BLOG: I'm Only Happy When it Rains

Hey friends! Well, I titled the previous blog a Sex Pistols song in honor of the upcoming sale of the concert tickets to them. Its only fair that I name this one after a Garbage song, cause I was eyeballing those tickets too. I’m happy to say that this morning, I scored tickets to BOTH shows!!

So I will be seeing Sex Pistols (sans Johnny Rotten) in October, Garbage in September and Collective Soul/Live/Our Lady Peace in July. Quite a busy concert calendar after saying I was gonna “retire” from going to live shows. Luckily these tickets for all three of these shows aren’t too expensive. For example, I was looking at possibly going to see AC/DC or NIN (for the third time). Basic upper bowl of those shows are $400!!! Upper bowl. Nosebleed sections. Yeah, fuck that. But I scored all of these for well under $100 each. Best part of all… all three shows are FRONT ROW PIT!!! So I will be up close at all three shows if I get there early enough. And I am notoriously early for everything! Always have been. A thing that got drilled into my head by my dad. He would rather have been two hours early than 2 minutes late. I’m now the same way. If I am to be somewhere at 1pm, I will be there at 12:20. If I am not, there’s something wrong.

I shouldn’t be spending cash for concerts like this. Its not like these bands are in my top 10… not even top 20 probably either. But I like em and they each got albums that I love and hit me at a time when I needed em. and life is for the living, so I say go for it. I needed things to look forward to. Plus to get me out of my damn shell! I bought tickets to see Primus, Puscifer and A Perfect Circle for next month last year, but I sold them cause I felt silly going to a show by myself. Now I am increasingly comfortable with that fact. Plus, these bands are for older folks like me. I don’t think I’ll be in a mosh pit at a Collective Soul concert. (I don’t think anyway… we’d all break hips!) “Oh shit! They are playing SHINE! Whoop whooooooop!” FALL. BREAK. CRY. DIE. RESSURECT. FALL AGAIN. BACK PILL. CONTEMPLATE RETIREMENT…

I said a while back I was gonna retire from shows because most of the bands I love I’ve ever seen, are broke up, members are dead… but the main reason is that its too damn expensive now. Even $100 for a show is pushing it for me. I mean, I saw The Ramones and White Zombie together for $25. Metallica for $30. but that was over thirty years ago. Now that same Metallica show STARTS at $450. Forget it. The most I’ve ever spent on a concert ticket was for Paul McCartney, Comerica Park in 2011. I was about 14th row back and that ticket was like $150. I shudder to think what it would cost now. Anyway, I’m excited to have things to look forward to. Now I gotta start burning more day off requests so I can get to these shows. Ah, adulting.

Speaking of music, I had a weird moment coming out of the post office yesterday. I was wearing a Miles Davis shirt. This old dude comes up and says “nice shirt” and we chatted about Miles for a minute. We exchanged favorite albums (Mine is “Tribute to Jack Johnson.”) He goes on to tell me that he used to work for an outfit that helped tour Miles back in the 80s. He even went to Japan with him! I decided to test his knowledge and say, what year did he die again? Was it ‘89? He corrected me and said ‘91, which is right. So I knew he was legit. I shoulda picked his brain more and asked for some stories, but I was kinda in a hurry. Maybe I’ll run into him again though. Small friggin’ world, eh? (Trivia: Next time you watch SCROOGED, one of my favorite Xmas movies, catch Miles Davis when he appears as a street musician very briefly early on in the movie.)

I spent the last few days off from work to spring clean at home. I didn’t get everything done that I wanted to, but enough. The weather wasn’t as “springy” either. So I just kinda fell out of the mood. Mostly took some time off and watched IRON CHEF, drew and I even did the word balloons on what woulda been PLEASANT LIFE issue #4. I’ve had the art done for months now. But since its coming close to the time I gotta upload those pages here, I decided to get it done. No spoilers, but here are a couple peeks of pages to come for that…

Yeah, some big emotional stuff is coming. You’ll see the cliffhanger I got coming up soon. For those that got the physical copies of this book last year, you know what happens. Well finally, you will find out the aftermath. I remember drawing it. I had tears in my eyes as I thought about the scenes. Its a very sobering part of the story. But its not all somber. I tried to inject some fun into the story and dialog. Hopefully you guys will dig the ride.

So today endith the “vacation” I took, its back to the day job for me. I got another one coming up later summer. Don’t plan on going anywhere, but I got cool events to look forward to. Like the concerts I mentioned before… there’s Cap City Con in July, my only appearance for the year. I may still try to Trek to Chicago, we’ll see how sales go. But any more bands I halfway care about go on tour, imma be broke! I always get minorly depressed the day I gotta return to the office, but today I got a tiny bit of pep in my step. I hope I can keep it going!

Thanks for reading! -T