The agonies and wanting to be ray toro in the meantime

My job is going to be the death of me, man. 

It's all manual labor for a supremely underpaid wage but I need the money and I wanna last a bit longer before hopping to another job. It means I've finally got some muscle on my arms though, which makes me feel way cool and butch.

I rewatched Life on the Murder Scene with my girlfriend the other day while we added studs and spikes to our jackets. I was struck by remembering how much Ray Toro and Frank Iero have influenced me. I haven't had the time or energy to pick my guitar back up lately, and between college worries and unending closing shifts I almost forgot why I was so adamant about picking it up in the first place. I watched for the thousandth time as Frank threw himself around stage and Ray smiled while shredding, listened for the thousandth time as Frank explained why he left behind college and his entire established Jersey life for the band. I remembered why I spent years fantasizing about "what if my band made it, what if we landed a tour beyond just our coast. what if we self sustained on the road, miserable and dirty and confident in our art, confident that it could help an entire audience".

The first step to even a fraction of that is getting better at guitar. I gotta play more. I go to tiny venues and see the best shitty punk rock bands who've never played off our coast, so I marvel when one frontman says they came here all the way from San Francisco. I wonder if my band, one of the twenty I've entertained in my fantasies, would ever even get that far, far enough to go to San Francisco and play for a crowd of twenty. How insane would it be to play a song like Skylines to a crowd of a mighty and roaring sixty. 

The first step to any of this, to having strong arms that could effortlessly wave a Telecaster above my head, to shredding with any shred of reliability, and to god forbid writing an original verse, is to play more. I'm not gifted in music in the fucking slightest, I do it all because I want to so, so badly. It's not like comics, I haven't been working at this since I could hold a pencil. I have to scrape and dig and tear and sweat over music if I wanna dare to play a house show for a crowd of ten. I need to start a band already.