Life as a Washed-Up Ex-Eff Beeeeeee

"Oh, I thought you guys had broken up like two years ago," said the friend of the girlfriend of my ex-roommate, riding the Blue Line en route to work, coffees in hands, I-Pods in ears, en route to work in the city.

When you get a guitar thrown at your head on the small stage of the Mutiny for the crime of standing up from behind your drums and trying to lead the audience in a show of handclap solidarity, you realize that a. this band you've been in for 5 1/2 years is no fun anymore, b. the differences between you and the bridge-burning guitarist transcend mere "musical differences," and c. there's more to life than stupid punk rock music nobody likes anyway outside of a self-contained little secret club of a clique treating music like Star Wars Action figures preserved in boxes for future e-bay sells.

The record mogul (also pissed because he thought I ruined the musical careers of The Worst for sitting in on guitar with them that same night) tells me they will license our "work" and that he thinks we have a good shot of making lots of money in commericals. He also is deluded enough to believe anybody will give a damn about the band in two years, five years, even thirty years. We're not a long-term investment. We were junk bonds from the beginning, and if there's any future for our records, it will be in the thrift-store bins of 2010, right next to Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass and Nancy Wilson. All I now is that I have no faith or hope of seeing a nickel from the thousands of dollars I spent on it, on vans, drumsets, gas, etc., and definitely not from some fucking commerical. Please.

I don't really think about it or even miss it. To be honest, I'm glad to be rid of it, of all of it. I have no real regrets; we did everything I ever wanted to do with it, and anything more would have become (ugh) a career. Most of it was fun, but the first 2 years were way more fun than the last 3 1/2, and after those first two years (especially after Nervous left), the fun slowly deteriorated to that sad band of drunks some of you saw at the Mutiny, and nevermind if it was the best, most receptive show we had done in a long long time. The whole thing felt like a chore. For sanity's sake and the perservation of making the good music, I wish I could say that said players were really just nice guys once you got to know them, and that their stupid thug behavior was really just an act, but sadly, it wasn't, and why the guy with the most to lose from ending this would destroy it so thoughtlessly is a question for somebody much smarter (preferably with experience in psychoanalysis) than me to answer.

So now I work a lot and don't go out all that much and when I do it's not places where I'll be recognized by anyone, especially anyone familiar w/ the band in any way. I watch Bears games on Sundays with old Florida friends. I go to work and get paid. Haven't done a talkshow since May. Resgined as columnist from T.B. Listen to nothing but "Hot Stuff" by the Stones and "(You Got) The Gamma Goochee" by Gamma Goochee Himself. Entertain thoughts of starting a band that would just be nothing but fun/funny/dancy (getting people to dance again at shows instead of standing their thinking of pithy comments to make to your friends) and thoroughly disinterested in all the crap that destroyed the fun of the FB's circa 01-03. Hang out with Sarabird and avoid beer.

For right now, I'm the dude Biafra addressed in "Life Sentence," and I like it. Most of the people who "stay a child and keep [their] self-respect," i.e. old punx, make me think of the guys in high school who were still in Boy Scouts. The thoughts then were "Dude, most kids were smart enough to give that shit up after Weeblos, and you're still doing this. Dressed like that?" There's a correlation here.

It's time to move on, and where that is, I don't know yet, but it's the right direction and, unlike the band, it's not floundering according to the spasms and tantrums of a puking musical combo. I accomplished what I wanted here, and had a lot of great times in the process, but it's done. D-O-N-E. The drums sit in my living room in six pieces with a mailbasket full of hardware, and that's where they will sit until it feels right to do something else. (Unsurprisingly, it's not like anybody's beating down my door for me to play drums for them.) That's all I know for now.