When I was 17, I had this girlfriend (briefly!) that was really in to watching "General Hospital" on TV. Being 17 and full of raging hormones, I figured I'd start watching this soap opera too, so we'd have something to talk about while I was trying to get her naked.

I remember watching this for about 3 weeks and thinking, "How on earth could anyone like this CRAP!? Real life is NEVER like this, everyone screwing everyone, backstabbing, sniping, heroes and villains, and even a guy who was building a weather machine to take over the world...ridiculous!"

Years later, I arrived on the 'Local Bar Band Scene'. And there it was...in living color, the soap opera lives that I thought were purely the creation of some wildly imaginative producer and writer who knew how to connect with housewives with a need for bath soap & laundry detergent. So and so is sleeping with the drummer for so and so, while their guitarist is getting a divorce for sleeping with someone else, meanwhile this other band is breaking up because the guitarist is sleeping with the other guitarists' wife, and then one band is stealing everyone else's gigs by undercutting all the clubs on price while another band completely stinks and has a huge following based only on their looks and light show, and across town is a kick ass band with no following at all, and so and so is going to jail for possession, and so and so is dying with a horrible disease, while this guy fires that guy cuz he thinks that guy's girlfriend is Yoko Ono... About all the scene lacked was the occasional murder and the guy with the weather machine.

It's no wonder that it's so hard to keep a band together when all of this CRAP is going on all around you, and on top of it, you have to deal with the usual band things like finding members who are reliable, talented, reliable, committed, reliable, not in jail, reliable, not psychotic, reliable, etc. etc.

I've decided to take a break from that scene for a bit...whether it's a week or 10 years, I dunno, but I need a break. In the meantime, I've set a goal to learn the entire Buddy Holly catalog, experiment with a new concept I have for 50's crooner music played on todays instruments, and learn a bunch of folk/campfire songs on my new Taylor for the upcoming summer campfire season.