Welcome to the boards Peter...

I personally didn't get very serious about guitar until I had already been playing for 3 years. I'm 22 now... I started playing when I was 16... I just started messing around on it because one of my friends was learning to play. We were the kind of friends that were always around each other and did everything together... So I got a cheap Fender DG-7 and started learning with him. He got pretty serious about it... I was trying to get a baseball scholarship so I was pretty involved in that. It wasn't until my Freshmen year of college that I finally got into it. Since then I have caught up with him. I've never taken lessons or anything beyond simply trying to teach myself some basic theory. I don't want my style to be majorly influenced by the laws of music theory. I would rather know the very bare mininmum and be able to work my style based off of that... playing without any concsious boundaries. I feel like I would be restricted by the knowledge of all the laws of theory.