Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
Watch as I answer today’s NaBloPoMo writing prompt: “If you knew that whatever you ate next would be your last meal, what would you want it to be?”
Clearly I have an affinity for fish. What would you want your last meal to be? Is it a specific dish like mine, or a entire genre of cuisine?
I would just like to take a moment to compare my current life to my life during the first year of NaBloPoMo, 2006.
I know I do my big “look at how grown up I am” retrospective every year for CK’s anniversary, but 2006 vs. 2011 makes for an especially interesting comparison. Not only because it’s a shorter amount of time, but because I took the opportunity of the 2006 event to come out as a “secret rock star” who was beginning to take music more seriously (as if I ever took it less seriously).
Let’s compare and contrast.
Me in November 2006. I will never get tired of how I look both cute and totally ridiculous in this photo.
In November 2006 I had just started a new job, and I was the junior-most person in the department. I didn’t have to stay late too much and took lunch breaks. My round-trip commute was 72 minutes by SEPTA or on foot.
I went to one open mic a month. I was not in band, and I had just quit my acappella group. I did not have rehearsals. I had a repertoire of 10 or 20 solid originals out of the 200 songs I had written, and was working on a slew of good songs that year. I was starting to write songs in a upbeat style I described as a “Justin Timberlake meets Fallout Boy.”
My home office and recording studio were crammed together into my teeny 2nd bedroom (also my dressing room), which was barely big enough for a twin-sized bed. I mainly played two guitars – a brand-new Breedlove acoustic and my red Epiphone electric.
I had been dating E for four-and-a-half years. I was an incorrigible night owl. There was no Twitter. I hadn’t written anything longer than a blog post for fun since high school.
I didn’t spend money on anything in specific, though I had just gone to Bonnaroo and went out drinking a lot. I was just starting to save for an engagement ring.
My now-traditional backstage pic in the Tin Angel bathroom, from just before Arcati Crisis's full-band debut gig this September.
In November 2011 I work in the same area, now as one of the more senior members of my department. Sometimes I have to stay late just to get some quiet time, and I hardly ever take lunch breaks. My round-trip commute is anywhere from 80 to 100 minutes.
I rehearse about six hours a week with my pair of rock bands. I have played at least one show each month of this year, but not a single time as a solo artist. I had to give up open mics because they aren’t very rewarding. I have a repertoire of close to 40 songs with Arcati Crisis, and another 20+ with Filmstar, and another 20-30 solo. I’ve been too busy working through a backlog of my own new songs from last year to do much writing, but generally am working on a mix of acoustic dance songs and ballads.
My home office twice the size of the old multi-purposes room, and is dedicated just to writing and reference. My separate home studio is about as big as an entire floor of our old house. I mainly play the same two guitars plus a baritone, but I’ve also added a trio of basses and a pedal board full of effects.
E and I have been married almost three years. I hate staying up past midnight. I’ve been copy-editing the first 200 pages of my novel for the past eleven months, and I’m presently writing the second half.
I have developed a serious collected comic book addiction in addition to keeping up our band equipment. I haven’t been on a vacation since our honeymoon. I have mostly given up drinking in bars. I’m just getting back to some semblance of savings after buying a house and all of my bass gear.
I guess my point is not only, “whoa, dude, you really did some growing up,” but to put the idea of blogging daily and recording songs into perspective.
In 2006, what the hell else did I have to do with my life but blog every damn day? Seriously, I had exactly nothing going on. I got home every day by 6pm and went to sleep at 2am. That’s eight hours to dream up a meagre 500 words and record a three minute song.
In 2011 there are weeks where my life is scheduled down to the minute, and blogging is only on the schedule every second Sunday. It happens in found moments, largely on the El (ugh). I spend so much time rehearsing music and writing communications plans at work that the idea of vomiting up another 500 words for a blog post can seem like it might be physically painful – let alone the requisite 1666 daily words for my novel.
I needed 2006 to get to 2011. I couldn’t have jumped right into the present day me. It took blogging daily and recording 30 songs in a single month to remind me of what I was living for. Things only got more interesting from there.
What about you? What was your life like five years ago today? What’s the biggest difference? Would you-of-2006 be happy to see what you’re up to in 2011?
I don’t like Halloween.
There. I’ve confessed it.
I thought I had escaped the costumed oppression when I graduated college, but my friends are more rabid about it now than ever – even the ones without babies.
E's rendering of your author in the medium of pumpkin. Licensing my image was the extent of my holiday celebrations.
Yesterday I gawked as E hustled to welcome an oncoming fleet of tiny trick-or-treaters to our doorstep and bowl of premium candy. She carved pumpkins, donned her masquerade mask, and pulled massive bags of candy from their strategic hiding spots that prevented me from consuming them.
(You see if you can resist a bag of Heath bars and Take Fives for an entire week if it’s in plain sight.)
Lest you assume my grinchy-ness is a recent, being-a-yuppy-related development, allow me to reveal that I only went trick-or-treating a handful of times as a child. Once I was Gem, because she was truly outrageous and the only rock’n’rock role model for children at the time, even if she was a girl. A few years later I was a pirate (yes, a male pirate, but only on the condition that my Aunt Susan would dress up as Like a Virgin era Madonna).
I think it’s clear where my priorities were, even at age seven: pop culture over tradition; rock over holidays.
I have never spent too much time considering my anti-holiday vendetta. Have I always been so resistant to the cult of the mainstream that I can’t even celebrate the same day they do? Are holidays too consumer and not enough DIY for me? Is this the symptom of a only child of divorced parents, who could never have the holidays he saw on television? Am I simply a contrary bastard?
It’s not like I don’t like to celebrate. I can party, whether that’s a dance-party or a food-coma kind of party. I just don’t want to party the same tired way everyone has been partying for twenty or a hundred years already.
Go ahead, picture me at age six dressed up like this ... and then admit to yourself how truly, truly outrageous I was. Also: aside from the pink wing, a not-terrible predictor of my adult pastimes.
Instead, think to celebrate a thing I need it to be imbued with personal meaning. I don’t dispute that some people get major meaning from the 4th of July, or Thanksgiving, but the standard-issue holidays never ring true for me. They already have too many other meanings ascribed to them.
I’d prefer to make holidays my own. I’ve done it for Thanksgiving and ::shudder: Christmas. I simply haven’t found a way to compete with the masquerade massacre of Halloween.
That’s okay – I celebrate November 1st instead.
No, not All Saints’ Day. November 1st is the kickoff of my favorite month of the year, thanks to National Blog Posting Month – where the entire universe of blogs endeavors to post every day.
Even if I don’t post daily, I’m sure to undertake some insane project while my friends and colleagues are busy recovering from their candy comas to travel to see family and work on their holiday shopping. In 2006 I recorded thirty songs in thirty days! Last year I wrote a book! This year I’m mixing two EPs and writing another book. And blogging, hopefully daily, while playing at least one show with each of my bands.
November 1st might be All Saints’s Day to some, but to me it’s “The Starting Line.” I’ve been dreaming up some big project all year, and November 1st is the day that I begin to make it a reality.
That’s way cooler than one night of playing dress up.
Whether you like the “real” holidays or not, I’m sure you’ve got a few of your own. A massive party to usher in the harvest? An annual drunken viewing of the Golden Globes? What’s your DIY holiday?
Epiphone Dot Archtop. I've played on this since 2004 (mine has gold hardware).
Boss TU-3 Chromatic Tuner. It seems silly to pay $80+ for a tuner pedal up until you have two beats to fix an out-of-tune string on stage. Also, chromatic means good for alternate tunings!
Last night as I put the finishing touches on my electric guitar’s pedal board I realized that I have become that musician, with his own persnickety alchemy for how his guitar sounds.
I really don’t understand how I became that musician or how anyone else becomes one, but I definitely am one now, and I am fully prepared to find myself insufferable.
How does it happen?
I’m not talking about playing. I get how to learn to play (and how to be insufferable about it). Western music is a system executed on a device. Notes on a guitar are the same as math on an abacus or Super Mario Bros on a Nintendo. I took six guitar lessons to learn how to play Ziggy Stardust and then struck out on my own, and I seem to be doing fine, even if I still don’t hold a pick correctly.
The thing that puzzles me is the layer on top of the music. The technology layer. Gauges of string, hardness of picks, choosing wood for a fretboard, different pickups for guitars, types of pedals to get a sound.
SansAmp VT Bass Driver. Though owned pedals before it, this analog amp-simulator finally got me to join the cult.
Boss GEB-7 Bass Equalizer. I already had this per the recommendation of Peter Mulvey to help keep my alternate tunings punchy and bright. Now I actually use it on a bass!
Did you know that electric guitars don’t even come with an instruction book? This is an electronic device more complicated than your typical kitchen appliance. I mean, the blender has little explanations under each button. A guitar? How am I supposed to know what the pickup selectors do, or what string gauges work best, or anything else?
My electric came with a warranty card and a little brochure advertising yet MORE electric guitars for me not to understand.
(As for tone, once I picked a few favorite songs and read up on their guitar tones. The first one was “Go Your Own Way,” and I learned that Lindsey Buckingham ran his guitar through a broken tape deck to get the right tone. Very helpful.)
I suppose the answer is community and experience – two things I’m not very good at doing. I want science. I want a fact sheet.
For many, many years my musical community was Gina. That’s it. When I won my first electric guitar in a contest I’m pretty sure I had to borrow an amp from her so I could play it.
Boss TR-2 Tremolo. I already owned this (to simulate old amp tremolo), but it became one of my favorite weapons in Arcati Crisis.
As for experience, I didn’t have any! I never had money to try untested solutions and I wasn’t out playing anywhere or with anyone (except for Gina). Hell, it took me over a year to even get good at TUNING.
The Loop-Master ABY Pedal. Gina started playing her own electric guitar, so I needed to be able to switch between us into the signal chain. This rugged, custom-built ABY pedal works in both directions!
Neither deficit really impacted my acoustic guitar playing, but breaking into the electric world was a different story entirely.
There is this cult of electricity, where you sacrifice your money and time to crafting that perfect tone only to have the electrons snatch it away from you with little notice. They’re fickle little beasts, and after a few early mishaps we didn’t want to have anything to do with them.
I think that’s why both Gina and I shied away from electric guitars for so long. We didn’t even like playing amplified for a while after a disastrous first gig in Drexel’s quad. Even after we got okay with amplification, we were still happy to keep things acoustic.
Weirdly, it took bass guitar to put a crack in the electric dam for me. When I bought a bass to fill in for Filmstar, I immediately understood something was missing from its tone. It didn’t sound like THAT bass sound, which is something a lot more discernable and tangible than guitar tone.
Seymour Duncan SFX-07 Shape Shifter Tap Tremolo Pedal. The more I played the TR-2 on Gina's slower songs, the more it bugged me that I couldn't match the tremolo rate exactly to the song's tempo. Not anymore ;)
Boss OD-3 OverDrive. Further research into Lindsey Buckingham yielded the fact that he now plays solely through a Boss SD-1, but I think it sound is a little thin. The OD-3 one has a thicker crunch.
I realized I didn’t have the money (or muscles) for a high-end tube amp, so I bought a SansAmp pedal to beef up my tone, but that gave me a bit too much 125hz, so I added a Bass EQ pedal, but I also wanted to add some fuzz to a few passages, so I started playing with distortion pedals.
Suddenly, I not only had a bass tone, but a burgeoning pedal board to plug my electric guitar into. It only took a few Arcati Crisis rehearsals to realized I wanted different things for my electric than I did for my bass.
A year later the result is last night, holed up in the attic working out the signal chain order of my new overdrive and tap tremolo pedals.
Learning the technology layer of music is an iterative process. It’s trial and error. You have to hear a tone on the radio or in your head before you have somewhere to go, and then you need the disposable income to get there.
I still don’t understand it. I guess some musicians have bandmates to learn from, friends to chat with, or a favorite guitarist to emulate.
Gina and I have always only had each other, but as we’ve become more confident as a band I realize we’ve also formed a community around ourselves – Jake in Arcati Crisis, our friend Chaz, Glenn from Filmstar, Josh Popejoy, Cris Valkyria and her bassist Lou Paglione, & Maria from Bedroom Problems.
MXR M182 El Grande Bass Fuzz Pedal. I've been struggling with a distorned tone for my bass. I tried the Electro-Harmonix Big Muff, but this is far superior.
MXR M-120 Auto Q Auto Wah Pedal. This is the one effect I covet for my acoustic guitar. Joshua Popejoy uses it to great effect, and Ani DiFranco uses a similar effect.
And you know what this group of people hs in common. None of them learned this shit from science – even the ones with formal training. They groped around until they figured out what they liked.
Maybe that’s why I’ve always found that musician to be so insufferably annoying – not because she bothers me, but because I’ve never been sure how to become her.
Well, now that I’m her … err, him, in my case, but probably still “her,” since all my idols are women … anyhow, now that I’m me, I don’t want anyone else to feel that way about it.
I might be a member of the cult of electric, but I vow to always share my trade secrets, and never make it sound like a bunch of technical gobbledygook.
Are you another member of the electric cult? What are your favorite electric guitar gadgets? Which major pedal in your setup do I need to know about, stat?
As I grow older I am starting to realize that all of the annoying things that adults told me when I was younger were not the baldfaced lies and emotional blackmail that I assumed them to be at the time, but simply the rules of the world viewed through the lens of someone whose body incrementally decays with every passing moment, drawing them nearer and nearer to death.
My answer will NEVER be "no." Never.
While my recent birthday might put me firmly on the side of the slowly dying, I’m hoping using my blog as a reference point can keep my attitude eternally young so I don’t turn into a curmudgeonly old person. For example, now eating too much ice cream or candy makes my stomach upset, but that was never true for the first 27 or 28 years of my life. It was a lie old people told me. I know not to try to impress this fact of my old-person life onto a ten year old enjoying the chocolate carnage of Halloween or the unbidden joy of an all-you-can-eat sundae bar.
I bring this up not because of the impending holiday of chocolate sacrifice, but because of sleep. I never used to need very much of it. Three hours served me just as well as twelve. Presently, I require seven hours and fifteen minutes a night or I will be the grumpmaster the next day. Note that this excludes eight hours, or even nine hours. We’re talking about an exact science. Oversleeping is just as bad as a restless night.
In an attempt to abet my adult habit of fruitful sleep, I have recently campaigned for us to buy a new mattress. The one we’ve been sleeping on just passed its ninth birthday, and over the course of our five homes in those nine years its coils have given up the will the live. When I sit on it, the area around me dips to half its height. Sleeping on it – or, rather, in it – requires several pillows inserted around my body as wedges and cantilevers, and is generally a miserable experience.
Ikea Futon, side view
Thus, times when I absolutely require quality sleep, I wil abscond from the bedroom to our trusty Ikea futon, which has all the give of a cinderblock and imbues me with the energy of my much younger self when I arise the next morning.
This is what lead us to the Great Mattress Shopping Adventure Slash Possibly Catastrophic Money-Pit of 2011 two weekends ago.
I was convinced I wanted a firm mattress, but refused to simply buy an Ikea futon pad as our permanent mattress. That would be declassé. I am through with Ikea. I want expensive, non-modular, fugly, adult furniture that is three times as much money and comes blessedly pre-assembled.
Deep in the bowels of a King of Prussia department store (which, FYI, in my life is utterly synonymous as a scene setting to “fourth or fifth circle of hell”) we discovered their mattress area.
This was mistake number one – why were we in a department store instead of… gee, I don’t know… A MATTRESS STORE?
Then, I committed a second error, uttering the following sentence: “I’d love the firmest possible mattress. Given the choice, I sleep on the floor.”
I quickly discovered that, as with any boutique industry, the more specialized your kink, the more it costs to get you off. I wanted floor, and he would give me glorious floor – glorious, expensive, mattress-shaped floor that had all the features and benefits of sleeping on the floor except for the possibility of getting your clothes snagged on a stray carpet staple.
I stole this from a travel blog. I have to admit, it looks sort of awesome - but that's not the kind of thing you should ever admit to a mattress salesmen, or they will get you on a "ditch filled with sharp pebbles" model.
Why mattress companies are making high end beds that emulate the floor I could never tell you. Anyone who can afford these mattresses can afford and probably possesses a mattress-shaped area of floor that they could sleep on, unless they are so fancy that their mattress is suspended in mid-air, possibly by some sort of anti-gravity ray.
That would be a very valid reason to buy a floor-like mattress. Sometimes you yearn for simpler things.
E and I do not have that problem. We have lots of gravity, and lots of floors that our gravity makes it very easy to appreciate. Yet, we bought the second very firm bed we sat on. To my credit, after we selected it I insisted that we walk around the mall (or, “fiery inferno”) and sit and/or lay on several other surfaces before coming back to the department store to initiate a transaction. I did not want to be the one to later complain about our major purchase which MAJOR PERSONAL DISCLOSURE I always am, unless I had the chance to research it for several months on the internet and it has never received a seemingly valid 1-star review on Amazon.
Nay, not this time.
Said mattress arrived at our house on Saturday, ahead of schedule. When first I sat on it and its firmness bruised my supple cheeks, I proclaimed it good.
Then I tried to sleep on it that night.
You know the downsides of sleeping on the floor? Like, if you turn on your side your hip grinds to dust against the ground as an entire half of your body falls asleep? This mattress has all of those features, too. Like I said, everything but the carpet staples.
An example of E enjoying a firm sleeping surface. I can neither confirm or deny if she is passed out drunk.
Basically, the mattress is for two kinds people at opposite ends of the sleep spectrum: those who fall asleep intent and motionless, flat on their backs, and those who collapse limp and facedown, like a drunk college student. I’ve never been a back sleeper, yet while I may no longer be in college or especially drunk at any given time, I still sleep the sleep of the dead drunk at least half of the time. In that half of the time our new floor-board style of mattress is highly satisfactory.
The rest of the time, not so much. Also, it never occurred to me that the department store version of the mattress had been prodded by people and jumped on by children for months. It did not represent a Day 0 version of the mattress. I would have to work it like a mound of clay or a block of unyielding marble in order to get it to the state of older, carpeted floor boards that have a little give and some weak spots. Fresh out of the plastic bag its consistency was more like “kitchen tile,” or perhaps “cement floor of a prison cell.”
If this was disconcerting to me at least half of the time, E’s percentage was much higher. She’s not of the collapsing drunkenly to sleep persuasion unless she is, you know, actually collapsing drunkenly to sleep. Otherwise, she has a very specific evening ritual to wind her body down towards the gentle embrace of slumber.
Our new mattress, front view
Nowhere in the product catalog for this mattress do the words “gentle embrace” appear.
Two nights later, let’s say I am not married to the happiest woman on Earth.
Yet, I remain dedicated. I am certain I can wear the mattress down to an acceptably firm sleeping surface. We have sixty days to break it in before the manufacturer will accept that we don’t like it and take it back, but I refuse to admit defeat.
Why not? Because I am stubborn? Sure. Because I do yearn for a floor-like sleeping surface? That too.
Yet, one of those reasons is surely that when I was a kid I loved falling asleep on the floor, and adults would needle me: “Don’t you want to go to bed? It’s much more comfortable.” And, even if my slowly dying body now needs much more sleep every night, I refuse to admit that I am so old and decrepit that I require a pillow-top mattress for quality rest. My bones are not yet quite so brittle.
I will take a pass on that Halloween candy, though.