbs of Pegamule in an ice storm grinning ear to ear. When I first told Ivan about the idea, and the extremely short dead line of two months, he spoke a new destiny into existence with a voice two octaves lower than mine,

“I was born for this shit.”

This is my favorite timeline.