DJ Mosher

Joined May 2020

0 stories

Bio

Ex-punk, aspiring freelance writer.

Commission me here! https://www.fiverr.com/users/djmosher/seller_dashboard

Stories (2/0)

The Storm
Rain. Days and days of rain. As if that weren’t enough, the skies had faded over the course of the week from a dull and foreboding gray to a menacing black with only a few small patches of anything remotely promising of the future. With what I was going through at that time, it seemed fitting, and it suited me just fine. Since the old plant closed down, I had been spending most of my days locked away in my study, never turning on the lights or so much as opening the blinds. Of course, I would answer the door to the occasional guilt-trip checking in of neighbors, or to accept a package or meal delivery, but those interactions, even in my best of emotional states, remained little more than an automatic call and response. Not to say I don’t have any friends, and not to imply that I don’t enjoy the occasional social outing. Truly, it is hard to explain myself, and it holds little relevance to the subject at hand. What holds the most importance is the darkness to which I had become accustomed to the point of absolute comfort. In the fleeting moments where the sun peeked through the windows in spite of my heavy curtains and pulled shades, I would wear a pair of sunglasses to shield my eyes. Many of my brief visitors would wonder what it was that I was working on so intently in that small room, shielded so carefully from any intrusion, both metaphorically and quite literally, and I rarely had anything substantial to tell.
By DJ Mosher2 years ago in Fiction
5 Lessons We Can All Learn From "Bad" Drummers
For better or worse, I have been a drummer for almost twenty years. Through the phases of my life, drumming has been a hobby, an amateur career, an old passion needing to be rediscovered and during my most formative years, a way of life. In junior high and high school years, the other “serious,” drummers and I worshiped at the altar of Bonham, Peart, Moon and Baker. The drummers who were in the popular clique idolized Travis Barker, Andy Hurley and Blake Richardson. Regardless of what particular teenage culture you found yourself in, if you couldn’t talk about your favorite solo by Buddy Rich or Gene Krupa, you weren’t a real drummer. We judged each other on what Zeppelin and Rush songs we could play all the way through. The single kick players trash-talked the double kick players.We compared each other's set ups and stick choices.The drummers in my small suburban town took their craft very seriously, and we judged harshly. Far from being immune to the culture of ridicule and elitism, I had some of the most intense opinions of my day. I swore by Vic Firth and thought Pro Mark was “trendy and too breakable.” I called Mapex a fake brand (Ironically, I now sit on a Mapex throne when I play. It has held up for over five years and was very reasonably priced). I laughed behind the backs of rock drummers who didn’t incorporate rudiments into their fills. I will readily admit that I was the textbook pretentious musician. Then, one day the unthinkable happened: I fell in love with Punk Rock, and began writing my own songs. Of course, this didn’t sit well with my fellow musicians who saw this genre as a joke, a style one defaulted to when they couldn’t play their instrument. Because of this disdain, I couldn’t find any punk bands to play drums for, and I committed yet another atrocity: I learned a few chords on the guitar and set out to start and front my own band. This left me with a task that would go on to change my attitude toward my main instrument forever: finding a drummer that was good enough for my band.
By DJ Mosher4 years ago in Beat