Where am I?

Hello again. I am choosing to restart this blog once again. Hopefully I will put more time into it and do something worthwhile this time. But for now I'm merely announcing the re-beginning, the re-imagining, of Spinning Wheels. The wheels are indeed still spinning and their my damn wheels so they mean something.

Quick update. Psyched about The Band. That's Black Hole Caravan, my band, of which I'm been a part since about Aug. 2009. We just had our first show, playing a 40-minute set Jan. 19 at Superhappyfunland near downtown Houston. Went very well, despite the absence of our bassist (stuck working that night on late notice) and a true singer. I say true because Sylvester, our lead guitarist and primary song writer, provided vocals on three of the sing songs we played; the others we performed as instrumentals. I was more than pleased with the outcome, especially for our first show and my first time behind the kit on stage since picking up drums in Aug. 2008. The going was slow for a while as far as practice and improvement, and I still need to practice more often, but suffice to say I can keep a steady beat now, playing both righty and lefty set-ups.

The other cool bit of info is that we have a second gig lined up already. Today Sly found that we'd be a part of the "We're all Doomed" fest at the White Swan. This he lined up through connections with a friend's band, also slated to play the March 20 event. I feel like this gives us plenty of time and a good chance to finally fill that singer position.

Not much else to report. No full-time teaching gig yet and subbing is going slow so I'm back to work for Ed A. Wilson, Inc. while still working p-t night shifts (and Saturdays) for CarMax.


Currents:

Listening: Violent Revolution by Kreator. Awesome through and through. Intelligent, poetic, scathing lyrics with expert songwriting. This is about as heavy as you can get and still be this damn catchy. My favorite track is "Replicas of Life," seven-and-half minutes of what I'd describe as "epic thrash metal." If I could play any style of music, this would be it. I'll be seeing these guys March 28 at The Meridian, I'm really looking forward to it.

Reading: "Don Quixote" by Cervantes - don't know if I'll finish this. Only two or three chapters in so far.

Recently read: "The Castle" by Franz Kafka. A twist ending to a book that doesn't really have an ending upped my opinion of this one, which I finally finished after starting three times and hadn't picked up since about Thanksgiving. Still, the metaphors used here are insightful in their application to daily life and the themes remain contemporary and universal. Not sure yet which I liked better out of this and "The Trial." After finishing "The Castle," I finally went back and read the tail end of "The Myth of Sisyphus" by Albert Camus. The last part of this essay is an appendix concerning the absurd in the works of Kafka, so I held off on reading it until I'd read those two novels. The main body of "Sisyphus" is remarkable and something I connected with deeply. I highly recommend it.