With love and trust and friend and hammers...we're gonna build something the summer. (Day 117) [Guest Update.]

Today's guest update comes from my good buddy John Miskelly. He's an internationally renowned talent, he can write and he's an awesome musician.

I really hope you guys enjoy tonight's update. Make sure to leave comments say how much better this was than anything else I've done. Because it's true. And he's foreign. Foreigners are totally awesome.

Tomorrow's update is gonna be a pretty long one. I'm pretty excited about it. I hope everyone's doing great.

And it's true. We're gonna build something this summer.

-Aaron.


There are band decisions, there are shit decisions, there are decisions that seemed like really good decision at the time of execution but turned out bad. Then there are decisions that are so utterly, audaciously and knowingly shit they can only, surely, hopefully, come full circle and turn out to be genius.

By my own volition I’m leaving a well-paid state job with free health and dental care, free accommodation, mostly free food and going back to a country on the brink of bankruptcy to live in rented accommodation with no income for the foreseeable future at the beginning of the Great Depression 2.

As decisions go it’s up there with the shittiest of the shit. Standing on a mountaintop during a lightening storm in a suit of armour springs to mind, investing your life savings in Royal Bank of Scotland, voting for Hitler in ’33… ask me again in a years time and I’ll see if I can put it into realistic perspective, possibly while I squat in a cardboard box with a McCafe cup full of coppers.

There’s an absurd but romantic reason for my voluntary decline into poverty though, I’ll be living with my friends in a city with a punk rock scene. I’ll be in a band. The house we live in will leak but it’ll be ours, we’ll play our music loud, we’ll live in filth and laugh at our own low standards, we’ll talk about inlay art ideas for albums we’ll never release, we’ll talk about the banter we’ll have with other bands we’ll never tour with, we’ll give a nick name to the van we never tour in, we’ll put demos on Myspace that never get listened to, we’ll tell major label reps we’ll never meet to shove the contract they’ll never write up their ass, we’re fine as we are. We’ll have nervous conversations with the locals, we’ll drink the local brew, we’ll drink our own brew, we’ll see small bands in small venues and breath boozy breath all over them and grin cos “they speak different,” I’ll sow another patch onto those jeans I can’t bring myself to chuck out, we’ll debate Against Me!, we’ll check punknews.org, we’ll “make coffee not war”, we’ll put out two issues of a zine one year apart from each other, we’ll “turn those clapping hands into angry balled fists”, we’ll sneer at yuppies, we’ll sneer at sports cars, we’ll tip our heads to tramps “cos tramps like us and we like tramps”, we’ll piss against SUVs and won’t wiggle and run away cos really we’re scared, we’ll do irony, we won’t do egos, we’ll sing, we’ll dance, we’ll jump about, we’ll play “the floor is made of lava!”, we’ll have acoustic sessions on the doorstep, we’ll play football in the park, we’ll swim in the Taff and catch cold, I’ll dissolve the paint away on my bass with alcoholic sweat, we’ll wear sombreros. We will acknowledge that existing and living are not the same thing.

Poverty is a middle class lifestyle choice that’s on the clearance rack and I think I like it.

“Raise a toast to saint Joe Strummer

We are our only saviors”


-Until tomorrow.