Theme Park Experience

For this week's edition , I interviewed Trever Keith from face to face as well as Chris, Jake, and Jordan from Strung Out. This kind of stuff doesn't happen every day, so to say I was stoked to interview these guys is a massive understatement.

I'm not necessarily one to welcome change. Specifically, the kind of change where I'm forced to adapt to something I don't agree with. But when my health is on the line, I must relent. And that's fine by me. In the past few months, I've had to adjust my dairy intake. Severely. As in, a glass of milk a day along with a lot of fiber, mixed with a lot of water and vegetarian options. This diet has been mostly based on suggestions by my colorectal doctor, whom I went to after a hemorrhoid ballooned to the size of my thumb. Fun stuff to experience, I tell you. Especially when you drive four hours for a wedding sitting on it. Since my initial doctor visit, I've had to drastically cut down on my cheese intake, milk intake, and cut out my ice cream intake almost completely. (I can still have yogurt, thankfully!) As I continue to see this doctor, the diet must remain before I have a clean bill of health. What's surprising to me about this adjustment is how much milk ...

For every year a cancer survivor lives, it's another opportunity to say, "Fuck cancer." The same applies to anyone fighting it. Sure, it's the not kind of stuff you'd say to your fellow parishioner in church, but there's nothing PC, pretty, or logical about cancer anyway. Hence why I had no problem making vegan red velvet cupcakes donning those ten letters for Diana's 27th birthday. I had never made a vegan dessert by myself prior to last Sunday. I had found a recipe here and made sure I had all of the right ingredients. I didn't want to mess this up because I wasn't going to give myself the option to fail. If I screwed up, I'd start again. I wasn't about to buy pre-made cupcakes from the store. My inspiration came from a post on Jean's excellent blog on her journey through chemo. Fellow mutual friends Keith and Stevie sent her those cupcakes and when I saw that picture of them, I had an idea. Since I wasn't about to ask any of th...

Sometimes you have revelations about matters that have been in your orbit for a long time. And these revelations make you reassess why something has not been closer to you before. These days, it's the Bouncing Souls for me. I wonder why I have not loved this band more. I mean, I've seen them play twice (and I enjoyed both times), own a number of their records, and would see them again if I had the chance. Yet something eluded me about them until I watched Do You Remember? , a documentary on the band, last week. I remember when my friend Sarah interviewed Greg Attonito, talking about Do You Remember? as it was in the pre-production stage. There was about fifteen years of footage available to use and a lot of hope as to when this documentary could come out. The documentary eventually came out and I passed on taking a look. I don't remember why I chose to do that, but that's what I chose. Recently finding a used copy and watching it a few days later, I had to ask myself w...

This week's edition is with Darin Robinson, guitarist for the fantastic punk/new wave cover band, the Mumbles. He saw the Who when he had the flu. Now that's dedication!

Continuing my tendency to revert back to bands I once devoured, the current band is one that is still incredibly divisive. As appealing as starting a conversation about Dungeons & Dragons or calculus, talking about Dream Theater can draw a few smirks. I know the band is very steeped in the exact ideology punk rebelled against, but music is still notes and beats to me. You want to run around all sorts of sociological implications, you could miss out on merely listening to music as music. Dream Theater introduced me to progressive rock roughly around the same time Rush entered my life. The exact timeline is rough, but "Pull Me Under" definitely had an impact on me as an 8th grader. Not too long after Awake and A Change of Seasons , I found myself listening to more Everclear and Therapy? and eventually, more punk rock and post-hardcore. I simply didn't have the time or energy to listen to a band who felt rather constrained by the 74 minutes you could squeeze onto one CD...

Playing drums has made up a half of my life so far and there's still no reason to stop playing. Whether or not I'm in a band, I must play, mainly to feed into my need to tap along to songs or air-drum. But it's come to my attention (only recently) about how hard I pound the stuffing out of drums and cymbals. The Pull Tabs moved into a new rehearsal space recently. While working on new material during our first rehearsal in the space, I couldn't help noticing my snares kept slipping off of my snare drum. As in, my snare sound could turn into a tom-tom at any given moment. I had this problem before at our previous gig, but I wasn't so sure what the problem was. Turns out, the threading on my latch had worn away. So far away that I had to get the latch replaced. One brief visit to Guitar Center got this taken care of (the clerk was kind enough to switch the new one on, free of charge). As I brought my snare back to the space, I decided to hear how the snare drum sounde...

This week's edition is with Jeremy and Chris from This Will Destroy You, a band I've interviewed before and have enjoyed as a live act. Hearing about their first Dallas show at the Cavern, I had to chuckle about how both guys had two very different recollections on how many people were at the gig.

Last week, I donned a look I have not had in years. It's the kind of haircut where I look like I got into a fight with a lawnmower. Buzzing my hair down to mere centimeters, I did it in hopes of having my dermatologist take a look at the back of my head. I wasn't trying to be paranoid: I wanted to make sure the back of my head merely had acne and not dark moles. And I didn't want him to miss any spots. Finding out my insurance was cancelled the day of the appointment (thankfully, before my appointment), I felt like I was Charlie Brown with a dunce cap on my head. I had plenty of reasons to believe this haircut was a good idea and had all the reasons to believe my health insurance was still valid. I rescheduled my appointment with my new insurance, but now I have to wait another month. I take the full blame for this hairdo and I don't really regret doing what I did. The interesting thing is, mere days after this, Diana had to cut her hair short, albeit for other reason...

As people posted their thoughts on national security late Sunday night on Facebook, I decided to break things up with a little humor. "Breaking news: Jay-Z is now in my music library. For those that know me, this is momentous." If you're keeping score, thinking I've backpedaled and have joined the League of Meh, well, this isn't the case. I'm still in the dark as to why people (read, people my age who have and will never deal with inner-city life conditions, hustling, or racial discrimination) with incredibly particular views on albums by Wilco, the Arcade Fire, and Spoon choose to go into a verbal lovefest with almost every kind of hip-hop out there. Something doesn't sound right when a final mix on a Wilco record means it should be torn apart critically while some rapper who sings about oral sex using various metaphors is called a "genius." In other words, yeah, I still don't get it. But as a drummer who has loved to play funky beats when n...

This week's edition is with Glen Reynolds, formerly of Chomsky. I saw Chomsky many, many times in college and I was rarely let down. I had to ask him about playing shows with them, along with his tribute bands to Blur, Weezer, and Oasis. Also, my friend Ben did a short a film on people who have serious hobbies. He interviewed me and filmed some of a Pull Tabs show. It's now online here and my interview is three minutes in.

Graduating from college less than six months after the worst terrorist attack on American soil, there has been a long, dark shadow cast over my post-college life. Whether it was a fellow co-worker slightly joking with me about how I'd be drafted by spring of 2002 or how terrible the economy is, uncertainty has run rampant in my mind. Uncertain as to how my adult life is supposed to be versus how it should be, worrying about doing the wrong thing has been a steady ride on a rocking horse. There's no harm in being cautious or careful, but sometimes I think I go overboard and can't see a difference. There's plenty of certainty in my life these days -- knowing what I must have and should not live without. I have a stable homelife, a stable and very fulfilling relationship, and a good exercise routine, along with lots of creative juices flowing with writing and drumming. Yet something in my life has been been like a carpet stain I always notice, even if it's safely hid...