January 15, 1999.

When I was seventeen, I wanted to be in a band.

Sure, everybody did. This was in 1993, a couple years after Nirvana hit it really big and inspired a whole bunch of kids to take the guitar into their own hands. Somebody once said that only a thousand people bought the first Velvet Underground album - and every one of those people started their own band. And a generation later, Nirvana took it to the suburbs in a major way.

Not to knock on Nirvana. I think that they're a brilliant band, and well worthy of imitators. But the point is that when I was seventeen, I wanted to be in a band. I learned how to play the drums & rehearsed a few simple songs with my friends before it fell apart, killed by inertia and incompetence. I was left with an unsatisfied itch to be punk rock, a year's worth of drum lesson experience, and a lingering resentment towards the later band Savage Garden (that was our name first, damn it!!).

All of this was gradually buried by years of doing other things. But the Boy has a four track and a hankering to play with Little Spider. I interpolated myself in, and voila! The Boy and the Wildly Incompetent Rhythm Section was born! Well, in our minds at least. Right now the Boy's writing songs and I'm planning the album art. Something involving small dogs, I think.

Idyllic, slack ass day with the Boy. Work up late, caught a matinee of Shakespeare in Love, ate at the Green Mango and generally lived like we hadn't a care in the world. Doesn't bear delving into details - most good things are diminished by description. Really.