Oh, Baby

You know, I hear people talk about when their kids were babies and how much they miss those times. How quickly they grow from when they were rocked and swaddled and laid down for bed in a crib to being lousy teens that don’t pick up after themselves or don’t understand the value of a […]

Fourteen

I remember my 14th birthday like it was yesterday. It was the birthday my parents bought me my first electric guitar. It was a 1986 Squier Stratocaster. Blue with white pickguard. They’d bought it with the help of my guitar teacher at the time Jim Howie from Paradise Music Store. In my hometown at that […]

Sick In The Head

I was sick a lot as a kid. Allergies, bronchitis, ear infections, pneumonia, asthma, were pretty familiar words to me growing up(well, I only had pneumonia once.) I had allergy shots from the time I was 4 to 17-years old, and still got chest colds pretty regularly till I was well into my 20s. But […]

Chuck

I shaved my beard recently. Not all the way, just enough to where it looks like I forgot to shave for a couple days. Don Johnson five o’ clock shadow? No, more like Dom Deluise 5 o’clock shadow. Or maybe Peter Deluise five o’clock shadow if I’m lucky. Anyways, I needed a change and felt […]

A Few Words From Management

The new year always starts pretty slow for me. I don’t know what it is, but I find myself lacking in words to type, stories to tell, and music to discuss. It could be that those final couple weeks of December are a huge push to discuss the previous year’s triumphs and put them in […]

Miracle On U.S. 30

I’m not much of a believer in the mystical and magical. I don’t look at fantastical events and think of some divine intervention, or a prayer was answered. For all the good and bad that happens, and happens in a miraculous way, I see it as either good luck or bad luck. Yes, I view […]

Writing and Mood Swings

For the most part I keep the writing on Complex Distractions focused on those things in art and commerce that move me. Records, books, films, art, and all those other things that fall under the category of “waste of time” in most public school systems anymore. That’s the stuff that drove me to start writing […]

The Only Christmas Album You Need : Vince Guaraldi Trio’s ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’

Growing up in the Midwest Christmas was always a special time to me. The family gatherings, the mysterious gifts that appeared under the tree, the spirits both in the air and in my parents glasses, and of course the true reason for the season. There was a mix of happiness and bittersweet, as you thought […]

Too Many Candles, Not Enough Cake

Eighteen years ago I celebrated my first birthday as a father. We had a six-month old going on seven months. It was that spot in new parentdom where you begin to feel a little comfortable with this living, breathing being that can make you feel on top of the world and as if you’re losing […]

AT-PL120

Chicago, 2008. My wife and I drove to the windy city in October of 2008 to see My Morning Jacket. The show had been cancelled because just a couple nights prior Jim James took a spill from an extremely high stage and messed himself up pretty good. The hotel where we’d made reservations wasn’t understanding […]