You gotta love hindsight. It is with the perfect vision of hindsight that I look back on my meeting with Allan. In high school, I was meekly reluctant to admit my friendship to the briefcase wielding guy that many considered “the least cool guy in the school”. But now I realize that I had actually befriended the one guy not afraid to announce his nerdhood  from the highest mountain, not afraid to be the only goth at a redneck high school, and not afraid to enthusiastically embrace a bunch of fellow geeks who saw through the whole high school “game”. Jesus once said “The meek will inherit the Earth”, but I think he was misquoted.

Without further ado, here's Allan's tale:

Ah…middle school.
That's where they banned bookbags, so I carried a briefcase. I also  
had rather gelled-up 80's hair.
For whatever reason, something made me take a class called “Art and  
Occupational Exploration.” I'm not really sure why, but it changed my  
life forever. That wasn't because I learned in “Occupational  
Exploration” that I was best suited to a life of bowling-pin setter-
machine repair person or lighting designer, but rather because I met  
these two equally quirky individuals.

Mike and I immediately clicked, I'm not sure why. But we would  
prattle on and on and on and on about Doctor Who. Hell, I would call  
Mike after watching Doctor Who to discuss what we just watched. And  
Jesse, well, he and I read a lot of the same esoteric books like  
Godel. Escher. Bach – which, in the seventh grade, we actually were  
able to make some sense of. So, the trio of us in this miserable  
class made merriment and pretty much annoyed the hell out of everyone  
else. The art teacher was less understanding, and usually exiled me  
to a desk far far away, in the corner of the class. Sadness.

Then there was this girl. Well, secretly, we all probably liked her,  
because she was nerdy and hot. Really really hot. I took it upon  
myself to write homicidal love poetry about her, comparing her to  
Caspar Weinberger and something about severe irritable bowel  
syndrome. Anyhoo, a pesky young man took a shine to my prose, and  
proceeded to give it to her. Gah. Enter Reuben.

The following year, we had a rather unfortunate gym class together,  
whereupon our method of physical activity was to throw rocks at each  
other. Reuben broke my fabulous calculator watch, I broke his  
glasses, and thus began our friendship. Somewhere along the way we  
met Mark, which, I think I met him whilst lying in a puddle of mud in  
my gym outfit. He seemed rather curious as to why I was lying in a  
puddle of mud, and quite honestly in retrospect, I did too.

My high school years would have greatly sucked were it not for these  
people. Hell, I was the only goth kid at hick high, and these guys  
were my salvation. Not to mention, they made an otherwise boring gym  
class rather amusing. Well, apart from me lying in the mud. Mike  
started a band, Reuben played the viola, Jesse pressed record…and I  
needed an axe. I picked up the bass guitar, an instrument which to  
this day I don't play terribly well…but well enough. Throughout  
varied dramatical performances, inhaling green Tic-Tacs as a ritual,  
and other varied sundry things, friendships were forged. Worlds would  
end. Nations would fall. Or something.

Then came graduation. And this odd, peculiar invitation to accompany  
these people to the beach. How could I say no? Worlds would end.  
Nations would fall. Oh, wait, been there, done that. So, obviously  
the next thing to do was to form a band. A band of mythical  
proportions. A band that has NEVER released a single album, but  
rather exists in the passing of mix tapes and mp3s spread all over  
the world.

And here we are.

(NOTE: The following was written by bran new blog collaborator, Reuben Saunders. Tell him hi.)

Portions of the following were previously published in Newstime!!!
Magazine

Mike and I met when we or in preschool or in fifth grade,
depending on whose mother you believe.  There's a mutual childhood friend in the
mix; it doesn't really matter.  Certainly, when we (re)connected in fifth grade,
it was love at first sight.  Mrs Jeffers' class.  Horrible woman, really.
 Uncurious, unkind, unhappy, and had a terrible penchant for mispronouncing
everyday words.  To this day, Mike and I both sometimes say “are-uh” instead of
“are,” and “p'yonsil” instead of “pencil.”

Mike and Jesse lived near each
other (Jesse was also in that unfortunate class), and I think they'd met
already, and after the first recess, none of us could be seated near either of
the other two for the rest of the year.  One of the first things we did was talk
about and voraciously consume cartoons, action figures, mythology, and The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  Jesse had different teachers the next year,
but Mike and I decided to stay together for the children's sake.

Mike and
I had the kind of standard childhood bonding that comes from years of shared
interests, classes, school trips, and other source material.  (We produced a lot
of oddly interesting stuff over the years.  When we divorced, Mike got the
archive, and I got the kids, so ask him.)  Anarchy, zombies, horrible puns,
Monty Python, comics, tv, technology, astronomy, physics, Transformers, pretty
much everything except, strangely enough, music.    Mike was raised rock n'
roll, and I was raised classical.  I'd been playing the viola, and the piano a
bit, for a while before Mike got a guitar.  Starting a band wasn't really on my
list of things to do.

After suffering miserably through junior high (yes,
it was so long ago that it wasn't called middle school), Mike and I geekdorked
our way into high school.  There, we met and gathered Mark and Allan, I think
through a shared disdain for gym class and an enthusiasm for James Bond.  We
were lucky enough to have very indulgent teachers for English, Drama, and
Debate, and they let Mike and me free-associate, essentially, for credit.  We
wrote skits, parodic prose, quoted Python endlessly, and generally assed around
for four years.  Mike and Mark had started a band or two already, and eventually
they ended up with Great Awakening, which had some success, and to which I
contributed a couple of viola lines.

Senior year brought the great
calming that it does, what with senioritis starting in August.  As we approached
graduation, my parents offered to take me and five friends to the beach.  I
asked around and gathered everyone but Josh, who couldn't make it until the
following year, when we did it again.  Anticipating the massive foolishness that
we could enjoy, Mike and I immediately got sugar high and started coming up with
ridiculous songs, like You Can See Our Teeth.  We did this in Mike's bedroom,
which annoyed his parents to no end.  This pattern – large doses of sugar, inane
humor, and parental annoyance – would serve us well as we embarked on the
mysterious voyage that turned out to be Bob.

It was about this time that
Mike really nuked the fridge and started wearing glossy sparkle lipstick,
platform heels, and fringe mini-dresses.  And not the sexy, Tina Turner-Proud
Mary kind of fringe; it was made of dreads.  1980s Whoopi Goldberg dreads.  Like
a hundred giant Sharpies were gutted and dried in the name of couture.  God I
hated those outfits.  Besides, Mike made a very… lumpy woman.  He was a
wheelbarrow full of doorknobs, in a dress.  That's why I had to leave him.  I
didn't mind that he liked cross-dressing, far from it, it's that his fashion
sense sucked.  I couldn't take the lack of aesthetics.  Don't even get me
started on his current penchant for ultra-low-rise ass-less jeans.  You see him
and think, “why are his back pockets pink? Oh, AHH, ECK.  NO.  No no no. Too
flat. Fill the damn things out or stay home.”  Sigh.  Lord love him.  He just
wants the attention.

Mr Schaffer, you have two minutes for your
rebuttal.

1985 brought 6th grade and my first visit to New York. It also brought a strange, seemingly alien visitor to the school I was attending at the time, New Garden Friends School (NGFS). This odd humanoid infiltrated under the guise of checking out the school as  someone considering enrolling. It seemed to me, however, that our tiny private school was merely an adequate place for him to remain incognito while formulating his plans for world domination. This alien had chosen the highly unlikely disguise of an Irish/African/Czechoslovakian  human. Irish Afro-Czechs had once roamed pre-historic Europe in vast herds, but were though long extinct. I made it clear that I could see through his guise and immediately engaged him a solitary duel of cosmic powers. I managed to convince him that our planet would be no pushover to his conquest by turning him into a pop sickle. He got better. His view of humanity now changed, he introduced himself as “Josh” and we declared a truce.   Remaining wary of one another, we kept tabs on each others activities by becoming seeming friends. Occasionally our truce would break down, resulting in further battles. However, I could often subdue him with my “Coat of Blades”. Eventually we decided to work together on world conquest. Throughout 7th and 8th grade, elaborate models were assembled in various basement to explore various scenarios for possible tactical approaches. Although our models based on mass deployment of robot disaster forces and lone assaults by elite bipedal mechanized warriors that spewed flames looked promising, we decided a more subversive route was in order. Winning the hearts and minds of the masses through the entertainment industry seemed like a logical method to employ. So, after some early experimentation as a comedy duo, we decided our best bet was to form a band. Thus was the birth of “Soundbox”. In order to better facilitate world domination, we invented a long and storied history for our non-existent band. Then, all we still needed were songs. We accumulated an impressive catalog of real songs for our fake band, including “Stupid Woman”, “Used to be My Heaven”, “You're My Girlie” and an early version of “The Girl I Love is Dead”. This is the state that the dawning of high school found us in. NGFS opted to no longer have high school while we were in 8th grade, leaving us to attend public high school. Due to our distant residences, we attended two different high schools.  Our plans of domination were momentarily thwarted by this inconvenience. At least until I got my driver's license. When I first arrived at high school, I knew almost no one. However, during 9th grade gym class, I discovered what appeared to be even more aliens that had infiltrated my high school, posing as “nerds”. These aliens called themselves “Reuben”, “Mike” and “Allen”. Over time, I befriended one of them, the one called Mike. I decided that the plan Josh and I had hatched about starting a band  in order to conquer the world was a sound one, and began making similar plans with Mike. Before too long, “Nemesis” was born. We decided that calling the band “Nemesis” may reveal a little too much about our intentions, so it was scrapped. Meanwhile, we began to piece together what would become our band. We added a keyboard player who was a girl I knew from my church youth group who bugged me until I agreed to grant her an audition. She impressed us greatly at the audition, so we had our third member. Later, the best drummer in our class defected from the band he was in to join our efforts. The band, now called “Great Awakening”, had been conceived. Among the earliest songs added to the set-list for Great Awakening were “Soundbox” standards “The Girl I Love is Dead” and “You're My Girlie”. By the time our senior year rolled around, while not having conquered the world as of yet, Great Awakening had done a decent job conquering Southeast Guilford High School, and some of the surrounding areas. During my senior year, I found myself being conscripted into the drama club, and also being promoted from Drama I to Drama IV, thus finding myself, with Mike, in regular contact with the other suspected aliens, Reuben and Allen. This group of nerd outcasts had already amassed as much history together as Josh and I had, and I had long ago determined that they were “like us” and that I must introduce all these freaks to Josh. We were quickly able to absorb them in to our original plans of conquest. By the time graduation came about, it had been determined that Great Awakening would be a mere cover, a front, for our actual plans. A new project would be born, utilizing  “Soundbox” songs that hadn't already been incorporated into the Great Awakening set-list,  along with others that were yet to be written. Around this time, Mike and Reuben formulated the first non-Soundbox songs that would be utilized for the new project, penning “It Was the Dog” and ”What I Stole”, among others. This project would finally gel during a week-long intensive planning and implementation session that was cleverly disguised as a “Senior Beach Trip”, just after graduation. The project would become known as “Bob Spelled Backwards”.

This past Thursday I had all 4 of my wisdom teeth chiseled from my head. Literally. They were all sideways, smacking into my other teeth's' roots and below bone. I was semi-conscious during the procedure, and have only vague memories of the few times I woke up. So, I spent my holiday weekend drinking my food. I finally got up to some bite sized solid foods yesterday and today. Most of the pain is gone, except for one area on my left side. I'm a little worried about it, but i have a follow-up appointment Thursday to see how things are progressing. My dad was in town for the weekend, and Friday was his 70th birthday. It's hard to imagine he's gotten that old. Kinda makes you stop and think. I'm exactly half his age now. For his birthday, I gave him a DVD of the Crossroads Guitar Festival that Eric Clapton put on, a wide-screen LCD computer monitor, and I took him to 4 baseball games over the weekend. That's all for now. I have to go seek out something for dinner that I can actually chew…

If you would've told me when I was a kid in North Carolina that by adulthood all my family's non-Christmas gatherings would take place in Las Vegas, I would've thought you were nuts. But, that happens to be the case. Every mother's day, Mom's birthday, and/or my brother's birthday, we've all gathered in Vegas. It actually has practical reasons, believe it or not. My mom still lives in NC, but she loves Vegas, and goes whenever she gets the chance. My dad lives only about a 2 hour drive from Vegas. My brother is 250 miles away and I'm only 320 miles away, so a half day drive for each of us. I arrived Friday afternoon, and spent a few hours failing to make a profit at gambling with my mother. Then my Dad, my Brother and my Sister-in-law arrived, and we hung out for a bit. My brother wound up getting a room across the street at the Fremont (Mom and I were staying at Fitzgerald's), and my Dad decided to crash with them. The next morning, while my mom camped out at the slots still some more, the rest of us walked up Fremont street to check out a custom car show they were having. This included some nicely customized PT Cruisers, which made me want to mess with mine some. Perhaps some day, assuming I even still drive a gas powered car for much longer. We all met up and headed over to the Rio for their famous Buffet, which we had gone to in October for my brother's birthday, but he missed out on because he had a dental emergency. It was still yummy. Although, buffets are pretty much wasted on me, since I can rarely stomach more than one trip through. But, brother was paying, so I indulged. Then Brandon, Maria and I went thrift shopping with my dad. Everyone found something to buy but me, which was a bummer. I found some things I was interested in, but decided they weren't worth the asking price. This included, at Goodwill of all places, a random plaster casting of what I initially thought might be the carvings from Trajan's Column, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Upon reflection, it seemed more Greek in nature. I thought long and hard about buying it. It was clearly a cast of something else, or an imitation. I decided it wasn't some rare artifact  upon examining the rear and noticing through a fracture in the encasing material that it was mounted on particle board. Sunday featured a family breakfast at the Fitz buffet, then my arduous drive home. Sunday night I watched “Day Watch“, sequel to surprise Russian hit, “Night Watch“. For those of you that like slick special effects and epic story lines, but are tired of the repetitive tripe offered up by Hollywood, I highly recommend them both.

Being an analyst at my day job, I normally like to break everything down to math. This includes my foolproof formula for making money on slot machines. My plan requires some luck, of course. It's mainly a method of maximizing your winnings and being disciplined enough to quit while you're ahead. Well, this particular Vegas trip saw me NEVER ahead. So I had one of my rare losing  trips to Vegas. Usually I break even or a little ahead, sometimes I win enough to cover gas and food, and occasionally I come home with a healthy profit.

I know I said I was going to make a photo post over the weekend, and I may still, but I wound up experimenting with something else. I made myself a shutterfly photo site. From there, if you are so inclined, you can order posters of my photos. Isn't that exciting? I don't know if I get any money from it if you do, I'm still looking into that. I may order some prints for myself. I've been meaning to make some decorations for my walls, and why not use my own photos? I'll stick the link over there on the right in place of the fotolog link I never use any more. Here's the plain 'ol link for you:

http://photobloggins.site.shutterfly.com/

Obviously, I haven't done the greatest job keeping my new year's resolution of updating the blog at least once a week. I have no excuses. I just haven't felt it. However, I do have news of interest to you old timers that have known me for a while. I'll add that as it's own entry in the next few days. I've also sought some collaboration on this from the likes of Reuben Saunders and Mike Shaffer, knowing full well that their writing will greatly outshine mine. I need the challenge and the inspiration, however, and welcome their input, should it ever actually occur. I'll probably add a photography update tonight or this weekend, as well. I've got some good new shots. More is coming!