Dear Corwood,

You are the rockingest. That guy sucks doggy doo.

LOVE, me (with lurkers support me in email approval by everyone who counts).

Thank you, everyone. That includes the lurkers.

You are the rockingest. That guy sucks doggy doo.

Until I read them, I had no idea that these would be the words I have been longing to hear. Now, of course, I know this and revel in them. Thank you.

go hug and kiss that beautiful kid of yours (and the loverly wife too, while you are at it). The kind words you had for me last spring are coming back at you in the sweet girly words I know and love.

doggy doo. My mom would be so proud.

I'm supporting you publicly, my friend. But I also sent you an email with a story about some other music weasels.

Didn't manage to get medical clearance until late this afternoon, but I now have a note from my doctor saying I can get paid again. If I could have made it until Thursday it would have been four full months on disability -- but I'm glad I'm going back tomorrow.

David, thanks for the Steely Dan link last week. I actually enjoyed this part more than what you quoted:

S is for Searching for Steely Dan, a novel about a disillusioned writer who gets dumped by his wife and begins a hopeless search for Steely Dan. How the hell could I possibly accentuate both the implicit and explicit comedy of that premise?

(For non-Dan/Burroughs fans the band took its name from a dildo in Naked Lunch.)

As for the part about the Walter Becker video game proposal, it was funny (if rather inside humor), but I got a kick out of it mostly because I read your post right after reading about this game. Don't remember what I was looking for when I found that guy's blog, but I thought Corwood would get a kick out of the game. Or if Emmett's a budding geetar player it's a birthday present waiting to happen.

Should go to bed, after all it is a work night!

Corwood, that is BULLSHIT!

I thought Corwood would get a kick out of the game

I do! Thanks for linking to that. Expect an email back from me shortly (I just now checked for the first time since yesterday, and lordy did I get a lot of emails), and congrats for getting back to work!

So, my wife just called, and the guy who fired me from the band yesterday left a long, rather sweet apology in our mailbox along with a gift certificate to Waterloo Records. I'm starting to think that maybe the asshole is me.

Is the gift certificate worth more than the cost of a SXSW wristband?

I'm starting to think that maybe the asshole is me.

Boo on that. I suspect neither of you are assholes and that combining with others to do the music and make the art is difficult and can bring out frustration and unkindness in people sometimes. But mostly - I am personally tired of adults, be they friends, co-workers or whatever, who do unkind/rude/stupid things and then do the note/e-mail/voice mail apology thing later and expect that everything is fine. If you screw up to the point of needing to apologize to someone for it - you need to do it in person.

I am totally projecting, sorry. (I got stood up on Saturday night and got a voicemail apology Sunday morning. SCREW THAT. No, we are not cool. No, I am not free this weekend. Jerk.)

Uhm...I am enjoying mixes! I am loving me some buffista-made frankenmixes. That's what I actually meant to say.

I haven't had a chance to download any mixes! (work computer is too old) but I am so looking forward to it. !!!

Is the gift certificate worth more than the cost of a SXSW wristband?

Heck no. But it's thoughtful at the least.

I got stood up on Saturday night and got a voicemail apology Sunday morning. SCREW THAT. No, we are not cool. No, I am not free this weekend. Jerk.

Good lord. I'm somewhat flabbergasted. What kind of dipshit would stand you up? Right-thinking men should be serenading you with slightly-sarcastic-but-mostly-sincere indie rock ballads and thanking their lucky stars you'd even consider spending an evening with them. Although this board may have people thinking otherwise, hot indie girls who know their shit are an all-too-rare phenomenon in this wicked world of ours.

On the apology, my wife made some excellent points to me last night. For one, I kept coming home from practice and saying that his lack of experience in organizing bands is glaring, and had led to my awkward role as permanent 2nd banana guitarist. He's a novice at this, she said, and if he really thinks this is his big break, he's going to be second-guessing himself constantly up until he plays the show. She also pointed out that I never seemed to be having fun playing his music, and was planning to quit, anyway. She said that I'd used the "exercise in humility" line several times in front of her already. She's a wise one, y'all.

I think the main things that pissed me off were the timeliness, which led to me being humiliated in front of y'all and other friends after announcing the show and now having to say "oh yeah, I was kicked out of that band," and the betrayal I felt from setting my ego aside to help the guy, even modifying my approach to the guitar to accommodate him and, at his request, sticking with the band after I'd indicated that I would just as soon leave.

But these things are transitory. He said that his label was giving him a hard time about having a second guitarist because his band is supposed to be a trio and further mentioned that he didn't feel comfortable with our disparate guitar sounds, which I should probably take to mean that as much as I try otherwise, when I play electric guitar, it's going to be snarly.

Anyway, he's basically a nice guy, which is why the sense of betrayal I felt was a bit more augmented than it would have been with musicians I've played with who are obviously self-obsessed assholes. And speaking of self-obsessed assholes, I have a few rules of organizing bands that I try to follow, but those are hard-learned rules from my 19 years of playing in bands, and I don't know why I should lose my shit just because someone who doesn't have my experience has violated a few of them.