Bassic-ly me

This time of year, a little over 20 Years ago, my life changed forever.    I'm not guaranteeing this will do the same for someone else but ...I have a perfectly good electric bass that I want to give away - for free. This is why... 20 years ago I was handed an upright bass in my grade 9 general music class in Birchwood.   I didn’t want it.  I hadn’t thought of it previously.  It just happened.  But then music entered my life. If someone told me that day that “you will become a professional musician and eventually teach upright bass at a university level”, I would have exploded with laughter in that persons face.  If someone on that same day told me “If you stick with music and study it at a university level this is where you will eventually meet your beautiful wife that you will have 3 beautiful children with”, I probably would have listened, but still not believed.  You see, I hated myself.  I had zero self esteem. Probably like a good portion of my classmates b

Palliative care - it's a beautiful place. It's not the curtains, the nice pictures on the wall, the items with little gold plaques in memory of, the flatscreen TV, or the free coffee and snacks, or the free wifi, or any material thing in here. Yes, they all help.... the patient and the family. But it's the idea of care.... that is beautiful. It's not about "you didn't take care of yourself now let's try to fix". It's the comfort that is beautiful. It's not about suffering unnecessarily. It's about love and respect of the human form in what may or may not be its last days. It's about allowing a family to take over the kitchen and make pico de gallo with the tomatoes from my mother's home garden. A story that will be told for years. Remember the time.....? It's about allowing a family full of kids and sisters and grand-kids to stay until 10pm laughing and screaming and accidentally hitting the nurse call button...remember th

This.................. is physically the absolute worse I've ever felt in my entire life... It was during a Groove Company gig the Friday after an over 135 hour-in-10-days-straight insane work week including 7 days of travel to Halifax ... it's funny the things we do to ourselves to stay afloat...to stay employed...to stay "normal" ...but it is what it is. I remember getting ready for this gig and Elizabeth said something to me...something I can't even remember now.. ( and neither can she because I just asked her ) ..it was probably nothing...and on any other day it probably would have been fine.. but on this day...on this day....I turned around...walked out of the house ...without a word...if anything came out of my mouth it probably would have been foul, it could have been tears, it may have lead to WWIII ...who knows...either way...whatever was going to come out of my mouth was going to be driven by insanity and unreasonabilityness ... so...I mad

Great Queen song....great sampling by Vanilla Ice so that we can make fun of it today  "stop...collaborate and listen...." ..but it's also just an accurate description of my life right now... I made a drastic realization this week... I'm not super man.  and some days I just can't @$%#ing take it.  I can be weak.  But that's actually not the realization part....I've felt and thought a lot of those things before...but...I always handled it...I was stronger than my weakness.  I was more willing than my feeling that I can't take it.  I was even more super than superman. The realization this week was....it's ok.  It's...O...K.   It really is...even though I'm understandably stressed out at home and work, mentally exhausted, stretched thin, eating more crap, getting more overweight,  exercising less, getting less healthy, being less patient with the kids, cranky, etc, etc, etc I don't have to pretend that I'm OK and nothing is wrong a

This is Saturday...ballet day....lately I've been taking all three kids to Sophie's ballet...sometimes she fights me getting there...Jacob always asked 7-15 times "Can I play a game on your iPod when we get there?"  ....Oliver is obliviously happy... This day was observation day...when the parents come in to watch their kids the shy kids tend to act up and pretend to need thier parents..which is what Sophie did...so she sat on my knee and watched the rest of her class....I had to snap a pic... I used to sleep in a decade ago..I think..I don't remember ...what was I doing 10 years ago?  April 2001..hmmm..right..the Jive Kings...we had just finished winning our 2nd ECMA a couple months previous and things were really cookin..we were giggin a lot..travelling all over the maritimes...making a living playing the bass...what a strange concept now...now I play the bass for fun...and that's not a bad thing when you think about it...full circle... Grade 9...all I

The best musician I have ever played with died this morning. Not just any musician that I've played with...but the one who has deeply seeded intertwined responsibility for creating the majority of my true practical and functioning musicianship. If you've never heard of him...I encourage you to read his story http://www.sonnycaulfield.com/sonnybio.htm If you know him, then you know what an immense loss this is.  My thoughts and prayers go out to his family. The only thing I can offer is an example of what he did for me.  I was 17 when I played my first gig with Sonny was at the Delta hotel in the restaurant - arguably Sonny's "home" since 1986.  Dave Shephard, percussion professor at UPEI, recommended me as a replacement bassist for one gig.  He said, wear a tux, bow-tie, bring your upright bass.  I showed up early, setup beside the piano and then Sonny walked up...I can't remember what he said to me but I knew this guy was the real deal.  My only quest

13 years ago this August I was walking down the streets of Summerside after a dinner theatre performance at the Brother's Two on the way for some drinks with the cast and friends. I was about to cross a street and the light turned red....I stopped....and waited. Just before the light turned green I looked down at the ground and there was a gold chain at my feet. I picked it up - it was a simple box-link chain and an even more simple golden cross. I instantly had this feeling like it was left there for me. You see, the night before I had this horrible dream and foreshadowing of my father's death. Perhaps my mind was on red alert. I pondered just leaving it there so it could be found by its rightful owner but, no one was around so I pocketed it and carried on for my drinks and all but forgot about it for the rest of the evening. The next morning as I got dressed I went to my dresser where the contents of my pockets lay from the night before and there was the chain. Witho

I used to write all the time in my late teens and early twenties - in journals, on scraps of paper, on the margins of text books, in scribblers, in binders, on loose-leaf, on exam booklets, and then on the computer saved nicely in word files - writings....word rants, songs, poems, stories, ventings, angerings, lovings, likings, stuff, deep stuff, important stuff, silly stuff, starts of screen plays, eventual hit songs, love letters - lonnnnnnng love letters, little silly notes, expressions and explanations of actions, feelings, thoughts, desires.... you get the picture. and then I stopped for a while.  I was tired of words.  I didn't have anything to say.  I stopped writing songs.  I stopped writing poems.  I stopped creating movie ideas.  I stopped writing book ideas. Then about 8 years ago I got into the web game, comparatively late - and while I was living in Calgary in 2005 I created my own blog from scratch as a small project for additions to websites I was building for