The car wash was all by hand. You vacuumed out the cars, then drove them through the car wash, while people washed by hand. Then you pulled the car out of the way of the exit and proceeded to hand dry it with a couple of other people. When the car was dry, you would wave your towel to let the customer know their car was ready. You would leave the keys in the ignition and they just got in and drove away.

There was an older guy that worked there. He spent his nights doing drugs and giving himself tattoos. He had recently given himself a tattoo of a needle going into his arm. These were not tattoos done with a tattoo gun; just a sewing needle, dipped in ink. Early into my working there, He pulled me aside to give me a bit of a pro tip. He told me, if there was a customer that I wanted to hit on, the way to do it is after drying the car, wave your towel, but “accidentally, out of habit”, put their keys in your pocket. When the customer comes out, they realize their keys are not in the car. When they let you know, you say, “oops, I put the keys in my pocket out of habit” and then you run the keys over to them. At that time, no other employees will be near and you can hit on the customer without anyone seeing. That way no one would see you get turned down.

Soon after he told me this, a lady with a new burgundy Lincoln Continental pulled into the car wash. The car had blacked-out tint on the windows and the back window said, “Incognito” in brush script letters, in a slightly different maroon than the car. She was wearing very short cut-off jean shorts, where the pockets hang below the cut off and a white tank top, with a bikini top underneath. I was smitten immediately, which is not really saying much at fifteen.

I drove her car through the car wash. We got done drying it, I waved my towel and walked back to the bay. Then she called out that the keys were not in the car and I gave my co-worker a quick glance as I pulled the keys out of my pocket, his jaw nearly fell off. I said, “sorry, it’s a habit” and headed back over to give her the keys. I was generally pretty shy, but in that moment, I had zero fear. I knew what I wanted. I knew I needed to know this woman. I have no idea what fifteen year old me said, but I imagine it was something along the lines of, “Just in case this is the only chance I get, can we go out sometime?” She was very sweet about it. She asked me how old I was. I told her I was fifteen. She said, “I’m twenty-two, you are too young for me”. Then she threw me a life line. She said, she respected my game and was willing to hang out as friends and maybe way down the line, who knows. I quickly accepted those terms and she gave me her number and address and invited me to come over that night.

My co-worker was beyond shocked when I showed him her number. He said, “That tip has never worked for me!” Shocking.

I had a drivers permit at the time, but not a license. I had to ride my bike to her house, which was four point two miles away. I learned that night that she had already finished college and was working in her chosen profession. I learned that she owned her own house.

I have always been one for people to open up to very quickly. She told me she had battled cancer since she was a little kid and was surprised to still be alive and that she did not expect to live much longer. She told me this in a happy way. She had long accepted it as she never thought she would make it out of childhood.

We were a great team right off the bat. We hung out most nights, went to a lot of concerts together and we drove around at night in her Lincoln blasting mostly Whitesnake and Great White.

Later that summer, I turned sixteen. She took me out to dinner for my birthday and Iet me drive her car. I do not know if I have ever felt cooler than driving her car, with her snuggled up to me while we blasted Whitesnake and cruised the scene.

Shortly after this, she got a boyfriend and I started dating another older lady, who was in the military. It was not long before life got pretty complicated. I got my girlfriend pregnant and we got married. My wife was pretty jealous by nature, so all my female friends just fell away.

My wife and I bought a house. I was still in high school and spent weeknights working at a factory from 4pm-1am. I spent the weekends making up for all the lost time of the school and work week, changing diapers, playing with the baby, mowing the lawn, household chores and so on.

As high school was ending, so was my marriage. I started trying to find a way to contact my old friend. This was the eighties and when someone moved, they had to switch numbers as all we had were house phones. A friend gave me her new phone number. My wife was out of the house while I was I packing up to leave. Before I left the house for the last time, I decided to call up my friend.

I told her my marriage was ending and asked what was going on with her. She too had purchased a new house. She was dating someone. She invited me over to see her new house and her new piano. I asked for her address and when she told me, I said, “No way! Just hang up, walk outside and look north”. We lived three houses away from each other, so only two houses in-between us.

I walked over to her house, we caught up for a while, then we did not see each other for a few months as I was going through the divorce process and she was in a relationship.

She called me one night and told me her relationship had ended. She had just purchased a red convertible and asked if I wanted to go out in her car like the old days. We went out to dinner that night, then drove around in her convertible and cuddled and talked on her couch for a bit. I was not even thinking romantically, I was just so happy to see my friend again.

The next night, she asked if I wanted to go out again. We ended up mostly staying in. She played some piano for me, then she wanted to dance. It was now nineteen eighty-eight and I was eighteen. She asked me if I had heard the new song, Wild Thing, by Tone Loc? I said no, so she put on the cassette and we danced in the living room. After that we found ourselves cuddling on the couch and watching a movie. Then she looked at me like she had never looked at me before and said, “Would you spend the night?” I did want to, so I did. It was everything we both wanted it to be.

Then we started fully dating after that, although we never put a label on it. I told her I had set a date to move to Dallas to pursue an art career. That date was a few months out, so we decided we would just have all of the fun until I left. We counted down the days on her calendar on the kitchen wall. As the day approached our feelings had grown. Occasionally I would pose the idea of me sticking around. Occasionally she would pose the same idea, only to quickly tell me it was not time for me to be held back in my hometown.

We talked marriage occasionally, she told me she was not good at relationships and was afraid to ruin what we had. She also told me that if I asked her to marry me, she would say yes, but to please not ask.

On the day I was set to leave, we stood holding each other in her kitchen and neither of us wanted to let go. It was very, very hard to leave, but I did.

She took some modeling pictures of herself to send with me, so she could always be with me. I still have a couple attached to the side of my filing cabinet. I know they are there, even though the filing cabinet is tucked away in a closet.

We made a deal that any Valentines that we were both single, we would get together and just have a good ‘ol time. We did that a for few Valentines.

It did not ever feel like I left town. I was still figuring out how to fulfill my parenting duties, so it felt like I was in my hometown almost as much as I was in Dallas. The two places were less than two-hundred miles apart.

If I had a chance, I would stop by and see her after dropping off my daughter at her mothers.

She called me up one day and told me she was turning thirty soon. Thirty was a very big deal. She told me in her wildest dreams, she never thought she would see thirty. Although she did not go into details about doctors appointments and the such, I knew cancer was still a threat. She wanted to come to Dallas and celebrate her birthday with me.

She came to town and we went out with another couple and had a good time, but mostly we just stayed in bed. We talked marriage again and she said she would marry me, but to please not ask. I never did. I knew deep down that she was right to keep it off the table.

For a few more years after that, we would randomly get together for a night of fun. The last time I saw her, I was probably thirty. Time did what it does and the years passed and we lost touch.

A few years ago I decided to see if she had any social media. She was now on Facebook. She was married and living in Colorado. She had a little shop there and seemed to be mildly retired. I did not reach out to her. A year or two later, I looked again and she was divorced and moved back near my hometown. I did not reach out.

Then she got a new boyfriend and he came and went. I did not reach out, but I meant to. I just wanted my friend back, but there is part of me that was afraid. There was a pristine magic to the past. A past where we were young and fun. Is it best to just leave all of it back there? The fact remains that I did not reach out.

Some more time passes and I am getting ready to drive up to Norman, Oklahoma from Austin, Texas for my grandsons seventeenth birthday. Yep, that kind of time has passed. I always get amped up before a roadtrip and it is hard to get a good nights sleep the night before leaving. On this Friday morning I woke up at 4am from a dream that me and my friend had reconnected. I decided to get up, go to my computer, find her on facebook and see what she was up to. Hell, if she still lived near my hometown, I would be passing by there later that day. Maybe today is the day we reconnect! I got excited by the idea.

I went to her facebook page and the top post was her obituary from two and a half years ago. I do not know how to explain that feeling. It is like an avalanche of your entire life collapses on you, both past and future. Every childhood memory, every love, every trial, every loss, every future version of all those things just bury you in an instant.

I texted my only friend that knew us as a couple. It was still near 4am and I said, I have to tell you this, because you are the only one who knows her. I told him she had passed away two and a half years ago. He immediately got back to me and said, “yeah the fact that it has been two and a half years, the thought of your own mortality, the time lost, the love you had, etc. Pretty devastating stuff”.

I told him the thing that was really driving me crazy, was her last post before she passed was the last post I had seen. She died shortly after that and if I had looked maybe one more time back then, I could have gone to her funeral.

It was this friend who went out with us when she came to Dallas for her birthday. I can vividly remember my friend telling me back then that the time she came to visit was the happiest he had ever seen me. That hit me hard back then and it still does.

There was no chance of going back to sleep. I read her obituary several times. I combed the internet to see if she was buried anywhere I could visit. I could not find any information on that. The funeral was held in Medicine Park, Oklahoma, a town near my hometown. I would be passing right near Medicine Park that night.

I decided I would stop at the location of her funeral and pay my respects on my way. I made a whole plan. I looked at the run times of the Great White and Whitesnake albums that we listened to the most. When I was that far away from the spot, I would queue up those two albums and blast them at max volume and pretend my friend was there with me. I started the playlist at the right time, but the plan got derailed when I re-remembered how much of a jam that the Whitesnake song, Slow An’ Easy is. When that song came on, I had to listen to it five or six more times before arriving at the location and then played it a few more times while there.

It was a weird and conspicuous place to be sitting late at night. I fully expected a cop to roll up on me. I sat for thirty minutes or so talking to her in my head, both the young me and the old me. I talked to her about all the fun we had and I apologized for losing touch. At the same time I was thinking about what I would say to a cop if one happened to pull up. No way of explaining that without sounding crazy.

Then I planned to really lean into the sadness of it all and put on the album, A Crow Looked At Me, by Mount Eerie. It is an album written days after his wife died, shortly after having their only child. It opens with the line, “Death is real. Someone’s there and then they’re not and it’s not for singing about. It’s not for making into art”. Every single line of this album is devastating. The second song starts with, “Our daughter is one and a half. You have been dead eleven days. I got on a boat and came to the place where the three of us were going to build our house, if you had lived. You died though, so I came here alone with our baby and the dust of your bones” It is a tough and beautiful listen. I could go on and on about lines from this album, lines like, “when I’m kneeling in the heat, throwing away your underwear, the devastation is not natural or good, you do belong here”.

I put it on, but honestly all I could feel was gratitude. I was so grateful she existed in my life for the time she had. I listened to the entire album, because it is not an album you half commit to, but it was not hitting me in the sad way it was supposed to. As soon as it ended, I put Slow An’ Easy back on and listened to it on repeat for the last thirty minutes of the drive. I pretended she was cuddled up to me and we were cruising through Wayne’s Drive Inn, the hometown hamburger spot everyone cruised through back then and I believe they still do.

Life is crazy. I was fifteen when I had the courage to walk up to her at the car wash and shoot my shot. Something in her knew, despite the age difference, we were meant to know each other. We had so many beautiful moments and so many real moments of connection. I wish we would have stayed connected, but life went another way. It does not mean we do not love each other.

Now I am going to my grandsons seventeenth birthday. At his age I was married, had a child and owned a four bedroom house. Wild.

I miss you forever, my friend. It would have been a great honor to be your ex-husband, but what we had was just as beautiful.

Photo and video references:

Whitesnake - Slow An' Easy

Tone Loc - Wild Thing

We started off on working a some of my songs and a newer one that I knew would require more skill from me. Eventually I knew I had to reveal the song to her that I really wanted to tackle.

I have been kind of obsessed with the song, A Salty Dog by Procol Harum for a couple of years now. I was aware of the song, but it never really stuck out to me until I fell into a Procol Harum hole after the singer died in 2022.

In my car, I would belt this song and even though I was not nailing it by any means, I thought, maybe? Maybe with some professional work I could get there.

The even bigger picture, I want to have a rock band where I combine my usual writing with much bigger arcs sonically. I know I am kind of running out of time to realize that goal, but also, time is an illusion.

After a couple of months of lessons, I told my teacher my grand plan of singing that song and crushing it. I played it for her and she agreed that I could get there and I was currently (granted only sometimes) hitting a half step above the highest note in this song.

We had not attempted the climax of the song until this week, but we had worked on other verses.

After stopping down to work on specific words, she just asked me to keep going. I was pitchy as I am still having to navigate employing all the techniques I have been learning, but for my first attempt at this in front of someone, I’ll take it.

PS: since I am a lyric stickler, I sang “how many moons”, because that is what I heard when I listened to the song for a long time, but reading the lyrics, apparently it is “Now many moons” and I have yet to unlearn the wrong word. So if you were sitting there listening to this and you thought, “It’s NOW many moons, Dumbass”, I see you.

INTRO: Sorry for the silence lately. January was a tough month, that also brought what I consider to be the worst day of my life. I have had some time to reflect on it and that statement still holds true. It cannot be contained in words and I would not write it out anyway.

I have not had the mental capacity to write since, so here is a story I wrote back in October and did not publish. I did edit it a tiny bit today, but tried to keep it as accurate to that moment as possible. I was proud of this piece and still am, so I think it deserves to not sit in my drafts.

Thank you for reading,

Robert

______________________________________________

About seven years ago, I started to fall for someone, very hard. I was lonely and she was lonely too. She was not interested in me the way I was her, but it did not seem that way to me or that way to the people around us. People just assumed we were a married couple. Small things would keep me going. It did and did not help that occasionally someone from her circle would offer hope, coming up to me and saying things like, “don’t give up, we’re rooting for you and want to keep you around”.

We spent almost every day together for a year or so. I woke up every day, hopeful that a corner would turn, it did not. Then the switch flipped for me and I walked away. She did not want that to happen. It meant she was losing a friend that she had spent most days and hours with for over a year. She wrote something to me like, please don’t go, you are my bestie. I thought, bestie! Really? That’s the fucking word you chose? A cute little slang word. You can’t even be bothered to say best friend? Fuck off. That is what I thought, not what I responded with, which was nothing. I was not at my best.

It is not fair to her, or any woman, to have to navigate difficult friendships with men. I am sure that gets exhausting.

I last saw her on October 19th, 2019. She came to one of my gigs. It has been five years, almost to the day. That is the night, I knew was the end for me. She said something to me after I got off stage that was specifically intended to crush me and that was it. The light was out. It was even more solidified when a friend of hers reached out to me the next day and told me something equally as hurtful. I took a couple of days to reflect, then I told her to stop contacting me. She texted a handful of times after that and I mostly ignored them.

The pandemic hit, she texted me one more time while I was on a walk with my friend, Amy. I think I gave it a thumbs up, the coldest of all responses and that was the last attempt at communication from her.

I took her out of all my social media feeds, but did not block her from seeing mine. She was able to see all of my social media if it was something she wanted to see. I did that, because I was the one that walked away and me blocking what I see was my decision and I wanted it to be her decision as to when or if she took me out of her social media.

Over the years, she still likes many of my posts and occasionally comments. I typically ignore the comments or sometimes hit the like button just because it feels stupid to like all other comments, but hers.

She commented on a story of mine recently and I decided I would respond in kind, like I did with everyone else. Just something like, “Thanks”. She saw that as a sign and sent me a private message, “Hi”, and that she hoped I was doing well. I thanked her and said, “same to you”. I made sure to make my response an end. I was hoping that was and was not the end.

Then she sent an apology. I told her there was nothing to apologize for, which is definitely a stretch. However, I was always aware of the score somewhere deep down, but my desire for companionship with her was making me ignore it, plowing ahead, deeper and deeper into frustration and heartache. I also knew she had no idea what she was apologizing for. Could she have been more clear or set clearer boundaries? Maybe, but whatever. I was too far in. We are all human, I do not hold her accountable. That is true, ninety-nine percent of the time, with the occasional thought of “fuck all the way off”, when I am pissed at how I allowed myself to be watered down.

If she was holding on to any guilt, I wanted her to let it go. Life is hard. None of us need to be holding on to such useless baggage.

The way I was reading into that apology gave me hope. A little part of me got excited. Excited that maybe some dumbass corner was turned and we could “get right back to it”, to quote a Waxhatchee song (I like to quote songs). I was playing the apology out in my head and I had edited it to mean what I wanted it to mean. Then I went back and reread the apology and realized I was entirely wrong and over-thinking it.

She did make me a much better version of myself. I will forever be grateful for that. As frustrating and terrible as it all was, and it was, I did grow and adopt many lifestyle changes that have extended well past our time together.

I got in better shape, got back to regular exercise, started eating better, got more mentally tough, more secure and healed some old things I was holding on to. That likely would not have happened if not for her.

I do really miss eating meals together, sharing a plate of something healthy. There was a time when sharing a plate of food at a restaurant would have pissed me off, but man I loved, loved, loved sharing a meal with her. I loved it more than anything. It was my happiest place. I miss it so much. I ate almost every meal with her for at least a year. Almost unknowingly, I had become vegetarian and mostly dairy free. I ate pizza one night with my grandkids, after months of not eating something like that and it destroyed me. When I told her this, she said, well you haven’t had meat or dairy in months, so it makes sense that a pizza with meat and cheese would hurt your stomach.

After her recent apology, she said, any time I was willing to see her again, she would love to meet up for coffee or lunch. I told her I would have to think about it. She understood. Would I fall again or has five years put too much distance between us, even for friendship?

I took a day to think about it, knowing I was going to say yes regardless of what my mind was telling me. My mind was telling me it was totally fine, but I still felt a desire to be in a relationship with her. I also felt no desire at all for that. I felt truly “over it” and I would love to be friends again and I felt no desire for friendship. Which one is true? All of them, maybe.

I messaged her back a day later and said, yeah it’s cool, I would love to catch up, Contact me any time. Again, I must say that is very true, but also reference the paragraph before this one.

I have known nothing about her since I cut ties. I am not one to lurk on social media or at all. When I cut ties, I cut them clean. I am not a “drive past someone’s house to see if there’s a new car” type of guy. Over the five years we have not been talking, I have not spent any time looking out of curiosity. None. It is an impressive and sad skill of mine. When I go, I go. I cut ties at a time when she started dating someone and it felt like a good time to cut and run because she would not miss me when there was someone new to focus her attention on.

It hurt me to my very core that she had someone. I could not be around for that. I could not suck it up and be cool. At the same time, I cared for her and I knew that trying to navigate a new relationship with me around would have been a hard scene for all of us to navigate. I wanted her new relationship to have the best chance of survival. For that to happen, it needed to be free of whatever bullshit I was going to do and I absolutely would have done some bullshit. Just thinking about it, fuck. I am so glad I do not have the added embarrassment I would feel right now if I had tried to stick around, fighting for relevance and attention.

After I told her we can be friends again, I was totally fine with it, freaking out about it and entirely indifferent.

A couple of nights later she saw I was online and started a conversation. We talked about life and what we had been up to. There was the nagging dread of her bringing up her relationship or marriage or whatever she has, but I knew. I felt it. I knew she was protecting me by not bringing it up. That sucked. It sucked that she felt the need to sensor herself. It is the truth that I care for her and I want her to be in a happy and healthy relationship. I can be happy and grateful she has that, maybe even proud! I know how bad she wanted it. She wanted it as much as I do. If I had that, all of this would be fine. I do not currently have that and that night of conversation was a bit crushing. 

She interrupted the conversation to say “11:11” That is something she used to point out and I told her I still think about her when I see it. She told me that she has missed me for 1,111 days, that she did not know down to the hour or minute, but that’s how long it had been since we last talked and how long she has missed me. It was hard for me to read that and not muster up a little hope, but I knew she was talking out of her ass. It was very inaccurate on the amount of days it had been, but I understood the sentiment.

I was not looking forward to the night. I knew after this conversation was over, I would need to sleep and it would be hard to sleep with all these emotions jumping around inside of me.

She left the conversation unannounced. I was thankful we did not have to go through the routine of saying goodnight.

I did something I rarely do and brought my computer to the night stand and watched a show. I knew there was no way for me to go to sleep without a distraction.

I feel asleep after one episode of Only Murders in the Building and woke after a couple of hours of sleep. It was three-thirty in the morning. That is scientifically the worst time to be awake with your thoughts and feelings.

The main thought I had at three-thirty was not about her. I went inward. How do I get the things I need and deserve? Am I doing enough? It is not like my life is bad at all, pretty great really. My time is very flexible, I make enough money to get by and spoil the grandkids, but also, am I growing to the true level of my desires and capability? Maybe I just need to relook at how I am prioritizing my time and adjust to be more effective. Maybe my ADHD mind is still too distracted. I was in a bad head space and all I could feel was the feeling of not being good enough. That is an easy trap to fall into, in the presence of unrequited love.

I caught a small window of being emotionless from the exhaustion of being emotional, and fell back asleep.

The next morning I got up and checked to see if she had messaged me… She had not. I then went about my normal morning routine. Make my bed, take my vitamins, drink two sixteen ounce glasses of water with fiber mixed in them (because my doctor says I need more fiber), make coffee, and meditate for ten minutes. I sat down to meditate and could not find peace. I then forewent my next routine of ten minutes of yoga and thirty minutes of piano practice to write some of what you are reading now. 

It is the morning after our online conversation. She is supposed to call me after brunch. I do not dread the phone call. A call is much better than messaging online. I cannot as easily read into a phone conversation and there is much less to be misconstrued in a real conversation. She texted me to say she woke up late and she will call in the early evening.

I missed her calls, but quickly called her back. She filled me in on her mother, father and sisters family. She let me know her step mother had lost her battle with cancer. I was hoping these people were going to be a big part of my life, so it was great and hard to hear about them. She saved the marriage news for the very end of the conversation. I was glad it was out. We talked about her husband. It was nice to talk about it.

At the end of the phone call, she mentioned that she would be open to meeting for lunch. She is awkward with goodbyes and I knew this, I have witnessed how cold it appears with boyfriends who had come and gone while we were friends. She ended the call, cold. It is just her way and I knew that, but it felt like the end.

I leaned on my team that night. I took a walk with Amy. We made grand plans and explored ideas to get us both where we want to be. She offered to be by my side where and when I needed it, because she is amazing. What a gift she has been over the last five years. I need to make her a nice meal.

I called my friend Robbie. There is no one I can be more honest with than Robbie. We talked for two hours. I released all the things. This friendship has strengthened through so much fire over thirty-six years. I do not know what I would do without him.

It was late at night and I was worn out. I feel asleep, hard. I woke to my alarm at 6am. It was a Monday. I sat on the edge of the bed and felt a strange calm. I was surprised by it. It reminded me that I do not have to be sad about any of this. I can be happy. I can be happy and grateful for everything and everyone in my life. I do not have to hold on to any perceived hardships or sadness. I can just let it go and so I did.

A few days went by and I texted her that the following Tuesday was good for me to grab lunch. She mentioned she had been chomping at the bit to ask me the same thing. We agreed on Tuesday, which is four days from now.

I searched my feelings. I still felt an amazing calmness. Robbie texted to check in. I texted back, “I’m much better with tiny windows of bottomless despair, but mostly fine”, He wrote back, “No one can put pain as poetically as Robert Steel!” And I replied, “Thank you, I take no great pride in it”. I lied to my friend. I was feeling fine. He knows me too well and he knows how in my head I can get and I had just resorted to pretending to be struggling, because struggling is a habit I have yet to fully break. I sent him a picture of my bicycle and said, “I’m definitely not stress riding all weekend”. He laughed. That was a lie as well. I did ride all weekend, but that is because I ride every weekend and it was a beautiful and joyful weekend of riding.

I do not know if it took the entire five years for me to be over it, but then again, I am clearly not over it. Maybe I never will be. It was everything I had been looking for. There is a Richard Thompson line in the song “That’s all, Amen, Close the Door” It feels really relevant to this moment. The line is, “Did I care? Was I in love? In love enough to know, in love enough to know, there’s precious few that line that road”. There will always be something inside me that feels a bit sick about it all. She is one of the precious few that lined that road, even if it was only my road. It takes two however and these feelings are mine alone, not hers. Right now, I am just grateful to have my friend back. Life just did not feel right without her in it.

I had torn it down over the years by writing privately about it. Somewhere I have many pages of all the ways I am grateful for her as I have always considered it the shortest path to healing. I could probably publish a book of those pages. It was a daily routine for a while. I needed to find a way to be grateful for all of it. I gathered all the good that came from her, let go of all the bad and built it all back up into healthy memories. I am fine, mostly.

I am walking into the lunch with no nervousness. No expectations. No baggage. No intentions. I am not rehearsing things I want to say. I am not picking out an outfit. I am not trying to be anything. I look forward to catching up with an old friend. I am glad she reached out after five years. I am happy she still has a place in her heart for me, however big or small. I am happy I have a place in my heart for her as well.

If you are reading this, the lunch has come and gone. It was lovely. There were hugs, there were tears, then laughter quickly after.

Maybe all of this is perfect timing. I visited a studio recently to start a new album, even though I currently do not have enough songs, I felt booking studio time would light a fire under my ass. I used to jokingly tell her, “you realize I am going to write so many songs about you? Songs you may not want to hear.” What has happened up until now is the opposite. I have not written at all about her. I have had zero urge to write about her. Absolutely zero. Maybe I just have not yet found what it is I want to say, but I do not think so. I think I just do not want to write about her. Those emotions will show up somewhere in songs, but I prefer to just let that heartache go. I am not harboring any of those bad feelings anymore. If I were to write anything about her, it would probably just be a sweet love song, which if you know me, you know it would be a real stretch for me to write a sweet love song, so probably never going to happen.

The studio and engineer/producer I am lucky enough to be working with, produced some of my favorite albums, including Doug Burr’s “On Promenade”. He also did an album with Doug Burr, called “O Ye Devastator”, hence the title and subtitle of this story. I also found the cover art particularly relevant.

I said I have not written any songs about her. While that is true, one of the songs I am doing in the studio makes me think about a lot of people and she is one of the people that run through my mind when I sing this last verse.

ACCOUNTABLE

I can’t hold you accountable for my own feelings
I can’t hold you accountable for my own feelings

There’s a river in this old town, but only when it floods
Otherwise it’s too dry to grow
The devastation that it brings is unimaginably quick
But it brings with it a beauty of its own

I can’t hold you accountable for my own actions
I can’t hold you accountable for my own actions
I can’t hold you accountable for my own actions
They’re mine alone

I own this life, it’s mine
I can change it up at any time
And if I don’t, then I don’t
Man, it’s harder work to regret your path
Than to put in the work to grow

I can’t hold you accountable for my own grieving
I can’t hold you accountable for my own grieving
I can’t hold you accountable for my own grieving
It’s all my own

Oh my, I miss you
I wish I didn’t miss you so much
I know it fades with time
But it takes too long
With no rain on the horizon
No waves on the water
Nothing, Nothing, Nothing
Gets washed away

Wish me luck in the studio. If you want to help in any small way, it is all very much appreciated. Here are some ways you can help me bring some new work into the world.

• Be a free subscriber, if you are not

• Engage by commenting or liking any of my post. Honestly this is a big one. It feels nice to build a community

• Become a paid subscriber, which thank you if you do, because that truly helps me afford to put new work out

• Find me on Spotify or Apple (Robert Steel) and follow me, listen to music

• Share any of my posts or music with your friends

• Listen, follow or buy any of my music on bandcamp, Here

If you made it all the way to the end, I feel like I am the one that owes you something and I am not really sure what, but if you have music or writing and want me to do the same I am things I am asking you to do, I surely will. My friend Jack loves to use the saying, “A rising tide raises all ships” and I think that is very true.

Thank you for listening,

Robert

I have to drive up to the Oklahoma City area for both Holidays. Sometimes I fall prey to I-35. At Thanksgiving, I vowed to take backroads, but time was tight and I talked myself out of it, even though I have learned that backroads are quicker during the holidays, even if they say it will take an extra hour and a half longer when I start the drive.

In normal times, the drive is a little under six hours. I can make it in under five and a half if I do super late night driving (which is my favorite). At Thanksgiving it took me about seven hours to get there and about eight hours to get back.

So when Christmas rolled around, I vowed, no matter what, back roads!

I was going to really treat myself. I told myself that drive was my Christmas present to myself. I got snacks, I got cigars. I do not smoke many cigars these days, so I was really looking forward to smoking, eating sugar and making a playlist that would last seven plus hours.

I ended up making two playlists. One from friends recommendations, which was a real interesting exploration that consisted of Opeth, Blood Incantation, John Zorn and Julian Lage, Regina Spektor, Jaimee Harris and Tori Amos. Such changes in gears, metal to jazz, to pop, to folk, to pop.

The second playlists was the entire catalog of Billy Joel, start to finish with the exception that I put his new single as the first track.

I was thinking about going a step further and adding about an hour to my drive to drive out to Johnson City to see the downtown lights and then take 281 from there, all the way up.

The route I mapped was going to take seven and a half hours, so I opted not to add more time to it. I took new routes most of the way. It is a good thing I did not go to Johnson City for the lights, because every single small town I went through had giant light displays of their own, most much more impressive than Johnson City.

I left town at seven in the evening. I decided I was in the mood for Billy Joel, so I started the playlist, lit a cigar, and pulled out of the driveway.

I saw very few cars once I got out of the city. It was pure bliss. I was hitting all the prime Billy Joel albums at the right times. He has a lot of jams. My favorite album of his is “The Stranger”. I know it is fun to hate on Billy Joel, but the dude is good. The reason I was in the mood for Billy Joel was I had just watched this video of this piano player I follow on YouTube.

This drive would go through my home town of Lawton, OK around one-thirty in the morning. From there it was still an hour and a half drive, but seeing that I had plenty of energy, I decided to pull off in my hometown, go to a friends house and do a dance in front of his ring camera. I did my best freestyle dancing for a few minutes, then just got back in my car and got back on the road. I never heard from him, so I am guessing it was all for naught, but I am still glad I did it, even if no one ever saw it.

I arrived at my destination near three in the morning, the morning of Christmas Eve day. I knew I would get little to no sleep before my granddaughter would wake me up. We got up around six-thirty and we had a full day ahead of us.

We had groceries to buy, last minute presents that the grandkids needed to buy their mom. We were also meeting my sister and her family at three in the afternoon.

We spent Christmas Eve at my sisters, eating pizza, making gingerbread houses, making rice crispy treat and nutter butter reindeer, which was a thing I saw online. We opened Christmas presents from each other, then we had to drive forty-five minutes back to the house to get to bed and get ready for Christmas morning.

After doing the usual Christmas duties after the kids were in their rooms, I was able to get five hours of sleep or so before it was time for us all to get up.

After opening presents we were going back to my sisters for lunch. I was in charge of making our great grandmothers mac and cheese recipe. I had bought all the ingredients on Christmas Eve day, but when it came time to make the mac and cheese, I realized the cheese somehow did not make it home from the store. I had to go out on Christmas Day and find cheese. I was successful and crisis was averted.

On my way back from Oklahoma, I listened to the other playlist and Opeth and Blood Incantation took a while, but grew on me a tiny bit. I was also reminded that Tori Amos and Regina Spektor are very good. I had to take I-35 because I was stopping at a friends in Dallas. However, when I got near his house he informed me that work was crazy and he could not get together that night, so I kept going back home to Austin.

I texted his wife and said, I’ll come back up any night, just let me know when you want me. She texted back that December thirtieth would work. I popped up to Dallas for a few hours and took him his favorite pizza from Austin.

This is the same friend whom I wrote the piece about his shitty father, Darryl a little while back. He informed me this night that he found out Darryl died two years ago of an “alcohol related illness”. That is it. The end.

My friend also grew up in New York as a broadway kid, but moved from New York to Dallas at some point. He showed me a clip he found of himself in Peter Pan on Broadway with Sandy Duncan. He is one of the lost boys in the clip below.

We talked about things going on in each others lives, smoked a nice cigar, ate some pizza and a little after midnight I hit the road back to Austin. Here is the only picture I took. Terrible picture, but great cigar.

I am having a hard time returning to my routines, but in the process of stumbling, I am still moving forward.

I have kept out of the loop on everything, with the exception of the fires in California.

Now I am trying to get back into a music routine. I recorded in December and I am trying to work my way to some form of an album.

I am currently going down a RadioHead rabbit hole and it is a wonderful hole to go down. I remember when I first heard the song Paranoid Android and the OK Computer album in general and thought, this is amazing, but how can you pull it off live? Then it turned out they can absolutely pull it off live. This performance of Paranoid Android gives me goosebumps every time.

The one and only time I saw Radiohead was on the Pablo Honey tour. They were playing in deep ellum in Dallas at Trees. It was an all ages show. Behind us were some young kids and one of them exclaimed he was going to have a band with eight guitar players, all playing out of tune on purpose. I still think about that kid and I keep hoping I one day hear this band.

A few other things I remember from that show, was while waiting in line, someone was handing out flyers for another show. I was handed one and proceeded to fold it as tiny as I could get it, then would unfold it and fold it as tiny as I could get it in a new way. The venue took a long time to open up because the AC had gone out and it was July 3rd, 1993. I proceeded to fold the flyer for a couple of hours, until it had completely disintegrated. The air conditioning never got fixed. They let us in to a steaming hot small venue and the heat from all the people made the ceiling steam up and it started raining down on us from the ceiling. I do not know if I have ever been more sweaty in my life. When we all emerged from the building we were wringing out our shirts and the sweat was just pouring out of them.

I was back home for Thanksgiving. One morning, my grandson got up and came into the living room. He asked if we wanted to put on a movie. We said yes, pick one. He said, “Well I watched Gremlins last night, so how about Gremlins 2?” My eyes lit up and I said, “You have no idea what you just said, absolutely put on that movie!”.

I never thought I would get to watch someone watch Gremlins 2 for the first time, but it was pure magic.

If you have not seen it, I would highly encourage you to watch Gremlins one and two back to back.

If you want a little insight, you can watch this Key and Peele Sketch about it. Since Thanksgiving, I have watched the below sketch a number of times. That number being something like twenty-two. Well, okay now add one to that, I had to watch it again.

I went to Wizard Rodeo recently, which is a music festival that some friends put together. It is wonderfully inspiring. I did not take any photos or videos, but there were so many highlights. All the sets were great. I saw Styrofoam Winos, Nina Natashia, Garrett T. Capps and Nasa Country (recognize foos!), Little Mazarn, Will Johnson, Jad Fair, A Hawk and a Hacksaw, plus some rad outdoor stage stuff. The night ended with The Space Lady. I was not aware of her and did not know that I was about to have my mind blown.

In a few days I head back up to Oklahoma to spend Christmas with the family. I plan on making Christmas Rice Crispy treats. We did these last year and they were a big hit and great fun to do with the kids. Stocking are a big deal in my family. These are the things I can reveal here, but I have a few other stocking stuffer surprises up my sleeve.

I am in the studio these days, trying to put out a new album, so if you are feeling in the giving spirit, here are things that are helpful.

• Be a free subscriber, if you are not

• Engage by commenting or liking any of my post

• Become a paid subscriber, which thank you if you do, because that truly helps me afford to put new work out

• Find me on Spotify or Apple (Robert Steel) and follow me, listen to music

• Share any of my posts or music with your friends

• Listen, follow or buy any of my music on bandcamp

Happy Holidays y’all. I see in my e-mails that I have been tagged by some friends in things on social media and I have some messages, so I might pop on one of these days, just to attend to those.

I even deleted the substack app as it has quickly become just another social media app. Every day I was getting droves of suggestions for famous people who are now joining. It was bumming me out, so I just deleted it.

I am missing lots of things. I missed knowing about friends shows, album releases. That is a bummer. But I have heard about the album releases through conversations with friends, so it did eventually get to me.

I miss all the friends goings on in general and that is weird and sucky.

I think the weirdest part has been, why am I still taking photos and what do I do with them? Texting pictures to friends has become my new social media. It is probably the way it should have always been.

My screen time was down eighty-seven percent last week, which was down seventy-six percent the week before. It shows I did social media for one minute, which I do not know how that is possible as I no longer have social media apps. I think Apple just did not want to put a zero or maybe they are not allowed to. Who the fuck knows?

My face to face time is ramping up and that is a good thing. I go on more lunch, dinner and exercise dates. I do my best to not be the person who exclaims they are not on social media anymore. The struggle is real.

Am I going back? Ugh, I think I will have to in some form. I do not know why I think that, but it is probably going to happen anyway.

I really just wish there was a way to strip away all the bullshit. I just want friends updates and friends only. I do not want algorithms. If I have friended someone, there is a reason, put their updates in my feed, goddamnit. I do not care if it is a video or a link, do not hide it from me because you think it means people are advertising and you want them to pay to advertise.

Ironically, on the substack app before I deleted it, I read a piece from someone I do not follow. I do not remember who it was. They said something along the lines of “social media is bad for us and your friends are the bait”. It is true, they are using my friends against me. I do not even get most of you in my feed as it is mainly pushing advertising, famous people and people I do not follow.

I struggle with writing on here as I know I am the bait, but I am hoping I can have more meaningful content if I am doing more long form posts and as long as I pop on and subscribe to my friends, I will just get their updates in my e-mail box and I do not have to tie myself to a social media app.

Here is what I have done in the last month. I went into the studio yesterday and worked on two new songs. I am working my way towards a new album, slowly. I did not take any pictures, but the studio is cool and I am excited to work with Britton at his Ramble Creek studio.

I rode my bike a lot in the early mornings along with the wildlife.

I had brunches, lunches and dinners with friends at some of my favorite restaurants.

I stuck to my schedule and routine fairly well. I am growing to love routine more and more. It is the way.

I made crafts with my granddaughter, went to an arcade with both grandkids, went rolling skating with the whole family and spent a night looking at Christmas lights and ice skating with the family.

We made hot chocolate, filled tumblers. Then we went to the convenience store and went hog wild on snacks. Spared no expense! I got hot tamales, Haribo gummy bears and an Ande’s chocolate mint bar. We drove out to Yukon, OK to their light display and drove through it, then parked and walked through it, did some ice skating and even did some redneck sledding

I spent Thanksgiving with the entire family, including the newest member.

We decorated the tree and watched Christmas movies, but more importantly, we also watched Gremlins 2.

I rediscovered a box of old concert t-shirts I have that fit me again, so I might be out in the world rocking some old concert t-shirts from The Cure, Counting Crows, Don Henley, Powermad, Queensryche and so on. I also have a lot that will never fit. How was I that tiny at any time in my life?

I know I am bashing the very thing I am on and it feels weird to thank you for being here with me, but thank you.

I am going to bury myself in my art and bring things into the world that I am proud of and in some tiny way, hopefully enrich the lives of those who know about it.

If you want to help in any way, it is all very much appreciated. Here are some ways you can help me bring some new work into the world.

• Be a free subscriber, if you are not

• Engage by commenting or liking any of my post

• Become a paid subscriber, which thank you if you do, because that truly helps me afford to put new work out

• Find me on Spotify or Apple (Robert Steel) and follow me, listen to music

• Share any of my posts or music with your friends

• Listen, follow or buy any of my music on bandcamp

I often wonder what childhood vacation memories I actually remember. It is quite possible that I built many of them from the few photos that were taken or from a story being told in rooms I just happened to be in. I do know I got to go on many solid roadtrips.

In that spirit, I took my daughter on many roadtrips and now I take the grandkids.

Are these things remembered more by kids now, because they have access to so many photos and videos? I have no videos from my youth.

The grandkids are at the age now where the vacations will get more adult. I have been desperately trying to cram in all the kid things. You never get this time back. Ever. You have to make all the efforts in this window of time you have. I think we are here. The grandkids are now eleven and fifteen and fall break is here and I have grand pepaw plans, but all they really want to do is be back home with friends and I totally get that.

I know as a kid, going to do fun things with a grown up is usually not as cool as doing it with friends your age. When I would take my daughter on trips I tried to have her bring a friend with her. You know how weird and scary that was for me? A single dad, taking girls on trips. I was always so very shocked at how casually people would let me take their daughters. I did not see my daughter on a daily basis. I lived out of town. I did not know her friends parents and they did not know me. I would call them to introduce myself and try to arrange a time for us to meet face to face, so I could look them in the eye and personally offer them every assurance I would take care of their kid and every single time they were fine with not knowing much and just letting me whisk their kid off for a week. It was shocking to me.

I asked nothing from the parents. If they wanted to give their kid a little spending money, cool, but either way everyone is going to be equally taken care of.

My daughter brought a variety of friends on trips, some were a pain in the ass. Naomi, my god what a challenge she was!

I even took my daughter’s sister on some trips with us.

After my wife and I divorced, she quickly remarried, had another daughter and then got divorced. Me and her other ex-husband became fishing and camping buddies and would take our daughters along with us.

Even though there was a lot of sibling rivalry, she was easy to take, because I was friends with her dad and her mom was my ex-wife. They both knew me well and trusted me. It was a good fit.

I had the grandkids for the last week of summer before they went back to school.

I made plans for us to meet some relatives at a restaurant in Plano, Texas that we do not get to see often. We had dinner and then had a pool party.

Monday morning the first law of roadtrips is snacks. You have to have proper road snacks! We went to target and loaded up.

The Sour Patch Oreos were surprisingly solid, by the way.

My grandson then mentioned that if we were going back through Dallas that he wanted to go see a certain Raising Cane’s fast-food restaurant. He has fallen in love with Raising Cane’s chicken strips and in Dallas they have a Raising Canes/Dallas Cowboys/Post Malone designed restaurant. I reminded him, that we are on vacation and we go where ever we go. So we headed there.

Once that was off the books, I gave them two options. One, we could go to the Waco zoo, which I heard is good or we could stay in Dallas and go to the Dallas World Aquarium. It was hot and AC was very appealing, so the aquarium easily won.

I wanted to take them to an old school burger restaurant in Waco on the way back to Austin, so we stopped in Waco and hit Health Camp. Classic old school burgers, fries  and shakes.

From there, we headed to Austin. There’s a hotel we sometimes stay at in Austin that has a great pool and a great breakfast. I had already booked it, so we headed there, set up camp, ordered pizza and went to hang with friends and do a pizza and game night.

The next morning we headed to Schlitterbahn water park in New Braunfels, Texas. None of us had been before and we met some friends and their kids out there.

The next day, we spent the day at the shop, making art. I had to make good on my promise to my grandson that he would screen print his art this summer. He brought a couple of drawings he wanted to print, but decided to just do one of his drawings.

I knew if we printed his art, we would also need to do something special for my granddaughter. I asked her if she wanted to draw something and print as well.

Her and drew something together while I went to go get lunch for the kids. I came back to some wonderful collaborative drawings and one t-shirt design. My granddaughter wanted to do a poster and some t-shirts. I do not really print t-shirts, but I have and I was down for the challenge.

We made the screen, then we went shopping for shirts to print on.

The next day we went to San Antonio to Six Flags, Fiesta Texas.

We were closing out the week with a concert and an open studio. We had an artist in residency for that week and were doing an open studio in their honor.

It was a wonderful night of friends, art and music. The kids both sold a good deal of their art. It was a Saturday night. The kids needed to be back home on Sunday, which was a six hour drive. That made Saturday night, very long. We left straight from the shop around 10PM and drove four hours of the drive straight from there. Luckily their mother was going to meet me in Dallas on Sunday, so that would cut my drive to about eight hours round-trip.

I pride myself with returning the kids with all clean clothes, so I had to document it.

We all made it home safe. Summer vacation extravaganza accomplished.

Powermad is a band that put out one album. If you have seen the movie, Wild At Heart with Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern, you have heard the band. They had a prominent role in that movie. That one album is great. However, at that time Metallica was the pinnacle and the last album they had put out was …And Justice for all. It was an absurd statement to say they were better than Metallica.

We became close friends in school over time, but it was not until an embarrassing thing happened at my apartment that we became best friends.

We were walking up to my apartment door and there was a note on my door that I had a package at the front office. I had no idea what it was, but we walked to the office to get it. I saw the box and immediately remembered what it was. Inside my head I said, “Oh fuuuuuuck, how do I get out of this?” I grabbed the box and knew I had no choice but to come clean. I tell him, you are about to know something about me that I would very much prefer not to be telling you.

We take the box back to my apartment and I tell him, I was drunk one night and ordered something off TV. It was a diet plan called “Micro Diet” and it was basically dry packages of food you add water to, heat up and eat. I had to tell him, I was depressed about my weight and I ordered this crap to lose weight. I probably weighed like one sixty-five at the time. Hilarious.

We laughed and laughed, even though I was also dying inside. We could not contain our laughter while we heated some up to try it. It just looked like you mixed dirt in a bowl or water, but the water and the dirt were somehow still separate. We both tried it and it was as terrible as it looked. I threw it all away and we probably went to Jack in the Box to get ultimate cheeseburgers, large fries, variety packs (two chicken strips, an egg roll and two taquitos) and two tacos each. That was our go to meal.

Over the years our friendship grew to where we were pretty much inseparable. It became bizarre how much we were alike and still are. It is truly like we are connected in some way and we can feel what the other is going through and what the other is thinking.

Even as I just typed that, he texted me about listening to our favorite band from that time period, Billy Goat. And an obscure song of theirs, but I had also listened to it the day before. It never fails, if I am listening to an old song or old band, he is doing it as well. It happens all the time. It is truly bizarre how connected we are.

One of our bonds was our dads. My dad had died when I was fifteen and his dad left him when he was fifteen. He just walked away and never came back.

This was such a big struggle for Robbie. He even decided at some point to ask his step father to adopt him so he could change his last name. His step father did and for a little while it was weird to say his new full name.

I still have his old “business card” that he designed in art school that has his old name. I text it to him every five years or so, just to kick him in the balls.

He will text back, “I hate you”. I will text back, “I understand. I hate me too”, which is an inside “joke”? I am not going to reveal the origins.

He wondered where his dad was. We talked about it often. There was no way to look for him in the early nineties, but then came the internet.

Occasionally, Robbie would dig around and try to find him on the internet. Eventually he found what he thought had to be him. He was living in Grand Junction, Colorado. We lived in Dallas, Texas.

Still, there was no contact information. Just his name and what town he lived in.

Then one day Robbie tells me he thinks he found him as a seller on eBay. It was his name and he was selling things Robbie thought were things he would be selling. We obsessed over every new listing.

It was fathers day, in two thousand. I decided that I was going to initiate contact. For some reason I did not have my computer up and running at my house and I drove into work on a Sunday just to buy some shit from him. I did not want to just contact him on eBay without buying something from him for some reason, so I bought an expensive knife.

After the knife came, I reached out to him that I received the knife and it was as listed and I gave him a good review. I said, by the way, I think I know your son, Robbie.

He responded, asking me how I knew that. I told him, he is my best friend and we have talked about you a great deal. If you are interested I would be willing to give you his e-mail address. He told me he would like that information and that he now considered me a good friend. He told me he would reimburse me the money on the knife if I only bought it for the reason of connecting him and his son. I told him I did, but that I liked the knife and was happy to have it.

I told Robbie what I had done and we nervously waited for his dad to e-mail him. He did shortly after and Robbie would send them to me, and the draft he had written in response and we would discuss and edit. It did not take long for his dad to fly in with his wife and begin hanging out. It was so fucking weird to all of the sudden be hanging out with this man who had caused my best friend so much grief and pain. It was such a weird energy of trying to impress him and trying to ignore the hard stuff.

He met Robbie’s wife and two kids. It did not take long for us to realize he was an alcoholic douchebag.

The newness wore off really quickly. He was always drunk. I do not know if I ever got the real and full story and I do not care to, but his dad had sent them Christmas gifts in the mail. They in turn had sent him and his wife Christmas gifts, but sent them late, so they did not arrive in time for Christmas. His dad called, angry. Told Robbie he was selfish and had hurt his wife’s feelings by the gifts arriving late. That he was embarrassed to have him as a son and cut off communication with him again and that was it. The end.

I have since learned more/was reminded of details I probably chose to forget. I sent this story to Robbie for his blessings, notes prior to publishing. I think those things are best left unsaid.

I have one of those big plastic bins that has three medium size pull out drawers. In them are all the physical photos I have. I have a bunch of ones that I got from my mother’s house when we had to clean it out and I have a ton I took on disposable cameras during the years disposable cameras were a thing. Most of the photos from that time are ones of me and my daughter on vacation or my family and Robbie’s family on vacation together.

I think most of us know what happens when sifting through tons of old photos, looking for something specific. You tend to get bogged down and distracted by memories. You come across photos that bring joy, nostalgia or sadness. Pictures of my mom, dad, grandparents, uncle who are all gone. Pictures of me as a child and I think about who I am and what would that little kid think of me.

I keep meaning to organize these bins, but I have not and it is just random piles of pictures. Every time I write a new story, it usually means I have to dig through all of those photos until I find the ones I am looking for. Sometimes I come across a photo that does not pertain to what I am writing and set it aside. I set aside a photo several months ago and it has been sitting on my desk all this time. I see it every day and I look at it every day and think, goddamnit.

This is a picture of his dad (Darryl) with Robbie’s kids. A picture I took. This picture is so crushing. I need to put it back in the bins of chaos. The date on this photo shows that it was one month after this, that Darryl left again.

As hard as this time was, and it was very hard. It would eventually bring closure. What a coward. Fuck that guy.

I do not still have that knife. I abused it, cutting things it should not have been used for and left it out side to rust into a piece of unsalvageable junk, then threw it away. Good fucking riddance.

In my last post about goals, a friend texted me, “be careful with lists, how many lists have you made in your lifetime?” The answer is a fuck ton, plus another fuck ton, but my monthly tracking is not really a list, in my opinion. His comment reminded me though of some things that I lose sight way too often. It reminded me not to take on too much. There is beauty in the down time. Consistency is the only measurement. The goal is not to beat last month or work harder every month, the goal is to do the things I say I will, for the amount of time I say I will. No more. That way I leave time for enjoyment that is not attached to anything.

Right now, what gets my time is music, exercise, writing, meditation and work. That all sounds real nice and I like that those things take up my time, but I know things will need to shift over the next five years. My big picture is, build a house in a place I like, do music, art and writing and sustain myself on that.

At seven-thirty in the morning I sit at the keyboard for thirty minutes. When the timer goes off, I walk away. This is the habit I want with everything that is important to me. I am there with my biking and workout schedule. I am mostly there with my morning routine of yoga and meditation.

Before the month begins, the highlights in the exercise lines are put there ahead of time. Those are the days I have already prescheduled as to when I will work out or ride. If I miss one of those days, it is fine. I do not need to make it up. Just make sure it only happens every once in a while. I have allotted times on my calendar for these things. It is easy for me to get carried away in areas and get burned out or just spend too much time on one area, while the others get a bit neglected.

This is my commitment to myself for November. I will only work out, ride, play piano, guitar during the times I have prescheduled. I will not try to “beat” last month and then try to “beat” this month in December and so on. I will just stick to a plan and the plan is consistency, balance and built-in focus.

My favorite items from the above image:

• I flossed every day, which yes I know we are all supposed to, but I did and I know it, because I tracked it. I did not track which days I did once or twice, but maybe I should write a one or two instead of an X

• I rode and worked out on all the pre-scheduled days

• NO TV THE WHOLE MONTH! I did have one movie night, but I do not count a movie night as TV. If people, sour patch kids and popcorn are involved, then I will allow it

• I only ate once after nine and it was because dinner just happened a little after nine. The “no eating after 9” rule is just to get rid of unnecessary snacking

• I only missed one day or push ups and sit ups because I was with the family in a tent and I just decided not to do it

• I rode my bike 309 miles! That is equivalent to riding my bike from my house to Lake Charles, Louisiana

My main challenge right now is to be always moving the below goals along and change direction and focus when necessary.

The goals I outlined in my previous post about habits.

• I am recording an album with me on piano

Update: I have studio time booked for December 2nd and I have voice lessons every Monday leading up to it, because one song I have written covers a lot of hard notes at the low and high end of my range. Right now I have two songs, but I am trying to write more.

• With music, I am hoping to write some bigger songs, more for a band and release work under the name Goldie Roxx. My hope there is I want to cross 80s metal shows with folk. I want to put on metal style shows, pyro, flames, big background lights of the name Goldie Roxx, but with folkier work. It would be fun to have flames and pyro going off during a Huffy pro thunder style song, right? Can you see that shit?! I would like to make this happen, not a small task, but I have pulled off harder things

Update: I am hoping the above project will turn into a Goldie Roxx album. I owe my teenage self at least one Goldie Roxx album and some big shows, with a big back drop of the name in lights. Maybe I should also dress metal, but play sad piano songs. It will be like KISS if they came out and only played Beth over and over. Who is in on this idea? I think it is a great idea.

• I am going to do more art. I am going to lean hard into it. I am going to take stained glass classes and I am going to draw and screen print and letterpress my own work and like piano, the practice of showing up will make me proud of what I get done here. My focus is on loving the process and at some point I will look upon beautiful things. It would be amazing to do these things into my older days for a stream of income coming in on something that I enjoy doing

Update: This is something I really need to ramp up time on. Doing art is a little intimidating around my friends, but I need to get over it and get these ideas out of my head and into the physical world. I hope some of those things come to fruition next week. Plus I am waiting for new stained glass classes to post, so I can sign up.

• Workwise, I am focusing on two things. One, kicking ass at what I currently do and growing those skills and opportunities. At the same time I am going to explore other options and keep myself ready and open for opportunities I might miss otherwise. Ideally I need more income coming in to further ensure I truly get where I am going to be

Update: I need to update the ‘ol resume and look at some things out there. I also had a friend that used to be my fiberglass sales rep, key me in on some opportunities that I should be exploring. I need to increase my money flow. I have increased it over the last couple of weeks, but I need to keep going.

• I am going to write more. I plan to write some books, one full-length, but mostly short stories.

Update: I love writing. I think I am pretty good at it, but I do not think I am amazing at it. Self worth wise, I struggle with the idea of doing a book. That is a lot of time and energy and it is a bit similar to doing an album. Lots of money and time spent with no return on investment and even worse, no one reads it. Still, I am shaking the negativity and I am going to forge ahead.

• My friend Amy and I are working on some plans to engage with our community and build new communities.

Update: We have our first monthly potluck coming up as that is one of the plans we talked about on our walks. I have signed up to volunteer with some cancer organizations and I have signed up on some group hikes and bikes rides with people I do not know. Wish me luck! I want to grow my group in any way I can and continue to find people who inspire and challenge me. If anyone ever wants to join me on any of these things, you would be very welcomed.

• I am going to buy land and build a house

Update: There is no update here other than I had a financial meeting in Ft. Worth two weeks ago with an investment group that I have worked with over the last twenty years or so. We discussed my goals and what we could do to get there. Plus, while at that office, I overheard someone giving out their secret chicken recipe. Lucky for you I pulled out my phone and wrote out that recipe. It is below for your enjoyment.

Raw chicken breast on the bottom of a casserole dish, then a can of rotel, then a packet of taco seasoning and a stick of butter. That’s it! It’s so easy. 

All of that is a direct quote. Now get out there and win yourself a best chicken dish in Texas award.

A lot of these goals are not really financially sound ideas, but who am I if I ignore what calls me? I am going to do art in many forms and trust in the process and find a way to make it work.

If you would like to contribute in any small way, here are some ways you can help me build the world I see.

• Be a free subscriber, if you are not

• Add me to your recommendations on Sub Stack

• Engage by commenting or liking any of my post. Honestly this is a big one. It feels nice to build a community

• Become a paid subscriber, which thank you if you do, because that truly helps me afford to put new work out

• Find me on Spotify or Apple (Robert Steel) and follow me, listen to music

• Share any of my posts or music with your friends

• Listen, follow or buy any of my music on bandcamp

Anyway, this is a short, music related post. I promise.

As a “personal” songwriter, most things I write are written autobiographically, even when they are not. I do not really want to break the illusion that it is all about ME!

When the pandemic hit, I wrote a lot about how unnecessary and trite it felt to try to write songs at all. I was in my head about everyone having bigger things to do than to listen to me sing a song about my usual things. I think a lot of songwriters felt that weight during twenty-twenty, especially.

I never stopped writing over the last four years, but I kept it mostly to myself. I wanted to write about loneliness and heartache, but my body would not let me. I have been trying to grow out of my comfort zone and look at bigger issues.

I have spoken at great length about this, but I think most people can relate. I am scattered-brained and all the “to do” lists and grand ideas always feel like too much and it is easier to just lay around and watch some show I will literally not even remember watching six months from now. Someone at work would say, did you ever watch “X”? I would say “No” and then they would start telling me about the show and I would think, Oh yeah, I am pretty sure I did watch that show.

As an over-reaction I decided last month to cancel my streaming services that I do not share with others. It is an over-reaction no doubt, but I stand by this decision. It has been good for me. I have been “TV” free this whole month, other than one movie night and I do not count a legit movie night. If sour patch kids and popcorn are involved, I will allow it.

Instead of being overwhelmed with all the things I need and want to do, I began just giving in to the process. I do not have to sit at the piano for hours and hours, although if I could do that, it would certainly not be a bad thing, but the goal is to break off tiny chunks and do it every day at the same time for a pre-scheduled amount of time and walk away at the end of that time. Eventually things will come together.

I have been scheduling four hour songwriting sessions on Saturdays and Sundays when I am not out of town. I do sometimes break this promise to myself, but I keep it most of the time.

It sucks to sit for four hours and come out with a bunch of nothing, but it often happens and I have to remind myself, the outcome is not the goal, the goal is the showing up. What comes of it is irrelevant. Sure, I want to finish songs, but right now the thing I love is just showing up and doing the work.

During these sessions, I record a ton of snippet videos of song ideas and I save them in a folder called, “Song ideas”. A folder I rarely go back to, but it is there should I want it.

Today, my four hours was almost up and I had just gotten a bit frustrated. I gave in to reworking an old song of mine. In my youth it was in the key of A minor and in reworking it, I have found it fits my voice better now if I move it down a half step. A-flat minor is not a key I know well, so I spent too much time during the four hours practicing in that key.

Then I reminded myself I was avoiding the work at hand. I needed to try to write something new. I moved away from the keyboard, into my reading and writing chair. I flipped through some old lyrics I had scribbled in a notebook. I found the page pictured below and I hated the first half, but felt there was something there on the second half of the page and I thought I could make that into a chorus. Yes, I know my handwriting is terrible. It is in general, but when writing lyrics I try to go as fast as I can, so it is way worse than even my usual terrible handwriting.

I went to a fresh page and started trying to write a new first verse. I started it with, “Just because we didn’t know any better, it didn’t make it right”. I stalled out there, so I went to the keyboard and tried to find a melody for that line in hopes that it would help me find the next line. Below is me exploring melody ideas and kind of stumbling into the beginning of a song right at the end of my time. It is pretty typical of me to just keep repeating a line in hopes the next line will reveal itself.

For those that do not know what “smear the queer” is, it is essentially, “tackle the man with the ball”, which is as PC as we got with the name, because we also called “Kill the man with the ball”. I do not know how widespread these names were in the seventies.

My shiny face is courtesy of Folk Potions™ essential oils!

I do not really like sharing these kinds of rough videos of the songwriting process, but it is fine. Maybe you like seeing the process.

Here are some ways you can help me bring new work into the world.

• Be a free subscriber, if you are not

• Engage by commenting or liking any of my post. Honestly this is a big one. It feels nice to build a community

• Become a paid subscriber, which thank you if you do, because that truly helps me afford to put new work out

• Find me on Spotify or Apple (Robert Steel) and follow me, listen to music

• Share any of my posts or music with your friends

• Listen, follow or buy any of my music on bandcamp

Thank you for reading,

Robert

In the early two-thousands I was real unhappy with my health and weight. I remembered loving bike riding as a kid and thought, maybe I would get back into it.

Back home, in my mothers rusted and dilapidated metal shed, with no doors, sat my BMX bike from my childhood. I loved this bike and did a lot of upgrades to it over the years.

I decided I would pick it up when I got back home and get back into riding it. I got pretty excited about the idea of having my BMX bike again. I was in my early thirties and was not sure I could do any sweet jumps, but I could at least do some sweet wheelies.

The brand of the bike was Mongoose. That was a medium big brand in the early eighties and it was the bike that replaced the infamous Huffy Pro Thunder (I have a song called 1980 Huffy Pro Thunder) You can listen to it here

My parents divorced when I was six years old. My dad made good money, but my mother did not. I lived with my mother and she could not afford to get me a new bike. I had to go a while without a bike when I was eleven and twelve. Then one day I saw an ad in the Thrifty Nickel for a black Mongoose bike, with Gold Honey Comb rims for one hundred and fifty dollars.

I asked my mom for the money and she quickly said, you are going to have to ask your father.

It is hard to convey how scary it was to ask my father for something. He did not want to get you anything, but if he did, you were damn sure going to work it off. I was fine with working it off, but he always made it a thing he held over my head and was just a dick about it.

My dad ran a gas station. When my sister turned driving age, he did not help her buy a car, so she ended up with a hand me down from my grandparents. My dad told her to get gas at his station when she needed gas. She did and then got a bill in the mail for the money she owned for gas, signed Bob.

I summoned the courage and asked my father if he would buy me the bike and I would work it off by working at his gas station. I would pump gas for customers, check the oil and fluids, clean the auto shop, the bathroom (I was already doing these things for free).

He said, one hundred and fifty dollars!? You know how long that would take you to work off? Yes sir, I do.

He drove me to the outskirts of town to meet with the father and kid who owned the bike. I am fairly certain I could drive you to that exact house to this day.

The kid had upgraded to a newer, nicer bike and was letting this one go. I gave it a quick look over and told my dad that I wanted it. He handed the other dad one hundred and fifty dollars in cash. My dad bitched about it the entire way back to my house, but I did not care. I had a new bike. I was so excited.

I was really pushing it, when a month later I asked him for one hundred dollars, so I could replace the heavy honey comb rims with brand new Z rims. Z rims were graphite and much lighter.

I still cannot believe it, but he gave me a hundred dollar bill. I think he was impressed that I had the nerve to ask for the money. I immediately went to Mud, Sweat and Gears and bought Z rims.

Pictured below: Me on my Mongoose with Z rims

Over the years I had that bike, I made many upgrades on my own. I bought some black and gold checkerboard pads, got new Shimano pedals, grips, seat, headset, handle bars. I was in for around five hundred on this bike, which was a lot for a kid in nineteen eighty-three.

After high school, I had moved from my hometown of Lawton, Oklahoma to Dallas, Texas. It was a three hour drive between the two and I went home at least every other weekend, because I had a daughter back in my hometown.

I was excited to pick up my bike next time I went back home. I was ready to get back to exploring Dallas on my BMX bike. The first thing I did when I got home was go out to the shed to get it and see how bad of a shape it was in. It was not out there. I figured my mom put it in my bedroom, which was now a storage and computer room. I checked in there and could not find it amongst the chaos. I then figured maybe she moved it to my grandparents garage. I asked her about it and she said, “Oh, I gave that away”. I was upset. “You gave it away?! You realize how expensive that bike is?” She said, “That makes sense then, that it got stolen immediately”. She told me she gave it to a kid in the neighborhood that did not have a bike and that it was stolen the same day she gave it to him.

That was a completely valid decision on her part, but I said something along the lines of, I wish you had told me. I would have told you to buy him a lock as well.

I was really bummed that my childhood bike was gone forever.

When I got back to Dallas, I decided to go to a bike store and look at new bikes. I did not spend much time deciding what to buy. My budget was three-hundred dollars and I walked in and bought the lowest priced Trek mountain bike they had. It was chrome with red lettering. I thought that was pretty damn fancy. I swore that bike would be the thing that got me in shape.

By my apartment was a bike trail that was twenty-four miles long. I had worked my way to being able to ride the whole twenty-four miles. I think at the time I had weighed about two-fifty when I started riding and I was coming down in weight pretty quickly as I have an addictive personality and went from fast food junkie to eating better and biking seven days a week. It is always my downfall. I suck at balance.

The same year I got the bike, I rode that bike one hundred miles in the Hotter ‘N Hell 100 in late August. I did not finish at the speed I thought I would. I think I finished at less than twelve miles per hour as my average speed.

The ride began at seven o’five in the morning. I expected to be done by two in the afternoon, but was one of the last to cross the finish line at around five in the evening. I was overly cocky and told my family to greet me at the finish line around one-thirty, but I think they got there even earlier. My mother, step dad, sister and daughter waited for a good four to five hours in the heat with no way to tell when I was coming in, so they just had to watch every rider coming down the street. I limped across the finish line and apologized that I did not finish in the time I told them I would. I did not let that put a damper on my celebration. Five months earlier, I was riding twenty-four miles, thinking that was as far as I would ever be able to ride. I was proud I had just done a hundred mile ride on a heavy mountain bike, not fit for long distance.

I wasted no time rebounding from the slow time and signed up to do an eighty mile ride in the Arbuckle Wilderness of Oklahoma in late October. My friend Charles and I had been riding all these long distance, organized fund raiser rides together, but he could not make it to this one. I knew this ride was going to be very hilly and therefore at least as tough as the hundred miles I had just ridden a couple of months earlier.

It was a stark contrast in the way of weather. The hundred miles I had ridden was in August, in over a hundred degree temperatures and when the eighty mile ride rolled around in late October, it was cold and rainy.

I reveled in the extra challenge of the weather conditions. It was about a two and a half hour drive from my house. I got up at three-thirty in the morning, to make sure I would be there in time. When I arrived, it seemed most people had backed out. The rain was coming down and it was in the low fifties. It was a very thin crowd of maybe a seventy-five riders and even some of them decided to quit before it even started.

I was mostly used to training alone in the middle of nowhere, I had a very large bag on the back of my mountain bike. I had just gotten used to having it there and I kept a lot of things in it, tubes, compressed air, patches, tools, snacks, first aid. I had just not really ever thought about taking it off in times when I would not really need most of those things. These organized rides usually have rest stops every ten miles that provide food, drinks, first aid, bike repair. Plus they have what they call SAG wagons which are vans or trucks that will come pick you up if you cannot complete the ride of if you are having issues with your bike and often those vehicles have the things to fix your bike should you want to keep going.

I was just a few miles into this ride and going up the first of many steep hills, when a group of guys on expensive roads bikes began to pass me. As one of the guys passed by, he said, What do you have, a six pack in that bag? They all laughed. He then said something along the lines of, you’re not trying to ride the whole eighty miles on that bike? I said, yep. I brushed it off for a minute. Then I got a little pissed about it and vowed to pass him up and finish before he did. I decided I would ride the eighty miles straight through. No rest stops. This would be my first attempt at doing a long distance ride without stopping to rest and refuel.

I rode like a madmen. The weather was not even a thought. One benefit of a mountain bike is the gearing is geared for hills. I was climbing them with no trouble. I got to the finish line and was sure I had passed that guy while he was sitting at a rest stop. I packed my bike up and went and stood next to the finish line and waited. I wanted to rub it in. I waited and waited. He was not coming. I walked to my car and looked back one last time and there he was, limping across the finish line. There was no one at the finish line. No one waiting on a family member, no one just hanging out. It was one of those rides where the finish line is very anti-climatic. You finished to an empty parking lot with a handful of cars in it. He quickly just made his way to his car. I walked over to him and said, “I tried to save you a beer, but I drank them all waiting for you”. He was exhausted and it took him a few seconds to even know who I was or what I was talking about. I explained that I was the guy on the mountain bike, but the joke landed flat and there was not really anything else to say, so I just walked back to my car and left.

I had told myself if I finished the year strong, that I had earned the right to treat myself to a nice road bike, the following year. I finished the year very strong, riding hundreds of miles a week, even in the bitter cold December. At the first of the following year, I started researching road bikes.

I spent months researching and testing bikes, so much so that I was still riding my mountain bike for much of the following year.

I tried every brand available in the stores in the Dallas area. Carbon fiber was the cool material at the time, so initially I was not interested in any other frame material. Then I rode an aluminum frame Cannondale. When I test rode it, I knew it was the bike I wanted. The frame was stiff and fast, but still light and smooth. It still took me a few more weeks, maybe even months to save up and pull the trigger. I cannot recall the price, but somewhere between twenty-five hundred and thirty-five hundred. I had resigned to telling myself I needed to buy it before August.

It is the coolest looking bike I have ever owned. I loved that bike. I could get off work and ride eighty miles easily before dark. I could get my sprints up to forty miles an hour on a strong day.

Where I did most of my riding those days was around White Rock lake in Dallas. It was ten miles around the lake, so I would just do as many laps as I felt like doing or had time to get in before dark.

August rolled around, I weighed around one eighty-five. The lowest my weight had been in years. I was more than ready to tackle the Hotter ‘N Hell. Charles was too. We had both been training all year and had done many long rides together.

Again, I asked my family to come out and told them this time I was sure I would finish before noon.

When that day rolled around, Charles and I got to the starting line about an hour ahead of the start time, so we could be at the front of the pack. When the cannon went off to start the ride, we wasted no time going full throttle. We stayed together the entire ride, formed fast packs with other riders and did our share of rotating out in the front of packs and we finished around eleven thirty in the morning with an average speed of 22.1 miles per hour. Not only was it easy, we finished with plenty of energy. We packed up, grabbed lunch and headed back to Dallas. I remember hanging out in Dallas that afternoon and thinking, it is crazy that I drove two hours to Wichita Falls today, rode my bike a hundred miles and drove the two hours back and it is only mid-afternoon.

If I remember correctly, I got up the next morning and did a sixty to eighty mile ride.

That is the fastest I have ever done that ride. I doubt I will ever beat it, but my next fastest time of doing it would be sixteen years later in twenty nineteen at age fifty. I got in one minute after noon at 19.9 miles per hour. In twenty twenty-five, I am shooting to beat my second best time.

Here is to a new month! At least that was the plan. I wanted to get this posted at the beginning of the month.

Did anyone else get super into the book Atomic Habits, by James Clear over the pandemic? I am loving being focused on the daily process of small improvements, because I am so scatter-brained. I want to be the person that makes tiny improvements that compound over time and slowly change how I operate and think.

I wish I could have learned this lesson in my youth. In the book, James talks a lot about the process being the goal, not a goal being the goal. The idea is to fall in love with the processes of being the person you want to be.

It did wonders with learning piano. It is daunting to sit at a foreign instrument and try to work your way to making beautiful music. It feels so far away! It is easy to get overwhelmed with the things you cannot do and do not know.

As I get older, a lot of my morning routine is about feeling better, both mentally and physically.

Age sucks, I do not like growing older, but I also do not like being in pain. My day goes much better if I wake and do a quick meditation, light yoga, some physical exercise to get the blood pumping. When I am in the zone, this can all happen within thirty minutes of waking, but most of the time I take it slower and do it in forty-five minutes to an hour. I feel really great these days.

Still, routine is hard for me. It is fun to get a coffee and stare at my phone for a while. I often fail at doing things I know will help me feel and be better.

I do not really want to share these pages, but I find if I share these journeys, the more likely I am to stick with them.

Below is last months checklist. There is a lot of room for improvement in there, but also a lot of success and I only want to focus on success and look to the present and future. The fact that I missed a lot of things in the past is irrelevant.

I rode 232 miles, went to the gym 12 times, which were on the days I had pre-scheduled, so I technically missed zero days.

I did 260 push ups and 360 core exercises during my morning routine and more importantly I was pretty consistent with this habit for the second half of the month.

15 of the days I got up for my 6am alarm. That’s fifty percent of the time and really, I should not count weekends, because sleeping in is one of the best gifts the weekends bring.

12 hours of piano practice. Not too shabby.

My focus is being happy, healthy and moving towards my goals of being fulfilled with the work I do and also being financially sound so I can build or buy a home, relax and do things for the love of doing them.

I have been putting in a lot of work on what I want my life to look like and falling in love with the process is helping me get there.

I want to build a home in a small town or outside of a small town somewhere. I have even designed the home somewhat. I want a garden. I want to sit on the porch and look at the garden. I want to sip coffee and say things like, “the azalea’s are looking nice”. I do not even know what azalea’s are. I just looked them up, scratch that. Those are too grandma’y. Maybe sunflowers, the big ones.

I want a piano in the living room. Not a grand, not even a baby grand, just a solid upright. I want to play beautiful things and write beautiful songs. I do not want to be alone, sad guy writing alone sad guy songs. That guy is exhausting and I am kind of done with him. Although, I have a wealth of sad songs currently that I am probably about to record and I think sad songs are beautiful, so there is that too. I am more and more preferring to find the positive change, growth and happiness. I deserve that.

Some days it is easy and some days I get bogged down and have to take a breath and say, you know what. Stop. Just keep to the plan of tiny gains. Make sure you are setting yourself up for your own future and stay open to all possibilities, just make sure you have done the things you need to do to be fulfilled and financially sound enough to do things you enjoy. It will come.

Here’s my current months habits. I am kicking some serious ass so far. I welcome and appreciate any moral support or sage advice. Do you have thoughts on what I should do when I grow up? I want to do things I enjoy and still have some income coming in, in my later years.

Let me just take a second to say, I have already done more push ups this month, than last.

Also, already over 12 hours of piano time.

Do you want an accountability partner? I know I do. It is harder to do all this silently, alone. I am not going to do that. I am over internalizing all the things. I am going to be vocal and relentless and I would love for it to be a community.

Here is what I am focusing on for my future.

• I am recording an album with me on piano. I have booked studio time. I have a strained relationship with playing live and trying to put music out in the world, but I have worked very hard to learn piano. I am proud of the work I have done and I am proud of the songs I am writing. The piano bench is one of my happiest places

• With music, I am hoping to write some bigger songs, more for a band and release work under the name Goldie Roxx. My hope there is I kind of want to cross 80s metal shows and folk. I want to put on metal style shows, pyro, flames, big background lights of the name Goldie Roxx, but with folkier work. It would be fun to have flames and pyro going off during a Huffy pro thunder style song, right? Can you see that shit?! I would like to make this happen, not a small task, but I have pulled off harder things

• I am going to do more art. I am going to lean hard into it. I am going to take stained glass classes and I am going to draw and screen print and letterpress my own work and like piano, the practice of showing up will make me proud of what I get done here. My focus is on loving the process and at some point I will look upon beautiful things. It would be amazing to do these things into my older days for a stream of income coming in on something that I enjoy doing

• I have a five and ten year plan, financially speaking. I have stayed pretty well on top of this and I am on schedule to be where I need to be. It is very doable

• Workwise, I am focusing on two things. One, kicking ass at what I currently do and growing those skills and opportunities. At the same time I am going to explore other options and keep myself ready and open for opportunities I might miss otherwise. Ideally I need more income coming in to further ensure I truly get where I am going to be

• I am going to write more. I plan to write some books, one full-length, but mostly short stories.

• My friend Amy and I have worked on some plans to engage with our community and new communities together more. She has really been a big help in helping me grow, getting me out there. I am grateful for her. Also shout out to my friend Lindsey who has single-handedly kept my music fire stoked when it was barely embers.

If you would like to contribute in any small way, which if you read this, you contributed, thank you. Here are some ways you can help me bring new work into the world.

• Be a free subscriber, if you are not

• Add me to your recommendations on Sub Stack

• Engage by commenting or liking any of my post. Honestly this is a big one. It feels nice to build a community

• Become a paid subscriber, which thank you if you do, because that truly helps me afford to put new work out

• Find me on Spotify or Apple (Robert Steel) and follow me, listen to music

• Share any of my posts or music with your friends

• Listen, follow or buy any of my music on bandcamp

Near our house when I was five or six, there was a little convenience store that had a giant cow statue parked in front of it. The cow was painted brown and white with a great deal of chips in the paint. It stood on a rusted out trailer, crudely spray painted red. There were bricks on each sides of the near flat tires, holding the trailer in place and rope under the trailer and over the cow, holding it in place. On each side of the cow was a marquee board that they could change out the letters on. They kept the marquee updated with whatever letters and numbers they had on hand. If a seven needed to be an “L”, so be it. It was a tiny run down convenience store, with a thick coat of white paint over many past colors of the brick building. I had been so curious to go inside.

Example:

One day, I was running errands with my mother and asked if we could go to that convenience store. She said, “not today, there’s currently a dirt road to get there and I don’t want to get the car dirty”. 

I had been on many dirt roads by that time, but I am not sure I had heard anyone call them dirt roads. At that moment I pictured a dirt road as some wondrous thing, like maybe you went through a dirt tunnel or up a dirt mountain! I begged my mom to take me to this crazy thing called a dirt road. It took a mild tantrum, but my mother obliged with a mildly annoyed temperament.

Up to that point, the dirt road had been very patch worked asphalt and less than a hundred yards long. The road was there just to make it possible to easily get from our neighborhood to the convenient store. If that road had not been there, you would have to get out on the main road and take a right, then u-turn, drive past the building a u-turn again to get to it.

I was incredibly excited about the possibilities of a dirt road. Will our car be able to handle it? Will I get scared?

When we arrived, she annoyingly said, “see here’s the dirt road, are you happy?” I said, “That’s all it is? I’ve been on a bunch of these”. “I know!”, she said.

However there in front of us was that magical cow convenience store. She decided to pop in and get something, probably cigarettes. I was so excited to finally go into this store. I bet they have candy I have never seen before!

I rushed to the candy isle and it was mostly the same as any other candy isle, but then I came upon it. The first time I had seen an Astro pop. What a fantastic looking sucker. Astro pop is a perfect name for it. It looked out of this world, like a rainbow rocket. They were about eight inches in length and came to a point. They were three colors, yellow, green and red to work your way through and the bottom of the sucker was capped with a white wax disk to protect your hand from getting sticky. They looked like they would make for a good jousting sword. I had to have one. I begged my mom, but had already spent my begging on the disappointing dirt road. My mother was out of patience with me and refused to get me the sucker.

I swore from that moment on, all of my energy would be focused on getting one of these suckers.

Time went on and money at that age was hard to come by. I would have to wait on some sort of hand out.

A few weeks later, I was able to talk my mom into taking me back to the store during another day of errands. She did and I finally got an Astro Pop.

I got it back to the car and I could not wait. I opened it up and sucked on it. I was not sure how I felt about the flavor or texture. I tried biting it, but it was tough and chewy, instead of hard and brittle. You could bend the sucker and then bend it back in place. I went back to sucking on it.

We went about our errands and I was warming up to the flavor or at least talking myself into it. It starts with a pineapple flavor. I am not sure that is the flavor you want to start out with. Seems like a questionable call.

At some point during our errands, I set the sucker on its wrapper on the back dash. We came back out to it melted over the wrapper and onto the carpet of the back dash. I tried to conceal what I had done, but it took my mom a couple of seconds to notice what had happened. She made me throw away the sucker and cursed as she unsuccessfully tried to pull the stickiness from the carpet. I remember thinking, it is not like it is a nice car, why be upset? I wisely kept my mouth shut. Errand Astro Pop fun-time was over and now we had moved on to errand, quiet, angry sad-time. That was the one and only time I had an Astro Pop and I am fine with that.

This past Saturday, I rode my bicycle a hundred miles in a hundred plus degree heat in Wichita Falls, Texas. An event called Hotter’N Hell Hundred. I need to figure out the right number, but I think I have done it eight to ten times now. I will break this story into some chapters and start at the beginning.

Unhappy with my weight and health, in two-thousand, I bought a Trek 4300 mountain bike for three-hundred and fifty dollars. That was a big purchase. I had never spent that kind of money on a bike. Even though I was aware it was a cheap bike in the grand scheme of “nice bikes” and by “nice bikes”, I mean a bike from a bike store and not from the sporting goods section of a department store.

At the time I bought the bike, I weighed two-hundred and sixty pounds. The most I had ever weighed. I was very depressed about it. The problem with my relationship with food is that I eat to celebrate and I eat to commiserate. Even though I am very aware of this and have worked hard to use healthy food for the highs and lows, I do not know if I will ever fully overcome that. Sometimes I have to eat an entire pizza and be down on myself and sometimes, sometimes turns into months or years and sometimes those months or years only felt like a week or two.

I have always been on a never-ending yo-yo with my weight and diet. Maybe I inherited this struggled from my mother. Her and I talked about this struggle quite a bit in my adulthood. Here is my sister and I running with my mom as she nears the finish line of a half marathon.

My mother used running as her healthy addiction and I use biking.

The trap I have fallen into time and time again is I am always operating in an extreme. I am extremely exercising or I am extremely doing the opposite of that.

I lived in Dallas, Texas at the time. I lived near a bike path that started at 635 and Hillcrest. It went seven miles to white rock lake and joined up with a ten mile loop that went around the man-made lake and back, making it twenty-four miles total. It took me a while, but I had worked up to riding this entire trail. I could not believe I was riding a bike twenty-four miles. That was so far!

Since I was riding so much, I did not work hard on changing my eating habits, but I was losing weight as long as I was riding most days of the week. I could justify eating this or that, because I was also going to ride it off. I also did not understand what it meant to eat healthy.

I remember hanging out with my aunt in Colorado around this time, someone who actually does eat healthy. I vividly remember bragging to her that I had been eating healthy. She asked me what a typical meal was. I told her I would microwave instant brown rice, and mix it with a can of cream of mushroom soup. It was hard for her to keep a straight face, but she just said, well that is not very healthy.

My childhood best friend, Charles had moved to Dallas after living in Los Angeles for a while. We started hanging out again. I told him I had been riding. He had a bike and wanted to ride together. He had a Trek road bike. It was one of the Lance Armstrong USPS models. It was fancy and he was a much better rider than I was. He told me we should start doing some bike rallies together. I did not know what those were. He said, a lot of cities and towns have these rallies with routes ranging from ten miles, up to sixty-two miles (100k) and some even have a full hundred miles. You would pay twenty-five dollars or so to do these rallies and they were either raising money for the town or for a charity.

That sounded so intimidating to me. He said he does the sixty-two mile routes, but if I would join him he would do a shorter route with me. He found one that was happening the very next weekend and it was close by in Lewisville, Texas. He said they had a forty-two mile route and that we should do that one. Forty-two miles! No way I can do that. He said, if you can do twenty-four, which you currently are, then you can do forty-two. I thought he was crazy, but he talked me into it.

I showed up with my mountain bike and we rode forty-two miles. He was right! I could ride forty-two miles! It was not even that hard.

He then said, okay, there is another in two weeks. We are going to do the sixty-two mile route. He told me to go get some slick tires to put on my bike and so I did and two weeks later we rode sixty-two miles. This was so unbelievable to me. I had just ridden a bicycle sixty-two miles, three weeks after thinking twenty-four was about as far as I could do. This was completely insane to me.

I was hooked. Over the next few months I dropped down to one-ninety-five as Charles and I went to all the rallies we could find that were less than three hours away. We must have done more than a dozen, sixty-two mile routes between April and July in addition to training most days. He told me it was time for me to do the Hotter’N Hell Hundred mile rally in late August. It was a hundred miles in a hundred degree temperatures. I was up for the challenge as I was just hungry to ride. I did two, eighty mile rides on my own through the Wichita Mountains shortly before the event.

Here are a some pictures from my a disposable camera I took during my first ever eighty-mile ride from Medicine Park, Oklahoma to a few miles past Cooperton, Oklahoma and back.

I did not get a good picture of my odometer, but if you squint just right, you can see it says 80.02 miles. The church photo was near the half way point and I just found it cool looking.

With cages or clip in pedals you could pull more with your legs, Charles tells me. With regular pedals it was more just pushing down. I still had just regular pedals on my bike, not even cages over my feet. He had been trying to get me to buy some clip in pedals for a while, telling me it was a game-changer. I think I held out so long because it seemed less like biking to me to not be using just regular pedals.

I was so enamored with the Hotter‘N Hell Hundred. I would read all the information I could find on it. At sixty miles they have what they call Hells Gate and if you cannot make it to there by a certain time, they would close the gate and you would not be able to do the hundred miles. I pictured an actual stone archway over the road with lit torches, stone gargoyles perched over a big iron gate that they would shut and lock if they deemed you not worthy.

The couple of days before the Hotter’N Hell, I upgraded to clip in pedals. That turned out to be a huge mistake. Now I would be altering the way I pedal a couple of days before the longest ride I had ever done. Even though I did not knowingly think I was altering anything, but when you are clipped in to your pedals you are just naturally going to pull up with one foot while pushing down with the other.

I had also not really committed to biking clothes as this time. I was still just wearing cotton t-shirts and mountain biking shorts, which were just cargo shorts with padding in them. I made my first purchased of a breathable shirt right before the hundred mile ride. I did not buy a biking jersey, but a t-shirt for joggers that was more breathable than cotton. I was not ready to commit to skin tight biking clothes just yet.

My mother lived an hour away from where the ride started and my sister lived about two-hours away. I asked them to come out to the finish line to see me cross. I think I was even cocky and told them what time I would finish, probably saying something like, between two and three pm. I knew how long it was taking me to do eighty miles and I figured it would take an extra hour and a half at most.

Usually at least a couple of thousand people ride the hundred mile route. Charles and I sat at the starting line, about a thousand people back.

They have a cannon that goes off to start the ride and Wichita Falls is an Air Force town, so they have jets fly over head right as they start the race. The timing is incredible. They play the star spangled banner over the speakers and at the end of the song, jets come roaring above you from behind at 7:04 and they zoom over the crowd as it hits 7:05 and the cannon goes off.

It seemed like it took twenty minutes before we were actually riding from when the cannon went off, but we were off. I had told Charles to ride at his own pace and not to worry about me. He hung with me for a little while, but eventually he needed to go at his own pace, so he took off.

Everything was going smoothly. People would come up beside me and tell me they were surprised how fast I could go on a mountain bike. Then they would ask which route I am doing and I would say, the hundred mile route. They would tell me that I was crazy to attempt it on a mountain bike. I would tell them it was no problem at all.

I made it to hells gate well before it closed to find it very disappointing. There was no gate! No fire and gargoyles! Just an inflated arch off to the side of the road, which was a service road of interstate forty-four in Burkburnett, Texas. There was nothing cool about any of it, other than I had made it sixty miles.

I was happy with my speed up to that point. It was not even noon. I was making great time and I started to get worried that I might get over the finish line before I said I would and my mom and sister would miss it. I thought to myself, I should have told them one thirty.

At mile seventy my hamstrings that were not used to getting much work, locked up entirely and I fell over because my legs would not move. This was the first time I had ever cramped up from riding. I did not even know this was a thing that could happen. I was dumbfounded. 

I sat there on the ground in pain for a while trying to get my cramps worked out with the added embarrassment of lots of people asking if I was okay as they passed by. I would assure them I was fine. I could not stop. I had to finish. I finally managed to stand and work on stretching out my hamstrings enough to be able to get back on the bike. I got a couple of miles before it happened again and again I fell over and again I had to assure people I was fine and again I managed to stretch out my cramps enough to get back on the bike. I discovered that if I rode pretty slow, I could keep the cramps at bay. It was getting hotter and windier. I was going slower and slower. I had no way to tell my mom and sister that it was now looking more like five thirty in the afternoon until I would get to the finish line. I desperately wanted to go faster, but I just could not.

They sat out there, worried and baking in the sun for several hours looking at every rider approaching to see if it was me. They probably looked at a thousand people crossing the finish line.

At mile ninety-nine you have to ride up a long overpass. It took everything I had to make it up that hill. Walking my bike up that hill would not have counted. And as I rode down the other side I knew I had to be close to the end. I started riding down an empty city street, turning down another and turning down another and then, there it was. I could see the finish line. I could see all the people waiting and cheering. Finally, here I was at the finish line, probably one of the last to cross. My mom, sister and step dad came out to greet me and in my excitement, I forgot I was clipped into my pedals and forgot to unclip when I came to a stop, so I just fell over after crossing the finish line. I was somewhat fine, but it looked very dramatic and everyone was rightly concerned. I assured them I was fine and that I was not dying, but I could tell they were not fully buying that.

I had done it! I had ridden a hundred miles, on a mountain bike no less. Charles was waiting there too and he looked like he had not ridden at all. I think he finished four or five hours earlier than I did.

I honestly cannot remember all the time lines, but it was around this time my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. A cancer with no real chance of surviving. It was the height of Lance Armstrongs fame and his cancer survivor story. My mom was deeply inspired by him. She was determined to beat cancer. She too got a bike and we began riding together in the Wichita Mountains outside of my hometown of Lawton, Oklahoma.

Photos by Mom.

I did not want to ask for anything. I did not want to fight for attention. We were all going through a lot. I just wanted to support my songwriter and musician friends how I could, even if it was just having their online concert on in the background while I worked. I could request songs, throw an emoji their way and post nice comments with whatever tip I could give.

The first day of the lockdown was the first day of spring break for my grandkids, whom I had promised a spring break trip to. If you know me, you know I take being a dad and grandpa pretty seriously and I take fun trips with family very seriously. It was not an option to renege on my promise.

Also, my daughter was now out of a job. She could use the time to look for work and stress out on her own without having the extra weight of two kids at home to feed, entertain and comfort.

I drove from Austin, TX to Norman, OK, which is about four hundred miles. I picked the kids up to take them to Austin. Since the pandemic was new and of course I was very nervous, I decided to take back roads on the way home as to not be in traffic and therefore maybe be more exposed. Again, first day of lock down. Everything was scary and new.

I did however take somewhat of a gamble right off the bat. On the backroads we would be going through Pauls Valley, OK. They have an action figure museum. I had to at least do something fun with them and I figured day one of the lock down in a small town was the only opportunity I would get. There was no one in there but one employee, so it felt pretty safe. She had hand sanitizer on the counter, was wearing a mask and we kept a lot of distance in the transaction. We were there for about forty-five minutes and the worker got a call from her boss to close.

We left and drove to Austin and like most of us, I figured the kids would be going back to school in a week. They stayed with me for a while. I was so nervous to drive them back home. We tried homeschooling for a couple of days, but the school quickly decided it was a bad idea and just abandoned it.

I worked at home, so even though I did not know if that would continue, I was at least in an okay position for the moment.

We made forts, rode bikes, played games, made art, put together puzzles, ate way too much junk food, watched every kids movie, watched every kid series (Phenious and Ferb and KC Undercover are forever in my brain now) hell we even watched all the seasons of The Masked Singer. My grandson learned baby shark and the theme to Star Wars on piano and my granddaughter “played” my guitars a bunch.

During that time I had gotten deeper into meditation, just trying to find any peace of mind. I downloaded a guided meditation app, by Sam Harris. He also has a lot of interviews on there and I listened to one with James Clear, he wrote a book called Atomic Habits.

I am a sucker for “get your shit together” books. I pride myself in failing time and time again, but always hoping something will click and help me overcome my inability to get things done.

I liked what James Clear had to say, so I bought his book. I read it, then bought his planner. I used the planner for several months and then gave up on it. As usual, I was over-tracking. I am over-tracking now too, but I guess it is just what I do. However, pulling the journal out for the photo above, now I want to start it again! I am realizing the new system I have is more ridiculous than this as it involves jars and tiny little plastic chips. I wanted to be able to “see” the progress. I cannot share a photo of that whole system now out of embarrassment, but here’s the tray of plastic chips I use to fill jars.

I cannot tell you how many systems I have concocted over the years, even in early childhood. If you have a system that works, share it. Like I said, I am forever in search of a better way.

The one thread I find in most self-help books, even if it is buried because the author is not giving it enough credit, is the goal is the habit, not the outcome. I am a slow learner and it has taken me thirty years or more to hear this lesson.

In 2023, I really wanted to get serious about learning piano. I had dabbled for ten years, but not enough to really make much progress. Every time I would sit down to learn something, it was over-whelming. There is too much to learn.

At the beginning of 2023 I decided I would practice piano for thirty minutes a day at 8am. This later changed to 7am, but in 2023 I did not miss many days. Am I a decent player? No, not really, but I am much, much better than I was when I began.

More importantly, what has happened is something I truly love. I do not care how much I learn or progress. I do truly only care about doing it every day, ideally at the same time. I have expanded that to songwriting.

This has opened up many doors for me. Instead of being in my head about trying to find something to say, I just sit and write for a set amount of time and then I walk away. I do not judge it. I do not care what comes out. I just care about showing up.

I love it. I wish I had learned this approach in my youth. It would have made things much less stressful.

Twenty years ago, a friend gave me a book by jazz pianist Kenny Werner. I have physically read it ten or more times. I have also listened to the audio book even more times.

Every time I read it or listen to it, I find something new. Recently, the thing that stuck out to me is a question he once posed to famed pianist, Bill Evans. He asked Bill what he practices and Bill said, “the minimum”. Kenny expands on that, “not the least amount of time, but the least amount of material”. Do the smallest thing you can until it is mastered.

I used to hate practice, because it seemed like so much. It never dawned on me to utilize my ADD super powers and do something small and mindless over and over. That is why fidget spinners exist.

I have spent the last two months of my piano practice time meditating and playing the triad of C minor up and down the keys in all positions, at this point mostly with my eyes closed. I did not expect to do this for two months, but I still have not mastered it and it is so enjoyable just trying to completely lose myself in the simplicity of it. Last night some friends sent me some music stuff they were working on and I did this quick video showing them what I was doing. This is one hand of doing some of the C minor triad.

It is really the only two ideas I want to spend the rest of my life on. Show up every day, even if it is five minutes and work on the least amount as possible.

For a while I wondered if I would ever do another album. However, although the goal is the habit of showing up, I do think I have many more albums to come.

I was a teenage father and got married in high school. My grandfather got me and my wife a one night stay at the Sandpiper Inn Motel across town for our honeymoon. I remember laying awake in that motel bedroom, while my pregnant wife was asleep and freaking out because it dawned on me I might be a grandpa in my thirties.

My first grandchild was born one month after my fortieth birthday and I was not sure how I felt about it. I hated that I was not all that excited about it, but it was just the circumstances that I was not excited about. It was not about actually being a grandpa.

I waited for word for when my daughter was going into labor and raced the five and a half hours to be there when my grandson was born. Still, it had not really set in.

I made regular trips to see my grandson and they even came to Austin once.

It did not take me long to fully embraced being pepaw.

Then my granddaughter came a little over three years later and I take the grandkids on many adventures. The grandkids are now fifteen (in 7 weeks) and the youngest just turned eleven.

Our first pepaw trip of the summer was hitting three theme parks in Texas. I love theme parks. I am first to arrive and last to leave. I typically arrive an hour early to be one of the first ones in. I am not leisurely making my way around at any time. I am still a kid racing to the next ride.

When I was a kid I feel like we always arrived late. We always parked a million miles away and had to have one of those parking lot trams take us to the front of the park. Every time I leave Six Flags in Arlington with the kids, we have to exit at the back of the parking lot and I tell the kids, this is where we always parked when I was a kid. I say this because they often complain about how far my car is at the end of the day and I’m always in this very front section.

Last Monday I was proud to have the first parking place.

This year I bought us all (my daughter, the grandkids and myself) season passes for all Six Flags and Six Flags water parks in the country, that comes with VIP fast lane parking, plus a ton of other discounts and perks. The kids have both a Six Flags theme park and a Six Flags water park near them in Oklahoma City, so they get to hit those as much as they want.

I have such wonderful memories of going to theme parks as a kid. I did not go to many and I do not know who took me to some of those, but they really made an impact.

My first big coaster was Space Mountain at DisneyLand in California. My cousins, who were older than me pressured me into riding it. I was terrified, but that started my love of roller coasters.

This is my sister and I coming back from DisneyLand and stopping at the grand canyon. It is weird to know that it had to be my dad taking this picture since we were traveling just with him.

I remember the magic of the theme parks turning from day to night and how they had employees walking around selling glow necklaces. In the seventies, glow necklaces were a hard thing to get a hold of. They were not in stores. Six Flags was the only place I ever saw these. I cannot tell you how cool a glow necklace was in the seventies. It is impossible to convey what a weird and fantastical thing it was to wear a necklace that glowed. Going to sleep in the car with a glow necklace on and waking up in a bed with a dim glow necklace on was about as good as it got.

Since twenty-twenty theme parks have cut their hours way back and I am not a fan of that. It used to be ten to ten or eleven, now it is eleven to seven during the week and til eight or nine on the weekends. I cannot believe theme parks are closing before dark. That is crazy and in general a giant ripoff, especially for the one-time visitors.

My grandson began loving roller coasters a couple of years ago. Sensing he was ready for the leap, but needed someone to ride with to give him the nudge he needed, I invited two of my friends, Lindsey Verrill and Garett T. Capps to go to Six Flags with us. They could take off with him and I could hang back with the little one.

After about an hour in the park, I texted my friends to see how it was going and they had already ridden two or three big coasters and he was on his way.

This year the youngest has begun to ride a few larger coasters, so I finally get to as well. It has been a long time for me and the last one I had ridden was the Titan at Six Flags Arlington quite a few years ago. My vision got very choppy on that ride and I wondered if that was it for me. I am very happy to find that I do still love them and have not had any more choppy vision. We rode one big coaster ten times last Monday.

I could be a professional family vacation planner. Outside of music and writing, planning family trips is my happy place. I spend a great deal of time researching places, cities, attractions, oddities, etc. I watch videos of the theme parks, I study the map so I have it all in my head. I make giant lists, itineraries, budgets. It starts off as a giant collection of ideas and eventually narrows down to a loose itinerary, like the one below.

I am not sure what other adventures we will do this summer, but I have already begun laying out a plan that involves theme parks, water parks, Caverns, Beach, The Cliff Carver Alpine Coaster in New Braunfels, Screen printing art, t-shirts and making art books.

Here is a scaled down list from this last trip.

Triple theme park summer extravaganza June 29th-July 7th.

Get hotel room DONE Courtyard by Marriot 210-558-7774 Right outside of Six Flags. Has nice pool and outdoor gaming area. Pool is open til 11pm

Back pack with sunscreen, goggles, towels, water bottles, quarters for food machines (to feed flamingos, ducks and fish), bathing suit, sun hat, water shoes, flip flops, portable batteries

Have medium cooler in car for cold drinks and snacks

Research Fiesta Texas layout for me and Pennie

POSSIBLE SUNDAY FILLERS
Ft. Worth Zoo, $55
Meow Wolf Grapevine, $130
Dallas World Aquarium, $80
Sunday night Six Flags, because it is the only night on this trip that they are open into the night time and I want to be there in the dark.

Hours for all three parks for all three days

SIX FLAGS ARLINGTON
11-7 all three days
But Sunday it’s open til 9, so maybe go Sunday night just so we can ride rides in the dark

FIESTA TEXAS, SAN ANTONIO
11-7 and 12-7 for the water park all three days
Wonder Woman coaster gets a long line, maybe hit it early
Rockville area has the pool ball ride Pennie might like
German town has Bugs Bunny white water rapids
Boardwalk has great rides and a medium coaster
DC area has two medium coasters, Batgirl and Kid Flash
Straight ahead from gate is an arcade that does tickets and tokens
To the far left is the boardwalk
To the right of the gate is the water park 

Find something to do Tuesday night after leaving the park. Probably just swimming at the hotel pool and ordering pizza, but maybe Incredible Pizza Company.

SEA WORLD
10:30 - 9 all three days
Seaworld will have the fireworks show at the end.

SUNDAY
Ft. worth Zoo, Meow Wolf, Grapevine Mills Mall/Movie theater, Dallas World Aquarium
7-9 Six Flags

MONDAY
Six Flags Arlington, 11-7
Drive to Austin after (3.5 hours)

TUESDAY
Six Flags San Antonio 11-7 (1.5 hour drive)
Swimming and gaming at hotel after
Order Pizza or go out to eat (Kerbey Lane near hotel)

WEDNESDAY
SeaWorld 10:30-9
Late night dinner
Drive back to Austin after (1.5 hours)

THURSDAY
Fourth of July cookout party
Arts and crafts at shop

FRIDAY
Arts and crafts at shop
Maybe Peterpan golf
Maybe go see Troll in the Park
Go check out SkyLine Park
Go check out the Tree House food trailer court
Game night with friends
Go to Toy Joy

SATURDAY
Pool party in Dallas with friends (3.5 hour drive)
Cookout

SUNDAY
Take them back to Norman, OK or meet mom somewhere (3.5 - 10 hours depending on where we meet)
See some friends in Dallas area til dark
Drive back to Austin (3.5 hours)

Now I am back in Austin, recovering from the trip. I got in around 1am Monday morning. Monday I have begun re-working on a song about childhood trauma and guilt. It is quite a switch, but it also ties in and is just part of the fabric of the real world. I think I might go in the studio and lay down a solo piano version of this song in the next month. Hope you are well out there and get to have some good summer adventures as well. Thank you for reading.

Shout out to Lindsey Verrill and Garrett T. Capps for helping my grandson get over the coaster hump!

P.S. The kids are not too much into taking photos these days, so I did not really take many. I did get this one though!

The summer before I was starting junior high, we moved across town from where we had been living. I was not sure if I would know anyone there. I found exactly one person I knew and that was my hunting partner, Kevin. Kevin’s dad and my dad hunted together, therefore Kevin and I hunted together. We did not do much hanging out on our own, but he invited me to sit with him in the cafeteria at lunch on day one and I was so grateful to not have to sit alone.

I was thirteen, I pretty much had a new crush every day, but my first junior high crush really stands out.

I saw Kristi the first day of junior high after leaving my first class in nineteen eighty-two. I do not recall what she was wearing specifically that day, but she often wore a bow tie or a long polo tie, with a nice button down polo shirt. Her posture was perfect, which later made sense as she was a violin player and a ballet dancer. Her hair was shoulder length, dark brown, big and feathered. She was always surrounded by friends that were all dressed in expensive brands, mainly izod and polo. I looked at the cool boys shoes and noticed Puma were a big brand. I was wearing Kmart brand sneakers.

Even though Kristi was my first junior high crush, I never considered trying to know her. It was just too far away. Any time I would see her, angels would sing, but I made exactly zero effort to work my way into her world.

At some point early in that school year, my mom sat me down and had a talk with me. She told me I could not be wearing the same thing to school multiple times a week and especially back to back days. She said that was fine in elementary, but not in junior high. I told her, I had no choice, I had no clothes. She looked in my dresser and closet and was shocked to find that she agreed. She took me to the mall and spent a little over a hundred dollars on clothes for me. I got two pairs of Ocean Pacific corduroy shorts, two or three Ocean Pacific t-shirts and a couple of other cool looking t-shirts that had checkerboard on them.

While we were in the Hallmark store looking at other things, my mom noticed I was not carrying the bags of clothes she had bought me. I had accidentally put them down somewhere. We frantically back-tracked and spent a long time looking for them, asking lost and found, store clerks, but we never found them. She was very angry and I was very sad. I still had no clothes, I knew my mom did not have the money to buy me those clothes and it was my fault.

That Christmas I asked for only one thing, Puma shoes. I needed to have cool shoes. Christmas morning came and I already knew I had the shoes because I had picked them out, but now I would get to actually wear them. They were exactly like these pictured, but white leather, a blue puma logo and dark gray soles. I expected these shoes to change my status. They largely went unnoticed, but one kid that had a locker next to mine commented after about a week of wearing them. “I’ve never seen those with gray soles” he said, and that made my day.

When I first began songwriting in my early twenties, one of the first girls I wanted to write about was Kristi. I wrote these lyrics, but I never recorded the song. I was new to songwriting and therefore was just stealing melodies from other songs. In my head, these lyrics were sung mostly to the melody of, “Twin Falls,” by Built to Spill. When I wrote something I knew I could not use, I just marked it up as a writing exercise and moved on.

YOUTUBE - TWIN FALLS - BUILT TO SPILL

A weird thing to write, being in my mid-twenties. I was so dramatic, but I still am I suppose.

My parents divorced when I was six. It was not a smooth divorce and it was not a pleasant household at the time. I went to the same church all of my youth. In the divorce my mom, along with my sister and I got to keep the church. My dad needed to find a new place to go to church if he wanted to go.

Some would disagree with this, but my father was an alcoholic. He was just a fun drunk more often that he was a bad drunk, but he was pretty much some level of drunk any time I was around him. It was the main reason for my parents divorce. He even took his own alcohol to restaurants that did not serve alcohol and they knew him well enough to just let it slide. He would drink and drive with me and my sister on road-trips. His favorite joke was conveying how far a trip was by how many beers he drank. Someone would ask how far a trip was and he’d say, “About eight beers”. My mom got angry when she found he was drinking with us in the car and yelled at him that he was not allowed to do that. This seems crazy today, but in the seventies it was pretty standard. The next time we went on a road trip with him, my mom asked me if he drank on the trip. I said, no he was on a real health kick and just drank gallons of orange juice. She knew better and tore him a new asshole over the phone.

My dad grew up with a preacher for a father and my dads brother became a preacher as well. When he was single he never really went to church. Then he started dating a woman that went to church, so he started going again.

He wanted me to go to his new church with him and his girlfriend. He took me to an event at the church, maybe a carnival. I do not recall, but it was mainly for kids. I was in the church gymnasium and in walked Kristi. She knew me kind of, so she just came over and started talking to me like it was a totally normal thing to do. I nearly fainted. All of the sudden I wanted to go to this church every chance I got. Kristi and I hung out at church regularly an I even got used to it and stopped freaking out about it internally. It did not carry over to school. She was not snobby like that, so I do not think it was for any reason. We just did not have any classes together and our lockers were not near each others.

One morning, around 5am, my dad and I were heading out to duck hunt. The drive was around an hour to the place we normally hunted and it was still dark. We usually sat in silence, while Johnny Cash played while we rumbled down dirt roads in his two-tone Chevy Silverado truck. That morning out of the blue, he turned down the stereo and just casually told me he planned to die by the time he was sixty. He said it like this was a normal thing to tell a teenage boy. He told me he did not want to live through any physical hardships and would rather be gone by the time it came to that. He knew his drinking, smoking and diet would take a toll and he knew there was no winding back the clock, so he just wanted to just continue the way he was and enjoy the time he had left. I asked him how old he was and he probably said something like forty-seven or forty-eight and I thought, oh, sixty is a long time from now.

It was not too long after that that my father passed. He had a heart attack at a party. He was on the dance floor and just dropped. Aside from being way earlier than sixty and a buzzkill to the party goers, it was a perfect way for him to go. 

When he passed, that marked the end of me going to that church and the end of seeing Kristi outside of school.

Later, I wrote another song about her and it would occasionally show up in a live set. After my album WOLF, I was having a bit of writers block. I was aching to get into the studio, so I decided I would record a bunch of songs that had never made it onto an album. I ended up making an album of some of those songs and calling it, Split Ends. I quietly nudged it out into the world.

This song about Kristi is my favorite performance on the album. I was running through a bunch of songs, solo in the studio to see what might stick. After finishing a take of another song that was satisfactory, the engineer talked into my headphones and asked what the next song was and I looked at my list and told him, “Pros of Divorce”. I delivered a take. The engineer came back in the headphones and said, well no need for another take, you’re not going to do any better. It made the album, because I feel like I really let the song swallow me whole and was surprised to find myself a bit emotional by the end of it.

While looking for Kristi in my old year books, I am reminded that I was graced with the nickname Cheryl for a while.

Recently I saw that Kristi passed away. I was a bit devastated by the news. I never knew her, so it feels weird to be devastated. Still, I feel like part of my childhood died with her, if that makes any sense. I would look at her obituary page that had no obituary and no comments. I did not know anything about her. Did she ever marry? Did she have kids? I knew somewhere people had to be mourning, but seeing an empty obituary page was making me so sad. I looked at it multiple times a day for a few weeks. Not one comment. I wanted to comment, but that seemed weird seeing that I did not actually know her. Then someone noted that their family had planted one hundred trees in her honor and that made me happy.

As you get older you really stop to ask yourself if you are a person who has made an impact on enough lives. I think ahead to my death. I think about the fact that my dad bought his wife a plot next to him before he passed. I think about the fact that she then transferred that plot to me as she moved away and was not going to use it. My mom was buried near my dad and my grandparents and great grandparents are all in this cemetery in a town none of us live in and rarely visit.

On one hand it would be cool to reside next to my dad as a bit of a brag that I lived longer than he did. One the other hand, nah.

This is a shitty detail to throw in at the end of this story, but my first day back to school after my dad died, my English teacher said to me in front of the class that I was going to end up drunk and dead, just like my father. Something I kept to myself at the time because had I told anyone, all hell would have broken loose and I desperately needed no more hell breaking loose. I walked out of class and went to the principals office, I told him I needed to move to a new class today and that I was not going to provide an explanation. He obliged. I did however have to see that bitch every Sunday in church for the next several years.

Here is the track about Kristi. I owe you a lighter story next time and now I am wondering if I said that the last time. Thank you for listening. 

PROS OF DIVORCE

They painted a line down
Down the middle of the town
And we had to move out
When they sold the house

My mom got an old house
About a mile from the old house
My dad got an apartment
Across town

My dad got a new girlfriend
And they joined a new church
And every other weekend
They would take me there

And that’s where I saw her
And that’s when my heart sank
Pretty as a picture
If pictures are any gauge

One day in a black dress
At Sunday service
Her violin solo
Made me believe in love

It was the last time I saw her
Soon after my dad died
And I never stepped foot
In that church again

Kristi, front row, center.

A couple of Saturdays ago I tore a calf muscle. As soon as I heard it pop, I knew what it was. It was a hard weekend all the way around, but laying with my leg iced and propped up did not help. I was supposed to take the grandkids to the zoo that Sunday. I am not used to not being able to do things. I had to drive the four hundred miles back home and I expected it to hurt to drive, but it was not bad and the next day I was getting around decently. I have spent a lot of time icing and massaging it over these two weeks.

This weekend I got back on the bike and the calf is feeling great.

Other good news is I got some new letterpresses books into one of my favorite stores, Paper work on South Congress and they are selling well. That’s cool. I have written many more ideas for books, so maybe I’ll make some new ones in the next week or two.

Oh, other cool things that happened in the last couple of weeks, we hosted a show at Biscuit Press. Datri Bean, Nick Jaina and some say Leland played wonderful sets.

I also printed these posters for Jolie Holland, got them out to her on her tour and they are selling well.

I have been inspired by my friend Sarah to work on some cyanotype. My idea is to take some of my mom’s old nature photos and make them into some nice cyanotype art. I like the idea of her living on through her photos. In the coming weeks, I look forward to breathing new life into her art.

Okay, I’ll end with a story about my dad, Rocky III and the band Survivor.

For a few years in a row in the late seventies and early eighties, I was Rocky for Halloween. I went out with black and gold boxing trunks, boxing gloves, and either no shirt or my Rocky shirt depending on how cold it was. My mom painted a black eye on me, except for one Halloween I had a real black eye as seen in the photo below.

I wanted to be a boxer. I wanted to chase chickens. I wanted to wear gray sweat suits and jog early in the mornings and run up stairs. I wanted someone to pity the fool.

I was twelve years old at the time Rocky III came out. When I first heard the song, “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor, I had to get my hands on it. That is the theme song to Rocky III.

My mom took me to Central Mall in Lawton, Oklahoma. It was the only music store in town, Hastings Records & Tapes. I bought that Survivor cassette and wore it out over the summer of 1982. I knew it backwards and forwards. All my time was spent finding ways to listen to that cassette.

My parents had been divorced for a number of years. Every summer my dad would take me and my sister to visit his parents. They lived in Arkansas. We lived in Oklahoma. It was a seven hour drive or as my dad would say, about eight beers away.

My dad’s dad was a retired Methodist preacher. My dads brother was also a preacher. My dad was the black sheep as he was a country boy that spent his time hunting, fishing, gambling and drinking.

I remember the trip to his parents house in the summer of 1982 more clearly than any of the other trips we had taken there. I was on the verge of being a teenager. Up until this trip I saw my dad as an authority figure and nothing else. This trip was the first time I had realized he was just a person like the rest of us and he had his own things to deal with.

I took my cassette on the trip, but I knew there was no chance my dad would play it in his truck. He played Johnny Cash, Hank Jr, Merle Haggard and Crystal Gayle and that was about it. To my surprise, I talked him into putting it on, but he gave it almost no time and ridiculed it and put his music back on.

He drank and smoked nervously all the way there. He was not allowed to drink or smoke at his parent’s house, so he was getting it in while he could. I sensed he was stressed and not necessarily looking forward to the arrival. Before we got to his parent’s house he stopped at a gas station, brushed his teeth, changed his shirt and put on some cologne. From there, we drove to their house with the windows down to air us off.

I was incredibly bored at their house. I sat around while the grown ups talked about things I could not relate to. The first night there I could not sleep. The house was stuffy and hot. I decided I would sneak out to my dad’s truck and try to figure out a way to listen to my Survivor cassette.

It was about one in the morning. I was very nervous about sneaking out. If I got caught there would surely be hell to pay. I snuck out of the house as quietly as possible and as I was walking up to the driver-side of my dads truck, he opened the driver-side door and quietly and calmly said, “get in”. He was in there smoking and drinking. He was in a real quiet mood. He was not angry. He did not even seem to care at all about my actions. I told him I came out to listen to my Survivor cassette. He put it on and played it in its entirety while we sat there, quiet. He seemed to be in a real heavy mood and I remember feeling a bit sad for him, even though I did not know exactly what to connect his plight to.

After the cassette played, he said, “well we should probably get back inside” and we quietly returned to the house and went to sleep. It was never spoken of.

Here’s my dad (in the Texaco hat) and the truck we rode in.

That summer passed and I moved on to listening to other things and had not heard that album since 1982.

In 2009, I went on a drive with my friend Doug. Even though we live four-hundred miles apart, we get together often, drive around, smoke cigars and listen to new music we both have been saving for this very moment and sometimes we put on albums we already love or albums we have not heard in many years.

I had been joking around with him for a while that we needed to drive around, smoke and listen to the Survivor album in its entirety. He was reluctant, rightfully so, but we eventually did it.

I expected to hate it. My only intentions were to see if I remembered any of it. Back in 1982 I had every second memorized. I was curious if that still existed in my brain somewhere.

We lit a smoke and put the album on. It opens with Eye of the Tiger, so obviously I remembered that. The next five songs I had no recollection of. I was a little disappointed it was not striking more of a chord with me. I was however enjoying it. The songs were better than I thought they would be. It was a solid eighties rock album and sounded great. It sounded like a band and that is something I miss about newer production. Most new stuff feels like it was recorded separately because it usually is.

Then a piano ballad came on for song seven and I knew it immediately. I remembered how much I loved and wore that song out. It reminded me how much I have always loved ballads. Tears streamed down my face while that song played. It took me back to sitting in the truck with my dad. I am a sap for nostalgia. It is something I have always considered more of a flaw than a blessing. That night, it was a blessing.

Thanks Survivor, for giving me this memory with my dad. He died not long after that experience and it is really the only time I saw him as a person, instead of a father.

Here’s the piano ballad for your listening pleasure. Also, while just now listening to this on YouTube, it is the first time I have noticed that the members of the band are in the eyes of the tiger. Amazing!

When my daughter was about to turn eight, I decided to start taking her on ski trips for spring break. I grew up getting to do ski trips because my aunt and uncle lived in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. I would get to visit them and go skiing.

I could not wait to start taking my daughter on epic road trips. I would save up all year for spring break.

We did ski trips every year for spring break until she was fifteen. The year she was fifteen, we were in Breckenridge, Colorado. I had purchased two, six day ski lift passes for both of us. After a couple of days on the slopes, I could tell my daughter was getting bored of skiing. I asked her if she wanted to stop skiing for the rest of the week and she was afraid she was letting me down, but after some prodding she admitted she would like to not ski the rest of the week.

The next morning we went to the lift pass line and we looked for anyone who looked like they could use some free passes. We gave our passes away, I believe to a mother and daughter, but I cannot remember for sure. Just like that, that was the end of our skiing and snowboarding.

We got in the car and drove to an outlet mall I had seen about forty-five minutes to an hour away. We shopped at the mall, bought some clothes, shoes, then we drove to Utah. What’s in Utah, she asked? I don’t know, I have just always been curious what the rest of this highway looks like through Colorado. It was a 7 hour round trip drive. It is the only time I have been to Utah. We enjoyed the scenery and discussed future spring break trips. I asked her what she would be interested in doing and she mentioned the beach. I said, we could go to Los Angeles and do beaches there and do the LA thing for a couple of days, then drive to Las Vegas and spend a couple of days there, then drive to the Grand Canyon and spend a day there, then drive to Santa Fe to spend a couple of days there. She loved the idea and we talked about it with so much excitement that I strongly considered driving to Los Angeles that day. I did not however and we just spent the rest of the week bouncing around Colorado and doing lots of shopping and eating.

The next spring break rolled around. I picked her up at school in a rented Chrysler Pacifica. I drove straight to Los Angeles from Lawton, OK in one shot, which is about a twenty hour drive. We got in on Saturday early enough to be able to do some things. I had no idea what the best place to stay was in Los Angeles, but I ended up getting a nice place right by the Chinese Mann theater. We spent the afternoon looking at Stars on the sidewalk and doing some touristy things.

The next day I had VIP passes to Universal Studios and we got carted around behind the scenes and got to be on the Gilmore Girls set while they were filming. We got to go to the set of Friends. We got to cut to the front for all the rides. At first, I felt guilty, but I let that go pretty quick!

The next day we went to the Santa Monica Pier, Venice, shopped and did beach time.  Then we headed to Los Vegas. In Los Vegas we did all the kid friendly touristy things, roller coasters, saw a cirque du Soleil, the blue man group, Siegfried and Roy’s zoo, went to every single casino to look around and shop, we ate at giant buffets, took pictures in front of the big fountain.

On the way out of Vegas we went to the Hoover damn, which neither one of us had seen, then headed to the Grand Canyon and she got to see it in person for the first time. It is never not breath taking. Then we went to the Petrified Forest on our way to Santa Fe.

In Santa Fe we shopped and ate and went to St Francis Cathedral.

I bought this turtle for myself in Santa Fe

This trip was such a blast, we could not wait to plan the next adventure.

The next Spring break was coming around and I presented two potential ideas. First idea was we could go to Florida and do some nice beaches and anything else we could find to do. We could also do a few days at Disney World.

Idea number two was we could rent a car and drive to Washington DC and spend two days there, turn in the rental car, then take a train into New York City and spend 6 days there, then fly back. The planes, trains and automobiles trip!

Without hesitation she chose package two.

I booked a hotel near the White House and in New York I booked the Ritz-Carlton over-looking Central Park for six nights.

DC was a blast and we spent two days walking through all the monuments and museums. 

When we arrived at our hotel in New York, I called my mom as soon as we got to the hotel. She exclaimed she was jealous as she had not been to New York in decades. I said, well why not come on! I told her I would cover the trip and that our hotel room was big enough to accommodate her. The next thing we know, she is on a plane and arriving soon. While we waited for her to arrive, we went down to Central Park and Jon Voight was in the hotel elevator with us and I did not talk to him.

My mother had been battling Ovarian cancer for over five years. At this time she was stage four and out of options. We knew she did not have much time left.

I am not much for relaxing on vacation. I am a hundred miles an hour taking in everything I can. We crammed in so much and my mother kept up the entire time. The one thing she was a bit tickled by, was I told her I wanted to get the music venue called The Living Room as many nights as we could to see songwriters. She knew that music and songwriting was my thing and I had turned her on to lots of music over the years, so she embraced going. I dreamed of playing this venue and I told her my friend Dayna Kurtz plays there a lot. She knew Dayna because I had hosted a couple of Dayna Kurtz house shows in Dallas, Texas and my mom came to one of those.

Here’s my mom and step dad with Dayna Kurtz

The first day of Spring break in nineteen eighty-five my father passed away. I was fifteen. Here I was with my mother and daughter during spring break twenty-one years later, with my mom not having much time left. That connection was not lost on me. The week could have been heavy, but it was not. We had an absolute blast.

We went to several museums, the Statue of Liberty, a Knicks game at the Garden where they beat the Detroit Pistons with a buzzer beater, We saw Hairspray and The Lion King on broadway, we ate at nice places, shopped on fifth avenue, explored Central Park and we got to The Living Room two or three nights of the trip. One of those nights a guy named Mike Viola was playing. The way The Living Room worked was there was usually four to five acts doing forty-five minutes a piece.

The first band up was a band playing their first gig. They were all maybe twenty or so and the audience was filled with their friends. As soon as they were done, Mike Viola got up to play and during his first song the room completely emptied and as all those kids left to go celebrate. It was kind of rough to watch the room empty while Mike was playing. After his first song, he took it all in stride and said, “I understand. I would have walked out of this at your age too”, then he went right into a song called Hair of the Dog. This song slayed me and the room was full again after a couple of songs. That night I became a huge Mike Viola fan. I bought the one album he had with him that he had just released and I took it back to Dallas with me and turned all my friends onto him.

Seeing Mike Viola was one of the last things we did on that trip. A few months later my mom lost her battle.

That was in two-thousand and six and until a few days ago that was the only time I had seen Mike play. He does not do much touring and especially in Texas/Oklahoma as he seems to mostly do east and west coast.

A few months ago he announced he was going to do a big tour and he was coming through Texas and Oklahoma. I bought a ticket to his Austin, Texas show (where I live now) and five tickets to his show in Oklahoma City.

The Oklahoma City show is where I wanted me and my friends to see him together at the legendary Blue Door. My friend Doug lives outside of Lafayette, Louisiana. Our friend Robbie lives in Carrolton, Texas which is just north of Dallas. My daughter lives in Norman, Oklahoma, just south of Oklahoma City.

Doug and I wanted to ride together, so we met in Houston, Texas which is halfway”ish” in between our houses. We then headed to Carrollton to pick up our friend and then went to my daughters house to pick her up.

The Blue Door is a tiny little venue run by Greg Johnson and he has done an amazing job with this place for over 30 years. It is a great venue to see someone play because it is so intimate. I wanted us all to experience Mike Viola there together.

I never thought I would get to see him play again and he was amazing both nights, but getting to see him again with two of my best friends and my daughter was very special. Mom would have loved it.

My friend Robbie captured Mike playing the song Hair of the Dog. It is so great.

After the show, we took my daughter back home and then drove the two and a half hours back to Carrollton. Then Doug and I got up Sunday morning and drove back to Houston. He dropped me off at my car and we both drove home.

What a special memory. Thank you Mike for deciding to come play for Texas and Oklahoma. We appreciate it more than I can convey.

Much love,

Robert

Here is my home studio from 1998-2000ish. I could probably write a story about most things in these photographs. People loved desk fountains back then. Everyone had to have a tiny waterfall that they got at Walgreens.

I started getting more and more into home recording in the nineties, because it was cheaper than a studio and I still did not really know what I was doing. It was nice to be able to sit for hours, recording something over and over until I got it right.

In addition to writing a book about a concept album I never made in my twenties, I made a book in my early thirties (2000ish?) that is a collection of fifty lyric pieces I had written over the years.

Bringing as many of these songs to life as I could was all I really thought about back then. I wrote constantly and my words were much quicker than my ability to play, so most of these songs never came to life, but a few did.

One of the songs from that book that got recorded at home is “Another and Another”. I was very into Radiohead and I was super into song four off OK Computer, Exit music (For a Film). I did and still do pretend that song is about me and my friend Vanessa running away in the night in high school, away from her father. I was and still am obsessed with the noise that comes in at 2:19 of the song, which is a recording of children playing, but played backwards. I love the fuzz bass. I love how the drums come in. I love that entire track.

Radiohead - Exit Music (For a film)

That song inspired how I recorded my track, “Another and Another”. I wanted to find something similar to the children playing to put into this track, and I wanted fuzz bass and I wanted the drums to come in super late in a similar fashion.

I worked with a guy who was a big partier. He was the kind of guy that you worried about when he went out. Would he make it home? If so, at what time or on what day? He was pretty fresh off a divorce because of this. He had two daughters that at the time were maybe six and eight.

He asked me to go to Mardi Gras in New Orleans with him. I declined, with the excuse that I was too broke to go. I was not really, but I did not want to go, because I knew he would be such a handful. He persisted and offered to fund the whole trip and the reason I caved was because I was genuinely worried he would not survive without someone trying to keep him in check.

We were going to be there for four days and three nights. When we got to the hotel, he threw his stuff into the room and immediately wanted to go out. Our hotel was right off the French quarter. It was early afternoon and we had just driven nine hours to get there, but out we went. I stayed sober as I was just trying to keep alert for his sake.

At one point he darted into a strip club and for two or three minutes, I did not follow. Then I knew I had to get him out of there or he would blow all of his money in no time. I went in looking for him and found him in a back room with a dancer on him. I grabbed him and the dancer said, he owes me four-hundred dollars and she quickly grabbed a couple of bouncers. He could not have been with that dancer for more than a few seconds. My friend said that he did not have four-hundred dollars. The bouncers walked us both across the street to an ATM and told him to take out all of his money. I quietly conveyed to him that we should make a run for it and we both darted into the crowd. They gave a brief chase, but we both escaped.

I followed him around until 7am. I could not stay up any longer and I asked him to come back to the hotel and we could take a nap and go back out, but he was not having it. I decided I would go take a quick nap and then come back out and find him. I was hoping he would just stay in the same bar as we had been at that one for a while. I took about an hour nap and went back out looking for him. I spent the rest of the trip looking for him, calling the police station every few hours, going to the police station, constantly walking the Bourbon street area and I could not find him and he never came back to our hotel room. It was time to check out of the hotel and head home. I had wisely taken his keys from him at the beginning of the trip and I was prepared to check out and drive back home in his car.

I decided to eat breakfast at the restaurant in the hotel before hitting the road. The restaurant was on the ground floor with one long wall that was glass, looking out to the street. I saw him walking by in a complete daze. I ran outside and grabbed him. He looked through me and it took him a few seconds to figure out who I was. He thought it was still the first day of us being there and was ready to go party some more. I told him that it was day four and it was time to check out of the hotel. He did not want to, but I was forceful and he was too strung out to resist. I grabbed him, physically took him to the hotel room and made him grab his stuff. When we were checking out, his card on file declined and his wallet had been stolen. I paid for the hotel.

He then told me he promised his daughters he would bring them back souvenirs. I took him to a souvenir shop and he picked out a couple of shirts and two small alligator heads. I paid for it all and we hit the road.

The reason I am telling you this is because while I was there I had the bright idea to take my micro-cassette recorder into the thick of the Mardi Gras crowd and recorded the background noise for this song that comes in about at about seven minutes into the song.

After I would finish recording a song, which usually happened in the 2am-4am window, I would walk it up the hill about six houses and put a burned CD under the windshield wiper of my friends PT Cruiser. I was like the Santa of sad songs. I would then wait for him to call me and give his opinion.

Here is the track. I know this is a lot. I have nothing else to entice you with. I like the sounds introduced over time and for doing it all by myself with not much knowledge on home recording, I think it turned out kind of cool.

And as always thank you for reading and listening.