Copperwound Chronicles Vol. 3

Here in the last week, my band has spent fifteen hours in the studio, recording cuts from our second album. We’re really knocking them out, too. We’ve recorded three complete tracks for the album in that relatively short amount of time. We also recorded a fourth song, which won’t be on the album. It’s a promotional thing for an event planning company. So technically, we’ve recorded four complete songs in fifteen hours. But let me tell you a little bit about what goes on in the studio.

People all the time ask if they can come hang out with us while we’re recording. Somewhere remote in their minds, I think people associate music studios with cocaine and strippers. It’s a helluva good time, all of us hanging out, snorting off their bellies and popping champagne into the air, confetti everywhere, a big wild orgy. It’s off the hook! But yeah, no, yeah, it’s really not like that. (more…)

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Eradicate the Crickets

You know what’s worse than lying there, not being able to fall asleep – when you should damn well be tired enough? Lying there, not being able to sleep – when you should damn well be tired enough – but you can’t because of a stupid effing cricket. Clearly it’s in the laundry room, which backs up to our master bedroom. But every time I open the door to look for his little ass, he shuts up.

So you end up sitting there in the dark, flashlight in hand, waiting for him to speak up. Sitting on the cold tile floor, waiting like a ninja. Or, ooh-ooh a Green Beret! And he never chirps again. I know he must be under the dryer, but I don’t even want to go into how much of an anathema that is. There’s no room in my laundry room to move the dryer unless I disconnect the washer and move it out first. So I have to live with the chirping?

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The History of Beer

I read a great article about the history of beer and thought I would share it with you. Go read it when you have a few minutes. It’s very interesting. Now we know who to blame for the taxation of beer. That bitch, Cleopatra, needed more money for her wars so she decided to tax it. Thanks.

Anyway, Flavio and I were outside talking about this, and I began wondering who the first person was to ever drink beer. How cool would that be? But if the Sumerians were the first to brew it, we’re talking thousands and thousands of years ago! So my theory developed pretty quickly, because I was concerned about why anyone would try such a thing. Surely he must have brewed it by accident. So here’s my thinking:

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I just joined the Darwin Awards.

We used to do crazy shit when we were adolescents. Seriously. My mother used to shout at me for jumping off the roof into the pool. Man, if she had seen some of the really crazy shit I was doing, she would have begged me to keep jumping. My girlfriend pulled up beside us on the highway one night, honking and flashing her lights. It was dark, there was no one else on the highway, but my pickup was very recognizable. The graffiti-style paint job was distinct. So she pulled up and rolled down her passenger window, waving at me and shouting something incoherent. Well, I’ll just get my buddy to take over driving!

So my buddy slides behind the wheel and I hop over to the passenger side, crawl out my window and into the bed of the truck (while we’re still moving). Then I did the whole acrobatic stretch between the two vehicles and slipped down through her window and into the seat. I guess I could have just waited, since we were going the same place, and both arrived some three minutes later. I missed her though, you know?

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Not a Happy Customer

If there’s one thing I hate more than slamming my finger in a rusty door, or stepping on a squeaky nail, it’s got to be incompetence in customer service. When I’m in a store inquiring about a product, your sales staff should know the answers to all my questions. Whatever happened to training the employees on the merchandise they are selling? When I worked in the Wal Mart Photo Lab, I took time every day to stand there reading the boxes of all the cameras. I learned what the best features were on every one of them, and was able to effectively compare and discuss intelligibly the best options for the customer. So if I go into Best Buy or Circuit City, why can I not expect someone working in the television department to do the same thing?

There’s nothing I hate more than asking someone a very specific question and having them look at the damn tag. Dude, I can do that myself. And already have. For instance, yesterday, I was in Micro Center, picking up an IDE/SATA I/O controller board for my home PC. I’ve troubleshot the problem down and determined that the root cause must be a bad IDE controller on my mother board. And since the computer I built is around three years old now, it’s a little outdated. It’s still a bad ass machine. I have a Pentium 4, and a good amount of RAM. But you know how quickly technology upgrades and supersedes itself. So my point is that it’s hard to find a socket 775 mother board that still supports the type of memory sticks I have. DDR2 is the new thing.

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I wear sheets and carry a lantern.

Have you ever heard of the Anson Lights? Anson is a small town about thirty miles north of Abilene. There are some lights there. It’s pretty interesting. Seriously though, there’s a dirt road that leads off one of the main roads there, which you can turn down to get to the cemetery. The cemetery runs all the way down this road until you get to a crossroad. At that point, you’re supposed to turn your car around and flash your headlights three times.

Legend is that a woman’s husband ran off with her baby and so she and a search party went out into the field to look for him. Her request was that if anyone from the party found the child, he should signal by flashing his lantern thrice. So when you do this in your car, the baby appears in your back seat!

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