What a babe!

-----Original Message-----
From: nathaniel greer
Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2003 12:00 AM
To: Tony Pierce
Subject: Thank ya' kindly, sir

Mr. Tony,

Thank you so much for linking me. I highly admire your work and it always blesses me to see you in my referral logs. This is the third time you have linked me and I only had to beg one of the times.

No, really, I appreciate you keeping tabs on me. It flatters me to think that occasionally you would read the damn thing.

Also, I enjoyed the big ass photo essay. You are king of the bloggers. Well, the prince maybe. I guess instapundit would have to be the king.

Did you see the Willie Nelson thing on USA tonight? If so, three questions: 1) How about ZZ Top? Has there ever been a better rock and roll band? 2) Did you notice that when Ray Charles started singing, Willie could only step aside and watch in awe? 3) What if Shania Twain brought you a birthday cake?

I hope things are well out there on the west coast.

God Bless,

Nathaniel

Perspective. All you need is a few hours of sleep and you can find yourself overrun with fresh perspective.

When I got home from work yesterday, Wylie was feeling pretty good. I went outside and planted a couple of tomato vines in my garden and he wandered outside with me. Just before dark I went to get us some BBQ and when I got back the boy was having a relapse. It was the saddest thing that I have ever seen. His fever went up to 104 and his head felt like it was going to explode. He was lying very still on the couch. I had the ceiling fan turned on high and his shirt pulled up. I put a cold towel on his head and another on his neck. He just lay there shivering. “I’m told, dadoe. I’m so told.”

We prayed together for God to take his fever away and help him to feel good again, but God didn’t move fast enough to suit me. We had given the boy some Motrin and it did nothing. I thought that we could give Tylenol after two hours, but I was not sure. I tried to call my mom, who is a nurse, and could not reach her at home, on her cell, or even my pop on his cell. They knew that Wylie was sick. Why were they unreachable? I called my sister who is a pharmacy tech. She thought that we could give the Tylenol. Miss J thought we could give the Tylenol. I thought so too, so we gave it. This did not bring the fever down, but it put him in a deep sleep.

I sat beside him on the couch and held a thermometer under his arm while he slept. I had my head down staring at the digital display as if I could make his temperature recede by sheer force of will. This was not helpful to anyone.

So Miss J and I ate our BBQ. We sat and ate and I confessed about school. I have failed. For a third time I have started college and fucked it up. I have to stop going for a while and reevaluate. I have no choice in the matter anyway. They don’t want me around and I don’t blame them. I have failed, I have wasted money, I have wasted time, and I have accomplished nothing.

Then the funniest thing happened. She took my side. She said that she still loved me just as much as when I was a straight-A student. More even. She said that the way she feels about me is not based on my accomplishments. She said that she supports me regardless of what I am doing and only wants me to be happy and successful.

Can you believe that? Perhaps you can, but that was not the environment that I was raised in. I feel like a complete failure. She does not think that at all.

Wylie was still red and hot. We tried to get him to roll over and expose his belly to the fan. He would not move, he would only moan. More prayers.

At this point it was getting late and close to out anniversary. Our tradition is to get out the wedding pictures and reminisce on our anniversary night. We figured there would not be a more appropriate time, and it was better than watching Wylie sleep and wringing our hands.

So we went back to the bedroom and got out the picture albums. Pictures from our trip to Nashville with my parents in the summer of 1996. Miss J and I had been dating for about a month when Mom and Pop invited us to go on vacation with them. My mother loves to shop on vacation. On our first day in Nashville we found ourselves at a strip mall. The girls went one way and Pop and I the other. We stumbled across a diamond outlet. The engagement rings were on sale. Dad let me put one on his credit card. Miss J caught wind of it and I had to give it to her. We got engaged on the sidewalk at an unnamed strip mall in suburban Nashville. My parents were walking behind us. That night we all went out to eat at the Olive Garden, then on to the Grand Ole Opry. How romantic.

Then we saw the pictures of our wedding day. Everyone that is important to us was there. Everyone that we thought was cool was there. My groomsmen were my crew. We all wore white socks with our tuxedoes and styled our hair into the biggest pompadours we could muster. When we marched in to the processional piano we broke out of line, wandered among the tables where the guests were sitting, and converged back at the podium. Miss J appeared at the back door in a white glow. Beautiful. Perfect. Her dad made some speech and Pastor Tim said some stuff and then I laid one on her, big time. The wedding kiss drew whoops from the crowd. Well, it drew whoops from the groom’s side - the side with the redder necks.

Pictures from the reception. My band played. That was my slick maneuver to get out of glad-handing all of the guests, I played guitar and sang at my own wedding reception. We had on our wedding tuxedoes and our white socks and our rock-and-roll- hair and we played some extra loud jams. Miss J danced with her grandfather. My dad danced with crazy old ladies from his church. My hippie brother-in-law danced with every girl in the room. Old people held their ears and murmured in the back. There was a picture of John and Janna Barber eating biscuits and gravy. They were just John Barber and Janna Young then. They would be married about nine months later.

When it was over, the Maid of Honor blasted me in the eyes at point blank range with birdseed. Somehow we found our way to Dan’s sister’s Honda and there sat my best buddy Dan with a lit Camel cigarette waiting for me. He drove us downtown to the fanciest hotel were Miss J and I, now mister and missus G, went upstairs and ordered some steaks from room service, by god. Send us some steaks! Big damn steaks, for we are hungry!

Outside our window Riverfest was going on.

Then we saw the pictures of our honeymoon in New Orleans. We ate seafood and went to bars and listened to music. We shopped and went to the Aquarium of the Americas. We spent a ridiculous amount of money. Every penny of the cash we got at the wedding. I flew on my first airplane. I stood naked in the windowsill of our honeymoon suite on one of the higher floors of the Hotel Monteleone and proclaimed my presence to all of Louisiana. There was not a picture of that.

Just by chance, there were pictures stuck in the back of the album of Miss J pregnant with Wylie, and then Wylie as an infant. Oh yeah, Wylie. I went back into the living room to check on him and his fever had gone away. God had delivered him just like we had asked him to. Shortly after that he woke up in a pleasant mood. He said he wanted to lie in his bed, but when he got in his bed he remembered the mac and cheese that he had asked his momma for four hours ago. The fever had come up and caused him to fall asleep before it was ready to eat.

So my happy little family sat around the living room in my house, at 1:00 in the morning on my sixth wedding anniversary and ate Kroger brand macaroni and cheese dinner. We all smiled and winked at each other. After our bellies were full we went to bed and slept until 10:00 this morning. Wylie woke up feeling great with no fever. I made us bacon and eggs. Whatever horrible bug had him feeling so bad yesterday has been vanquished from our property. Wylie’s visit to Mimi’s is back on. Mine and Miss J’s anniversary date and trip to Riverfest is back on. I am a horrible failure at school, but I have a wonderful family that loves me unconditionally. That is my perspective from the morning after.

When I woke up this morning I thought that today was going to be the start of a great weekend. As late as 1:00 today I thought that things were great and only going to get better. Now they could only get better, because there is nowhere to go but up.

Saturday is mine and Miss J’s sixth wedding anniversary. This weekend is also Riverfest here in Little Rock. I was planning to take the boy, Wylie Allman, to concerts at Riverfest tonight and early tomorrow. Then he was going to go home with his Mimi tomorrow afternoon so that Miss J and I could have a nice Anniversary date. Sunday would be Church and more Riverfest. Monday I was planning to bottle my homemade peach wine that has been sitting in my pantry for a year. That night we were going to go see A Mighty Wind. Tuesday morning Wylie would come home and I would go back to work, feeling revitalized by the relaxing weekend.

I found out at 1:00 that Wylie was barfing a running a fever. I hate it when he is sick. It kills me to see him puny and down. I want to fix him. Make him feel better.

Also it ruins my plans. Obviously I am not going to go to the concerts and leave him at home. Even more obviously, I am not going to send him to Mimi’s when he is sick.

Then I got home to find a letter from school. I have flunked out. No more financial aid will be offered to me until I can pass nine hours in a row with at least a 2.0.

I have not talked about school this semester because it has been bad. Traditionally my grades will go one of two ways. Either I make all A’s or I make all F’s. I overwhelmed myself this semester with too many classes and a new job that required me to work a lot of overtime and do a lot of traveling. By mid-April I had made A’s on all of my tests and assignments, but I had missed so many classes – either because of work or because of exhaustion – that there was no way for me to pass. UALR instructors take roll and they will fail you for missing more than the allotted number of days.

Getting the grades up would not be a problem. I just have to take a small enough load for me to handle and forego some overtime at work. This will likely not happen though, because I am not going to have any money to pay for it. I certainly cannot afford to pay tuition out of my pocket.

But I sincerely hope you have a good holiday.

The Guitar Center in Little Rock is a wonderland of shiny beautiful playthings. They have all kinds of stuff I want to take home, but they also have the lousiest sales staff in the history of the world. They are a lazy, juvenile, uninformed bunch of dolts with rock-and-roll hair and lip piercings. I try to give them my money, but they won’t take it. Consider my last three visits to the store:

About six months ago I got a postcard from Guitar Center touting the latest sale. Looking down the list of sale items, I found a nice PC sound card at a very reasonable price. I could use one of those. So I went down to the GC and strolled past the instruments into the Pro Audio department. I brought along my sale flier just in case. I pointed to the sound card and said, “I would like to buy one of those.”

The salesman huffed and sighed and slithered over to his computer terminal. He punched a few buttons and made a few clicks. Finally without looking up he said, “It says here that we have one left, but it is in the back.”

“That will be great, I’ll take it.”

He said that he would go in the back and get it in just a few minutes. Then he started talking to another customer. After a few minutes I tapped him on the shoulder and said, “I am going to go play some guitars. I’ll check back in a few minutes.”

He replied, “I am going to the back right now,” then he turned on his heels and went through the back door.

After about twenty minutes of playing on several lovely guitars, I decided I needed to get going. I went back over to Pro Audio. As I got to the counter, my salesman came through the door from the back holding not a sound card, but a bag from Taco Bell. I asked him if he had any luck finding it. He said no, but he had another guy still looking back there. I told him I would go back to playing guitars and check back in a few minutes.

Twenty minutes later I went back in there to find him finishing up his burritos behind the counter. He looked at me like he was surprised I was still there. No sound Card. I left.

---

A few months later I went in there with a friend who needed some strings. While he was shopping I got to chatting up one of the salesmen. This was a Saturday about 5:00 in the afternoon. The salesgeek told me that they had not sold a guitar all day long. As a matter of fact, they had done about thirty dollars worth of business all day. “If you ever want to buy a guitar, today is the day to talk us into a deal.”

So I went and found a lovely Taylor Acoustic. The price tag said $1800. “What kind of deal would you like to cut me on this one?” I asked.

“We’ll give you that guitar for $1800”

“$1800 is what the sticker says.”
“Ok, you drive a hard bargain. $1800 cash and I will pay your sales tax for you.”

“I know why you haven’t sold any guitars, you don’t want to sell any.”

“Ok, fine. But this is as low as I can possibly go. How does $1750 sound?”

---

Fast forward to yesterday afternoon. Guitar Center is running a special. Fifteen months no interest on your Guitar Center Credit Card. Dan has one of those. He has wanted to buy some stuff for the studio, so we went over to see what we could find.

Dan went into serious money spending mode as soon as we walked in. He started grabbing snakes, microphones, cables, and anything else that looked interesting. You only get one shot at this “no interest” deal, so might as well make it count. The whole time we are placing all of this stuff in a pile on the front counter next to the cash register. There are two sales guys just staring at us. The only thing that they will say is, “Y’all ready to check out yet.”

Finally they just start ringing the stuff up. At this point we have about $1000 worth on the counter.

Dan says, “Do you have any Mackie M90s.”

“Nope, all sold out.” The salesdolt replies.

“Can you order me one?” Dan persists.

“Yeah.”

“Can you put it on this ticket so it will be on the no interest deal?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you find out?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, we are going to go play on some guitars. Page me when you get it figured out and we will come finish checking out.”

You know what happened. We played guitars until closing time. We checked back with the sales guy twice. He never gave us a straight answer about the M90. At closing time we left. As we were getting in the truck the sales manager comes running out of the building yelling, “Hey wait. Where are you guys going? Are you not going to get your stuff? What is the matter?”

We told him the story. He tried to act like we were the assholes.

Imagine that you are a fat, sweaty, hairy, lazy, introverted, anti-social, sad man. Imagine further that you are married to a beautiful, with-it, confident, sweet-smelling, popular local television personality. This is Miss J. and I.

She keeps a calendar online for me. Being a self-employed atmospheric consultant and paint-picker-outer her schedule is erratic. I looked at it this morning as I do every morning. The entry for this afternoon said, “Go to Party Time 3:00-4:00.”

She called me about 3:00 and said that she was running a little late and might not be home by the time I got home at 4:30.

When I got to the house I called her to see when she would be home and she said she was shopping with a client and it would be a few hours.

About 6:30 I called to say that I had prepared dinner.

Miss J said, “Well, we have not gotten to her house yet.”

“So what then, about 10:00 tonight” I joked

“Nah. I should be home by about 9:30 at the latest.”

She got home about 11:00

Imagine that you are a fat, sweaty, hairy, lazy, introverted, anti-social, sad man. Imagine further that you are married to a beautiful, with-it, confident, sweet-smelling, popular local television personality.

What would you think that she had been out doing?

Dan, since you are going to die in a few weeks of SARS poisoning, stop eating that cheesecake and blog for me, dammit.

Dan recently told me, "When I first heard of SARS, I knew immediately that it would be what I died of."

Well buddy, it looks like the reaper has made it as far as Memphis.

Kay R. Daly in National Review Online

If the consequences for the Constitution weren't so dire, the recent antics of the nation's Democrats would be downright funny.

Whether it's obstruction by filibuster of the president's judicial nominees, or obstruction by flight of redistricting in Texas, these Democrats seem to have regressed to infancy. Temper tantrums, however, are annoying whether deployed as a toddler tactic or as a political scheme, and both mothers and voters have a tendency to take a dim view.

. . . What the Democrats in both Washington and Texas have shown is that when their minority status doesn't suit them, they'll do anything to obstruct the will of the majority — regardless of what damage is done to the constitutional process.

Senate Republicans inside the Beltway and the Republicans in the Texas legislature need to draw a line in the sand and clearly articulate the damage being done to our Constitution, to the voters, and to the legislative bodies as institutions. This must be done over and over again until the message is successfully delivered through all the media noise.

Of course, if that fails, a time-out might work.

You know, the people in this office talk about stupid stuff just like the people in my old office did. For some reason it doesn't bother me as much over here.

Miss J. and I were laid up in the bed last night, watching Countdown with Keith Olbermann just like we do every night. In a segment of the show dedicated to hometown, school age imbeciles, Mr. Olbermann told us about the group of high school girls who were suspended from school for a brutal hazing incident. (Some of the girl’s parents are suing to have their daughters reinstated, despite the damning video evidence against them.) Then he told us about a mom inciting a fight at a baseball game and kicking a child that was not her own. Finally he mentioned the New York baseball team who visited a strip club while on a road trip to play ball in Florida. A parent got them in and bought the drinks.

Now I am no saint, and I was involved in my fair share of tomfoolery as a youth, but these incidents were unthinkable to me. Particularly the video of dozens of high school girls beating up younger high school girls while boys cheered them on and ran the video. I can confidently say that if I had been faced with such a scenario while I was in school, I would have turned on my heels and got out of there before things got that ugly. I know that I would have done so because I did just that on several occasions. The stuff that was about to go down in my neighborhood was nothing compared to what I saw on the video last night. I bugged out not because I thought I would get in trouble, but because my parents had instilled in me a sense of right and wrong. A moral compass. A fear of God. A sense of honor. I knew that a bystander was an accomplice and I did not want to involve myself in such nonsense.

Miss J gave the opposite answer. The reason she stayed out of trouble as a child was that she was afraid that her mom would find out. She said that her mom was nosy and got into everything. “Where are you going? Who is going to be there? What will be going on? Will there be adults there? You had better not lie to me. I’ll find out! I’ll show up and check it out! You know me; you know that I will!”

So I asked Jerusalem if all of this prying was necessary. Not to say that it was not her mom’s business. She certainly had the rights to any details of her child’s life. But didn’t sweet Miss J. have a sense of honor that would keep her away from bad situations? She said nope. Girls don’t have that sense of honor. They are not wired like that. Girls want to be popular and have a boyfriend, not to feel good about themselves.

This brought up a fundamental difference between the sexes. Boys have to be taught honor. We (males) have to have some sort of moral guidelines to live by because ultimately, we can do whatever we please. We are not responsible for anyone but ourselves. Men can set themselves up as the center of their own universe where we only have to answer to ourselves. This is why we need honor, integrity, and pride. This is a big one of the infinite number of reasons why we need God.

What makes women different? It is physiological. They can get pregnant. They have this handy, built in, natural reality check. Do the wrong thing and you might get knocked up. Then what are you going to do? Now you have a whole other person that you are responsible for. You started their life and its continuation depends on you. If you are lucky, you might get some help from the dishonorable jerk whose approval and affection you were so desperately seeking when you got yourself into this mess.

As parents, what is our plan? I am going to let Wylie earn my trust by proving himself to be honorable. I’ll give him room to breathe and teach him to not put himself in situations that would cause him embarrassment. If he has a relationship with his creator then he will know the sort of circumstances he should avoid. Sure, Jesus hung out with the ragamuffins, but he did not participate in - or encourage through inaction - their incorrigible behavior.

Miss J. is going to search his closets and under his mattress. When he gets home from a teenage night out, she will break out the heat lamps and sodium pentathol.

By the way, if I were an administrator at that school where the hazing took place I would expel everyone who could be positively identified from the video, weather victim or perpetrator. I would expel them just for not having the common sense to avoid such an unholy situation. If I were a parent in that district I would demand as much.

Hey Jeanetta, what do you think of your chickenshit Texas Democrats now?
Running Away, eh? You yellow . . .

Note: This post was meant partially in jest and has the purpose of provoking a spirited response from a longtime dear friend. Dearest Jeanetta, please reply with venom, but please do not take it personally.

You have probably heard by now that Katie Couric hosted The Tonight Show this week and got much, much better ratings that Jay Leno has ever gotten. This should tell NBC something. Not that Katie Couric is more popular than Jay Leno or that she is a better talk show host – but that anyone is a better talk show host than Leno. He is the worst. His jokes are simple and often not funny. His interview style is excruciating. You get the feeling that these people would never talk to him in any other setting. My wife refuses to watch him, even if he is interviewing someone she likes. He is simply not able to talk to people in an intelligent and entertaining manner.

If NBC has any sense at all, (and they can not possibly have much, they are still shooting new episodes of ER) they will send that rubber-faced idiot packing and get someone, anyone else to take his place. I can name about seven people off of the top of my head that would be a thousand times better and would likely take the gig. Ok, here goes:

1) Dennis Miller
2) Dana Carvey
3) Jan Hooks
4) John Stewart
5) Anyone named Wayons
6) Charlie Rose
7) James Lipton

As a matter of fact I cannot think of anyone who would not be funnier than Leno.

Well, I said that they would likely take the gig, but who knows for sure. When Leno took over the tonight show from Johnny Carson, it was the most coveted job in TV. Now, I am not so sure. It is certainly not the prize it once was. Jay has sort of defiled it.

There was a skit on Saturday night live once, the first time that Mike Myers came back to host. He was singing a tune in the opening about how wonderful it was to come back and host. He ran into Tim Meadows and acted surprised to find out that he was still part of the cast. Meadows then sang a mournful verse about his long-term contract and how he has not been able to leave. “Why did I sign/ A twenty year contract.” I’ll bet the NBC executives are singing a similar tune right now about their contract with Jay Leno.

Some people have nightmares that they show up for work in the morning and have forgotten their pants. I am not worried about that. I am not going to forget my pants. I think I would notice the wind on my boys. The thing that terrifies me - that I am sure is going to some day happen - is that I am going to show up for work and realize that I have forgotten to fix my hair.

I have thick, course, coal black hair with flecks of gray. I keep it pretty short, but I still have award winning bed head when I get up in the mornings. My hair grows into a natural pompadour; indeed it is the hairstyle that the Lord has chosen for me. It does not take a lot of effort to achieve the perfect young Elvis look in the mornings. All that I have to do is get it wet and run my fingers through it. But until then, it is headed off in various directions at unnatural angles. I have been looking at it for twenty-seven years and it still makes me laugh.

I am convinced that some day I am going to casually stroll into the office to start my day and be snapped into a harsh reality by the sound of my coworker’s jeers and ridicule. “Hey, nice hair! Did you forget to look into the mirror this morning.” That is why I check myself in the rear view mirror every morning as my last act before going inside. If there is a tinge of doubt, I have even turned around at the office door to go back and look. So for I have been lucky. I have only forgotten to fix my hair one time, and I caught it in my morning mirror check. There was still time to run by the restroom (and I do mean run, with my head down) and give it a quick taming.

So far I have been lucky, but my days are numbered.

Today I stumbled upon each of the following items over a period of about an hour:

1) Wristwatch - Missing three weeks.
2) Two CDs - Missing two weeks.
3) Sunglasses – Missing four days.

I have decided to take this as an encouraging sign from God. Things are looking up.


I am at my parent’s house for two days. I feel pretty certain that I have brought along everything that will be necessary to make that comfortable. It is 11:40 Tuesday night and I have just arrived. I am working in Nashville, Arkansas, tomorrow and then Murfreesboro Wednesday. I have decided to crash here rather than drive all of the way back to Little Rock. Some of y’all might not know this, but I am from the country. Even by Arkansas standards. I drive a truck. I don’t tuck in my shirt. To buy groceries, we had to go into town. My folks are still there.

So here I sit at Momma and Pop’s and it is night and I am sitting up in the bed typing away on my laptop. Also I have a cold. As a matter of fact, I feel generally shitty. Now that I think about it, perhaps I should be in bed.

I configured my laptop for SBC dialup today. That will make it a little more effective to travel with. The only problem here in the back woods is that there is no SBC number in the area. I am going to have to dial long distance to connect. For that reason, online activity will be spotty for a little while. (I ain’t using a credit card, so connectivity will be on momma and pop’s nickel.) Actually I should say that online leisure activity. I am converting two office networks from Token Ring to Ethernet this week. They had better come back online pretty soon after I get there or it is going to be a long couple of days.


Day 2 10:12 PM

Having a cold makes me feel very sleepy and generally lousy in the late afternoon, more so if I do not sleep well the night before. Today I resolved that by crawling up on the pillow top mattress at my parent’s house and having myself a three-hour tour. Yesterday I was at home and home has no time for naps. Starbucks was my only hope. So I ordered who shots of espresso in a large cup (I think the sizes at Starbucks are Benini, Da Vanci, and Mussolini) and had them fill the cup the rest of the way with the house blend. As you can likely tell from last evening’s entry, I had some trouble sleeping. Finally I turned out the light at about 1:00, after reading the newest National Review cover to cover. By 1:30 it was raining like pouring piss out of a boot. Hail, thunder, brimstone, cats, dogs – no sleep was to be had.

If you have not seen Pootie Tang yet, you really have to. Pootie reminds me of a young Fatnathan. Roaming the streets of the big city back in the rough-and-tumble early ‘90s. Searching out the forces of corporate greed and whooping their asses with my big black belt my daddy gave to me.

I watched the season finale of Alias last night. I love that show because it is the logical extension of the greatest and most ridiculous television show of all time (and my personal favorite), Dallas. Remember the time that the Dallas writers painted themselves into a corner and had to “reveal” on the finale that the entire season had been poor sweet Pammy Ewing’s dream? Well the Alias writers got themselves out of a storyline jam last night in similarly cheap fashion. At the end of the season’s final episode they set up the next season by having the main character wake up in the middle of the street in Hong Kong, phone home, and discover that we have flashed forward two years, she has been missing, and has no recollection of anything that had happened. Amazingly, neither she nor her (now married) boyfriend had aged a day.

Now I hear that Aaron Sorkin is leaving The West Wing. Sure he is a lefty, but he is a badass writer, and the show is going to suffer because of it. I doubt NBC will cancel it anytime soon. I saw the other day that E.R. is still on. Who knew? I am sure that no one has watched ER on purpose in six or seven years.

I just found out that I am going to Alaska this summer. Juneau is Miss J’s hometown. She has not been back since she came to Arkansas for college ten years ago. She has been invited back to participate in her best friend from High School’s wedding. We had pretty much given up any hope that I would be able to go with her when God dropped the money for my plane tickets right in our laps. I have never visited a state that does not touch Arkansas. The only time I have ever flown was from Little Rock to New Orleans for our honeymoon. This is going to be quite an adventure for me. I hope to take my laptop and tell you all about it.

But for now it is just another week at the old grind.

In honor of Dan's new blog, I would like to rerun a post from September 17, 2002.

My best buddy is named Dan. Dan is a big fat sweaty lazy hairy musician, just like me. That is why we hit it off so well. For a day job, Dan learned how to break in to cars. He got himself a cell phone and an ad in the yellow pages . . . instant locksmith career. Now he spends most of the day sitting in front of his computer, surfing EBay for sweet bass guitars. Did I mention that Dan is much smarter than me? He talked his wife into letting them get DSL instead of cable, and then he just stole cable from the neighbors for free.

We came from the same town and I knew who he was, but we did not hang out. When I was in ninth grade my old man gave me a guitar for my birthday. It was just what I had always wanted. After I had exhausted all of Pop’s knowledge I wanted to learn more about pickin’ and grinnin’. I went to the high school band director and said, “Mr. C, where could I get some guitar lessons.” I was expecting him to send me to some college professor, but he replied, “You should talk to Dan the Man!”

I said, “But Dan is into heavy metal. Besides, I thought that he was a bass player.”

You see I was a little bit scared of Dan because (a) I did not really know him (b) He had long hair and wore slayer T-shirts and (c) He hung out with The Great Whoreior – Corey Shepherd.

Mr. C said to me, “Big Nate, He is the pest guitar player around. I know you two will hit it off.”

Turns out Mr. C was damn right, we did hit it off. I gave Dan ten bucks a lesson for three weeks. At that point we had exhausted all of his knowledge also. Then he went back to playing the bass and we started jamming as peers.

Dan lived in a tiny little trailer house with about 27 brothers. His room had two beds in it. We would sit on the beds facing each other and play for hours. All we knew were Cream and Zepplin and AC/DC and Guns N Roses, but we would rock them all night.

With Jody Evans and the Silver Crickets we put the rock in rockabilly.

We joined the music department of various universities and learned something about music.

With The Electric Church we put the funk in dysfunctional.

One time we crashed an open mic coffee house at a college. We played an avant garde improvisation for thirty minutes while two guys we had recruited from the visual art department smeared paint on a huge canvas and we all freaked out. Finally this little black kid in the front row got fed up with all of the weirdness. He jumped on this drum kit that was set up for the next act and started laying down a beat. Daniel and I accepted his challenge and rose to the funk. Another black kid jumped up, grabbed a mic and started freestylin’ some rhymes. We brought the crowd to their feet.

Next we started a jazz quartet with a drummer and a horn player. We could never come up with a name, although we had some good ideas. (Fugitive Squirrel, Clearly Disturbed Beavers, Jesus Chrysler, The Colostomy Bags, My gay uncle, Purple Monkey Discharge, The President's Penis, My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult, The Ed Fuqua Experience, The Underwear Men, Pissing Razors, Spiked Fondue, Jazz Ass) So I told the guy who owned the bar that we were the Daniel Schoultz Quartet. Dan has never forgiven me for this. One day we were playing this reception at one of the colleges and several members of the music faculty came and sat in with us. These guys were world class jazz musicians and we were clearly poseurs along side them, but it was a compliment that they even jammed with us.

With the Mark Currey Band we molded contemporary worship music and alt-country into a polysynthesis that only a Roach could despise.

We have been playing together at church for the last few years and that is where the real music is at; getting to worship the King along side my best friend while using this amazing gift that God has given to us. Jamming with Dan on Wednesdays at church is my most cherished memory.

Last Sunday night we got to rock the Decorative Arts Museum, opening up for a band that was much better than us. Dan booked the gig, so what did he name us . . . The Nathaniel Greer Trio. Vengeance is mine, this saith the Dan.

The unthinkable has happened. Hide the women and children. Daniel has a blog.

Welcome. At last a unknown world of evil has come to the surface. Here you will know the horror of the home service security industry. My friends, you will be shocked by the TRUE accounts posted here in the future. Also there might be some stuff about hot chicks.

http://theasthmaticlocksmith.blogspot.com