too old to "rock"...

Saturday night I went next door to jam with my neighbor the drummer and his friends. Short version... played until midnight, drank 2 somewhat large JD & Pepsi's, stayed up until nearly 3:00 AM.

Ugh. Sunday required no fewer than three naps to recover.

Long version...

My neighbor's wife invited my wife out for dinner and a movie with her friends. This caused my neighbor to pout and then organize his OWN guy-night-thing in response. So he invited ME over to jam with him and some other friends of his. (Thus we had to hire a babysitter.) So I head over there at 5:30 with my gear and we get all set up and run through about 6 minutes of 12-bar blues to get loosened up, and then we stop and my neighbor goes - "OK, let's go get something to eat."

I assumed this would involve calling for pizza, but no... it involved piling into 2 cars and driving to a restaurant 20 minutes away. What the fuck? I'M PAYING A BABYSITTER!! I could have stayed home until you guys came back and saved $20. (plus the money I spent on dinner!) I just wanted to play, I didn't want a whole social-occasion thing with people I barely know... especially since going out to dinner with these guys was like going to a restaurant with the cast of the fucking Blue Collar Comedy Tour. And I hate to be all "classist" and shit, but really, when the conversation turned away from Gibson vs. Fender, I really had very little in common with these guys.

And so we leave my neighbor's house and not 5 minutes out the door, my neighbor realizes he brought the wrong set of keys, so we are all locked out of his house. Which involves driving ANOTHER 20 minutes past the restaurant to meet up with his wife (and all the wives) who have elected to go to dinner and a movie at an absolutely insane distance away from home. Why? WHY?

The upshot of this was that we actually got down to playing not at 5:30 as I originally hoped, but at 9:15. I was pretty irritated. Then when we started playing, I broke the g-string on my Strat after about 5 minutes. Fuck.

But once I switched guitars and things got rolling, it went well and I had fun. They were all a little too impressed by my playing, which is flattering, but at the same time... not the perfect situation. It's actually much more fun to play with people who are BETTER than you. The other guitar guy had a fairly fancy recording setup running, so I'm sure I'll post some snippets on the "Weekly Improv" when he burns me a disc.

We wrapped up around midnight, a little after the wives got home and headed over to my house to hang out where it was quiet. (well.. quietER) We hung out talking until about 1:30, when I walked over with my first load of gear and chatted with the wife for a few minutes. She went to bed and I went back next door. We hung out and I had another drink and the guys smoked some cigars, and I finally came home around 2:45.

Ugh.

Then to cap it all off, on Sunday afternoon, after my wife and I had traded off naps all morning, I asked her if we were going to run any errands or anything that evening and she starts in with "Well, I had plans to do this and this and this but since you've spent all morning napping I guess we can't do that... I'm kind of pissed of that you stayed out until 3:00"

Umm... WHAT? Ok... first of all, we've BOTH been napping all morning, and second of all, THIS WAS NOT MY "THING". This was YOUR thing... I only went along with the other thing to be neighborly and polite. It's not like I WANTED to go out to dinner at TGIFridays with the cast of American Chopper. And THIRDLY, if you had TOLD me about these plans BEFOREHAND, maybe something could have been done about it.

Ahem.

I think I'm still a little tired.