Operation I.B.

How to shed weight the hard way, Razorcake, and getting your ya-ya's out

Here is an excerpt from a post I started and never finished:

“You’ve NEVER been to Mexico!?!?”

That’s a question I have gotten a whole helluva lot in my life. I like to think it’s because of my relative proximity to our Southern neighbor, or my well-documented penchant for travel. At the risk of sounding like Alice Cooper in Wayne’s World, Milwaukee Mexico has certainly had its share of visitors, hovering around 40-45 million per year in non-plague years, and so, maybe, I think…THAT’s why so many assume I have been there, it’s just a statistical probability game. And perhaps that is somewhere closer to the reality, which is that because I have a Hispanic name, and I talk about being Chilean (“Brown on paper”, like bad LSD maybe…), and I mean, hell I SPEAK Spanish for chrissakes…it just stands to reason that I would have traveled to Mexico at SOME point, which is pretty much like Chile…right? Geography has never really been our strong suit as a country.

In the end it was Cumbia that took me to Mexico, somewhat last minute and on a total whim, as all the best travel plans are laid. I had seen, a while back, that legendary Chilean cumbieros Chico Trujillo would be doing a five date run in Mexico, and, knowing that the chance of them coming to the US anytime soon was slim to none, the seeds of an idea began to sprout. I reached out to my friend Timo, who manages Mexican group Son Rompe Pera, to see if perhaps they would be the openers (the two bands are inextricably linked, for reasons too long to detail here…) and was informed that they would only be opening the CDMX date. Sign me up.

I texted fellow intrepid voyager and purveyor of experiences that don’t suck Jim Ruland to see if he’d be on board to link up, and a resounding “Let’s do it!” was all I needed to start drafting the pitch to my ever-supportive-of-my-ridiculous-concert-whims wife. Jim had countered my offer with the prospect of also doing an interview with Son Rompe Pera for Razorcake Magazine, for which he writes a monthly column, and with a few messages to Timo we were able to set that up as well. A couple of short months later I was on a Volaris (the worst airline I have ever accidentally had to deal with) flight into CDMX, you know…where I’d NEVER been.

Long story short, the mission was a success, and last week I had my interview published in the new issue of Razorcake, with a few photos alongside the excellent work of Becky DiGiglio. Being that I had never done an interview before, let alone entirely in Spanish, I was supremely grateful to have my mentor Jim Ruland there to guide the process, share NA beers and tacos with, and let me know when my proposed questions were shit. The process of translating, which I did directly from the recording, was a lot smoother than I had anticipated, and I was fortunate to have speakers of specifically Mexican slang that I could lean on for certain words/phrases that escaped me. Razorcake is a non-profit DIY punk rag, so I viewed the opportunity to promote a Cumbia band that I love as a unique and important cultural bridge, and to my surprise, the powers that be agreed with that sentiment enough to put them on the cover, which absolutely blew me away (and of course, the band is overjoyed as well). You can subscribe to Razorcake here or buy individual issues as well, they are well worth supporting in this day and age of disappearing print media.

I could, and will at some point, talk more about this trip at a later juncture, but I wanted to also follow up on my last post , which I wrote from the hospital after having a small, superficial tear in my sigmoid colon. A few weeks later I met with a surgeon to discuss next steps, and it was decided that the best course of action would be to have the offending foot of colon removed (don’t worry, we have six…) and thus not have to deal with these ongoing bouts of diverticulitis.

Given two options for surgery dates, I nixed the one that would have been two weeks from then in order to do it on November 26th, the day before Thanksgiving. I felt in the moment that two weeks was not enough time to mentally prepare, nor to work leave out with my job (both of which seem silly in hindsight…), and so now I have been playing the waiting game. The wake up in the middle of the night and not have anything else to think about game.

I have never had a major surgery before, so I think I am a bit on edge about it, but ironically I know a couple of people that have had this exact surgery (Laparoscopic Sigmoidectomy, for the curious) and have nothing but good things to say about the results. The prognosis is 2-5 days in the hospital, followed by 2-4 weeks of home recovery, with the surgeon expecting me to be on the shorter end of both of those estimates based on my age and relative health, glaringly obvious exception notwithstanding.

The last little bit of my life in recent days that I wanted to share is that I bought a drum set and have started playing some music again. I’ll tell you what, in this current landscape of absolute terrifying news headlines at every turn, there is nothing quite like getting to beat the absolute living shit outta some drums in a small room with likeminded folks. It’s been interesting to realize that this is the first time I have ever really played music with other people since I got sober, and a lot of the things I used to think I couldn’t do (like sing and play at the same time) were really just because I was expending the bulk of my concentration staying upright.

I started playing drums when I was about 8. I went to Harmony School in Bloomington, IN and we had a once-a-month music afternoon. I had actually wanted to play keyboard, because I had gotten a small Casio as a gift, but of course I would always forget to bring it. My teacher Charlie Cole thought I would be a good fit for the drums, so me and a few other kids learned to play Johnny B. Goode for our school talent show. A couple of years later, right after the release of Nirvana’s “Nevermind”, I took a few lessons from a man who had once been ranked one of the “Top 10 Drummers in USSR”. “Smarrrrt boy” he told my mother, in an accent reminiscent of Sam Neill’s dying “I would have loved to have seen Montana” in The Hunt for Red October.

The rest of my formative years I played drums when I could, but never had a kit. In High School if you wanted to be in jazz band, you had to ALSO be in marching band, which meant getting up early on the weekends and going to football games…two things I detested with all of my soul. After I moved out on my own I played in a few bands, my proximity in work/home to Colorado College meant I was always sitting in with campus bands, and these kids were always wildly more talented than I was.

In 2007 I think, Adam Leech and I started Thee Kissing Disease, after he told me he wanted to start “the greatest shitty rock n’ roll band ever”. We definitely nailed that second part, but it was a lot of fun. With just the two of us in the band, we could pretty much do whatever we wanted, and with Adam’s connections we were able to start playing shows around town almost immediately (read: without actually being good). It was a blast, and a blur, with my drinking spiraling outta control, I hardly remember opening for The Black Lips, our last show together (though I DO remember that they were assholes to everyone there and bragged about how much they were getting paid…).

Apart from a one-off project in 2012 or so, that was the last time I played drums with any consistency. The nice thing about being in your 40’s and playing music in a basement is that nobody expects anything from it, so if you can make it through a cover of “Orange Crush” you feel pretty damn good about it. Nice to be using parts of my brain that have been sitting dormant for a few years, and I actually think I have gotten to the point where my drumming might actually be getting BETTER (not great, mind you). It’s like that old joke that goes something along the lines of “Wow, you’ve been playing for 35 years you must be so good”! Riiiiiiight….

Not much else to share at the moment, but wanted to check in and let people know about the surgery. Send me good juju, I’ll be down for the count for the foreseeable future. Doc says 10lb lifting restriction for 8 weeks, so obviously no gym, and will have to see what that means for playing drums. I’ll check in next week when I am drugged to gills and convalescing!

Much Love!

Andrés