When I was a kid I caught a bug. Good bug. Clean bug. The kind that crawls inside your ribs and never leaves.
I was alone a lot. House empty, clock ticking loud. I learned practice the way some kids learn prayer. Golf in the backyard, hacking at dandelions until the light died. Skating on any ice until my ankles bled inside the boots. And drumming. Always drumming.
Golf and drums stuck. Skating got left in the snowbank of childhood. This is now. /
Back then I built a shrine: one rubber pad, edges taped precise, so the stick never lied. Full-length mirror like a parole officer. Music stand. Metronome ticking like a snitch. Hours vanished. I hunted the perfect five-stroke roll the way other boys hunted girls (weeks, months, chasing a ghost in 32nd notes). Frank Arsenault spinning on the turntable, those old classic snare solos carved into my skull. I never caught perfection. Good. The chase was the juice.
Cut to today. Same ritual, older skin. Start on the pad, slow and monkish. Move to the acoustic kit, metronome still ratting me out. Play time. Stretch. Then the V-drums fire up, Logic glows, and I drop into drumless tracks or bleed new ideas straight into the machine. Same zone. Same trance. Same bug. Sixty years of sticks in my hands and the kid with the taped-up pad is still sitting there, hungry, counting sixteenths like rosary beads.
The bug never left.
I just learned to feed it better.
Pat