(PT 2) Don’t Wanna Carry This Thing Just For Fun

In part one I briefly mentioned that I started dating someone. This “someone” would actually become my ex-wife and the mother of my daughter. I want to avoid saying much about them because they are still my family and out of respect for my daughter and her mother I don’t want to I guess “go there.” I will relate some of the events that happened. Suffice it to say that after the relationship with Jess, I entered into an all-out sprint to the relationship finish line with my ex-wife who we will call Maggie. Maggie and I were simpatico. We were the same levels of weird, the same levels of drunk, and the same levels of rock n’ roll. So we started playing music together and just being general miscreants around town at night. This relationship evolved into us having a child, Margot. At this time, I experienced what I will call “Hell Week” or the week that drastically changed my life in a way that no other week has before or since. Like the famous Lenin line goes, “there are weeks where decades happen.” I don’t want to compare my little Hell Week to the Bolshevik revolution, but it certainly was a turning point in my life.

The story goes like this: I knew something was going on with my balls. I know that sounds funny now but in a second you won’t really be laughing. One of my testicles had just become rock hard all of a sudden. This came at the heels of my driving up to northern Illinois with my dad to bury my last surviving grandparent from either family’s side. It was sort of a final nail in the coffin for my mother’s family, the respected patriarch of the Greatest Generation now gone, the 50 and 60 year olds who still refer to themselves as his “kids” left wondering what to do. I left the funeral posthaste and sped in my dad’s truck all the way back to Murfreesboro where I googled my ball symptoms and chugged whiskey and smoked cigarettes as Web MD revealed to me I was now a cancer-haver.

I went to the doctor and he joked that when people come in diagnosing themselves they’re usually wrong. It was just funny that I was spot on right about the cancer. We had a good laugh about that. Hilarious shit. So surgery was scheduled for two days later and I kissed goodbye to my tumorous nut.

It was this same week that we discovered we were pregnant. So dead patriarch plus ball cancer plus new baby on the way sort of made my head explode. Thankfully I will say that this experience actually propelled me to become a slightly more responsible and forward thinking person. The cancer made me humble. And it showed me who my true friends were, as many shrinked away from the fear that I might die. The thought of having a child made me want to grow up and be more responsible. I don’t think I really accomplished that, but it definitely altered my mindset. The death of my grandfather and the coming birth of a new child gave me some sense of purpose, that I could maybe carry on the legacy that my grandfather had of raising a family and working hard and blah blah blah yeah that didn’t fucking happen

We eventually got married and in lieu of a honeymoon we moved to Washington DC to start a new life with Maggie’s career. I sold all of my musical instruments except a guitar and a bass, a practice amp. Nothing else. I sold my upright, my fretless, my amps, my accordion, my saxophone, everything. It is truly one of the greatest regrets of my life that I quit playing music for three years because the effect that it had on my mind, body, and soul was devastating. The time I spent in DC as a professional meme creator were some of the darkest, most depraved times of my life. I had the darkest thoughts at this time. I was the most depressed at this time, the most bitter and sardonic. I was drinking and in addition to drinking high gravity craft IPAs I was vaping dabs daily. This “crack weed” as I always liked to call it caused me to hallucinate on occasion. One time I spilled a beer all over my computer on the stuff. Another time I started packing all of my earthly possesions into the stairway closet because I thought that Nazis were coming for me. I wish I was making this up. It was this time period that I would stay up all night and then wake up late and make memes all day, pick up my daughter from school and cook dinner, make memes all night and there was nothing more to my life. I enjoyed the scenery and mechanics of DC. I love city life truly, and DC is full of history and grandeur. It is one of the only places that makes you a little patriotic despite yourself.

My meme career ended as quickly as it began when someone reported my page and it was taken down. No more money coming in from bong and dildo posts. And soon the rest of the career dried up. No more copywriting or ghostwriting for brands, no more shoutout rotations, no more group chats. The meme game was done with me, and ironically at that time we were gearing up to leave DC and head to Chattanooga for a big new job for Maggie. This was the plan all along: cut your teeth in DC and find a nice place to settle down and raise the kid. So we did.

We moved to Chattanooga and in the interim we lived in a dank basement apartment that smelled like mildew, had no natural light, it was a real shit show. Bugs, you name it. We called it the temporary apartment. It was horrible, but we soon bought a house and I started working on getting it ready to move in. We had to renovate the kitchen and bathroom which was expensive. But we got the house for a good price and it was a lovely little 1930s bungalow in St. Elmo. So we were happier than in that nightmare apartment. But I was still drinking. And I couldn’t find a job. I had no idea what to do with no memes and no music and no thing to my life. So I was panicking and cracking under the pressure and then it all unravelled.

COVID hit, and although I knew she wasn’t happy with me before, being stuck together in the same house cause Maggie to resent me in a way that I never thought possible. It wasn’t long into 2020 that she absconded to her sister’s house and began making plans for divorce. Obviously, it took me longer to comprehend and accept this. I thought I could fix it if I just got skinny and stopped drinking and got a job she would love me again. It doesn’t work like that. But yadda yadda lots of bad stuff happened and eventually we got divorced. We had gotten a dog, Murphy at that time, and I got to keep the dog and the Fender Hot Rod Deluxe and a lot of furniture. Maggie got the nice carpet and the bed. It was a spit shake divorce. Once I accepted it, we were both happy to be rid of each other.

BUT! I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a major thing that happened to me as a result of this divorce. It wasn’t so much the divorce itself that was making me contemplate suicide. It was the prospect of having no prospects. It was the day that I went to look at a house for me to rent. I was looking at something around $1,000 a month and what I was quickly finding out is that you can’t rent a shithole in drugtown for $1,000 a month. I had no idea. And so I was looking at my life with no job, no money, no house, no skills, no friends, no nothing. And it caused me to seriously consider blowing my brains out. Maggie was leaving to go see someone (we had both started dating again while still living in the house together. she had been more successful than me and it absolutely killed me) and I stopped her. I told her I was making plans to do something bad to myself and I didn’t think I needed to be alone. We dropped the kid off with a friend and she thankfully took me to the hospital and probably saved my life. It was here that I hit rock bottom and here that I began to rebuild my new life without Maggie or memes and where I decided that if I was going to live on planet Earth, I was going to have to drastically change what a pussy little bitch I was and I was going to have to grab life by the shaft.

A doctor diagnosed me with MDD over a big tv screen and prescribed me Lexapro and Abilify. The first night I took them I violently threw up. It was the demons inside of me not wanting me to get better. So I kept taking the drugs and a week later when my parents came to help us move out, I was cool as a mf cucumber. I moved into a beautiful new house that I still luckily live in to this day and that is where my new life began.

I spent the first few months struggling through grad school while I worked digitizing VHS tapes in a big warehouse. It was a fun gig, I would honestly probably kill to do that again. I saw crazy vintage commercials and porn, home videos that stretched from birth to college graduation. But bigger things were calling me, namely a digital marketing job at a medical supply company. This was a salary. This was a cubicle. This was nice clothes every day, meetings, emails, the whole corporate thing that I thought I wanted to do.

So I played the part and drank their little Flavor Aid and soaked up everything I could. The CEO knew a lot about leadership and took a shine to me. We did a podcast together and he taught me loads of useful stuff he had read about leadership. Unfortunately, my tenure there kinda ended when I decided to stand up for some of the women in the office against some sexist and just general misogynistic attitudes from the men in leadership. It backfired. When pressed, the women in the office denied having any issues with sexism and frankly threw me under the bus after I went to bat for them. It was misguided on my part but the conversations leading up to me addressing the issue included all of the women in the office supporting my decision. This was an important lesson in corporate as lying is not only encouraged in corporate, it is necessary for survival.

They threatened to fire me for “highjacking the meeting” but instead I stayed on for another month while I looked for a job. I got hired at a very hoighty toighty hotel company in town to do their marketing. This was a mistake. I should have never come to this place because the damage to my heart and soul and to my career has been basically unfixable. The leadership at this place was cutthroat. They would stab you in the back. They would lie about you. They would blind copy your emails to whoever could damage you the most. Everyone was looking over their shoulder at everyone else. A year and half in and I became a target. My new boss fired me within a week of his new charge. I realize now that he was just cleaning house to install his own people. They told me I was making “little mistakes that added up” and that was enough reason to get rid of me. I got a severance package and left without much fuss.

My personal life during these three years was even messier than the corporate life. I had turned into a little fucking whore for dating apps and bars. I was going out every other night just trying to find cute girls to hook up with. And I was succeeding. Something was in the air after COVID. I think after being cooped up thinking the world was gonna end, everyone was ready to be open sexually afterward LOL. I won’t pretend to know the psychology behind it but I was certainly ready to explore different kinds of partners and relationships in the wake of my divorce and was really enjoying my freedom and having a full time job with money and benefits.

Of course, this pleasure seeking lifestyle led me down a path of sleeping with some pretty terrible people who didn’t even like me. This was very damaging to my soul and it took me a long time to realize that the pleasure of sex wasn’t worth the emotional torment of reckoning with your feelings about having it. So it was during this time I had many partners and also played in a band called The Claw.

The Claw was another traumatic nightmare. The bass player, Dave, scared the crap out of me. I always thought he was gonna blow up on me or get violent with me. And he would blow up on everybody. I joined the band during the end of my marriage, just before COVID, and after lockdown we were rehearsing for shows in 2021-2022. Dave was a former cokehead who had now become a weed terpene dictionary. He smoked like an ounce a week with his girlfriend and his nose was always stuffed up. He used Afrin to unblock it which just exacerbated the whole thing. He had a huge dirty red beard and long red curly hair he would tie into a pony tail. He would wear black band shirts and like….. cargo shorts??? With long striped socks and shoes with pot leaves on them. I truly hated the way this man dressed and I wanted to flame him every time for looking like an 8th grader trying to find his mom at the Warped Tour.

Dave was an accomplished bass player and had some great ideas. The band was working great except for the fact that Dave would choose one person to lambast and when his life was not going well, he would hone in on this person and make their life a living hell by criticizing their performance. He first did this to our original drummer. Dave and the singer pushed this guy so hard he finally just quit the band. And the angry outbursts and rants Dave unleashed on this poor kid were hard to watch. We got a new drummer, Dave’s best friend, and so the ire quickly shifted to the new singer, Trey, who was also very headstrong and opinionated like Dave. I really liked Trey and still do to this day. I won’t say it was easy to work with him, but he has an incredible wealth of musical knowledge that spans across the best genres and the best decades. He also has a powerful rock voice and he can play the drums like a mother fucker. So really I have a lot of respect for Trey and watching Trey and Dave go at it both in the rehearsal space and in the group chat was rough. It wasn’t long before the tension caused Trey to lose interest and he quit showing up to practice. I was charged with settling up with Trey and we started auditioning new singers.

That’s when we found Shawn. Shawn was great. He had a great voice and an amazing stage presence. He was cool and attractive, young looking and fit right in. So guess where the ire shifted? That’s right, it went toward me. Dave started being very critical of my guitar playing and started accusing me of whispering things under my breath about him. Does this sound at all like a FUCKING PARANOID COKEHEAD CRAZY PERSON. Sorry. I remember one time we were playing a concert at the local arcade. I only had like a $10 bill so I put it in the change machine and started passing out quarters to the band so we could play games. Everybody was excited and it was gonna be fun and I was happy to put a $10 in the machine for us. I had a good job and it was not that much money. Dave was highly offended that I was offering him money, even though it was just quarters to use as tokens for the machines. He slapped the quarters out of my hand and walked away. I was so fucking confused. But this was Dave. He lived life like it was out to get him and he had to show life how mean he was so it would leave him alone. I wonder if that ever worked.

It all culminated in a series of events that more or less ended my relationships with a large chunk of the Chattanooga music scene. This was unfortunate as I truly liked some of these people and thought that we were friends. What happened here at the end of the Claw I felt was very unfair to me and was hurtful. I felt I had spent years working on my reputation in the scene, and I felt like my personal decision to leave the band came with the price tag of my friendships with The Claw’s associates. It went like this: one day Dave hung back after everyone in the band left rehearsal. I was in the kitchen just standing there probably drinking a beer. He gets in my face and starts like angrily whispering at me about how he knows I don’t like him and he knows I’m whispering bad stuff about him and that I better fucking stop or else blah blah blah. And then he flicks my hat. Which I will never forget. My fucking signature dad hat that I’ve had since before I was a dad. He gets in my face and puts his dirty little finger on it and flicks it. So that’s when I decided to quit the band. He disrespected me and frankly scared me a little like he was gonna get violent with it. I always thought Dave had the capacity for violence and I would be lying if I said we didn’t discuss violence against people pretty regularly. I was always under the impression it was a joke.

The decision was made by Shawn and I that we would leave the Claw and form another band with the two of us. We had formed a strong connection and I had even let him start living upstairs in my house rent free for a while. This was a mistake. I made a lot of mistakes at this time and I think this begins the spiral that leads me here. But regardless, Shawn and I messaged the group chat and said we weren’t feeling it and that we were out. The drummer for the band, Chance, who you will recall is loyal to Dave, asked me as a friend if I would consider playing the two shows we had booked and then being done. I agreed, which again I know now in retrospect was a huge mistake. You should never play music with people you resent. You should never play shows with a band you have already broken up with. Let them deal with the fallout. That is worth more than trying to force similar magnets together. So it was at these two shows that our resentment for each other really grew. I did something childish. They had a whistle they were using for a percussive sound during one of our songs, kind of a calypso thing. But Dave was blowing the whistle in everyone’s face and he was drinking and just thinking that was hilarious. So I pretended I wanted to blow the whistle at people too and asked to borrow it. When he gave me the whistle I took it out back and threw it over the fence. They later asked for it and I just said “you were being annoying with it so I threw it over the fence.” This is probably what made them hate me now that I look back on it. LOL

So after the band broke up I started working on a new project called Dead Beat with Shawn. This never really took off but it was a good start for me finding my sound for the current project. The unfortunate part is that during this time I was drinking pretty heavily and after our first show I went out to a local bar. I saw the drummer for the Claw, Chance, and sensing this tension growing between us (I thought we were still friendly after I left the band, turns out we weren’t) I confronted him. I asked if we could talk and he said “you can fuck off.” And if you know me unless you’re a girl, if you tell me to fuck off I’m probably gonna proceed to make your life a living hell by just talking at you until YOU fuck off. And that’s exactly what I did. I just went in on Chance about how he was pretending to be my friend online but secretly hated me and I kept asking “what the fuck did I even do?” and saying stuff like “sorry I quit the band!” and saying stuff about Dave. So he finally got out of the beer line and left the bar and shamefully, in my drunken rage and I walked after him. That was a big mistake and I really should have just left him alone. So I started yelling at him down the street like saying “I just wanna talk! Can we talk?” and he started filming me like I was gonna charge him with a knife or something. It was stupid on his part to start filming me like I was some kind of threat. He’s like 6 foot 350 lbs and I’m 5’3”. But when I say the man is popular and well liked in town i meane JESUS this guy is popular and well liked among the musicians in town. He drifted away from the Claw and it went on the backburner as he started playing with a band called the Terrestrial Troubadours. This was made up of some people I thought were my friends, but he soon soured them against me somehow. I remember being at a bar and saying hi to the Troubadours singer and she just gave me that look like i don’t know you and i don’t give a fuck who you are and walked right past me. A similar thing happened with another local band, Havoc. They cornered my new drummer at the bar and highly encouraged him to stop playing music with me. Like they’re in the Chattanooga music fucking mafia. Of course we laughed at this forever but it highlights the fact that something shifted against me because Chance must have told them I did something awful.

It is ironic that Dave was kind of the one who instigated all this with his aggressive behavior. Anybody in their right mind would quit a band where they didn’t feel safe. I don’t think anyone ever understood this part of it. They only knew about me and Chance fighting at the bar that night. But I watched the Claw as they found new members and a new sound. Shawn secretly rejoined the band and I saw this as a major betrayal as we had quit the band together. I continued Dead Beat without him but the other members of the band had secretly joined a band with Shawn. I dismissed them and kinda sat on my hands as I decided what to do.

That is when I decided it was time to form a project that was just centered around me: my ideas, my life, my story, my ideologies, whatever. I didn’t know what to call it, but I found a spunky little Gen Z drummer with a funny name and a tumblrina girlfriend and I somehow thought this was gonna work. He brought in his friend on bass who was just miserable at the instrument but a fun guy to hang out with, and we started Pinch Hitter. It went ok. The drummer was decent but Jesus he played too much. Just fill after fill after crazy fill with no regard to the music or lyrics. He was difficult to record but fun to jam with. The bass player was hopeless. I just had to basically put his fingers on the right fret and pray he could use his ears enough to listen. His incompetence sabotaged more than one of our concerts and I think bringing him on was a big mistake. This iteration of the band ended when tumblrina started getting involved with the day to day. Gen Z drummer had LOGGED HER IN TO THE BAND INSTAGRAM to take videos and he saw no issue with this. Tumblrina was very sensitive to drinking and she hated my habit of 3-5 Coors at the gig. She always offered to drive us home and I always got very offended by it. Finally at our first big show she was hassling me about drinking and driving and the show wasn’t even over yet and I wasn’t even drinking that much. So I blew up on her and I don’t remember what all was said but I basically said she was annoying and makes everything awkward and I wasn’t gonna play by her rules or live life according to her wishes.

So I told Gen Z drummer boy I had a fight with his gf and we thought we could fix things but we couldn’t. To me, she was insufferable. To her, I was unbearably cruel. We could have coexisted had she not gotten so involved with the band. I believe that. I won’t speculate about what all this means but I will say as he exited the band I started forming some new plans that I thought would finally make a rock band work. Shamefully, I didn’t even contact the bass player about the band transition. I should have texted him, but I just assumed he was out along with the drummer as they were a package deal. I do regret not talking to the bass player about this. His callout post about me did seem like I had hurt him. But MOTHER FUCKER MADE A CALLOUT POST ABOUT ME!!! FUCK THAT!!! FUCK YOU YOU TERRIBLE FUCKING BASS PLAYER. I hate when people just cosplay at playing an instrument. Like you’ve watched enough Youtube videos to know the motions but you have no idea about tone or notes or feel or groove. Just cosplaying.

So I formed a new version of Pinch Hitter. I would be the only true member and all the music would come from me. No negotiating, no collaborating on song titles and album titles and artwork and all that shit that slows the band down. It would be a singular vision and anyone coming on board would be a hired gun that I could hopefully develop a long term relationship with. I found that relationship in a drummer named Seattle Gage-Chavez, and Seattle plays with the band to this day! Truly Seattle has been an amazing asset and a great friend and wonderful influence on my life. He is a bright shining light in the darkness and I hope he knows how much I deeply appreciate his presence in this band.

So finally for the first time in this story, something is going right: I have a band made up of really good players who are highly motivated to play my music. I’m getting booked on bigger and better shows and the hype is growing. I’m writing awesome songs and the recordings are sounding amazing. Rehearsals are professional and tight and productive. The marketing is working, the artwork is working. and then BOOM.

Andy dies.

That mother fucker Andy. Who has followed me around my entire life being my little protege. I had known about the addiction for years. He hid it from everyone while we were playing music together, but after I moved to DC he confided in me that he was buying research chemicals off the dark web with bitcoin. We discussed this in an earlier blog. So yeah I’ve told the Andy story but I will just say that this man’s death was so devastating to me. Not that it was a surprise. He had been through rehab 7 or 8 times. He was a prime candidate for dismissal from life by God’s little demon Fentanyl. And it got him. And it hurts to this day that I couldn’t save him. And I cry for him. And I think of him every single day because that’s how important he was to my life. Even in the depths of his addiction I was always his friend. I would always let him ramble nonsense to me. I would let him stay here and even when he brought the devil stuff over here and used it in my driveway I still forgave him. And his parents wouldn’t let us in the funeral. And they didn’t recognize my face when I walked up at the visitation. And they just treated us so mercilessly during Andy’s death that I don’t think I can ever get over it. And nothing’s gonna fix that. They ruined that once in a deathtime opportunity to say goodbye to my fucking best friend and I don’t think I’ll ever get over it. I hate them. I hate them for that.

So now it comes to today. I’m clearly battered by the events of my life and I have all but given up on trying to make my existence compatible with this reality. Most days it feels like the two cannot coexist. That the transparent page of my life lines up wrong on the graph of the events of history, and as the world spirals one way I spiral into a far distant trajectory alone and unsupported. My primary issue now is that I cannot sustain my life with money. No jobs have hired me in two years of applying fervently. I work part time and I pick up jazz gigs, but I have learned this month that it is not nearly enough. It is killing me and sucking my bank account dry trying to be a musician full time. I need to either pivot or die. But I don’t want to do anything else. I don’t enjoy anything else. I’m not good at anything else. My dad gave me money and begged me not to kms for another month. I agreed and now I’m looking into some kind of therapy although I haven’t had much luck up until now. My family is kind of “intervening” on me now and they are all threatening to call the police if I try anything. So I’m bound again to life. They truly will not let me die. And that’s ok. I suppose I understand. They think they love me. I’m not sure anyone understands what love is. I’ve certainly never been able to receive it in my life even if it was offered. I guess I never believed it was real. And my divorce showed me that. And my relationship with my parents and my sister showed me that. And the dozens of broken hearts and paved-over relationships showed me that. And it hurts people when I tell them I see life this way, that I don’t trust a single other person enough to call them a “partner,” that I don’t believe humans have the capacity for true love, and that everyone will eventually leave you for something better if it comes along. This has been true in every instance of my life. Possibly the one thing I can say for almost certain is that you can trust people to act in their own self interest. It’s a bleak worldview, I know, but if you read the events of my life up to now, maybe you understand why I think this way.

I have been hurt by life and by God. I don’t believe God is real but if he is real He fucking hates me and I don’t blame him. Why did he make me? If I wasn’t supposed to be here why am I here? Why am I so different from my family? These are questions I’ll never understand. I don’t know how I ended up here so broken, like my song says I’m a “short fat divorced dad, bitter, depressed.” And truly that’s how I see myself now. I quit drinking alcohol six months ago and it has had a profound effect on my spiritual and emotional health. I took a vow of celibacy 5 months ago. And in those first few months experienced a lot of clarity around sex, women, and relationships. But now I feel very socially empty, unloved, awkward, unconfident. There has been a cost to this spiritual growth which is that I’m significantly less fucking COOL. Whatever. I’m so broke financially, I don’t know what the fuck I’m gonna do. I’m so broken by all this shit I don’t even know what the path forward is. But this is my life in all of its horrible glory. And that’s my story up until now. Who is to say how it will end, but it just feels like it’s already gone on for so, so long, doesn’t it?