The Dishwasher Blues

I typically wake up anywhere between 5:30am and 7am M-F (depending on what and how much I drank the night before). Well yesterday morning I didn’t wake up until 7:30am (damn Sweet Tea Bourbon) so even though I wasn’t going to be late for work or anything, I still woke in a panic. I have a ritual every morning and when it gets disrupted, I forget things. Knowing I had to be at the studio that evening, I still managed to forget a pretty important component…my bass.

Can I refill your eggnog for you? Get you something to eat? Drive you out to the middle of nowhere and leave you for dead?

The past few months have been pretty insane and chaotic, but in a very welcoming kind of way. Aside from that, I can’t complain. Oh wait…yes I can….

The Times They Are A-Changin’

2009 has been a pretty good year but it’s also been an extremely busy one. I can’t complain though. It’s been a fun ride. With the end of the year right around the corner, another birthday and a couple holidays in between, I’ve decided to regroup and evaluate what it is I want and how I’m going to get it. I’ve got a career that has taken off in a great direction as opposed to last year when I was unemployed for a month (same company). I bought a house and have been spending as much time as possible making it my home. My friends and family are my life and music has always been second but still a HUGE part of it all. At the beginning of the year I started playing with local veterans, Car Bomb Driver. Even though I was (and still am) playing in Nessie I thought the dynamic between the two styles would keep me interested and busy. Well, it did…but it also kept me having to constantly move things around on my calendar and neglect things that are more important to me. That being said and although it’s not easy for me to do, I will be leaving Car Bomb Driver. We have two more shows this month and then we’ll be parting ways as bandmates, but not as friends. I’ve had one helluva time playing with Dave, Joe, Shea and Matt. They really made it easy for me to fall in love with the music. There’s no animosity or anything like that and I thank them for understanding my decision. Will I ever play with them again? I don’t know. Is Nessie still going to play? Yes but not anymore than we do now. Nessie is a whole other entity. It’s more than just a band to the three of us. Scott, Joe and myself are best friends. We hang out and do things outside of the band. Our families are all close to one another and we even vacation together from time to time. If we didn’t have the music, we’d still do all those things. We’re a family. Just playing in a band to play in a band isn’t enough for me anymore. I’ve been doing this for over 15 years. I just want to have fun. I don’t care about anything the music industry has to offer me (past, present and future). I don’t want to HAVE to be anywhere unless my heart’s in it. My heart is only so big and right now it’s spread out over a few things that I didn’t have a year ago when I thought I could take more on than I was. So that all being said, I can now focus on work, freelance opportunites with another best friend of mine (of which I’ve also been neglecting and dropping the ball on) and my personal life. 2010 is shaping to look like it’s going to be an even better year so, so long and thanks for all the fish.

I might even try and update this damn blog more often. I noticed I’ve been getting a lot more traffic than I thought I would. Thanks for reading, you filthy animals.

In case you’re curious, here are the last dates of the year I’ll be playing…

12/5 @ Pastime’s Pub (Sarasota) w/ Car Bomb Driver, Crash FistFight & Ovni Sound System

12/11 @ The Emerald (St. Pete) w/ Nessie, Have Gun Will Travel

12/12 @ Proud Pony (Brandon) w/ Nessie (We’re playing two sets. One original, one all covers)

12/19 @ Shackleton’s Folly (St. Pete) w/ Car Bomb Driver, The Pretty Voices & DANK

Best invention, ever…since latex anyway.

Before I praise all the glory that is the Linksys PLK300 I have to thank my homegirl Carrie Waite for recommending it to me in the first place. So in case you’re wondering what this little piece of awesome is (and you’re too damn lazy to Google it) I’ll tell you…

You know how you move into a new place and you’ve got no place to plug in your ethernet cables unless you want one running across the floor or tacked to the wall(s)? Or maybe you called someone that wanted to charge you a ridiculous amount of money to install said wiring because you’re too chickenshit to get under your house through the crawlspace and do it yourself? Well then this little gadget is the answer. Real simple, you plug one of the boxes into your router and plug the power source directly into the wall and then you connect the other box to another electrical outlet and run a cable from it to the computer you want on the network. You see where I’m going with this? That’s right. It utilizes the electrical wiring in your house instead of using ethernet cable(s) AND it seems to work even better than it did when I had the wire running from my living room to my office. I’m not gonna lie, I’m pretty stoked. Now let’s see if I can come home drunk and not trip on any wires. Oh wait, there’s still the whole furniture/shin situation I’m still trying to rectify.

Turning brick walls into doors since 1976.

I’ve been pretty fortunate since I popped out all those years ago minus the whole self-induced head trauma over the years. It’s amazing what a beating ones head can take after a lightning strike and a windshield (two separate occasions). Sure every time I walk by a microwave I piss myself and forget my name for an hour but the way I see it…it’s a small price to pay to be alive. Ok, so maybe THAT doesn’t really happen unless there’s whiskey involved but I’m sure if you were to spend an hour or two with me you’d be able to pick out my faults or ticks fairly quickly. Maybe not. I dunno. What I do know is that life growing up around my house was awesome. My parents are the most non-conservative, conservative Republicans I know. They taught my brother, sister and I good ethics and manners then let us run free and become who it is we’ve become today. Sure they don’t agree with everything we do or believe in but they also never judge us. That kind of mentality is why I have the tolerance I do. Sure, it’s mixed in with my father’s Irish temper but at the end of the day you’re more likely to get a high-five from me than a punch in the throat. Why? Because life’s too short to give a shit about the little things. Hell, it’s too short to waste time for that matter.

I spread myself out pretty thin. Between work deadlines, fixing computers, freelancing, playing in two bands and working on my new house – I pretty much have just enough time left over to share it with a handful of people. Some are old, some are new but ALL of them know who they are. I don’t take a single one of them for granted and in return, I have people I know I can trust and call at 3am when I’m locked-up or broken down on the side of the road or just need to talk to. Well lately, I’m totally coo-coo for cocoa puffs. Take that as you will but needless to say, good things are on the horizon and no I’m not talking about the Miami trip in a couple weeks. I actually just threw up in my mouth a little bit just thinking about it. Great…

…where am I?