It’s been nearly a year since I’ve left the country. While that would normally make me more than a little sad, I think I’ve been making up for it by travelling quite a bit within the borders of this fine country.

It’s wedding season, and over the past four months I’ve been to three weddings, three bachelor parties, and a bachelor party reunion (really just an excuse for a bunch of college friends scattered across the country to hang out in Vegas). I’ve been to Las Vegas twice, New Orleans, Fort Lauderdale, and Ponca City, OK to visit my grandparents.

Due to a minor flaw in the iPhone software that has since been fixed, my phone’s kept a record of everywhere it’s been since the last time it was reset (and by extension, everywhere I’ve been). Thanks to some cool software created to expose the flaw, I’ve been able to visualize everywhere I’ve been in the past year:

I think this picture proves it’s been a pretty awesome year.

Yes, it’s been a while since I’ve posted because, yes, it’s been a while since I’ve left the country. But that doesn’t mean I’m not hauling ass around my own nation. Between by the end of May I will have gone to Las Vegas twice, New Orleans, Oklahoma, and Ft. Lauderdale over the course of three months. Including the ones happening in Chicago, I’m attending 3 bachelor parties and 3 weddings over the same time frame. Since airfare has gone up significantly, this has not been cheap for me, but hopefully it doesn’t delay another overseas adventure sometime in the near future.

But, in all honesty, this post has nothing to do with traveling the world, but it does have quite a bit to do with the other thing that I love: drumming.

My new band The Mediocre Fight is hoping to go into the studio in May to record an album. The band is much less jammy than my past endeavors, with a much more indie rock influence. We’re super excited about the project, and think the music we’ve come up with is pretty rad.

To help make this album a reality we’ve started a Kickstarter project. If you don’t know what Kickstarter is, it’s a way for people and groups to raise funds for creative projects (or in the case of the city of Detroit, to erect a statue of Robocop). The buzzword for this is crowdsourcing. You pledge now, but your credit card doesn’t get charged unless we reach our goal. And if you pledge money to us, we offer gifts/prizes/awards in return. Lower levels include digital or physical copies of the album, upper levels include a private lesson with one of us (over skype for those not in Chicago), recording a cover song of your choice, or even write a theme song just for you.

We explain a little more about it in our video above.

Make sure to check out out website, themediocrefight.com. Our multi-talented bass player Paul has been drawing Mediocre Fights of the Day for a while now. They pit epically mediocre opponents against each other in a battle to the death (or until they get bored of each other) such as: Puppy vs its Reflection, Admiral Ackbar vs Traps, Alcohol vs Memory, and the mediocrest of mediocre fights, Grass Growing vs Paint Drying.

I’ve contributed to a few of these posts with my Mediocre Prose. Heavily inspired by Dan Brown’s writing, these works abound with misplaced modifiers, excessive adverbs, and inane similies, it’s the best terrible writing I can come up with. Check the comments on: Rabbit vs Carrot with Face (heavily inspired by Watership Down), Puppy vs Its Reflection, and possibly the greatest piece of writing I’ve ever done Fat Man vs Rickety Chair.

I’ve been thankful to you all for reading this blog over the years and would be eternally grateful for your support in my musical adventures as well.

This is what happens when I go out of the country. I don’t get to be part of awesome film shoots like this one Be the Groove did while I was in Costa Rica:

Click here to view the embedded video.

We’re currently leading the Chicago Human Rhythm Project’s Virtual Rhythms: International Tapography Competition. There’s one more day of voting, so help us out!

Vote Now!

We’ll be having another video coming soon filmed the same weekend that you won’t see me in, but you’ll hear the music I wrote.

And stay tuned, in the next day or two I’ll review a couple recent domestic, but awesome trips, and talk about my next international adventure, what I like to refer to as Operation JRO.