It’s Actually An Honor

My basement is a navigable mess. There is not a method in the madness. There is method and there is madness. They live on top of each other. Madness taking over the top of the couch, method taking over the recently reorganized drumset area. As my daughter S practices her guitar before bedtime and I EVERY GOOD BOY DESERVES FUDGE through the treble clef I look around and look at what I will clean up and organize the next time I have time. I come down on Thursday nights and roll some joints for the weekend while listening to either Political Gabfest or Jazz88 and I think about how to make the room better. Bit by bit, and in fits and starts, I have made it better. The centerpiece of the basement is the music room. Heiruspecs rehearsed down there. Now we’re retired. . .maybe permanently. Big Trouble rehearses down here once a month. Rachel has a desk over in the corner. I do some work down here. S practices guitar. And I house the graveyard of recorded projects of yesteryear. I have an unconscionable amount of CD copies of the 2008 stone cold classic Heiruspecs. If you will take them all I will give them to you for free. T-shirts. Twinkie Jiggles records. Minidiscs. Some cleaning material called Borax that I believe Rachel spills on the merch on purpose every three months. Hanukkah decorations. Beers no one wants. A laundry area where items slowly move from dirty to clean and back again with a long liminal phase.

I find that liminal float between proud, disappointed, frustrated and ambitious. I find it in my basement. I dreamt of having a house with a basement where the band could practice. I dreamt of living next to grown-up assholes with weight sets and a 300 inch TV that is perfect for gaming in their stupid basement and I thought I would have a room full of keyboards, recording stuff, posters et cetera. I am in a room I dreamt of having. A room of merch. A room of posters celebrating and documenting the fact that I was in a band that traveled all around the country. That put out records. That got written about in magazines. I didn’t think the hoodies would have Borax on them. I didn’t think the Seagull acoustic would sit stringless on the wall. I thought I would still be writing songs into it. But I’m glad I have a basement for music.

Nowadays somebody orders a record, t-shirt or CD from Heiruspecs about twice a month. I dreamed about that too. Dreamed about being in a band with a PO Box. Dreamed about being in a band that had a little area to do shipping. A sharpie, a pile of records. A shelf with masking tape labels that read 2X, XL, L, M, S. I dreamed about it all. I might’ve dreamed about that more than I dreamed about being the band that has a warehouse. Pearl Jam has a warehouse. They have a batting cage. Eddie Vedder has a tremendous collection of baseball shit. But I bet he dreamed more about the masking tape denoting shirt sizes for his rehearsal space. It’s a fucking honor to have t-shirts that people want to wear.

Ed. Note - What’s the word I’m looking for? Neigh? I’ll try neigh.

Neigh, it’s a higher honor that people in Imperial Beach, CA want to wear these t-shirts. I looked up to the guys at Burlesque. The poster rolls. The utility. The work of it all. I felt the same being at Paisley Park the first time I went after Prince died. Paisley Park is not even a temple to work. It is just work. It is a utility-serving place that made it possible for many people to make records, film videos, plan productions, launch careers. I don’t think Prince dreamed about masking tape shirt sizes, I think he dreamed about magnetic tape capturing a vintage Fender Rhodes being recorded while the deadest tom toms in the world are captured in high-fidelity by well positioned microphones. But it’s all work.

I have given my daughters S and N the duty of helping me with Heiruspecs shipping. S has an elaborate pricing technique but I basically pay her something like $3 or $4 per record and I give N maybe a $1 of $2. I pay them out my pocket. We look at the bandcamp order page. S reads me the addresses. I write em on the packages. N carries them upstairs. We end up always having to do it on Sundays. We take the small amount of packages out to the car, we drive to the airport post office to send them. There’s plenty of musicians who don’t know a thing about that post office. I know it well. Sending out new CDs. Promo CDs. Taxes at 10:49pm on April 15. It’s all an honor. It’s an honor to have spent part of my life trying to broadcast music I believe in. I’m not settled with Heiruspecs’ retirement. Our retirement doesn’t yet sit right with me. I don’t know how to explain to others or myself. And I resented doing the shipping. I resented the basement. It sits at the ready for a moment of rebirth that won’t come. It’s the Pompeii of a once active project.

But on Monday, when we took the thirty minutes we had after lunch and before canoeing to do the packaging, I started to find a different footing. This is what I dreamed about. It’s much worse than I thought it would be. Every time someone orders a shirt they order the one size and color combo we don’t have. I end up sending them three shirts they didn’t want in the same size, refunding their order, eating the shipping cost and paying my girls $7 for the assistance. But, it is an honor. I don’t know what the other guys in the band dreamed about. I don’t know what they got and didn’t want. Don’t know what they wanted and didn’t get. I am starting to understand those things for me. But as my daughters see me hold that Sharpie, and reliably fail to get the tape to stick right the first time, they are seeing me living a part of my dream. And they are hearing me say “F” cause I don’t say fuck in front of them but they know what I’m saying all the same. They are seeing some dream I had, that, through decades of modifications, I am now living. It is an honor to share the music I helped make with the people around the country who love it enough to buy it. It is an honor to drive to the post office, to explain to S what a mercury warning is. We put our kids in front of screens to be entertained and to give the parents some respite from responsibility. But a couple times a year I park S in front of a full ass desktop computer and we punch in tracking numbers, she types thank you notes to the folks who bought them. Screens are for work too. Screens are for the nuts and bolts of sharing art, sharing culture, sharing community. It’s an honor to send those three shirts out to Imperial Beach and lose $7 to do so. I wanted this.