2008 Retrospective: The Novel

"Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down."
-Ray Bradbury

2008 has been quite the year for me. It's been a year of challenges, hard decisions, brand new experiences and contrasts- in my actions, attitudes and circumstances. It's also been the first year I've kept any kind of consistent journal of what I've been doing. I don't mean this blog, as I've been pretty sparse in my entries here, but my trusty old 2008yearinreview.txt notepad file. I'm just kinda lazy (or perhaps not all that interesting) so I've managed to keep it going all year by writing only one line per day, usually point form, of what happened that day. It might not seem very profound but its helped me numerous times keep tabs on where I've been and where I'm going, or want to go. I highly recommend it if you're not the journaling type. Anyway, enough rambling. I'm going to throw down a quick recap of what I've been up to this year and then get on with the usual New Year's Resolutions and plans for the future. Ok, who am I kidding? Brevity is not my strong suit, I hope you've got a comfortable chair.

January
My friends in Dead And Divine needed a fill-in drummer for a tour in the US, and called me up in mid December. I had been band-less for several months, and jumped at the chance. After an 18-hour drive to Tulsa, Oklahoma the tour began, with a band called Oh, Sleeper headlining. Unfortunately the tour had some problems along the way, including poor turnouts and canceled shows. D&D were used to being decently successful in Canada, and going right back down to the bottom rung of the ladder in the States was somewhat demoralizing. We experienced the best that tour poverty has to offer, including sleeping in the van in winter and eating next to nothing. After all that, the D&D van's starter blew. It was coaxed back to life by some sort of mechanic voodoo, but the guy that got us moving said that if we turned off the van it may not start again for good. Long story short, D&D were forced to leave the van running on fumes for 9 straight days until the tour was over. We parted ways in Clinton, New Jersey; the boys headed home and I was picked up for an audition with New York hardcore veterans Shai Hulud. They were about to head out for a month-long US tour (in sold out large venues, quite a contrast) with plans for European and Japanese tours in the works. At last! The success that I had been chasing for years! However after a week working on their songs in Poughkeepsie NY (and MUCH gnashing of teeth and self-debate) I decided to pass on the opportunity- I would have been doing it for the wrong reasons, and I just wasn't into their music (or the drum parts especially) enough. It was definitely one of the hardest decisions I've ever had to make, being that close to what I've longed for and turning the other way, but I believe to this day it was the right move. The downside was, I was stuck in New York state, and wound up having to pay through the nose to UHaul myself and all my gear/luggage home. It was an expensive lesson to learn.

February
A few days after I returned home my roommates in Lifestory Monologue took off for a tour of their own and I was left to tend to a mostly empty house. Having quit my previous job for the US tour I jumped back into my old faithful standard of temp jobs, with the intention of trying to find a good one to get hired on at full-time. I worked hauling furniture at an office and shoveling their parking lot, and shunting skids of returns at an electronics warehouse, but evidently my body was bored with the lack of excitement and decided to catch a case of strep throat for the fun of it. In Feb I also made a brief attempt at joining in with my friends in the Lifestory/Skylight crew and their new fad of dance parties at downtown bars, but as you can probably imagine that died faster than Soulja Boy's career.

March
March was a tough month. Having dropped right back into my old habit of wasting far too much time online immediately after returning from the US in Feb, I decided to go cold turkey on my e-addiction and take a solid month off from the internet, mainly MSN, Fiveonenine and Facebook. I used my newly acquired free time to restart my gym routine which I had started the previous September but didn't know enough to stick with. I recovered from the strep and started a temp job in receiving at Now Foods, a health supplement manufacturer. Frustrated with an unending winter, I partied maybe a little too much at my birthday bar night downtown, and later that month got in a fight with one of my best friends, resulting in us dropping out of contact for some time. I also got hit with my first speeding ticket (a big one) in 9 years of driving, and at the end of the month Now Foods downsized and I was let go and had to start job hunting all over again.

April
A certain friend who will remain nameless decided it would be hilarious to hack my cold-turkeyed facebook and write a very sincere but fake 'coming out' letter to all my friends. One should be a good sport about such things, but I had a number of friends not get the joke and several equally sincere emails from people I barely talk to wanting to have heart-to-hearts about my 'situation'... Perhaps the fact that I had been girlfriendless for nearly 3 years aided the ambiguity there. Possibly in light of this, I decided to continue my social networking jihad by getting rid of Facebook and MSN altogether. This idea almost worked but in the end my willpower died faster than... well, you get the idea. More importantly than all that, my parents took advantage of my lack of employment stability and brought my brother and I to visit them on the mission field in Guatemala for two weeks. We had been once before, but this trip was equal parts The Amazing Race and Wild Kingdom as we drove all over the country, visiting Tikal, boating down rivers and visiting a number of other missionary families, as well as the usual touristy side trips. I got food poisoning, ziplined through a forest canopy, and inexplicably got a police escort through a 20km long mountainside construction zone. It was quite the trip. I returned home yet again to an empty house but within a few days had something else new on my plate, setting up at Sundown Studio for a studio drumming session, tracking parts for ex-Race Well Run bassist Dave Whiteside's solo project, The Sun, The Rain, The Appleseed.

May
It was transition time at the ol' Lifestory Haus, as a number of roommates moved out and my friend Jon Elrick moved in for the summer. In early May I got an invite to go try out/jam with a new band Paul had in the works, which I did, and at first didn't think too much of. I had no idea what it would turn into... In the meantime, Jon had a job working up north renovating a cottage for the owner of Reid Homes and got me a few weeks' work as his assistant. The job wound up to be a bit much for just the two of us to handle, so I returned to the now monotonous slog of temp jobs. My days were brightened somewhat by spending more time with Candice, a friend I'd had for some time but never been all that close with.

June
The band I had jammed with a month back began to take shape, and by mid month we had a name- Kingdoms, a full lineup (mostly ex-members of disbanded groups I had previously been in), a rented jam hall, a handful of songs in the works and plans to basically be a 'weekend warrior' band just playing as a hobby. I had no idea what it would turn into... On the employment front, I continued to shuffle jobs week by week and had gotten thoroughly sick of it. I had been told at some point that DZ driving jobs were pretty easy to come by, decently enjoyable and well-paying, so I enrolled in a 2 week training course at Transport Training Centres Of Canada, which was mostly a joke but did manage to teach me enough to pass the road test. I began job hunting yet again, restarted at the gym yet again, and hacked all my hair off.

July
After a few months of hanging out, a number of false starts, sorry excuses for dates and general male-female confusion, Candice and I decided to make things official and my first proper relationship in 3 years got off to its gloriously wobbly start. I had no idea what it would turn into... (fortunately it eventually turned into something awesome, more on that later). The band hammered away at songwriting 3 nights a week and with progress came the seed of an idea that maybe this could become more than just a weekend warrior type project. On the work front, I landed myself a job that wasn't temporary! sort of. It was seasonal, and although the difference was perhaps only semantic it was a regular paycheck for the time being. I was a driver for Compact Sod in Cambridge, delivering skids of sod and bags of bulk soil around Southern Ontario. I got sunburned, I worked long hours and Saturdays, but it was money and as it turned out, money I desperately needed. My months of inconsistent work and near month off for training and job hunting had taken its toll on my bank accounts and credit rating and I found myself swiftly tossed to the bottom of a large hole of debt I'd been digging myself over the past few years, only now with the added bonus of collections agencies calling. I had to face the music- so I sat down for some hardcore budgeting and made a plan to haul myself back up into financial solvency. Oh, and I also started this blog!

(SIDE NOTE: I have to get this published already! Going to have to fill in the extra photo links for the rest of it later. I know I know, you're terribly disappointed. Get over it.)

August
I met Candice's family for the first time during a long weekend trip north, the band continued writing and booked studio time in September to record an EP with Jordan at Sundown Studios (it maybe helped a little that he's in the band!), and booked our first show in KW in October. A 'Coming Soon' myspace was launched, and some hype started to build regarding the band in our local area. The end of my time at the Lifestory house was also coming up soon, and lacking anywhere else in Guelph to move to I put a deposit on a Kitchener apartment, figuring there would be more permanent driving job opportunities there. Irony then reared its hyena-like head and I was offered a permanent job (with a solid raise over the sod gig) in Aberfoyle, which meant twice the commute distance compared to my previous house/job. The extra cash outweighed the extra driving so I took the job. Jon and I (mostly Jon) did some pre-move-out renovations on the basement of the LSM house, and then quite suddenly my home for the past year which had been filled with people (and mess) became oddly clean and empty, and I moved my stuff to what was at the time a quite impersonal, foreign old house in foreign old Kitchener. I was excited for the future but not exactly at ease.

September
I spent the first half of the month at the studio and Candice's when not working (which was extremely slow and boring at the start) so I really didn't get settled in my new place until later in the month. We started promo for the band, making a preview video and launching our actual Myspace site. The band was attracting what was to me an impressive amount of attention for not having music up yet or having played any shows yet. However our first show was being promoted well and looked like it would pretty successful. The excitement was welcome as my day-to-day life otherwise was becoming comfortable and, dare I say, uninteresting for the first time all year.

October
Kingdoms' first EP was finished and we debuted a few songs on the local college radio station the day before its release. As planned, the record was released for free download online rather than pressing CDs to sell at the merch table, as all our previous bands had done. We were banking on the idea that getting it out to a far greater audience online than we could sell it to by our first handful of shows would be more beneficial to the band in the long run than any income we would have gotten from selling it on CD. This hunch would later prove to be mostly correct. The songs turned out better than we expected and we began to make tentative plans for the band to get more serious and hopefully eventually be a full time touring act. We bought our first band van from friends in London and played our first hometown show with a few other new local bands to an over-capacity sold out crowd at the King Street Theatre. In other news, I did another studio drumming session for my old friend Jay Soloduik's solo project and signed up for a new gym in Kitchener with Kingdoms' vocalist Hutton. Work was giving me more hours but my hours were becoming inconsistent and unpredictable- some days I would only work 5 hours, and some days as many as 14. Life with Candice was good, not without some bumps in the road now and again, but we were growing closer and becoming more honest and vulnerable with each other.

November
The free-download record release had paid off- Kingdoms had as much traffic on our site in terms of plays and downloads in one month as our previous bands had taken several years to attain, and we had a solid pile of shows being booked for December. After months of reading about it in news stories and magazines the impending global recession began to actually hit home. Good news- gas prices had been falling for weeks, but bad also bad news- it seemed that everyone's job was potentially on the chopping block. Another impending disaster that had been looming just out of sight hit home- Candice and I had our first big blowout and nearly split up. Not that we hadn't had tiffs before or were bad at conflict, but this was pretty big. The issues that came up were entirely mine, and mostly had to do with my fear of the costs of a truly serious long-term relationship (I had been fine with the benefits, but selfishly had not wanted to really invest myself in things). It was a complicated mess for awhile, and I'll save everyone the sordid details. Unfortunately, this wasn't contained between the two of us and a number of other people either got dragged into things or inserted themselves into the chaos. I honestly wish everything had gone differently somehow, as feelings were hurt and friends were lost, albeit somewhat due to other people's actions or decisions, but it all started because I didn't have myself figured out, and to anyone that was involved in that whole debacle, Candice especially, I am very sorry for that. Candice and I patched things up and committed to working at rebuilding our relationship from the ground up, with real effort and real honesty and I'm happy to say it's been going really well. Not perfectly, but we're not perfect people and we're both learning how to help each other grow.

December
My parents came home from Guatemala for an entire month, and I got a solid dose of good old fashioned family, which I think was needed after a somewhat chaotic year. The car my parents left for Paul and I to timeshare when they moved away broke down and needed some serious work, but we fortunately found an honest and inexpensive place to get that taken care of. It was a busy month for the band, we played 6 shows including a label showcase, two dates with Dead & Divine and two awesome shows with Protest The Hero including opening their Toronto show at the Sound Academy! That show in particular was a highlight of my year, being the largest crowd (3000+) I've ever played in front of. We also joined forces with a booking agent, but ran into some serious trouble with our van on the way to a show we wound up having to drop. After deciding to take some time off in January to save cash for fixing the van, to write new songs and come up with our attack plan for 2009, it was holiday time! I went to more Christmas dinners and saw more relatives than ever, met Candice's entire extended family, ate far too much turkey and chocolate and spent half a week procrastinating on my plan to write this very long-winded blog. And now here we are, 24 hours from a new year that will hopefully be as exciting, interesting and challenging as the one just past. Looking back, 12 months ago I couldn't have possibly predicted half of what would happen this year, so I can't wait to see what unexpected adventures 2009 will introduce. Bring it on!

PS Since this is such a long entry, I'm going to come back in a few days and write my plans and resolutions for next year. It's getting late, I need my sleep!