"Never Take Friendship Personal"

Thank God for friends who aren't opposed to sweating a bit in the Southern humidity! After moving just about anything that would fit in our cars all last week—and after a quick weekend field trip to a small Georgia town for a family wedding—we finally moved all our stuff in to our new place a little more than a week ago, thanks to a fantastic effort by those foolish enough to accept our invitation to help out. All told, our “crew” worked for about an hour-and-change, and we were done.

It almost feels wrong to badmouth the “old” place. When we decided to move here, housing was slim pickin’s, and we were thankful to have anything at that point. I think we conveniently forgot that fact when our gripes were piling up. Somehow, seeing the city’s abundant homeless population didn’t do much to temper our complaints. Uh, my bad?

Anyway, we’re now in an environment where we feel more comfortable—a house with yard/garage/closets/etc. and no neighbors right on top of us—and I’m hoping that the next several years are free of U-Haul trucks, packing tape and paper plates. After 12-plus years together, and nearly seven years of marriage, this was our first in-town, in-state move—despite packing our things and throwing them on a rented truck more times than I care to recall.

And to our friends who continue to offer their help, for our next move we promise to at least try to sign a lease in the winter.

"Close Yet Far"

I really should have seen it coming.

This morning, as I was getting ready for work, I caught myself thinking that I'd finally gotten a handle on my "new" job—where I've been working for nearly a year... it's a pretty lengthy learning process. Gimme a break.

I put the toothpaste back in the cabinet and said to myself, "Slow down. The last time you started feeling this confident things totally fell apart." I brushed my teeth, calmed myself down and spit the toothpaste into the sink, assured that I'd dodged whatever karma bullet was surely headed my way for being too prideful about my accomplishments at work—or my lack of extreme failure in at least a month. In a few hours my day started to crumble, and by noon it was in shambles.

Without going into the specifics, my job often depends on others meeting their deadlines in order for me to meet mine. If I miss a deadline because someone else dropped the ball, it's still my fault, kinda like the scene in Goodfellas... "Business is slow? F--- you. Pay me!"

I'm the kind of person who gets very invested in his job. I get heavy boots when things aren't going right, especially when I feel like the fault isn't my own.

But, tonight, all the stress of the workday disappeared as I sang Connor to sleep—as I do most nights. Feeling blissed, I offered a quick thank-you prayer to the heavens and left my protégé sound asleep, his arms wrapped tightly around his stuffed dog, Barkley.

I sat down in front of this computer against my better judgment and checked my work e-mail one last time before bed only to receive more bad news, completely unrelated to any of the issues from earlier.

I wonder if I'll ever learn to quit while I'm ahead...

Games Daddies Play

Yes, yes. Been a long time and whatnot. Let's just dispense with the preliminaries, shall we?

Much has been happening in our world these last few months. The banjo twangs have been getting more purposeful (and on-key), and the swimming pool water has been inching toward bearable while the weather inches toward unbearable in equal fashion. Connor and I have also invented a brand new game that we call Creeper Catch, after his favorite rogue from his new favorite show—any one of the many Scooby Doo variants.

The Creeper aka Mr. Carswell, the bank president. (He would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for, well, you know...)

It started by accident, as all good games do. (Who throws a ball into a peach basket expecting to invent a multi-gazillion-dollar behemoth?) Connor and I were playing in the den when I started to pretend I was the Creeper, and he ran away at full speed, halfway pretending to be scared. Without really thinking, I reached out and grabbed one of his bedroom slippers and chucked it at him. Just before he turned the corner into the kitchen (a good 20 feet away from where I was lying on the floor), the slipper knicked him on the heel. For about two seconds, he freaked out, thinking that I had closed the distance between us at an otherwise unbelievable rate. Once he figured it out, though, he started to laugh, and thus Creeper Catch was born.

Between the 30 minutes that he spent sprinting through the house to avoid flying bedroom slippers and the 45 minutes spent shivering in the swimming pool (the weather hasn't quite become unbearable enough for the pool to be comfortably bearable yet, apparently), he was asleep before his head hit the pillow.

Just remember, when your children's children are reading in their history books about the birth of Creeper Catch, you can say you read about it here first.

"You're Gonna Get Yours"

People in my family know people—or they know people who know people.

For example, my older brother does quite a bit of entertainment writing and can secure everything from backstage passes to Disney tickets with a quick phone call. So, imagine my surprise when a piece of “insider” swag was delivered to my mailbox and my brother wasn’t involved.

Put another way—the banjo saga has taken an interesting and unexpected twist.

My father-in-law, ever the creative thinker, called in a favor and delivered one of the more unique gifts I’ve ever received. His company, a finishing (printing/laminating/binding/etc.) firm recently did some rush order work for none other than Mr. Roy Clark—the man I credit for originally interesting me in the banjo back when I was still losing baby teeth and wanting to be a “CHiPs man” when I grew up.

One called-in favor later and several days ago, I received a surprise manila envelope from Roy Clark Productions. Inside was an 8”x10” photo of Clark with the following inscription:

To Carter
Thanks for the kind words posted on your blog
Keep on pickin’
Happy Birthday
Your Friend,
Roy Clark

I was dumbfounded, and it took me awhile to believe that this was really from Clark and not from one of my scheming friends or family members.

Stacey had to fill in the back story for me—some of which I’ve recapped above—but she also said that, yes, Roy Clark had read my blog. I’m not sure if he interpreted my comments about him as serious or insulting (I tend to come off as a condescending jerk to those who don’t know me—and even to those who do), but I will say that anyone who thinks merely of Roy Clark as “that rube from the redneck show” hasn’t heard him play any of the instruments in his repertoire. Check the YouTubes for proof—underappreciated isn’t the word. The dude can play his tail off, and he’s ripe for a Rick Rubin-styled, Johnny Cash-esque makeover if I do say so myself.

The autographed picture was very much appreciated, but it was more important to know that perhaps I offered a few moments of entertainment to a man who has certainly offered me plenty (Saaaalute). In addition, it was the result of a kind gesture based on something that I said I liked—almost in passing.

By the way, have I mentioned how much I like $100 bills?

"Beliefs and Obsessions"

I have an obsessive personality. When I decide that I NEED something—regardless of whether I truly need it or not (and usually, I don’t)—I can think of little else. Probably the worst thing to happen to me as a kid was receiving my older brother’s hand-me-down Musician’s Friend catalogs.

Contained within these pages were images of instruments, amplifiers and accessories so far out of my price range that they might as well have cost a million bucks. That didn’t stop my futile wish-listing, though. After trying to decide which guitar in the whole catalog that I’d pick, if given a choice between any of them—I foolishly chose the Steve Vai Jem 7V, complete with carved handle...ugh—I began to stare at the pages of drumsets.

I was convinced that I had to have a drumset, even though I’d not long since bought my first electric guitar—a D-grade Strat copy from Japan. I began poring over the images of drumsets, and they even began creeping into my dreams. I even went so far as to make a kit of my own out of differently sized boxes and using skateboard rails as sticks and pie tins as cymbals. After a few aborted attempts to craft a homemade bass drum pedal, and growing increasingly frustrated that the rails constantly pierced the box tops, I gave up. It was surely an unrecognized sign of the mania that would follow me into adulthood.

So, it should come as no surprise that I continue to find objects over which to obsess. The latest object of my desire? A banjo. Yes. A banjo.

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted a banjo, though never enough to go out and actually buy one. I’m pretty sure—and I can’t believe I’m admitting this—that I can trace this desire back to the Hee Haw episodes I’d watch on Saturday nights. Between Stringbean, Grandpa Jones and Roy Clark, I thought that the banjo looked like a lot of fun, and I’ve always liked bluegrass music on some level. But, if it was a trip to see Alison Krauss & Union Station in 2004 that reignited my interest in the banjo, it was a chance to see The Avett Brothers in early November that finally sent me over the edge.

For the last two months, I have been banjo-crazy, and my poor wife has been suffering just as much as I have, though if only for having to put up with me. I’ve ordered catalogs, devoured retail Web sites, watched countless YouTube videos and even joined a couple of banjo-themed forums. I’ll not even speak about the dreams I was having, or the cardboard banjo that Stacey and Connor made me as a joke... I hope.

At Christmas, however, my obsessing over owning a banjo finally ended when my mom stepped up and gave me a banjo to call my own–although I had picked it out and ordered it myself and shipped it to her house several weeks before Christmas, which nearly killed me. She was footing the bill, which meant I had to wait, but it was more than worth it.

Now how do I play this damn thing?

Where to start with this picture? How about the super awesome stars-n-stripes guitar? How about Ernest Borgnine in the background? How about the fact that both Buck Owens AND Roy Clark were in the same place and the Hee Haw set didn't explode from an overdose of awesomeness?!

"Picture Book"

Although I am nowhere near my little brother’s record number of employers (which must surely be nearing triple digits by now), I have held at least a handful of jobs in as many different industries.

I’ve worked high-stress, low-stress, no-stress, clean-up-this-mess jobs, but few of them outside of fast food have been set up in a way that offers a clear workday schedule; and anyone who knows me should be aware of how highly I value adhering to a schedule and sticking to a pre-decided plan of action—although the “pre-decided” part usually doesn’t actually scream “ACTION!!”

My current job is incredibly detail heavy and very structured—the latter of which necessity mandates, due to a daunting workload that would be otherwise unmanageable. When I think of how structured this job is (especially compared with some workplace “adventures” of the past), I turn into Gollum and start gushing about my structure. “My precious.”

But, aside from keeping me from drowning in a sea of projects, I’ve discovered an added benefit: time to read. Every day around mid-day, I heat up my lunch, sequester myself and disappear into a book.

It helps me escape from the stress of the workday, and I can finally dig into the ever-growing mental list of books-to-read that I’ve been amassing for quite a few years.

I’ve always been a slow reader and would often get frustrated at the quick turnaround time necessary for school-related reading. When left to my own schedule, oddly enough, I’ve found that my reading times have picked up a little bit—probably because I’m not trying to capture meaningless details that I know will be on a pop quiz. In fact, I find that I have a better grasp on what I’ve read and can analyze the material and pick up on the symbolism and underlying themes just as well on my own as I ever did in a classroom.

I have also found that my tastes in books are as divergent (or “disorganized”) as my musical preferences. In the last few months I’ve read, among others, early 20th century sci-fi (William Hope Hodgson), a thinly veiled attempt at satire disguised as music criticism (Chuck Klosterman), a 21st century masterpiece (David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas), disposable pulp trash (Chuck Barris) and a book that I’m absolutely glad that no one asked me about while reading it in the breakroom—Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal.

Whether they’ll (we’ll) admit it or not, readers look at non-readers with at least a little disdain. If someone asks you about the last great book you read, just lie. You could say that you believe the earth is flat. You could say that there is no such thing as a laundromat. You could say that there are no cats in America. You will still be looked at as less evolved if you say, rather blasé, “Oh I don’t read.”

You’ll look dumber than Dan “Do they speak Latin in Latin America?” Quayle.

Henry Rollins often says that one of the first questions he’ll ask a woman he’s interested in is not the usual get-to-know-you banter like, “Where are you from?” or “What do you do for a living?” Instead, he typically inquires about the most recent book that the woman read—usually coming up disappointed because it seems like fewer people are reading anything of substance these days... coughPeoplecough.

But, had he asked me about Sound of the Beast, I'm sure he would have been disappoinsted.

"Leave This City"

Hi, my name is Carter, and I live in Florida.

Sorry, it’s taking some getting used to.

Living in the Sunshine State has been a bit of a mind trip so far, aside from having to readjust from the notion that I’d never live here (people under 80 don’t move to Florida) and actually winding up here (at 31).

It’s strange to drive around town and see real live palm trees everywhere and not the plastic ones in the parking lot of the local seafood restaurant. It’s strange to step outside in October and immediately start sweating. It’s strange to not see orange leaves anywhere in the fall. It’s strange to be living in a state I’ve only ever associated with Cannibal Corpse, spring training, Mickey Mouse and geriatric Yankees.

Most of all, though, it’s strange to leave a town with palm trees and warm weather to drive to the beach—which isn’t that far away and also features palm trees and equally warm weather.

A few weekends ago, Stacey, Connor and I ducked out of town and headed to a beach condo owned by a family member in St. Augustine—a perk that’s been far better than any dowry I could have hoped for.

For as long as Stacey and I have been together (and a bit longer for her), this has been our usual and favorite vacation spot, taken usually with family, sometimes with friends and occasionally with both. Going there is a BIG deal. The trip is preceded by a little bit of planning, a lot of anticipation and half-a-day in the car.

Now, it’s a relatively short drive away, and we have a three-year-old who can actually appreciate the ocean air, salt water and riptide better than our adult bodies ever will.

I’m sure that being this close to the ocean (and the prized family condo) will be both blessing and curse; Connor knows that we’re hours and hours away from our families, and he’s a little sad about it, but he definitely knows how close we are to the beach.

...and don’t think he hasn’t asked to go more than once or twice.