The Bowling Alley Years

From twenty to twenty-six I worked at a bowling alley in San Antonio. I ended up the front desk guy. Some nights I worked security instead.

That is where this actually starts. Not a studio, not a scene — a shoe counter.

What the job was

Front desk is lane assignments, shoe sizes, league nights, the register, somebody's birthday party, somebody else's complaint. Security is standing near a problem until it decides not to be one. Both are mostly waiting, punctuated by something you have to handle immediately.

The useful part is the downtime. You are present, you are paid, and large portions of your brain are free. That is a strange gift if you are twenty-two and have something you are trying to make.

An iPad and GarageBand

I made beats on an iPad. I recorded in GarageBand. That was the whole setup.

No interface worth the name, no treated room, no monitors, no idea what I was doing technically. I had taught myself piano by ear and then learned the pentatonic scales, which was enough to build anything I could hear in my head.

People wait to start until they have the right equipment, and the right equipment is always one purchase away. An iPad and a laptop was what I had. It turned out to be enough to learn on, which is the only thing early gear has to be.

What the demos were for

Here is the part that explains the writing.

As a teenager I had written a lot of cryptic poetry and put it on Facebook. Genuinely cryptic — dense, oblique, the kind of thing you post at sixteen because saying it plainly is unbearable. I kept writing like that into my twenties.

The demos were, more than anything, a way to repurpose all of it. I had years of writing that existed in the worst possible format — status updates — and beats were a way to give it somewhere to live.

That is why the writing is visceral and sometimes cryptic. It is not a style I selected later. It is what I was already doing before I knew it was going anywhere.

Why it had to end

The bowling alley was also where I was using. Those two facts are not separable, and that is a different page.

I left at twenty-six, a year after meeting my wife, and went to work at a coffee shop. Getting away from that building is a large part of how I got away from the substances. The job did not cause it, but the environment and the hours and the people were load-bearing in a way I did not see until I was out.

Six years, a shoe counter, an iPad, and a backlog of teenage poetry. That is the foundation this record is built on.