UNTIL MY HEART STOPS

In addition to the always delightful and informative trevorhale.com, I also have another, far less frequented and even less updated blog.

I started it a long time ago as a home for all the writing I had done about touring and being in bands. It's called Until My Heart Stops. The goal was to update it a couple of times each week (ha) during and after all the touring I was going to do. That plan started somewhere around Valentine's Day in 2005 and I started cobbling together stuff I had already written and started fresh. Stories were pulled from various MySpace blogs, LiveJournal posts and my trusty notebook.

The goal was to write about every out of state show I played with either Cherem, Tamerlane, Cool Your Jets or whatever other band I was in at the time. I had decided to take a few years off of school and become a full-time touring musician.

It might have been the worst idea I'd had up to that point.

We never toured more than a few weeks at a time and there were months in between stints out on the road. And over time, I got lazier and lazier about updating or writing about any of the shows. There are huge gaps and lapses on the blog. I started out strong, with 36 posts in 2005, 1 in 2006, 1 in 2007 (when both Tamerlane, Cherem and Cool Your Jets stopped being real bands that ever did anything), 0 in 2008, 9 in 2009 (when the restaurant I worked at was closed for 3 months and I had nothing to do so I tried to get caught back up) and 1 in 2010. Hasn't been touched since.

Slowly, I've been working on compiling a lot of little miscellaneous tidbits and writings that have shown up elsewhere but it just hasn't been consistent. There's a file on my desktop with scanned fliers, notes, pictures and various writings and I've always meant to get back to it.

Last week, as I was sitting at work, I realized that I now have the perfect opportunity to do something with this. I pretty much always have something to do at work, but sometimes, I'll finish a project early and there won't be anything else ready to start right away. Instead of just refreshing Twitter every few minutes, I can work on Until My Heart Stops.

That night, I gathered everything I could find that was on the Internet in some form or another, took the word document out of the desktop folder and compiled it all into one place on my Google Drive so I can get to it whenever I have a few minutes.

Right now it's a text document that's 90 pages long. There are still 47 shows that have bullet point notes that I remember but haven't written about yet. I'm trying to make it a point to get through at least three a week when I have downtime either at work or at home.

Then once I've finished, I'll go back through and make it all consistent. I've grown a lot as a writer since I started doing this in 2005 and some of those older posts are hard to look at. I've almost gone back to them all in the past week, but stopped myself.

Finish the damn thing first, then toy with it. That's my 2013 goal. It was also my goal from 2010, 2011 and 2012, too. But whatever.

No one probably cares about any of these stories, but I'm going to do something with them anyway. Maybe by summertime next year I'll have my own version of Get In The Van where you get to read all about the weird places Cherem played and all the random stuff that happens on the poorly planned and borderline disastrous tours of a vegan straight edge band.

My uncle really wants it to be called The Junkyard Next to the Women's Prison, which is an actual place we played once. But I don't know. I'm getting ahead of myself again.

You can read one of my favorite tour stories in the post below. That's one that I'm still mildly happy with, but will definitely need to clean it up a bit later on. Still though. It's a good time.

Check it out.