Recently while on tour I had the opportunity to visit my little brother in Austin, TX. Someone very close to us recommended we go to The Texas Chili Parlor for Mad Dog Margaritas. They make their margaritas with fresh limejuice and don’t bog them down with commercially packaged sweet & sour mix. Mad Dog Margaritas are made using an extraordinarily harsh mezcal tequila…the kind with the worm in the bottle. It’s a tough cup-o-drank.

The recommendation came from a person that learned of the drink from a song they listened to while dealing with divorce. We’ve talked about how much of a tool music can be in processing here before. I think it comes up a lot actually. Sometimes someone has said it all before. You need to live through their voice. It helps us find solace. We’re not alone.

Sitting there in The Texas Chili Parlor in a city that is not my own, turning tequila into hair on my chest, my girlfriend and little brother at the table, I felt very connected. I was connected to the people around me, the floorboards, the jukebox, the person who recommended the bar, the humid rainy air, and the laughter that can wash so much of the past away.

I search for words to describe the feeling here…though someone has said it first and, of course, said it best…

Here are the lyrics…
(more…)

Whitney treated me to a picnic on a private beach in the northern suburbs of Chicago. The only other people on the beach were having a party on the far end. Many of them were dressed as pirates. We assumed at first it was a birthday party for one of the kids but there were just as many adults dressed up as there were children. I’m not sure if it was a birthday party or some weird North Suburban Pirate Cult. They didn’t steal our picnic or anything and we only spotted a group of canoes and kayaks. No pirate ships.

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My roommate is building a full bar in our basement. The drywall is finished but the floor is a bit uneven. He wants to put tile down but they have the potential to crack if the floor is unbalanced. He attempted to put down self-leveling concrete. It didn’t work quite as well as he had hoped. While he was telling me all of this I interrupted by saying, “You should try an acrylic polymer. Ya know? Acrylic polymer? Acrylic polymer is the way to go bro.” He said, “Yeah, you mean like, that acrylic polymer. Acrylic polymer would probably do it.” After a few moments I proclaimed, “I don’t know what acrylic polymer is.” He replied, “I’m pretty sure you made it up.” I said, “I think I did too.”

When I looked up “acrylic polymer” online it read, “Acrylic polymer can be used in lieu of water in [concrete] mix adding both crush and flex strength to cured concrete. The product also promotes even curing thus eliminating tension cracking on the surface.” So the product I thought I was making up to irritate my roommate turned out to be an actual product used to fix the problem he was attempting to explain to me.

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A joke I heard yesterday…

Q: What’s brown and rhymes with Snoop?
A: Dr. Dre

I hope that joke is adorable and not hateful. I’m leaning toward adorable though.

My younger brother Tim runs a blog called “America in Short.” You can find it here: www.americainshort.com. Every Wednesday he posts a “Triple Shot” in which he gives you three quick glimpses into his life. They are small moments, bits of conversation, quick observations, pocket-sized ideas and thoughts. I have decided to take on this regularly scheduled post as my own. With that said, this is my first “Triple Shot.” I stole it.
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I not only stole this idea from my brother’s blog. I also stole the photo above from him.

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When I was 16 I stole 47 cans of spray paint from Wal-Mart. I threw the cans in a cart and walked right out the small door with the flaps they use for shopping carts. I made it about 30 yards before an off duty cop noticed me trying to push a cart full of spray paint off of the property. I was thusly held in a small white walled office and had to wait for my parents to bail me out of Wal-Mart Jail. I then signed a release that I would never return to any Wal-Mart anywhere ever again forever.