See, I just know that the minute I step in the shower, or go run and errand, the UPS guy is going to show up.

So the trick is finding things to do that don't take me out of the apartment or require that fresh-scrubbed feeling, I guess. I already made up for skipping my practice pad workout from yesterday, which is kind of fitting, I guess. It was today, way the hell back in 1977, that I took my first drum lesson. At least I'm reasonably sure it was today. I hung on to my first copy of George Lawrence Stone's Stick Control, which is one of those books no drummer should ever be without, and the date "11/7/77" was scribbled on the first page. It's possibly that I didn't get the book on the day of my first lesson, but if it was a week earlier, it would have been on Halloween, so it seems semi-reasonable.

Anyway, it's been a long time. I have some mixed feelings about how my drumming "career" has come along. It's not that it hasn't gone the way I had hoped, because it has, to a frightening degree. It's just a matter of whether those hopes were ambitious enough. On the one hand, I now know what it would have taken for me to have established a serious full-time playing career, and looking back, I don't know that I was ever prepared for that. On the other, I feel like I chickened out on giving it a try, because I'm still learning that, if you're not quite sure if you can pull something off, trying generally doesn't hurt unless you're skydiving.

I'm definitely satisfied with where I am as a player, even if some of my friends can play circles around me. Those guys have dedicated most, if not all, of their lives to their playing, and I haven't. The upside of that is that I've never had to take a shit gig just to get paid, and that is important to me. Drumming is still more fun than work, and I don't want that to change.

Right now, I'm at a peculiar crossroads in that circumstances have dictated that music is my primary, non-unemployment-benefits source of income at the moment. Yet I'm not pushing hard to get gigs. I've got some things planned, sure, but I'm still holding out for some manner of full-time job. This has some strategic merit, in that two projects I'm involved in haven't started hitting their real "revenue potential" yet, and they should soon. A third project is just getting off the ground, and I haven't quite figured out what I'm going to do with the solo acoustic side of things. Until those four things start to play out, I don't really know what I can commit to, and at the same time, it's not so much that I would have to give anything up if I got a "real" job.

If history is any indication, pieces will fall into place for the better, but if they don't, I think I have enough experience now that I can nudge the ones that are closest.