Well, howdy! My name is Mike, but people just usually end up calling me…….
Sträusbaügh
Here’s a short list of stuff that’ll tell you how pretty I am:
- Music Sensai/Jedi Master,
Sträusbaügh Guitar and Music Academy
College Music Professor
TEDx Speaker
Award-Winning Composer/Guitarist
Cät Däd!
Master of Music, Composition
Master of Music, Jazz
Master of Music, Classical Guitar
Bachelor of Arts, Classical Guitar
Music is my JAM LOL
Has been, from the moment I met my Guitar, hanging on the wall at Citadel Music in Colorado Springs in 1987. I was a 15-year-old Kid.
So, yeah, if you’re at all interested in following The Ways of Guitar and Music, I’M YOUR GUY.
But here’s the thing…
The story behind that resume is so abso-goddamned-lutely unbelievable, they asked me to do a TEDx Talk about it.
I mean, tell me this wouldn’t make a great movie….
Part I: A Boy and His Guitar
An abandoned teenager, we’ll call him Mike, finds Meaning and Purpose through his Guitar, and for the next nine years, pursues his Musical Dreams and never puts his guitar down. He graduated with his BA in Classical Guitar at the age of 24, eager to leap into the next chapter of his Awesome Musical Life!
BUT…. just one actual week after graduating college…..
Mike is fighting for his Life in a cold Emergency Room, and calling his parents to say goodbye.
It’s May 11, 1996.
Day 1 of 4,018.
Part I: A Boy and His Guitar
An abandoned teenager, we’ll call him Mike, finds Meaning and Purpose through his Guitar, and for the next nine years, pursues his Musical Dreams and never puts his guitar down. He graduated with his BA in Classical Guitar at the age of 24, eager to leap into the next chapter of his Awesome Musical Life!
BUT…. just one actual week after graduating college…..
Mike is fighting for his Life in a cold Emergency Room, and calling his parents to say goodbye.
It’s May 11, 1996.
Day 1 of 4,018.
Part II: The 10-Year Medical Nightmare
Over the next TEN YEARS, his Life becomes ‘Survival!’ inside a Medical Nightmare as an invisible disease slowly destroys everything – Guitar, Music, Body, Psyche, a Future, even his Identity.
Horribly sick all the time with hundreds of respiratory infections, and eight face-to-face encounters with Death; Hemolytic Anemia, Pleurisy, infected Lymph Nodes, Viral Encephalitis, Sepsis, and more.
But at the last possible minute!….
Day 4,018: on Monday, January 8, 2007, at exactly 11:23am, Mike is finally diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder called Common Variable Immunodeficiency.
At 36, Mike gets a Brand New Life. A Do-Over.
His Life before The Medical
Over the next TEN YEARS, his Life becomes ‘Survival!’ inside a Medical Nightmare as an invisible disease slowly destroys everything – Guitar, Music, Body, Psyche, a Future, even his Identity.
Nightmare is barely even a memory, and the poor bastard is basically a withered, dissociated, paranoid, PTSD-riddled shell of a Human Being LOL
Surely there’s no way Mike would be able to come back from all that and just…. forge a NEW Awesome Musical Life!, and rekindle his Hope and Joy and Spirit and completely relearn how to play Guitar better than before while learning more about Music than he had ever dreamed, right?!
HOLD MIKE’S OVERPRICED CRAFT BEER.
Part III: Wings of the Phoenix (or Whatever)
Cue the 5-year montage, complete with hard-driving 80s rock song called Wings of the Phoenix or some shit like that, during which we see Mike:
- earning not-one-not-two-but-three Master’s of Music in Composition, Jazz, and Classical Guitar
- Studying, writing, playing, and recording symphonies and string quartets and Jazz Big Band tunes, yada yada…
- GUITAR!!
- working 50 hours a week
- getting divorced
- being homeless
As Wings of the Phoenix fades out, a 42-year-old Mike finishes grad school, returns home to Colorado, and re-establishes Sträusbaügh Guitar and Music Academy in 2013.
As the movie winds down, we see Mike teaching college in Denver, and the movie ends as he is presenting this very story, and a message to live and appreciate Life as the impossible miracle it is, at TEDx Cal State Long Beach in November 2022.
I dunno about you, but I’d watch that movie.
My name is Mike Strausbaugh, and you have no idea how grateful I am to be your Guitar and Music Mentor.
