Burnout

I suggested Homebound as our band name, but of course my friend who looks like Jeffery Dahmer didn’t like it because he doesn’t really ever like any of my suggestions. And Homebound is already the name of a movie and some super obscure band anyhow. We spitball some other names but didn’t really get anything worthwhile.

I asked my goober Asian friend what he thought, but he wouldn’t take it seriously and kept saying dumb crap like “whale fart Hitler poop” as his suggestion. I asked him to take it seriously, but he wouldn’t, because everyone in high school constantly feels the need to be the funniest person in the room, and sincerity is nonexistent. He’s like talking to a Marvel character.

What we have figured out is that we’re going to cover Basket Case by Green Day first. I’ll be rhythm, Dahmer’ll play lead, and the goober will be a keyboard bassist since we don’t actually have a bass.

There’s a multitude of problems, one obviously being that we don’t have a drummer.

The second is that Dahmer doesn’t have an electric guitar, only a classical. He keeps texting me, sending me pictures of guitars and saying, “I really like the skronk on this guitar, the tremolo is very nice and has a good 9.5 inch radius neck.” And then the next day he’ll say, “Well actually, I saw someone say that that bazoinka reflex on the guitar isn’t wound tight enough, so I’ll get a different one.” And then he just never makes up his mind. He’s so obsessively caught up with the tiny, pointless details.

Dahmer was supposed to be our vocalist, actually. He hyped up his voice for a week, and he even made us miss the release of the FNAF movie just to hear it. And when the time finally came, he started pathetically making excuses about how he doesn’t want us to suffer from his Yoko Ono voice. So then he made me be the lead vocalist, which I thought was dumb because I can’t really sing, and I know he’ll get on my case about my voice all the time because he’s so particular about everything. I listened to a recording of Dahmer singing because he refused to give us a live performance, and while it wasn’t Yoko Ono tier, it wasn’t too great. And the goober is even worse at singing, so that’s a third problem. We don’t really have a good singer.

Fourth, the goober is not good at music whatsoever. He was never in band or in orchestra. And even though he is Asian, he could not play piano. His music taste is pure pop, any other form of music like hip-hop or even rock is just too out there for him. Most concerning is that he can’t tell what instruments are making up a song, even when I’m pointing them out to him. I tried to see if he could recognize the upstrums of the rhythm guitar in Say It Ain’t So, and he could not, even after five minutes of pointing it out. He didn’t know what a bass, rhythm guitar, or lead guitar did or sounded like. I’m not sure how he can be a keyboard bassist if he plays piano poorly and can’t even hear the bassline in a song.

Anyhow.

I’m surprised Dahmer let me pick a Green Day song as our first choice, because he doesn’t really like Green Day and is into more obscure, experimental stuff. A lot of the stuff he wanted to cover seemed a little ambitious for a couple of wannabe musicians. It’s a good thing Green Day songs are stupid simple. The thing is, there’s no lead guitar part in Basket Case, so we’re currently trying to write our own addition to the song so Dahmer has something to do and isn’t just standing there. If only he would just sing, then he could be the vocalist while I play guitar and the goober plays “bass.”

But I suppose none of this matters because at the end of the day we don’t have a drummer.