Hey, Hey.....YEAH!

My first summer in Guelph is in full swing now. I still haven't found a job, though to be honest haven't put the most effort into looking and I'm pretty much flat broke. This leads most people to ask me "What do you do all day?" and I can't really answer that well.

I'm lucky because a decent amount of my friends who I attended school with stuck around this summer, so I don't have a shortage of people to hang out with. And hang out we do. I live with my best friend who I've known since senior kindergarden. Another two of my very good friends live only a block down the street. A house of friends is only two blocks in the other direction. I've been playing bass with a group of great friends and could not be happier about playing music again. They live only a town over and are just a $7 bus ride away.

Basically what I'm trying to get at is that there is no shortage of people around for me to see and I love it. Even better is that we always have room in our house, so friends come and go for weekends.

But still, what am I doing? Well I just returned from a trip to New York City. While I was there I got to see the Arrogant Sons of Bitches play a reunion show, which I never though I would be able to see in person. Three Cheers For Disappointment has been my favourite album since the first time I heard it right at the end of 11th grade, so seeing these songs (along with many other amazing ones from the band's back catalogue) was extremely important and special to me. Not to mention screaming as loud as I possibly could to "Have Fun Rotting By Yourself", "Yeah, I Don't Know What It's Like To Be Around A Bunch Of Hipsters", "Last On My  List", "So Let's Go! Nowhere!" and "Built To Fail Motherfucker" with James during the encore. Fucking amazing. On top of that, during Dan Potthast's set opening the show ASOB came out to serve as his backing band for some mu330 songs. Great night.

On top of my ska orgasm on Sunday night I also got to see a Mets game at Citi Field, show my brother around the city for his first time and meet a ton of rad people along the way. I love New York and especially Brooklyn and really want to move there at some point in my life.

The weekend before this I went to Montreal for the second edition of Pouzza Fest. The weekend was a pretty ridiculous bender, topped by staying up all of Sunday night to party in the streets. Even better than hanging out and having amazing times with a whole whack of friends was seeing amazing bands the entire time, especially Classics of Love, The Suicide Machines, Lagwagon, The Lawrence Arms, The Menzingers, The Bouncing Souls, Cheap Girls, Junior Battles and lots more.

A great part about travelling to go to music festivals like The Fest, Death To False Hope Records Fest and Pouzza over the last few years has been that I've accrued a ton of great friends all over North America (and even Austrailia and the UK!). So when a group of them were making travel plans for Pouzza Fest this year, they decided to come up to Southern Ontario a week early to see a house show in Waterloo I played and to hang out! It was more or less the best.

This stretch of events take us back to May 15h, the date of the show. The weekend before the show three of my closest friends came up from Toronto. I hadn't seen them in a long time and we had an absolute rager of a time. I miss the fuck out of them and don't see them enough so that weekend was a great time. The week before all of this consisted of my friends and I in Guelph relishing in our freedom from school by drinking and smoking and hanging out and skateboarding and raising hell and attending a particularly funny roof-top party on Wyndham Street.

This was, and I say this without exaggeration, the best month of my life. It really had everything I could have asked for.

So people keep asking me what I'm actually doing because I graduated and have no job. The easiest answer is that I've been having the time of my life and doing exactly what I want to.