This weekend I saw my friend Ganesh play a gig. He’s a great drummer.

I went over to talk to him after he finished playing. “I’ve heard better…” I informed him.

He said, “Have you ever seen a grown man take a shot in the pills?”

I finished my stairs today. Check them out!

When I was 15 or so, my next door neighbor Brian was a few years older than me. I wanted to be like him because he got notes from girls and had a driver’s license.

He used to lift his dad’s weights. They were the concrete kind with the plastic covers on them. He showed me his arm muscle to prove how much he’d been working out. I flexed my arm for him too, but he wasn’t very impressed.

“You can’t really call it a muscle,” he told me, “until it goes like that.” He drew an arc in the air with his finger to illustrate how a muscle should look.

There were a lot of tornadoes where we lived. Whenever a tornado was coming, his dad would go outside and smoke cigarettes and look for it. One time it hailed huge balls of ice the size of baseballs and all the cars in town got damaged. No shit! Brian and I hit the ice balls down the street with his baseball bat.

We used to have bitter badminton wars. I haven’t played a single game of badminton since then, but my parents had a set for some reason and we would play game after game and get really, really pissed if we lost. I don’t remember who was better, but probably him. He was older than me and liked being better than me at most things.

I met a few of his friends from time to time, when they would come over to his house from highschool. I really wanted to hang out with them because I was still in middle school and they were high school kids. They would drink stolen beers and talk about girls, and they were really cool.

I remember once Brian made a fake ID by making a huge copy of a driver’s license on a poster board, taping it to a wall, then having one of his friends take an instant camera photo of him standing in front of it where the picture should be.

This was before the days of computers that could edit a photo, and the driver’s licenses were much more simplistic back then too. Still, once he trimmed the polaroid photo down to be the approximate shape of a driver’s license, it looked terrible. I remember thinking that it had to be the worst fake ID ever in the world. Even I knew it and it was the first one I’d ever seen.

Polaroids aren’t really meant to be trimmed down, you see.

I am excited to be doing some carpentry work in the scene shop for the Stage Door Players, a theatre company here in Atlanta. You’ll note the use of “theatre”, which means Art, as opposed to “theater”, which means “let’s go somewhere on our date where I don’t have to listen to you yap”.

I used to do all manner of technical theatre when I was in high school and college, and I’m happy to be back at it, especially since the pay is pretty good and I can come and go as I please as long as I finish building my crap.

Today I built the stage on the left in the picture above. It’s awesome-tastic, as you can see. I also started on a set of stairs that will go up to the stage, but I didn’t finish them. I’ll go back by tomorrow and finish that up, and then build a flat containing a window that someone has to crawl through.

Sawing stuff, screwguns, wood… good times!

Click on this image for a time-lapse animated gif of the stage getting legged up and put together.

I have a bad habit of leaving the TV on after I go to sleep watching Adult Swim, so it jabbers away all day until I turn it off. One commercial has been running a lot lately, and if I ever hear it I have to turn off the tv immediately.

It is a CD that someone has made of popular music sung by kids. I will leave out the name because I don’t want to give them any extra publicity, but the name leads me to believe that this is not the first CD like this that they’ve made. In fact, it is the ninth.

It is quite horrible, and I’m not saying this because I dislike kids. It’s just weird to hear kids singing Gwen Stefani and Gavin DeGraw songs in the same way that it’s weird to see JonBenet-type kids in beauty pageants in their childhoods. Kids should be singing songs about peanut butter and jelly, or mulberry bushes, crap like that.

From a marketing standpoint, it’s a home run. They have implied consent to cover the songs, it only costs them $.08 per song per CD. Let’s say they have 10 songs on a disc, that’s only 80 cents in licensing fees. They throw the kids a few bucks apiece, toss a faceless band of studio musicians together to play the tunes, and bingo. Low cost CD that sells like hotcakes!

Maybe I’m insane, I just don’t want to hear a chorus of 10 year old kids singing “I know we’re cool” to me. They’re not even singing harmony parts or anything, it’s just a crowd of kids singing the melody together.

I hope no crowd of kids and my songs are ever put together to make someone a fast buck.