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2004-07-07 - 9:18 p.m.
these hands, take a look at these hands
Zuul's got another gig at the Sidebar coming up in about 2 weeks, and we've been eyeing that date for a while now and talking about what we need to do to make it a better show than our last one. Frustratingly, though, there were about 5 weeks after the last show where we only played together twice: when we did the radio show, and the day before when we practiced for that. I kept calling everyone and trying to see when they were available, but things kept falling through because one person was busy or didn't feel like practicing. So there was a lot of wasted time when we could've been rehauling our set and working on new material. When we finally did reconvene and started having regular practices again a couple weeks ago, it was really tough for me to get back on track. In fact, that first practice back was maybe the worst I've ever played since I learned how to play drums capably. Not only were my arms completely out of shape, but my sense of rhythm was way off, I was clumsy as hell, and had no intuition about what to play, if I went for a fill it would just fall apart. Plus that night, Mike couldn't make it, and Sean decided to try out a different guy on bass, Dave, and it was kind of embarrassing for me to play for the first time with someone in that condition. Pretty much ever since we got our current practice space last fall, I've been bugging Sean about getting me keys to the room so that I could go down there by myself and practice by myself to get my chops up. And maybe it was my especially poor showing that did it, but that night Sean finally placed the keys in my possession. That week, I went down to the space by myself 3 times, in the afternoon between the work shifts. It's weird, it's been so long since I've been able to practice alone that I'm not really used to it anymore. Back when I was a teenager I'd come home from school and play my drums for an hour or two almost every day, until my mom would come home and ask me to give it a rest. I really miss that. It's depressing to think about how much better a drummer I was when I was in high school, just because I could play at home on a daily basis, which I haven't been able to do since then. But as long as I have the keys to the space, which we might have to move out of at the end of the summer, I'm going to keep going there and woodshedding and getting my skills back up to a good level. One of the other problems I've been facing with my drumming lately has been pain in my right hand. Sometimes the muscles in it get tight and it hurts a little to grip anything, but usually if I go easy on it for a while, the pain goes away. But it's been there consistently for the past couple months, and it's starting to worry me. It started up in the weeks before the first Sidebar show, when we were practicing a whole lot and around the same time we were going through a really busy period at my on-campus job, so I was lifting heavy stuff on a daily basis, and the strain on my hands started to really add up. And since I've been working even more at that job over the summer, it hasn't really had enough downtime to heal. If the pain gets much worse or stays much longer, I might just take off of that job for the rest of the summer and take it really easy on that hand aside from playing drums for a while, I don't want to do any long term damage. But over the past week or two it’s started to feel a lot better, so hopefully it won’t come to that. -al
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