Daily writing prompt

What would your life be like without music?

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The answer to this question is simple. Without music there would be no me. My life would be 100% different and completely unrecognizable. Music more or less defines me. We can’t have one without the other.

When I was little I liked to listen to my parent’s record collection. My father had a copy of The Beatles Sgt Pepper that he won from a radio station. He wasn’t much of a fan, but I loved listening to that record. When I was about to start fifth grade I started taking saxophone lessons through school. Before the start of ninth grade I started taking trumpet lessons though school. Before the start of 10th grade I started taking guitar lessons through a music store in town. When I was in high school I started playing guitar in bands with friends and we started writing our own songs. We also played the occasional gig. When I first went to college I was a music major playing saxophone and studying audio recording. My main focus was playing guitar in bands and writing songs though. I was hooked. I still am. Completely.

Starting in elementary school, fifth grade or so, I started developing obsessions with multiple bands. Fandom in the extreme. Rush, Led Zeppelin, Yes, Cream, a few others. The older I got, the more bands I added to my obsessive fandom list and the more varied genres were represented. Rush was the king of all obsessions though, by far. They are still top of my list.

All of my closest friendships developed either directly through music, or partly through musical fandoms. That includes my wife. We met online and one of the things we bonded over were our love of The Beatles and Rush. In fact, we went to see Rush together a whole ton of times at various locations throughout the US and on one occasion we actually left the country to see them. We had tickets to see them in Hamilton, Ontario. We made it to the city in time for the show but hit a snag once we got there and didn’t actually get to the show, but we tried.

These days, at age 52, my primary creative outlet is still making music. We’re trying hard to get the band back up to speed in a post covid world (ironically, as I have covid right now), but even without the band I still play the guitar as much as I can, and I still write and record music as much as I can.

So in summation, I would not exist without music. Apart from my family it is the primary love in my life. Apart from my family it is my primary interest. It’s vital to my existance.

So no music… no me.

Daily writing prompt

How do you celebrate holidays?

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Alert! Alert! Bad Question Alert!

Who said we celebrate holidays? Well, depending on the holiday, of course. How does one “celebrate” Veteran’s Day for instance?

Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year, we do all the standard stuff. I guess the only way to answer this broad, vague question is to say that I celebrate holidays with family. Jen at least, but the kids come home for the big ones. There are some holidays we more or less ignore. Easter, for example. We don’t celebrate Easter at all.

So this was a bad question. Too broad and too vague and just bad. It’s been a while since the daily prompt was as rough as this. Here’s hoping they follow it with a streak of good, fun prompts. Fingers crossed.

Daily writing prompt

Write about your most epic baking or cooking fail.

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I haven’t thought about this in a long time and some of the details are hazy in my memory, but there is one epic cooking fail that jumps to mind, partly because it was a sort of public event.

I can’t remember if we were still living in the Duplex on Ashland Ave, or if we had already bought the house. Was it before or after Fall of 2010? I don’t know. I think it was in the old place. We invited our friends Larry and Nawal over for a cookout. The plan was for me to try to cook chicken breasts on the grill for the first time ever. Jen and I found a recipe online for a marinade that sounded really good so we went for it.

We whipped up the marinade and let the chicken breasts soak it in for however long the website said. Then, with our friends already on their way over to us, I popped them onto the grill in the back yard and followed the grilling instructions to the letter. I may have the timing off, and I may be over dramatizing the events, but I seem to remember needing to open up the top of the grill to flip the chicken for the first time coinciding with our guests pulling into the driveway. I could be wrong about that.

There was a healthy amount of smoke billowing out from under the closed grill’s cover, but nothing that seemed unusual. When I opened the top though… the entire interior of the grill was engulfed in a conflagration the likes of which I had never seen before. There was so much fire and so much crushing heat that I expected the very universe itself to start melting. The four gloriously marinated chicken breasts were burned to black cinders, though I do recall they still smelled really good. Our friends came into the back yard and saw me staring blankly at the inferno, unable to process what was happening.

I believe we ended up ordering pizza that night.

Daily writing prompt

Share a lesson you wish you had learned earlier in life.

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I’m late getting started this morning and I have a ton of things I want to do in a short amount of time so let’s make this one quick, m’kay?

The one thing I wish I had learned earlier in life is something that I am still trying to learn today. It’s simple. Don’t be afraid of everything. Don’t let fear run your life. So many things I didn’t do when I was young. So many things I missed out on just because I was a little afraid of them. If I have just let myself step out of my comfort zone, even a little bit, I would have experienced so many things. I don’t really believe that my life has lacked anything, I just let a lot of things slip past that would probably have turned into positive life events.

Stop being afraid, Robert. Let things happen and see how it goes. That’s what I would tell my younger self. I don’t know if it’s something I would pull off, but I would try to get that point across to my own dumb ass.

I’ve mentioned this before. In my post-gastric bypass world my food focus is on protein sources. Chicken, mostly, but also eggs and beef and various supplement type things. I just had lunch and it was just a protein bar.

Chicken might qualify for my current favorite, based on volume, but at the moment the true favorite is an example of me getting in touch with my Irish heritage via a silly stereotype. It’s potatoes. Anything potato based. Mashed, baked, French fries, home fries, hell even tater tots, which I never really liked much before. If it’s made out of a potato I’m loving it these days.

Another food in the running for current favorite is Ritz crackers. I feel like I’m regularly filling up my tiny new stomach pouch with them, though I suspect I’m really in it for the salt, and the crackers are just a salt delivery unit.

Also, a dark horse candidate is pizza. I don’t like tomatoes and I loath cheese (even the thought of cheese makes my skin crawl) but I do like cheese pizza. We’ve had it a couple of times over the last few weeks and each time has been basically heaven.

I was planning on having some chicken and either French fries or mashed potatoes for dinner tonight…. But maybe we will send out for some pizza.