It’s never too late to be a guitar hero.

I played guitar when I was younger, but I hadn’t touched the instrument in 30 years before I got to China. Now I’m taking lessons from my neighbor Toni, a talented musician who plays guitar, piano, flute and clarinet. Today, I’ve been trying to pick and strum  “Scarborough Fair,’’ which was one of the first songs I originally learned to play. It’s slowly coming back to me, though I’m not sure Simon & Garfunkel would recognize my version.

My goal is to play the blues like John Lee Hooker. I sang “Boom Boom’’ with a band at a friend’s birthday party last year.  I hope John Lee forgives me from his grave.

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I’ve mentioned my friend Damian several times on this blog, so I thought I’d tell you a little bit about him.

He’s a former investment analyst from Toronto who is teaching statistics and quantitative methods at Henan University of Technology. He first taught in China five years ago, and decided to return after his consulting work dried up in Canada. With the extremely low cost of living in Zhengzhou, he’s hoping to save enough money to pay off some debts he’s incurred over the last few years.

Damian and I like to shoot the breeze about politics, sports, books, movies and, yes, women. (He’s 36 and divorced.) He’s a libertarian conservative and I’m a libertarian liberal, so we agree on most social issues and disagree about most economic ones. He thinks too many people rely on government for support, while I think that the rich benefit the most from public policies and that the poor and middle-class in America have been screwed over the last 30 years.

We met in the hotel where we first stayed in Zhengzhou, and now we’re living in the same apartment building. We’ve been hanging out a lot, going to restaurants, playing basketball (he bangs like a hockey player), visiting museums and shopping malls, and going to see the Terracotta Army in Xi’an.

He’s not your typical low-key, ultra-polite Canadian. In fact, he seems more American than Canadian with his brash opinions (he defends Pinochet and castigates Obama), caustic humor and pro-business philosophy. But he likes baseball and football more than hockey, so he’s OK in my book.

By the way, his last name is Wojcichowsky. Damian said he didn’t learn how to spell his Ukrainian surname until he was 7. “I just wrote Damian W,’’ he said.