I just got back to Chicago after taking a road trip with my father.   It wasn’t a vacation–We had to go to central Florida to transform my grandmother’s apartment into a collection of boxes.   Over 36 hours, we traversed most of the southeastern United States and went through the bulk of Otis Redding’s discography.  I broke up the listening with a couple of Silver Jews CDs, as lately the band’s been unable to get away from them for more than a few days. (We were even moved to try our collective hand at “Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed” at our last show.  Not sure if we’ll be bringing that out again any time soon, though…)

As a result, I decided to respond to this experience with a rather David Berman-inspired poem–the first I’ve written since high school.  Enjoy!

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For those of you just tuning in, I’m currently in the process of researching various subjects for the play I’m about to start writing.  One of these subjects is the director and cinematographer Gary Graver (1938-2006), an assistant of Orson Welles who went on to a storied career in TV documentaries, direct-to-video movies, and a lot of porn.  Right now, it’s hard to explain what Graver has to do with the other things I’ve been reading about (which include the history of modern Kenya, Bill Clinton’s bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory in 1998, and the life of Arthur Rimbaud), except to say that he provides further evidence of how surprising and endlessly fascinating our world can be.  You can read my essay on Graver after the link, which has some more cool pictures.

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Not a lot of people know this, but when I’m not playing drums, I’m secretly a writer. I indulge the habit a couple times a week by writing movie reviews for a friend’s site; when I had downtime from the band over the last two years, I was writing a stage play, which I recently finished. It’s a love triangle/stoner comedy set several hundred years in the future. (No, really. Drop me a line and I’ll email it to you.)

The rest of the band has been writing a lot of songs lately, so I’ve had time to sneak away and start making notes for the next big thing I plan to write. I usually come up with characters by writing short stories about them in other situations, and I just finished one about a young man at an Amtrak station. If you’d like to read it, it’s at the link. (more…)