Severe Tire Damage, Track 1

This is the blistered horror of my left hand.  Note the blood-blister just below my wedding ring, the regular blister on my middle finger, the open wound on my index.
It’s a good pain.  It means I’m drumming again.
A very pretty girl was foolish enough to tell me that she liked men with nice arms, and I thought, “Well, I used to have great arms.”  Plus, I needed to get into exercise again, having fallen off recently, and there was this full drum kit downstairs – so why not do that?
Vanity, thy name is Ferrett.
Drumming’s a little different than other instruments in that you can’t drum in silence – or, rather, you can if you have a) a very expensive electronic kit with headphones, or b) silencing pads.  I don’t have a), and b) means I can’t actually hear what I’m playing, which means that when I practice, the whole neighborhood gets to hear me fucking up.  And I am fucking up, because my style of drumming has always been “technically sloppy, but big on feel.”  Which means that I play differently every time, going for these elaborate fills and winding up off-beat because once again, I bit off more than I could chew.
As I’ve been playing over the last ten days or so, though, I’ve felt those skills surging back – and there’s a strength in going for an elaborate set of triplet-to-kick-pedal fills in the middle of a song and nailing it.  There’s that Babe Ruth feeling of the called shot, of going, “I fired here and dropped back into the pocket, fuck yeah.”  Which is nice.  It’s not so nice, only playing along with other people’s music, but the iPod makes that considerably easier than it was back when I played along with CDs or (gah!) tapes.
I’m too old to be in a band, alas. Don’t have the commitment or the social network.  Would be nice, though.