In 7th grade, my social life took a serious nosedive into the computer nerd world. I was really into making text-adventure games written in BASIC on my family’s Apple IIe. I was perpetually pimpled and greasy. Technology was my girlfriend. It was a rough time… 7th grade.

I recently fell back into it (nerd-dom, not 7th grade). Got a new computer. It’s basically my new instrument now. It’s amazing how much “practicing” I do on this, yet so little music comes out of it. In the time that I could have used to learn a thesaurus of scales and melodic patterns, I struggled to get protools to work with a new external hard-drive! Geek! In the time that I could’ve learned a few Jimmy Page guitar solos, I installed some software to make blips and bleeps! Woah yeah… here come the memories! Jocks putting me in a headlock! Girls walking by me in the hallway and saying “ewww! gross!” There was even a point when other nerds would gang up on me and diss me! I was a minor player, even in the nerd circles! Ahhh, gotta love the pecking order.

I even look more like a “computer player” now.

3 words: $11 dollar haircut.

I asked the barber to give me a trim, nothing too drastic… now that I think of it, I don’t think he understood English. I told him it’s ok if I look shaggy, I’m a musician. It dawned on me that he only knew how to do one haircut- the technology haircut. It makes sense now, because as I was getting my hair cut, a previous customer came back to pick up his jacket that he forgot… suprise, suprise: he had the technology haircut! The barber did a good job though, maybe it’s a kind of a zen thing for him: Know one thing… apply it to all things…
So, I’m probably not gonna gig until my hair grows out a little… unless it’s something I can’t turn down, and/or I can borrow a wig. $11 though… ya can’t beat that.