In The End...

In the end, all she wanted was to get the chair through the door.

In the end, comfort was a new place in the sun.

In the end, she realized that Miles Davis didn’t speak to her through his horn.

In the end, which was worse, peace or war?

In the end, the cat forgave her for trying a new cat food.

In the end, it was the butler who did it after all.

In the end, fact was not stranger than fiction.

In the end she found a sunny disposition as her new attitude.

In the end, what’s one more bite of pie?

In the end, it was the leak and not the rain that caused the rot.

In the end, the teacher’s right/wrong record was no greater than her own.

In the end all she wanted was all she hadn’t got.

In the end, life was no more fair than death.

In the end, his kiss was no more deadly than is eyes.

In the end, the destruction of his youth coincided exactly with is failing memory.

In the end, she didn’t hesitate before she told him yes.

My day yesterday:

I started off the day by blubbering like a little girl in front of everyone at the Humane Society when I discovered that they knew who had my sixteen-year-old blind cat, Zane. I was completely out of control.

Bought more than a hundred dollars worth of meat at Costco.

Picked up the cat from the nice lady who found her without making a scene and found out that we owe her more than a hundred dollars for taking our cat to the vet.

Got into a snit with Key bank because they were trying to charge me five dollars to cash a check because I didn’t have an account with them. The check I was trying to cash was drawn from a Key Bank account, but that didn’t seem to matter. I asked them when I deposit this check at my own bank would they also charge me five bucks? They said no, that this was a teller fee. I told them with all my righteous indignation what they could do with their fee and left.

Found out that the baby sitter we had been counting on to sit the kids on our anniversary celebration Saturday night wasn’t going to be able to make it after all.

Broke the inside mechanisms of the handle to the van. Thus making the only way to get Ike out was through the front passenger side door. Now the van is in the shop having the panel removed to see what’s wrong.

Drank too much champagne and stayed up far too late celebrating the actual day of out ninth anniversary, that being August 20th.

I think you could call that a full day by just about any standard. Though this morning my heads a little soggy I don’t mind. I’ve got the cat back alive and two whole days to find a babysitter replacement.

Prairie Dogs

Spent the better part of the weekend beating myself up in the studio. I’m trying to get as all the grunt work done here in my own studio so when I take it in to be mixed down, we’re not spending time doing things like “cleaning tracks” “track lists” and the like. It’s slow tedious work but I’m hoping that I’ll save time (i.e. money) in the long run.

Colin from Colin Magnuson Creative has said that he would like to work on the CD art part of this project so that’s going to be a big help. He’s the one responsible for the colorization of the picture of my Grampa. He’s got a great eye for design and I’m looking forward to seeing what he comes up with for the rest of it.

Right now I’m looking at getting into the studio for the final mix sometime in the beginning of September. Though Mike came over last Monday night to finish up the last of the tracking, somehow that entire session didn’t get saved and got blown away, so now he’s going to have to come over on Wednesday to do it all over again. That’s the one big drag about recording all this on my crappy computer at home. It’s a pretty unstable machine and I get so paranoid about losing all the data before I get a chance to do anything with it. Right now, if the hard drive dies, I’ll be left with just the 8 tracks I started with back in April. Once Mike finishes his tracks, I’ll be burning the whole thing onto CD ROM’s to take to the studio. Once I have it on CD I’m going to feel a whole lot better about everything.

I’ve been having trouble putting the recording project aside long enough to get to sleep so last night I tossed and turned until 1 am or so and woke up at 5:30 to stare at the ceiling for an hour. They started mowing the trailer park at 7 am and woke up all the boys.

Corlis' Love Life

Corlis’ wife left him last week. They’d been on rocky ground for the past few years anyway, what with her being so quick to anger and all. Course truth be told, I imagine Corlis isn’t the easiest guy to be married to either, he’s obsessed with his car and Christopher Walken movies. In fact it was his bidding on an original script of the Dead Zone on ebay that was the straw that broke the camels back. He tells me that he wasn’t serious about getting it, he just wanted that feeling that for a brief moment, he was owner of a small part of Christopher Walken’s life.

I feel bad for him really. Not that Trish left him; She didn’t like any of his friends and I never much cared for her either. It’s just that in the long run, he’ll be better off with out her, but in the now, he’s feeling all like it’s his fault and he’s running around town buying chocolates and roses in some romantic notion that if he can just buy her enough crap, she’ll come back to him and that can start from where they left off.

I’ve been giving him a ride home from the mill lately cause is 73 GTO threw a rod and he doesn’t have the money to do a tear down right now. He has Trish’s old Jetta, but he says he’s rather walk than drive a car made by VW. I don’t mind that much cause it’s not all that far out of the way but I wish he’d just sell the Jetta to pay for the rebuild. Of course that would just screw with is belief that she’s coming back.

“What if she comes back and I’ve sold her car?”

h I try to tell him that if she really wanted that car, she would have taken it with her. I don’t try to remind him that the guy she left him for already bought her a Celica with a sunroof. I guess some people have a hard time moving on, you know? Sometimes being a friend requires being a broken record and sometimes it requires you to just turn the whole stereo off. In truth I’ve been trying not to say all that much on the way home.

The day she left the rains started up again.

We both keep the windows down though, me because the city feels clean and new, and he…I don’t know. Maybe the rain reminds him of her. Maybe the rain stinging against his arm is the closest he feels to being alive.

Then again, it could just be that it’s my car, and if my window’s down, he better do the same and roll his down his as well. Hell, I’d do the same for him.

Band Names

The Prairie Dogs played their last gig Saturday night. We had a nice turnout, playing both in front of old friends and people who had never seen us before. Doug, who had been out of commission for the past few weeks, came out to bang on the drums, and though the tempos were all over the place, the energy was good and we pulled out some nice stuff. We brought the list of every song we've ever played and did kind of a hunt and choose to make up the set. Pulling out songs we haven’t done in a long while and even slopping through a new one of mine. My one regret with this band is that we were never able to practice enough to get down all the new songs we were writing, and though it was great that the music seemed to keep moving and producing, it just felt like were never able to keep up with it to see where it might take us.

Dave and I went out for beers after, since neither of us was all that interested in going home. We talked about a lot of things but not about the band much, I think we both just wanted to let that one alone for a while. Besides, though we won’t be playing live anymore, we still have the cd to finish, so it’s not like it’s over, over. That, and there will always be other bands.

In fact here’s a list of all the bands I’ve ever played in.

Gylt
Sorcerer
The Cool McCool
Bandit
Natural Causes
Cause and Effect
My Brothers Eyes
Hubris (thanks Ry)
Dreams in the Witch House
Mojo Skill
The Prairie Dogs

In between there have been some sound tracks, Christmas music and stuff that I recorded but never actually played in a band. I’m not sure if this looks like a long list, or a short list.

So now I’m sure you have questions…well I’m here to help.

Eleven bands? How many of them were any good? Two. Well, maybe three sometimes if there was enough beer.
Why list them all? Seemed like a good idea after all the coffee I drank this morning.
How many of them were any fun? All of them really, and that's the truth.
Favorite band name? That’s a hard one. Sorcerer I think…just because it’s so young and stupid and you really need to be both to pull that name off.
Any regrets? I just wish I had more of it on tape. There are so many moments that are gone forever.
So what’s next? I’m not sure. Come back in a few months and I’ll let you know.

One added bonus to playing Shakabrah Java is the fact that it’s within walking distance from home. After the beers, I strapped my guitar to my back and headed out into the night. The heat wave that had been kicking our butts over these past few weeks was gone, and the night had that cool late summer feel to the air. I didn’t see a car or another person the whole way home.

To tell the truth, I kind of found myself wishing the walk could have lasted just a little bit longer...