stop and diddle the roses
Let me give some backdrop on the whole “I’m sick and tired of crybaby musicians that talk about how hard everything is. They’re simple whiney pussies that need to get kicked in the face by hob-nailed boot wearing kangaroos and thrown into a river of hot death”, attitude that I carry around with me.
That style rant is pretty much the premise of this month’s column in the On Tappito. I will hail the gods of synergistic print and online journalism, (“bundled content” to those of us who spend time interminable at newspaper conferences), by dovetailing that there column and this here blog with a story about why I feel the way I do on this subject. It’s not just band dudes that act this way that I hold in such disregard, they just catch my ire because I’m around them and they’re fun to hold a literary gun to. No, in the world at large these bellyaching waterheads are everywhere crying and moping around because their sandwich order is wrong and the mail is late and the Redskins lost and their fat wife is a fat whore and woe is me sob sob sob boo hoo hoo.
Fuck.
Off.
(A brief side note – I just heard from a friend of the Mrs.’ who was recently in Vegas and caught the last Prophets show that my guitarist Trey bears an uncanny resemblance to a male stripper in a traveling show called “THUNDER FROM DOWN UNDER!” that she saw perform whilst in Sin City. This news and the associated years of mirth I will have at his expense have completely made my day. Back to ranting.)
Here in America amongst the people I am usually amongst the vast majority do not have hard lives. When I see some nitwit at the airport talking on a cellphone about how terrible things are because his flight is ten minutes late I want to make him the secret ingredient on Iron Chef. Life for most of us blessed middle classers is a fucking breeze. Sure I complain but I don’t think my life is hard, my life isn’t hard at all. I have a great wife, two healthy kids, a roof and a car and a band and my hair…..not a lot to bitch about, (certainly not the hair). Jobs can suck but most people I know don’t have hard jobs. Moving furniture is a job I did for years, that shit is hard. Everything else has had modicums of difficulty but it’s all pretty much been a walk across a park made of buttermilk pancakes compared to humping a piano up five flights of stairs.
I have a good friend who had it hard. Ten years ago I was at the funeral for his wife which was a kick to the nuts just a few years after I was the best man at their wedding and drunkenly wished them a full life of babymaking ahead. In the intervening years between the joy and the heartbreak they had a baby boy who came too early and passed away after fighting as hard as he could to hold on. That was hard. A few years later my buddy’s wife was diagnosed with cancer right after she found out she was pregnant. They had to make a decision on how to treat the cancer and she held off on aggressive treatment so she wouldn’t risk the pregnancy. That’s a hard decision. The baby came healthy but the cancer came along full steam ahead and when my buddy was barely 26 years old he found himself a widower that had already lost a child and now had another one to raise alone. That shit is hard. Are you starting to see where I’m coming from?
Anyway he had little else to do but get his shit together, get a job that could provide for his wee family of two and try to put some sort of a life back together. He didn’t really have time to feel sorry for himself and just got down to the business of living instead of the business of being a self-absorbed sissy. I took a lot from that and on the anniversary of the shittiest few days of my life which involved laying his wife to rest I can smile at the memory of my friend Jill and how proud I’m sure she is of my buddy who is now remarried, has two kids, a house, two smelly dogs, a cool job and an independent film company that makes movies at a pretty steady clip.
It’s even more impressive if you knew us way back when. The two of us were definitely on the list of, “most likely to mouth-breathe and chew their knuckles as an occupation” when we barely graduated from high school. But y’know sometimes life treats you to an unwelcome lesson about having priorities other than your own convenience and how unfair it is that you have to share drumkits at P.J. Quackenberry’s on a Tuesday night and you learn to adjust and work and take some laughs along the way. That’s the thing that drives me crazy about people, it’s not the fact that they have it easy, certainly easier than most it’s that they refuse to take a second and appreciate it. Fucking jerks, if you get the chance to have a hoot don’t piss in the face of those that don’t by being a shit for your entire life. Idiots. I want to see them all destroyed and have their good fortune presented to some dude tilling a field that in his heart is a rock star waiting to happen. Someday when I’m appointed master of the universe this will be my first order of business.
See the movie guy at www.twentyoneproductions.com
See me at DC9 this Wednesday looking magnificent at the Six Points Music Festival shake and tickle happy hour.
I’ll see you later.
That style rant is pretty much the premise of this month’s column in the On Tappito. I will hail the gods of synergistic print and online journalism, (“bundled content” to those of us who spend time interminable at newspaper conferences), by dovetailing that there column and this here blog with a story about why I feel the way I do on this subject. It’s not just band dudes that act this way that I hold in such disregard, they just catch my ire because I’m around them and they’re fun to hold a literary gun to. No, in the world at large these bellyaching waterheads are everywhere crying and moping around because their sandwich order is wrong and the mail is late and the Redskins lost and their fat wife is a fat whore and woe is me sob sob sob boo hoo hoo.
Fuck.
Off.
(A brief side note – I just heard from a friend of the Mrs.’ who was recently in Vegas and caught the last Prophets show that my guitarist Trey bears an uncanny resemblance to a male stripper in a traveling show called “THUNDER FROM DOWN UNDER!” that she saw perform whilst in Sin City. This news and the associated years of mirth I will have at his expense have completely made my day. Back to ranting.)
Here in America amongst the people I am usually amongst the vast majority do not have hard lives. When I see some nitwit at the airport talking on a cellphone about how terrible things are because his flight is ten minutes late I want to make him the secret ingredient on Iron Chef. Life for most of us blessed middle classers is a fucking breeze. Sure I complain but I don’t think my life is hard, my life isn’t hard at all. I have a great wife, two healthy kids, a roof and a car and a band and my hair…..not a lot to bitch about, (certainly not the hair). Jobs can suck but most people I know don’t have hard jobs. Moving furniture is a job I did for years, that shit is hard. Everything else has had modicums of difficulty but it’s all pretty much been a walk across a park made of buttermilk pancakes compared to humping a piano up five flights of stairs.
I have a good friend who had it hard. Ten years ago I was at the funeral for his wife which was a kick to the nuts just a few years after I was the best man at their wedding and drunkenly wished them a full life of babymaking ahead. In the intervening years between the joy and the heartbreak they had a baby boy who came too early and passed away after fighting as hard as he could to hold on. That was hard. A few years later my buddy’s wife was diagnosed with cancer right after she found out she was pregnant. They had to make a decision on how to treat the cancer and she held off on aggressive treatment so she wouldn’t risk the pregnancy. That’s a hard decision. The baby came healthy but the cancer came along full steam ahead and when my buddy was barely 26 years old he found himself a widower that had already lost a child and now had another one to raise alone. That shit is hard. Are you starting to see where I’m coming from?
Anyway he had little else to do but get his shit together, get a job that could provide for his wee family of two and try to put some sort of a life back together. He didn’t really have time to feel sorry for himself and just got down to the business of living instead of the business of being a self-absorbed sissy. I took a lot from that and on the anniversary of the shittiest few days of my life which involved laying his wife to rest I can smile at the memory of my friend Jill and how proud I’m sure she is of my buddy who is now remarried, has two kids, a house, two smelly dogs, a cool job and an independent film company that makes movies at a pretty steady clip.
It’s even more impressive if you knew us way back when. The two of us were definitely on the list of, “most likely to mouth-breathe and chew their knuckles as an occupation” when we barely graduated from high school. But y’know sometimes life treats you to an unwelcome lesson about having priorities other than your own convenience and how unfair it is that you have to share drumkits at P.J. Quackenberry’s on a Tuesday night and you learn to adjust and work and take some laughs along the way. That’s the thing that drives me crazy about people, it’s not the fact that they have it easy, certainly easier than most it’s that they refuse to take a second and appreciate it. Fucking jerks, if you get the chance to have a hoot don’t piss in the face of those that don’t by being a shit for your entire life. Idiots. I want to see them all destroyed and have their good fortune presented to some dude tilling a field that in his heart is a rock star waiting to happen. Someday when I’m appointed master of the universe this will be my first order of business.
See the movie guy at www.twentyoneproductions.com
See me at DC9 this Wednesday looking magnificent at the Six Points Music Festival shake and tickle happy hour.
I’ll see you later.
posted by Castor OiL at
3:17 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home