SHAFTWAXER

So yeah, kinda neglected this page for a while. Sorry about that.

It appears that I am married. I can tell because there is a rather large silver band around my left ring finger. When it was all said and done, the wedding day went quite well. There were a few stresses (which I imagine are to be expected), but in all it went over very well. People had a good time, our ceremony was unique and relevant, and finally, all of that planning came to fruition.

I was slightly surprised to see that before the ceremony I was feeling quite edgy. Not quite nervous, but man. The women have it much easier in a way. They get to play and get their hair done, do their make-up, get ready with the dress, all that shit. It pretty much takes up their entire morning up until the ceremony begins. Me? I did laundry. Emptied the dishwasher. Didn’t really have shit to do aside from wait. And think. Once things were going, it was much better for me. And my wife? Fucking gorgeous in her dress.

Being married kicks ass.

The honeymoon was also pretty great. It was pretty much exactly what we both needed. It was long enough that we got to see and do lots of cool shit, while being just long enough that by the last day, we were pretty much ready to come back home and take a few days to decompress. San Francisco was lots of fun. We always had things to do everyday, but we had also always managed to leave some time in our schedule so if we wanted to do something else a little more spontaneous, we had more than enough time to do it.

This turned out to be good as many of the best things were spontaneous. The most notable was a side trip down a road to a northern peninsula that dumped us on a short foot trail that emptied out on the Pacific Ocean. Magnificent. And the drive around that part of the state was incredibly fun. Driving along California 1 is tons of fun if you are into that kind of thing. It was great, I didn’t even think about work until the afternoon before we came back.

So here we are, about 6 weeks or so since we have been married. Nothing really seems all that different, after all, we had already been living together (in sin!) for the last year, and before that we might as well have been living together, just with our shit spread apart between 2 apartments. I think what it really comes down to is that the difference is in more how people perceive you and your relationship. The change (somewhat against the normal grain) comes more from outside rather than in.

I’ve been busting my ass as best I can at work. I don’t think that I am working faster than before. If anything, I think I’m slower. I do feel, however, that the quality of my work is the best that it has been. For working in a highly creative field, this really makes me feel good. I’m most pleased with how far ahead I’m managing to plan visually, often months before I will get around to making it happen. This is good. Still, the whole wedding thing kinda set me back a bit. My list of things to do is a little over half done, so with some luck, I’ll be making solid headway on that over the next week.

We also have made some new purchases. With the wedding money, we were finally able to get a new dining room table and chair set to replace the hand-me-down stuff we had been using. It wasn’t bad, they were sturdy and solid, they were just rather old, beaten up, and showing their age. My computer also had a bit of a temper tantrum while we were gone on the honeymoon, and since my computer is pretty much my total life line for my work, something needed to be done. The result is a fantastic new machine I built. I had not built a machine entirely on my own in years. I was pleased that I was able to make it happen with an absolute minimum of issues. We also ended up getting a Playstation 3. Holy shit. People were right. Once you have it, you get it. It’s going to be an incredible machine, and it really is the media center of our entire home and network. Wow. We picked up the BBC “Planet Earth” 4 disc Blu-Ray set to go along with it and our 1080p TV. Holy shit. Stunning.

So yeah. I’m back.

This is usually the sound that I wake to. There is an Indian guy that lives next to me (think Ghandi, not Sitting Bull) that comes out most mornings… and afternoons… and nights for that matter… to have a smoke break. This in and of itself is really nothing out of the ordinary, there are tons of people who still piss away money on that shit. What I find most interesting is that the entire time that he’s outside, he’s completely HACKING UP A LUNG. The whole time. He clearly isn’t feeling good, and the frequency of the cough would be enough to make me consider that it might be time to cut that shit out. But no… We get to listen to his lungs shit all over themselves every day. He likes to sit by his window when he’s inside. Coughing.

I realized a while ago that I never really recounted the whole moving thing. It was tiring, and it was difficult, but in the end everything worked out. We thought a 16ft truck would do the job, and we had already been doing our part to really cut down on the stuff we were taking. Lots of trips to GoodWill, even more trips out to the dumpster. Both of us were pretty much established with full sets of furniture, loaded kitchen, and everything else that goes with it. We knew the “Great Merger of the Shit(TM)” would cause some doubling up, so we actively were working to minimize it. The worst was the kitchen supplies. When it was all said and done, combined with the fact that our kitchen is probably the smallest that either of us have ever had, we still had WAY too much kitchen shit.

In the end, it all worked out though. Our apartment is very full, but not crowded. It feels nice and homey. (Coughing man just walked by again) The cat is happy, she has lots of window space to look out at, and nothing makes a cat happier than to have a bunch of birds and squirrels wandering around outside. Aside from that, the woman has started her job, the bank accounts, phone plan, and credit cards have merged, and I try and get as much done during the day as possible so I can be the good little domestic housewife and have dinner started when she comes home. We hit the gym most nights after dinner. We are so suburban yuppie it’s insane.

…and I’m just fine with that.

So what exactly is up with artists releasing albums that have a great first track but then fill the rest of the album up with steaming piles of horse shit? I mean, sure, I understand you want to start off strong with a great hook, but what’s the point of a hook if you are just dragging me into a wading pool filled broken glass, cow urine, and covers of Britney Spears songs?

Last week was crazy. During the beginning of the week, I was busting my ass, churning out drill for everybody. I was very pleased with the quality of my work. It’s nice to feel like you are growing, getting better. Being stagnant is being creatively dead. I think when the writing season is done, I’m going to pull out a few of last year’s projects and compare them side by side, see how their product improved from year to year. I have the feeling that it will look like products written by 2 different people entirely.

The mad rush of productivity was inspired by the need to get everybody in place so I could escape for a vacation with the woman. It was really great. I don’t think I realized how utterly exhausted I was from the past few intense months of writing until I got away from it. I’ve been working pretty hard. I’m glad that I’m starting to get to a point where I can see the end. Only 14 things left to do, and 2 of them are over halfway completed. 3 more of those things will probably be taken care of by the weekend as well, so I’m getting there. Slowly but surely, I’m getting there.

One thing that is making my life annoying difficult would be kids dropping and adding band at the last absolutely possible second. You brats are the absolute bane of my existence. I get a number, and then I try and come up with all the great geometric shapes I can work with. I write 20 some pages of stuff only for you to decide that you don’t want to do it. Not only are you pissing me off and making me go back and rewrite everything I’ve done, but you are also fucking over your friends and your classmates. I could have gotten more done, gotten it to the guard staff so they could write work well ahead of time… But no. I instead have to waste my time rewriting everything and putting a band-aid on everything because you didn’t have the balls or foresight to say anything to anybody until you absolutely had to. No matter how late I wait to start in on the drill (sometimes I don’t start until the day before they go to camp, especially with some schools that seem to have a chronic history of this shit) it seems that I can’t escape.

Now, I understand that there are some occasions where things happened at the last second, something involving their family, a sudden scheduling conflict with the guidance office, stuff like that. I get it. I was a public school educator, I know how things like this work. These things happen. These are not the kids I want to beat. No, it’s the ones that just decided they didn’t like it but didn’t want to have to deal with the confrontation of telling the band directors about it until camp starts and they are getting phone calls wondering where the hell they are. If they are not careful, I’m going to shit in a lunch bag, set it on fire, and leave it on their doorstep…

…or maybe I’ll just suck it up and post something about it on the internet… like that’s going to really change anything.

Yup, it’s the middle of the busy work season. Over the past 3 days, I have written 55 pages, putting me well ahead of where I need to be. For the first time in nearly 4 years I actually feel like I’m ahead of the game. This is great. And to reward myself, I’m leaving for a vacation with the woman. No internet, no work, no directors, no instructors. I’m turning off the phone. Just me, the woman, and Mackinac Island.

Hell yeah.

• I am often my own worst enemy… especially when trying to get shit done at 2 in the morning. Why did I let it get to 2 in the morning in the first place? Seriously?
• Damn, the acoustic rerelease of Alanis Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill” is really damn good.
• I started writing some shit down by hand. Extensively. I haven’t done this in almost forever. I don’t know how I used to take notes in class back in the day. It takes for ever.
• Humidity sucks ass.
• Having all my work and my playtime on the same machine is probably a really bad idea. Productivity goes way down when the same machine to write “On the Waterfront” also allows you to play “San Andreas”.
• What it all comes down to is that everything is going to be quite alright because I’ve got one hand in my pocket and the other one is giving a peace sign.

I now remember exactly why I’m not a fan of central Illinois.

I had lived there for 2 years, it’s a bit of a requirement when you are working at a school there. It was also the first time that I had left Michigan. In the end, it was a good experience, I learned a lot about myself, but of course there was a cost. One of the major things that I learned was that I took Michigan for granted. It’s a great state. It has interesting things like curves in roads, hills, and legitimate lakes that were not man made from run-off when building the highways through long-ass stretches of corn field and… corn.

My first experience with central Illinois came from working at the BOA Summer Symposium in 1999. I was astonished at how utterly flat it all was. And the sheer volume of nothing that was surrounding you was pretty impressive. Impressive in a not great sort of way. Just as we were pulling into Bloomington, there was the sign for our exit. Amazingly enough, there was nothing around. How could this large city be surrounded by absolute nothing? Get off the highway and you are suddenly in what would appear to be a large city. Strange. I would later find out that this is the norm. When I was living in Champaign, I was in the city, yet less than a mile from me were corn fields as far as the eye could see (probably further than the eye would want to see…)

So for the first time in years, I was back in town. This time, I was there to do a rehearsal with a bunch of kids I had never met. I would be there for 2 days, mostly observing and listening the first day, running the rehearsal the second. After the first day, I was seriously concerned. The kids were more chatty than I was ready for, and I was starting to get really concerned that the show that was written for them was a bit over their heads. Fortunately for me, I had an afternoon visit from a friend in St. Louis and a long phone call from the woman that night to figure out what I was going to have to do to make it work.

Part of the anxiety came from the fact that it was the first rehearsal that I had done in a very long time. Beyond that, I knew that I was going to have to strike a balance between being the jerk as well as the cheerleader. I decided that I was going to set the unrealistically high expectation that we would make it through the first 5 minutes of the show with percussion and pit by the end of the rehearsal. We would not have any train wrecks, we would be slightly under tempo, but it was going to be incredibly readable, occasionally musical, and in the right style. Considering that the music was passed out the previous morning, this was a ridiculously lofty goal.

Amazingly enough, they did it. They worked very hard, and they managed to keep their focus for almost the entire hornline rehearsal. I was busting my ass up their trying to keep them entertained and focused while making my way through music at a very fast pace. Somehow, it worked, and I was extremely happy, exhausted, and satisfied.

One thing I did discover, however, was how much conditioning I had lost since not directing anything in almost forever. My upper body and arms were kicking my ass for the next 4 days. It was insane. Hell, I still feel a little bit of strain today, and that was from working Tuesday.

That’s OK, I think it was worth it.