Tag Archives: band practice

Tom’s Wrist Slash

Tommy's Wrist

Coma was supposed to have band practice today. For whatever reason, practice was canceled, so Tommy and I talked about meeting up to jam anyway. Soon after the conversation, the outside temperature dropped 10 degrees, and it starting raining. So I said “Maybe we be jammin’ another day”.

Later, I got a call from Tommy urgently needing assistance because he slipped while chopping open some coconuts at his house. I collected gauze and other bandage material and drove over to his house.

The wound looked like a mouth had formed where his thumb meets his wrist, carrying a lazy expression of slightly parted lips. The mouth drooled red fluid, and by the time I got there it was mostly done drooling and spitting, so long as Tommy kept the mouth closed.

The whole thing was quite the bummer considering that if we had band practice or if I decided to jam, the coconut knife-slip never would have happened. Plus Tommy could have comfortably gone to yoga without any fears of wounds opening up during down-dogs and side-planks.

The story is that after 3 hours in the waiting room, the doctor finally began to look at the wound, tied a mask on to take a closer look, and blood shot straight out.

Stitch Wrist

While Tommy was semi-irritated about the incident for short-term reasons, I’ve been thinking about the unfortunate location of the wound, and the eyes that will draw conclusions when seeing Tommy’s scar for the first time.

The Train Car Jam Space

Train Car Jam Space

For about the last year, this is where I’ve been practicing with my mates. There are rows and rows of empty train cars, and we pay rent to play music in one of them.

It’s the weekend, so that means I’m back in Albuquerque for a couple of days. Today Tommy and I jammed; Tommy on drums, me on bass. I think it’s been about 6 months since he and I worked on some of my ideas. Sometimes I feel fresh and ready to rock. Other times, I realize I should have brought my allen wrench set, having left my bass in the freezing-cold train car for over a month. So, the entire jam session was laced with a lot of fret-buzz.

After that, we went to Noel’s grand opening for her make-up studio.  The majority of interaction involved sipping wine out of styrofoam cups and talking to parents about how making a living with music is dying unless you are somehow an artist who is independently marketing-inclined, or already at the brandable status of U2, Nine Inch Nails, or Radiohead.

I thought this article was fascinating about how the internet ruined music.

Never trust anything that bleeds for 5 hours and doesn’t die.

Sliced

Today I went to band practice and Will didn’t show up. After an hour of Dustin, Tommy and I standing around in the dreadfully cold practice space, we parted ways.

I worked the Skinny Puppy show tonight at Sunshine Theater. I saw Will there, and talked about how mad I was that he didn’t show up to practice. Then we smiled a lot about I-don’t-know-what and I again remembered how hard it is to stay mad at Will.

While washing beer glasses during my barback duties, I sliced my finger on a broken glass in the sink. It wasn’t a bad slice or anything, but I found it strange that it didn’t stop bleeding for a good 5 hours. My band-aids refused to stay on, so it’s possible that somebody got a lip-full of blood among beer sips.