Jun 19 2007

Where pub meets saloon

Tag: Bailey's, Idiocy, Tales of Woe and Wonder, extremeskenn @ 12:05 pm

Working in a dive bar is one of the greatest jobs I’ve ever had. In fact, perhaps even more than playing with the Exhibit(s), I’ve felt like a rock star in my nights behind the bar over the past two years. Working just about anywhere else in the bar industry — clubs, where the bone-dusting thump of techno attracts the lowest common denominator of rednecks and Guidos (sadly, Birmingham and New York City aren’t that different — only the names change at last call), lounges with their pretentions that alcoholism isn’t as sad if it’s dressed up, restaurants where the regulars can blame their daily drinking on the call of cheap wings or the widescreen TVs on the walls — just isn’t the same experience, and never could be.

Continue reading “Where pub meets saloon”


Dec 14 2006

Third time’s a charm

Spiff and I sat talking at the bar the other night — about marriage, among other things. He and his RHC are coming up on one year of dating, and they’ve naturally talked about the prospects of getting hitched somewhere along the line. He asked if CL and I had talked about it, what I thought of the idea.

And I know I’ve written about it here — somewhere — before, because I distinctly remember contradicting myself at least once or twice. And I’ll probably do so again, right here, right now.

Continue reading “Third time’s a charm”


Aug 17 2006

When A Strange Her Calls

Generically speaking, I hate telephones. I’ve thought many times about why this is, and the best that I can come up with is that my mother was raped and killed by a pack of wild telephones when I was just a child. Of course, this is obviously not true; while I think that my mother might have dated a telephone in her teens (a lovely rotary, according to the pictures), she’s not the type to hang out with the phones that would kill.

Why do I have a cellphone? Well, it’s cheaper and more portable than a landline, it comes with a camera that fits in my back pocket and allows me to email myself photos instantly, and sometimes my job requires me to be near a phone at random or inconvenient hours. Plus, once in a blue moon, I like to call people, if only to tell them that I just saw their boyfriend at the movies (with another woman), or to warn them of impending if slightly fictional disasters.

Everyone that knows me well at all knows that I often don’t answer my phone. They also suspect that I am ignoring their phone calls only, and I’d like to take this moment to note that, when I ignore calls, I don’t even pull the phone out of my pocket. I have no idea who is calling when I don’t answer. I don’t care, I think, is the point I’m trying to make. Oh, and sometimes, I’m doing something that would prevent me from answering the phone: watching a movie, playing a concert, working.

In fact, that’s what I was doing Tuesday night at midnight. Same as every Tuesday, we’re playing at Bailey’s. We were a little late getting started with out second set, though, and so when my phone rang, I actually felt it (it’s set to vibrate so as not to bother those around me, but playing bass makes everything vibrate; if I’m onstage, the odds of me knowing that anyone’s calling are comparable to those that Mel Gibson’s next film will play temples across America). I pulled it out to check the caller ID.

Hey, just because I’m probably going to ignore you doesn’t mean I’m not curious sometimes.

Turned out to be CL, which struck me for two reasons: she’s almost always in bed and asleep well before midnight, and because she had a rough night with what she thought might have been a pre-migraine headache and some weird conversations. I answered, if only to make sure that she was okay.

And if any of you want to go ahead and get jealous, yes, I always answer CL’s calls unless I’m incapable of taking a call.

It was a short conversation, mostly due to the fact that Eric began pointing out to the crowd via the live microphone that i was on the phone and holding up the magical country set. Nothing was wrong, it turns out; as she said, “I just wanted to tell you that I love you.” And while it’s even better to see her eyes and feel her hand in mine when she says it, it’s those little moments, the in-between moments, those times when you’re waiting for the next big thing…

See, this is why I answer the phone any time I see her name on the screen.


Jul 21 2006

These Memories Can’t Wait

Tag: Peeps, Tales of Woe and Wonderkenn @ 12:23 pm

Yesterday is a cancelled check;
Tomorrow is a promissory note;
Today is the only cash you have,
so spend it wisely.
-Ancient Chinese Secret

I don’t remember my grandfather very well (speaking maternally, as it were; my father’s father died before he and my mother ever met, and so I know him only through the stories my father and his brothers and mother have told over the years). He was, if memory serves (and as I’ve noted many times before, if it’s prior to the age of 12 or so, memory serves about as well as most of the people I worked with at Ruby Tuesdays), a mean, grouchy old man who really had little use for children.

Keep in mind that I don’t say this with any bitterness. I don’t remember him ever being really spiteful toward me or Mandy, nor did he ever (that I recall) lay a hand on either of us. He just was sort of there in my peripheral vision when we would go visit my grandmother, Merv. I do recall Saturdays watching wrestling with him, six-year-old me sitting on their blue leather recliner while he sat in his customary position at the far end of the sofa, smoking his cigarettes.

The clearest memory that I have of him is him towering above me on the stairs in their house as he showed me old coins that he had, explaing what they were and where they came from. The specifics have gone the way of Theater Appreciation 102 in my head, but what I remember the most vividly was that he was talking to me, and even smiling every now and then. I think I was about seven or eight at the time, and it confused me; grumpy old Da was being nice to me, and even at that age I knew something was amiss.

It was shortly after that that my mother sat me and Mandy down and explained Alzheimer’s to the both of us, and our adventures in the world of the mnemonically challenged began.

I always thought it was funny, at that age — the idea of a grown man wandering out of the house in his underwear, getting lost in his own neighborhood, forgetting the names of grandkids, his only child, his wife and sisters. But I started seeing more and more what it was doing to my mom, and to my grandmother, and the seriousness set in.

He eventually died from some abdominal something or another; I was thirteen, and have little to no memory of him after the stairway conversation. It seemed, strangely, like a relief for my mom and grandmother, something I wouldn’t understand for another fifteen years.

Shortly thereafter, my grandmother moved down to Birmingham from Nashville, to be closer to my mom and us (my mother is an only child). That would have been around ‘87 or so; by 1990, my parents had finished building their new house with a connected apartment for her to live in. I had moved out in the summer of ‘89, after high school, and again, my memory gets fuzzy regarding family stuff, but I know that it was before my divorce in ‘94 that Murv, too, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Whether from youth or emotional distance from my grandfather, the only effect the disease had on me in round one was watching the effect it had on others. This time around, it was much different. Murv was the one person outside of my immediate family that I had ever (or would ever, to this day) feel any sort of connection with. It was painful to watch the slow decay of her memory — even more so, I think, because I wasn’t living with her and seeing it every day. Instead, I visited weekly, and thus the progression was more noticeable.

She would ask over and over, ten or twenty times in the course of a visit, if I had talked to Jen, if I had found someone new yet, how my classes were going (I hadn’t taken classes since ‘92). I never minded answering repeatedly, though, because there was still that grandmotherly concern there. It wasn’t long — maybe I mean to say that it wasn’t long enough — before she started misrecognizing me, first as my father (which was tough to spot, since we have the same name), then as my grandfather, then as one of her brothers who had passed away many years earlier (my mom had to tell me whose name she was calling me).

Her physical health got worse and worse; she was having small strokes, which were causing jumps of progression in the Alzheimers, and she developed some sort of cancer in her shoulder. Mom and Dad moved her into a nursing home, so that she could get the constant attention that she needed. I didn’t visit much; it was too hard for me, and frankly, she wasn’t my grandmother any more, not even in mild flashes of recognition.

In April of 1999, we went to Nashville for her funeral, and I finally understoof the relief that I had seen in my mom’s eyes all those years earlier. My grandmother had disappeared somewhere along the way back, becoming little more than a barely functional shell of meat along the way; she was in a better place, no matter what I believe or don’t about an afterlife. My mom had taken on the maternal apron for the her own mother, and now that extraordinary burden was off her shoulders.

I think there’s some sort of irony to be found in my memories of both of them being almost dominantly pre-Alzheimers. And that’s exactly the way I’d prefer it, honestly; maybe it’s delusional, or pathetically nostalgic, but I don’t really care. They’re my memories, and I’ll do with them as I please, knowing full well that genetics or an act of God may take them from me on a whim.

Once, long ago, I saw the sun inside the fire
But now my eyes are burned and blind
The time has come to walk the road into tomorrow
And put the memories behind
-Frames Per Second, Awakening


May 25 2006

X3: The Last Straw

Tag: Tales of Woe and Wonderkenn @ 6:17 pm

You know the movie you’ve just seen is bad when you have better memories of the trailer for Ghost Rider (a movie starring Nick Cage about a flaming skeleton demon crime fighting biker — chew on that for a bit) than the movie itself. When that movie is the third and final installment in a trilogy that has been, up until now, a brilliant and shining example of how comic books can successfully transition from print to screen, it’s crushing. And when that trilogy is about the X-Men, the linchpin of your inner nerd, it’s as memorably traumatic as having your original Mint on Card Star Wars figure collection sold as the penalty for making a B on your physics test.

I’m kidding, of course, about that last part, and it’s obvious to anyone who’s known me for long enough. I never made above a C in physics.

Needless to say, spoilers are rich in abundance, much like my hatred for the collective team behind X3: The Last Stand.

Continue reading “X3: The Last Straw”


Feb 21 2006

After the Flood

Tag: Idiocy, Tales of Woe and Wonderkenn @ 5:54 pm

(Yeah, they’re lyrics to a song. I wrote them. Fuck off, or I’ll make you listen to the version with my vocals.)

Shadows in the sunrise
Angels in the storm
Sorrow without reason
Anger without form

Daylight burns the blind
Passion scars the mind

Driven by forgotten dreams
Blinded by the tears
Scream the silent lullaby
Drown in whispered fears

Daylight burns the blind
Passion scars the mind

Sheltered by a foundless faith
My garden’s path grows wild
Torn rose petals hide the blood
And the body of the child

(Well, bugger me — look what I found…)

A while back, on I-20 between Jackson MS and Birmingham, I saw in my rearview mirror the most amazing sunset just after a fairly brutal rainstorm. I don’t actually remember too much detail — just that I was overwhelmed in the moment of it all. This would have been sometime between 1996 and 1998 — closer to ‘96, probably fall. And in the moment, the disease that I’ve dealt with all my adult life suddenly made perfect sense to me; it’s summed up in those first two lines.

-

This is one of the very last songs that I wrote. I know that there’s Beautiful Garbage from around 1998 (a total Canon in D rip, with some really great lyrics by Jonas Grey) and King of Shadows from the same time (again, lyrics by Jonas - easily my favorite thing that Jonas and I ever did). But as far as music and words, all by me, After the Flood was it. Oops — not entirely, actually; the music was written by me and Daniel as part of a soundtrack thing we were working on for some nature thing. I still have those original tracks that were eventually spliced together Frankenstein-style to make up After The Flood.

Frames per Second — there’s a memory. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to having my “own” band, which is to say, like the Exhibit(s) are for Eric — mostly by me, but with input from Jonas and Daniel. And yeah, it’s some really uplifting shit — you can check out about half of the catalog at Garageband, which I had forgotten all about — but keep in mind that when I’m in a good mood, I’m not sitting around long enough to write a lyric.

FpS still exists as a moniker for my own stuff, the things I do at home with samplers and loops and the occasional experiemental or solo instrument piece. But for a short two or three year span, it was mine, and though the production is rough and rushed, I think the arrangements and lyrics and playing are all something that I can be proud of. Hell, I can still stomach hearing the songs ten years after they were finished, and while flawed, I think each of them has moments of their own where they absolutely shine.

-

This started out as a post to anyone who wonders what being me feels like. I know it’s not much of a help, but it’s there.

And if nothing else, King of Shadows has a great beat. Maybe you can dance to it.


Feb 17 2006

Nerds in Love

Tag: Beauty and Beast, Tales of Woe and Wonderkenn @ 12:03 am

“all of the flowers
all of the flowers i gave her
she burned them
burned them”
- Type O Negative

Birmingham is a really small town. In some ways, it’s the perfect game of ‘Six Degrees’ — sooner or later, everything in this town starts connecting, a wickedly beautiful web that draws together everyone and everything in it.

There was the lawyer and musician, some twenty or so years my senior, who I met when he was a client at TapeSouth. He later went on to do a lot of work with Daniel, and it was at Daniel’s home studio that I talked to him one day about his days in California, some of which were spent building a commune — a commune that my ex-wife’s mother was living at.

There was discovering that Melissa was originally supposed to have attended RLC with me instead of her zoned high school. And even having missed each other there, finding out that we attended the state finals of Trumbauer (a high school drama competition) together. Aside from becoming my wife for a while, she’s also easily one of the most naturally gifted actresses I’ve ever met in my life, and stars in Muckfuppet.

One of favorites, though not smacking of coincidence as much, was Maria. She lived next door to Jen, after our divorce in ‘94. I moved in down the way from both of them in the spring of ‘96 (Jen and I have always remained friends — not always close, but never, thankfully, the sort of bitter enemies so many ex-couples become), and although I can’t remember how it happened, or why, Jen decided to set us up on a date. Continue reading “Nerds in Love”