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Fuck you, Bud Cole.

Days Like These

Last night I watched Alan Sparhawk with Trampled by Turtles play Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. I was very happy to watch it from my couch instead of going to San Francisco, mostly because I dislike outdoor festivals.

Mimi Parker has been gone for almost 3 years. For nearly a decade, her songs "Holy Ghost" and "If I Could Just Make It Stop" from Low's album The Invisible Way may have kept me alive. And I was devastated when she passed.

Earlier this year, Alan mourned his wife publicly with the release of his album with Trampled by Turtles. It's a gripping, raw album about the pain of continuing on. Watching them play it live was intense.

They ended with "Holy Ghost" and it took on a whole new meaning for me. Alan sang it, which was different. But now it wasn't about the struggle of a person who couldn't control their life. It was about finding purpose after life changed without warning. And given how quickly Mimi passed after announcing her diagnosis publicly, I always wondered if she knew a decade prior when she wrote this song. "I don't know much but I can tell when something's wrong. And something's wrong."

I don't know that I've ever had purpose. I really just wanted to make it stop. It's taken me 7 years to make it even slow down. Now the question is what's next and how do I get there.

This is the worst best bass.

It's an absolute piece of garbage someone spent $300 on pickups and electronics and then sold for way too little. The local MGR set it up really well and I bought it. It is not an enjoyable bass to play. It sounds like a million bucks and the setup is good despite the feel not being pleasant. But not every decent playing pig with lipstick has songs in it. This one has STANK.

The riff I wrote has ended up on my main player, a Guild Starfire II. That's where it's gonna stay. But holy riff machine, Batman! This bass has IT.

Stranger Than Fiction

After a number of days of procrastination, I got to looking at a book, and I got really angry. Not at you, at myself.

I already have two books I haven’t opened, The Mindful Way and the DBT skills workbook. And now here’s another book and I’m kind of afraid of it. The scared inner child doesn’t want to do it.

At the same time, I have that conversation with my wife last Saturday swirling through my head. Particularly the part about how this life just hasn’t turned out the way I wanted. Those were her words. Another thing she said (though I alluded to it last session) about CPTSD was that she “doesn’t know what it's like to have CPTSD, but that I don’t know what it’s like to be married to someone with CPTSD.”

I’m angry she’s been coddling me for nearly 20 years. And that I don’t know how she does it.

I’m angry at how in-touch I can be on a moment by moment basis and yet be completely unaware of how the world interacts with me.

And I’m angry at how I get stuck on tangents and seem to answer everyone’s questions sideways.

As mentioned, I bought a bass yesterday. It is not a refined instrument. It’s an entry level 2x4 with strings. It also has pickups in it that cost more than I paid. So it sounds amazing. The setup is decent. It’s not worth sinking any money into. But it has a function. It’s a training ground. Because when I pick up my other basses, they're super easy to play. Either I’m gonna break it in because I play it so much or it sells and I make some money. I listed it for sale Wednesday night. Like I said, the pickups cost more than I paid. If it sells great. If it stays, great.

So through all of this, I didn’t start working on my resume yet. Instead I’m thinking about cleaning, eating better, losing weight, and trying to take a more holistic approach than I’ve had the bandwidth to do in any year of my life prior. And I may have started gaslighting myself into revisiting religion. Because this is the timeline:

Friday - layoff

Saturday - argument

Sunday - reconciliation

Monday - new toothbrush

Tuesday - new year

Wednesday - bass lesson/therapy session/bass buying

Thursday - nothing. Then the boy won an award at tutoring for all the work he did over the summer. They gave him a trophy. Then we went for Mexican food. And there were a ton of bad jokes and my wife glared at us sitting across from her with the same cackling laugh. After the boy went to bed, I had a gummy and listened to new releases including a mono mix of Coltrane's “A Love Supreme” and the new Bill Laurence album “Lumen”. He’s the pianist in Snarky Puppy and it’s obvious he’s had an intense amount of classical and jazz training.

Friday - well it’s Friday now and I’ve been writing this for an hour. I didn’t mean to spend that long but I had to get it out.

I don’t think I want to do the new book. Not because I don’t want to but because I think I’m not ready to. Maybe we should revisit some of the moments that may have been concerning in the past and we should talk about more now. Maybe working through it with new perspective makes for easier answers. Instead of uprooting the root causes of trauma and possibly sending me down a path I’m not ready for. It’s not really repeating the grade, it’s writing a pedagogy book on the grade. Of course, if you say we should do the book then I’ll do it.

Last thing, Thursday is both Yom Kippur and my birthday. This whole thing started with me being angry that I’m gonna be 48 and need to go find work again. And then it’s Yom Kippur and it’s not the first time I’ve gone to services on my birthday. I haven’t fasted in many years and I’m certainly not fasting this year. At least I can eat and play this behemoth of a bass and not be miserable or frozen or both.

Bonus Pic:

I guess it's time to start writing again

So I got laid off today. AGAIN.

We moved here 7 years ago and I've been laid off 3 times. Once for COVID and twice for corporate downsizing.

Tonight, I watched "Stranger Than Fiction". And like Will Ferrell in the story, I don't think I'm in control of my own destiny. I don't have a narrator anymore but there's some bullshit going on.

This week I confirmed my diagnosis is Complex PTSD. I got a referral to a therapist who specializes in EMDR. We took band pictures. Progress had been made for the first time ever. I was on the precipice of making a huge leap forward. And the Mets actually won.

And then I got laid off and all of that stopped. Karma? The slow arc of history turning towards good but not for me?

So what to do now? I'm gonna cut down my bass lessons to every other week. I'm going to stay with my current therapist because this is the time for stability and she's fantastic. I'm gonna do what I need to this weekend, rewrite my resume and cover letter on Monday, and by Wednesday I'll start applying for jobs.

I wasn't ready to make this transition yet. I felt like I needed to ride it out into 2026. People turn to god when they have nowhere else to go. God is dead. He was a literary device. There is nobody coming to save me, or kill me, but myself. But I'm not in control either.

Either this shit is gonna finally break me, or I'm going to break through.

Only time will tell if we stand the test of time. (For posterity, this is the worst lyric ever. Sammy Hagar sucks.)

"I'm going to stay with my current therapist because this is the time for stability and she's fantastic." I wrote that above. And as I was proofreading this it occurs to me that this could be a cosmic shame to get me to stay with my therapist. You couldn't have told me any other way?

Sigh.

Famous last words indeed LOL

Famous Last Words: I Might Be Done

As witnessed through pictures, I've bought a lot of bass gear in the time I've been in this band. I think there's 2 pedals that are the same as when we started. As I placed that last pedal on my board on Friday, a sense of completion hit me. This could really be it. Oh sure, i could always get another cabinet. But it's completely unnecessary.

Even more than gear buying/selling, I think I've reached the end of gear forums. There's just nothing for me to talk about there. I can see hanging around for the rare times people post new music. But there's just no desire to interact with these people. I mostly don't like them and the good interactions I do have are few and far between. It's always been this way but I also felt like I had things to learn. I don't think I know everything. But I know about as much as a someone can know from being "forum educated" and not have a degree in woodworking, physics, or electrical engineering.

Now part of this is medication. I had an increase last week. And for the first time this weekend, I've started to clean up a little bit. I need to clean a lot more but I'm starting to not feel stuck. That's huge for me.

And while I'm still going to Twitter and Facebook, I have removed every last political account from my feeds. It's either baseball, stupid memes, music, or stupid memes about music. Anything political that comes up gets the "show me less of this" treatment. There's no reason to make myself spiral over this stuff any longer.

I'm proclaiming a goal. I want to read one book in full before the boy's school starts in mid-August. That's like 6 weeks. Usually I stop after like 3 days and I have piles shelves of half read books. I'm gonna read something light and fun and take it from there. One book instead of trolling the internet this summer. I can do this. It's not like I don't like reading. I just need other things to read that aren't old guys arguing on the internet about why everything sucks.

More on Influences (Moron Influences)

Yesterday I wrote about Allen Woody. Today I've been wrangling with myself about influence.

This all started yesterday morning when I took the dog for a walk. I listened to "Out Louder" by Medeski, Scofield, Martin, and Wood for about 30 seconds before I decided to listen to the first Gov't Mule record instead. Warren Haynes opens the record with "Grinnin' in Your Face" and the bass and drums come in for "Mother Earth". It's a crushing sound. I felt like I was back in college hearing it for the first time.

So I went on a mini tour of influences, talking myself through it for the past day. I only listened to about half of the first Mule record yesterday so I finished it today. Then I moved onto the self titled God Street Wine album. This evening, I listened to Mule's "Dose" record and then "A Go Go" by John Scofield with Medeski, Martin, and Wood.

The Mule records are mind-numbingly good. I've always held them in high esteem, but listening now with "bass ears" has really elevated them. Woody has more of a flatwound tone on the first album and is much brighter on the second. He's a freight train and the song is always moving and developing because he's making it go. This gives Warren and Matt (Abts, drums) the opportunity to take chances and play more freely. And as a guitarist, you don't get a bigger tone than Warren Haynes. He's up there with Jeff Beck and Slash.

God Street Wine's self titled album from 1997 is the best recorded document of the band. And yet, it's a very different GSW than the one that had become my primary influence. Being a quintet, and one where yes there's a lot of jams but it's also intricate music written by very schooled jazz head musicians, each person has a role to play. Then there's this record which falls more in line with The Black Crowes and late Beatles than it does the Steely Dan/Frank Zappa/Grateful Dead roots of the band.

So Dan Pifer's playing really hits more like Marc Perlman, bassist in The Jayhawks. He might not always play the exciting part like Woody does, and he certainly doesn't have that giant tone. Instead, it's a clinic in playing the right part, having the right tone, and serving the song.

The last album tonight was "A Go Go". I've written before about Chris Wood and how I think he's my primary influence on bass. I actually think he fits in very neatly between Woody and Dan. Even though he's playing jazz, and Scofield's guitar fills in the space of a vocalist, there's a lot of ground to cover. He finds that right tone and groove and lays it out for Medeski and Scofield to fill the space.

Next up is to mine some more influences. I've had a lot of anxiety thinking about this tonight and I think it'll be good for me to do some deep dives. Besides, May is going to be a helluva month for new records anyway. I won't have to look for them.

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