Ten Things Of No Real Consequence

Ten Things Of No Real Consequence

09.13.05 (5:20 am)   [edit]
1.) For all the money I spend on gas just to see my daughter (one-sixth of my income, the shitty unthinking father I am) I'm rather happy to see that I'm getting 35 miles per gallon. I don't bitch much about gas prices (I see it mostly as our country finally having to pay for years of excess) so I enjoy listening to rednecks in big trucks getting nearly a third the mileage I do bitching about it, but not understanding the stupidity their very vehicles represent.

2.) Ever feel like you have three or four bricks lodged in your colon? I went back from my 15-minute break ten minutes early today just to make up in my own head (nobody else seemed to notice) for the amount of time I spent on the toilet half an hour after I got to work this morning. Usually Thai food has the OPPOSITE effect. What the fuck?

3.) I saw Amanda today. (OK, I ate something for lunch to try to reverse the effects of last night's dinner.) Another waitress sat me down, at one of her tables. Five minutes later, Amanda comes up with that killer smile.

"Oh, I see how you are. You didn't even ask for me, did you?"

"I'm sorry. Hey, I'll never forget to ask for you again. How could I be such a fool?"

"Maybe you shouldn't bother. I'm so hurt that you didn't." (Really big smile.)

"Wow, I'm amazed that you care so much! That makes me feel better!"

"I thought you didn't want me anymore."

"Oh, I WANT you all right, but that's another story........I can't believe I just said that to you." I was halfway between shock and laughter at what came out of my mouth before I'd thought about it.

Her reaction? Doubled over, suppressing huge laughter. And a look on her face that said "A-ha! I KNEW you wanted to fuck me!"

I think I scored a point or two. I waved goodbye when I left and she yelled back "Bye, hon!" More genuine and less typical-waitress than ever. Cool! Damn, I'm gonna go broke and gain 30 pounds eating at fucking Steak & Shake every day from now on.

4.) Just had a voicemail from my northern band's singer (I'd left the phone in the car and just remembered it) about his wife's call earlier today. I was really excited. We had an offer for a gig this Friday night. I was prepared to get out of work early to do it, but it's not happening. Between not getting a set time to start, being offered much less money than normal, and the singer being sick and not wanting to have his voice fucked up on a far more important gig the next day, it just can't happen. Which is fine, he needs to take care of himself first. But man, I was really looking forward to making extra money this weekend. We're already playing a cool gig Saturday (a Vietnam Vets reunion that we're getting paid rather well for a two hour set, they had Iron Butterfly there last year, or all people) but I'm itching to play as often as possible.

Given my financial situation (low-paying job, major expenditures to see Katie, paying more rent than I wanted to in trade for havng a place I really like being at, a maxed-out credit card, my enormous short-sightedness and stupidity over the summer in going through money that should have lasted at least six months instead of the three I blew through it in) I realize that my current pace of one gig a week HAS to continue if I'm going to keep going. I need a lot of outlets to make this happen. The band in Cincy might very well get someone to replace me while I'm out with the other guys for over a month (they might not even exist in a month, for all I know) and the current schedule will begin to drop a bit after the beginning of October. So even being in two bands, I need more.

One of the cool things I got to do when I played up north years ago was doing a project with our singer's brother. We did it with him singing and me playing electric guitar, usually clean with reverb and delay. A very cool sound. I played a bit of keys too, and we even did a couple songs just bass and vocals that worked out really well. We also had a drummer and bass player on a couple gigs, and I did my first-ever performance playing lead guitar with him. It was a riot. My solos ranged from a sort-of Pete-Townshend like rhythm-lead combo, to the one-note Neil Young approach, to wholesale quotes from other people, to a solo on I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry where I basically quoted the melody, but tried to do as good of a Jeff Beck imitation as possible. I very nearly pulled it off, but my tone couldn't possibly match Beck's.

Anyway, Dennis and I are talking about getting back together. He's been out re-living his glory days as a proto-punker (he's nearly 20 years older than me, and in all seriousness, the killer punk-metal shit he was doing in the mid 70s was way ahead of its time) but we're going to do the duo thing here in Indy. i'm calling him in the next couple nights to set things up. He has a gig in NYC right after I do the three-day festival binge next weekend. Then we might be able to throw it all together in a month or two.

I'm probably going to have to do a solo thing too, which I really want to do, but still have massive reservations about. I've been singing brilliantly when all I do is sing. I feel stronger than I have in five or six years, which was about the time I first realized I COULD sing.

But when I sing and play, it's much more erratic. It's worse when I'm playing bass, which makes it hard to force myself near a microphone with the band when I'd much rather just play bass anyway. But this past gig went well for me vocally (not including the somewhat dismal soundcheck) and restored a bit of confidence. So it's something to work on, and I've done more of that lately.

But I'm terrible at self-promotion, and barely competent at talking to an audience. I'm completely incapable of putting effort into singing things I have no feeling for (I can play bass on a Bob Seger cover and somehow come out with a trace of dignity intact, but *singing* that shit? I'd have to live in a trailer for three years solid eating bratwurst and cheese all day to do that.) and though I can do a lot of perfectly accessible material and love it (Neil Young, Beatles, CCR, etc) I don't know if my acoustic renditions of AC/DC songs (sung in something that vaguely resembles a bad Elvis impersonation) will be accepted or greeted with a plague of broken beer bottles through chicken wire.

I've had all sorts of stupid unworkable ideas for bands, (OK Elmer, plug that banjo in and let's blow through Sabbath Bloody Sabbath) but right now I'd love to find a three-piece that would do loads of Cream/Hendrix/Who/Rush/Tr ower stuff, with a guitar player that could do at least 75% of the vocals. I'd like to sing some, it's good for me. But mostly I just want to play bass four or five nights a week without having my soul sucked out by having to do so in the Midwest - shallow culturally-deprived shithole that it is. I enjoy the bands I'm in right now, but it's giving me about 15% of what I need as a human being trying to be musical.

5.) There is a very bad tendency in me to forget that it doesn't matter what others think of me, and go the opposite direction wanting too much to know what they think. I'm trying to kill that, because it's served no real purpose. It's one of my major faults that I'd like to reverse.

6.) I tried five times to write something this evening that could not be written without being far more vicious and self-serving than I want to be. (And I just went back to cut this in half for the same reason.) But I stand by my previous post (I'm not happy about the bile that I allowed to be brought up, but I stand by the basic content) and don't enjoy being made out to be an asshole over something that I know for a fact was barely worth mentioning and blown out of proportion as to what it actually was. Fucking Christ. I shouldn't even have to talk about this, but I wasn't about to let that shit slide, especially coming from where it did. My feelings about THAT person are much better not discussed. I also notice that instead of dealing with my concerns, it's been turned back on me and the issue isn't really being dealt with or even actually addressed. But that's typical. Some people would make really excellent Republicans. Which is all I have left to say, because the other ten thousand words I feel like typing right now are far more nasty than I want or need to be. Yeah, it does still hurt. It hurts me too. Wow, imagine that. Me, having feelings. Fuckin' hell.

7.) I'm still buzzing from Larry and Marty getting in touch again after all these years. I've pulled up so many goofy memories in the past week, some probably shared, some I might have to myself. I drove through Muncie on Saturday on the way back to Marion with Katie, and tried to imagine how many times I must have driven over there for the band.

One big memory is of one of the last times I did so. If I remember right, this all happened on one night, but maybe I'm combining stuff in my head. On the way over,I had to drive myself to the hospital when I suddenly found it damn near impossible to breathe. By the time I got there (and ended up paying out the ass for it, since I had no health insurance at the time, as I don't currently) it was gone, and I felt fine. Years later I was told I have mild asthma. Didn't feel too mild for half an hour that night. I seriously thought I was going to die. Back then, it didn't seem as good of an idea.

I left the hospital to go to the band. They were auditioning new bass players since I'd recently left, and wanted me to come over and help out. Which I took as a very nice gesture. I watched one or two guys (can't remember now, but one had a fretless with nylon strings) and thought "Fuck, why am I doing this to these guys?"

Later, I saw them with the guy they picked. Good player. I remember hating myself as I watched them play Sober, which was the current Tool hit at the time. And some months later, I saw Larry with the next band he played with, and they opened with the Ren & Stimpy Theme. You know, I don't get to do things that goofy anymore. I miss that.

(Well, to be fair to my current band, in our last incarnation several years ago we did Hocus Pocus by Focus, and after the singer did the yodeling part, I did that climbing high part ending in the big scream, all while switching from bass to that wacky keyboard part. That was a lot of fun. but we're not doing that anymore. Dammit.)

8.) Now this year, I don't want to catch anyone not drinking.

9.) The weekend with Katie was a treat, though gas was even more of a dent in my wallet after doing a total of well over 500 miles in two days. (Maybe I shouldn't harp on this so much, but I'm putting out a very large chunk of my wretched income just to see my little girl, and I haven't complained about it, I haven't tried to get around it, and yet I'm apparantly a moron father. I need to let this go eventually, but right now I'd like to pound somebody's empty head. MY fucking father had the balls to tell me I probably shouldn't go see her as much now that gas is so high. "Oh, so that's the message I want to send my daughter. That my wallet is more important than she is. Gee, that sounds familiar somehow, Dad." Shut him up quick, the bastard.)

I drove to Cincy early Saturday morning, then we went up to Marion from there. Five hours in the car. Katie was in it for three, and though she asked a few times after the second hour if we were there yet, she was VERY patient, and very cool. She also ate lunch in the car and didn't make any ketchup messes, which I was prepared to let slide since I fully expected it. Should have given her more credit, she did GREAT. By the way, since this is so important to people who actually think I don't consider these things (when Katie herself can tell you how many times we've talked about saftey, to the point where I've annoyed her about it, because THAT'S WHAT PARENTS DO), she was wearing her seat belt. Damn, imagine that.

I was hoping for more reaction from her at the gig. We played a two-hour afternoon gig at a Harley dealership, of all places. They were having a big barbecue. I was strongly reminded of Hunter Thompson's Hells Angels book noticing the ten percent of the bikers who looked like the real hardcore thing (who also are some of the friendliest people I've met since playing these kind of gigs) and the 90% pretenders who usually drive SUVs. One big bald guy with about 79 tattoos told me he loved us, asked where we were playing next, and told me how cute my daughter was, in the same kind of tone one would usually expect from a soccer mom. The soccer mom/weekend biking pretenders were all gone by then. They left when the food was gone.Twenty minutes before we started playing. Fuck. The people who hired us apologized for the bad timing (there were a couple hundred people there when I arrived, and maybe 20 when we got done, most of whom were people we brought along) and we got paid well for two hours.

Katie actually slept in my mom's lap for a while, only 15 feet from me. We weren't loud, but we sure as heck weren't playing lullabies. She actually fell asleep during the song I was loudest in. We just started playing Mercury Blues (David Lindley's, not the Alan Jackson version everyone knows but me, because I don't listen to that annoying fuck) and I play straight 8th notes nearly the whole time, because sometimes I actually enjoy that. (Gotta get out that little bit of punk influence I actually have.) I pounded it harder, and I got off a little on seeing Dennis out there looking at me like "Shit, that rocks." Turns out I was too loud in the mix on that song. LOL.

She didn't sleep long, and they ended up under the tent across from us. It wasn't terribly hot, but it was enough to keep people from moving around much. I'd really hoped to see Katie dancing around the way she did a couple years ago when she saw the country band I played with. But I was sweating my ass off just playing bass. Mom kept us all very supplied with water, and had a wet cloth to dab Katie's face with a few times. I'm glad Mom actually thought of something in advance that was actually helpful. She's worse than me at that usually, and I suck at it. She was a big help, and so was our guitarist's wife, who is expecting her baby in March. She loved hanging out with Katie, and Katie seemed to really like her.

At first when we arrived, as usual, Katie was pretty shy. She loosened up well in short time, and was very happy to see a tiny frog in the gravel parking lot, which hopped under my car. It's so cool to see how she reacts to animals. Well, she definitely has a problem with bugs. :)

As we got set up and ready for soundcheck, Mark and Dennis made me smile. They were both watching Katie, both with looks of amazement on their faces, and finally Mark said it."I can't believe you are responsible in any way for something that beautiful." Dennis chuckled a bit, obviously thinking the same thing.

To which I replied, "Man, I think that same thing at least three or four times a day."

We went to my grandma's afterwards and had dinner, and got to see Dad for 15 minutes when he came on his dinner break from work. (He's temporarily running two departments at his store now.) He looked older to me somehow, more than I've noticed in some time. Maybe because I've had such a hard time being around him since Katie's incident with the cat. I've finally gotten over it (our last two talks have been pretty good, other than the aforementioned comment) but I went through a period of deep resentment when I realized how much I needed his help a couple months ago. The temp agency wasn't keeping me anywhere for more than a few days, I was out on the days I wasn't working sweating my ass off walking door to door filling out applications for crap jobs, and I was filled with hate for damn near everything and everybody. I don't know how I managed to not be paralyzed by it the way that kind of desparation usually renders me immobile. I think much of it was the intense feeling of not wanting to be beholden to him anymore. It's bad enough to feel hopeless without someone there to do basic shit for you that you find impossible to do yourself. That feeling fucked me up for a long time, and made it harder still to do anything. But when it's a person who you pretty much loathe because they robbed you of any self-confidence you might have had from the time you were able to wipe yourself, there's a really big hole waiting for you to fall in, and I looked at my Dad and said "Fuck this, I CAN'T go there." I'd rather suck a bullet than be tied down to him, needing his help and having to accept the ego-crushing crap he doesn't even seem to realize he's saying half the time.

But we've gotten along fairly well more recently.

Katie gave him a nice hug when he left, and we left soon after. We drove by the house (the back hatch was not closed all the way and I realized it half a mile from my parents') but no one was home yet. We walked back to the car and I told Katie that I had moved there when I was her age. Either 4 or 5, couldn't remember which.

"You were four???" She looked amazed.

"Yes, honey. I was four a long time ago. Now I'm 35."

"Oh, you weigh as much as I do."

That was pretty funny.

She fell asleep on the way home. I'd hoped to spend some time with her before bedtime, but it was really nice to be able to get her out of the car, and hold her as she slept all the way inside and onto the sleeping bag. She woke up two hours earlier than planned, but got back to sleep well. When she woke up again, she ended up snuggling next to me. It's been a long time since we've done that. I felt very close to her, and I knew that I'd do anything to make her happy. Which is perhaps why I get pissed at people who assume things about my parenting abilities that they know little or nothing of. My relationship with my daughter is one of the very few things in this world I've ever done right. Not perfectly. Not very well for the first year or so. But fuck anyone who thinks I don't take her safety very, very seriously. I've given her more love and attention in four years than my father has given me in my whole life. Nothing changes that. I make a stupid decision on occasion. Like no one else ever does. My track record is pretty fucking good, though, and I don't need anyone to tell me that, because I KNOW it. I also know when I do something wrong, and I do my damndest to fix it.

We watched a bunch of MST3K that morning. She sat in my lap for a long time while we watched The Horror Of Party Beach, which is such a hilarious piece of shit on its own. There's a couple places I had her look away at, but she really needed an experience of seeing a movie with guys wearing really stupid monster suits. I jumped right into making fun of that, and finally she was laughing and pointing at the screen. "They're silly!" The absolute BEST part was when the dopey googly-eyed fishy thing (who was killed by SODIUM!) first appeared, coming out of the water. The camera shoots to a close-up of this rubberized misfit, and Nelson goes, "Coooo-kie!"

Katie laughed her tiny butt off. Then we danced around singing "C Is For Cookie" for a couple minutes. Someday I'll record my metal version of that, it currently exists only in my head.

The cable guy came over and we entertained him with some sheer silliness. Katie hid under the sleeping bag and said "You can't find me!" So I immediately picked up the sleeping bag with her wrapped in it and ran out to the front room and back, pulled it off, and tickled the snot out of her. "Do that again!" Crazy nut

She slept most of the way back to Cincy. Before we got.her home, I told her I was going to miss her. She gave me the saddest look. "I'm going to miss you, Daddy." I told her I had a great time with her and we would again next week. (We're going to Dayton to have lunch with friends and see the Air Force Museum again.) I asked her what her favorite part of the weekend was and she said "Seeing your band." Which really surprised me. I almost wondered if she didn't say that just to make me happy. But that was her answer. I'd been looking forward to this for weeks, and I hope I can do it again. She'll probably never see the other band, since they never play anywhere she can go to (shit, I wouldn't take most of the adults I know to these places) I'm very happy this weekend happened, and she got to see me doing one of the few things in the world that gives me happiness when I can't be with her.

I love her more than anything.

10.) I'm tired. And starting to think about Jenny, who was really nice and friendly this morning when I stopped by to talk about my time off next week. More expressive than I've seen her in a while. We bullshitted about some more personal stuff for a moment. After a mention of current expenses, I thanked her again for getting me this job. "I still really appreciate your help." She looked happy.

But it'll never be anything more than that. I'll go to bed soon thinking about her, because that's what I've done constantly for over a month, but I think tomorrow I'll be plotting my next move on Amanda, who I might actually have a vague shot in hell at. I hope so, anyway. The weekends are great, but Monday through Friday definitely needs some more fun thrown into the equation.

Love,
Dougie