Once again, real life disrupts my creativity. I spent this last month worrying about tons of things I had very little control over. For this ‘New Music Monday’ I had hoped to review some new entry which was more listener-friendly so that more readers would be inclined to check it out instead of my thrash, in-your-face, angry, the-system-is-against-me, music.

Sorry. I ran out of time. Out of due diligence, I’m opting to fall back on an old reliable. Now, it sort of just fell into my lap and maybe that’s what makes this review even more appropriate. This is one of my favorite groups of all time. I only have three groups where no matter what they release; I’ll fawn over it no matter how horribly it sounds or resemble the aural equivalent to excrement. And this is one of them.

Authority Zero is back together after taking a little break with the new release “Stories of Survival.” I love this fricking band and always felt like if I were to ever have pursued music with my little brother, this is what it would sounds like. For the uninitiated Authority Zero is loud with a heavy influence of ska, reggae, and skate punk. Successfully and efficiently, it channels my inner-13 year old adolescent.


Before I go into the review which will obviously be ‘unbiased,’ let me explain my obsession. It was summer 2004 and we’d been through an absolute shit stain of a year. Unbeknownst to us, it was going to get a little worse. We moved up to Seattle from Long Beach as our lives took a dramatic turn with the loss of my brother, the pregnancy of my wife, the dysfunction of my job, and the impending terminal illness of my mother-in-law.

While looking for a house, my pregnant wife and I were living with my mother-in-law in her little rambler in the hood. It was a small place with my wife, me, my mother-in-law, her boyfriend, and her boyfriend’s son all to live. No privacy and one hell of a commute to work. One night, the five and half of us were watching Third Watch. Bored by the episode, I remember hearing a song at the end of the show which hit me hard. The show was good at locking in great music at the end as the story was wrapping up. Once, even Green Day and “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams” was used.

Anyway. The song was “Find Your Way” by Authority Zero. I was on the internet, searching out newsgroups and threads the next day to find out who the hell this band was. And after work, I hit Best Buy and picked up “Andiamo.” That record was life changing. I’ll always remember everything my wife and I went through in 2004 and 2005. Authority Zero is my life then, just as it is now.

So this is less about a review and more about how music can map your life. It marks major intersections with signage on your life’s journey. Forever, “Andiamo” will mark loss in my life and the start of a great family. In a coincidental parallel to then, we’re going through major life changes now. And again Authority Zero releases a record which zeros in on my soul with laser-targeting accuracy.

“Stories of Survival” is just that, a collection of stories of making your way through the chaos of life and holding on to the few things that matter; your faith, your friends, and your family. Don’t get me wrong here; it’s edgy, fast, and loud just like my life. But get past that and listen to the message in the lyricism. Jason DeVore is an incredible storyteller who can capture emotion and bottle it like lightning. This record is what feelings sound like.

To make this easy on you, I’m not going to subject you to my weak musical assessments. Instead, I ‘m going to note a few songs and the poignant lyrics of each which really connected with me. I hope this will encourage you to find music out there which, just like a very close friend, will take care of you in your formative times.

“Brick in the Wave” – Do you remember acting up and acting out. Not following the herd Now they see it in your eyes. Your actions speaking first as you rise with a will to survive.

“Get it Right” – No you’re not dead, no not quite yet. This is your time, How far will you take it?

“Crashland” – As we stand in awkward silence, and we see these crazy things. As this world goes on corrupted, we lose sight of our being.

“Liberateducation” – Here we go again. Liberated and alive, with unrelenting words and a strong will to survive.

I know that listening to a genre of music like this can be a little intimidating and even tiring. It’s loud and fast. But don’t discredit the purity in the emotion that created it. Those feelings are woven through the lyrics. Because of all that my wife and I have endured over the years and even now, Authority Zero is knotted to the thread of my existence. People are always looking for a signs to guide you. For me, I found it in this music.

While your preferences may differ greatly from mine, I encourage you to open yourself to the healing powers of feelings put to sound. Whether you like Dave Brubeck, David Hasselhoff, Cher, or Authority Zero, there’s a message out there specifically tailored for your heart. You just got to listen and your life will change.

When you're closing a chapter in your life and opening another, you find yourself intensely open to many emotions. I’ve spent the last few weeks packing up my family’s life in to assorted cardboard boxes. And while it felt like it took forever to sell our home, in an instant it was sold. So too did packing feel like an eternity only to move out in an instant. During the loading, and even the unloading and unpacking, the weight of what we were seeing in the rear view mirror of life hadn’t hit us. I don’t think I really ‘thought’ about what I was leaving behind until I spent extended time touching up the walls with paint and cleaning up around the empty house.

While structures of houses vary little from one to the next, the stories within those walls, the laughter, the tears, and the memories vary greatly. Those are the elements which make your house a home. And while cleaning these last two days, I realized that each room of my now sold house had many stories. These were the building blocks to the start of a dream; a family full of love and compassion, and a little bit of piss and vinegar.

It’s the seemingly insignificant nuggets over the years which have the greatest collective pull on your heart. Room by room, I kept getting swept up in the emotion while I painted. It was like each hole I patched was a peep hole into something deeper in my family’s existence. In the backyard, I remember building the brick wall around the flower bed while Son #1 was an infant and looked on through his little play yard. In the kitchen, the holes in the wall mark the magnetic board of letters and days of the week. Son #1 learned his alphabet there and how to spell his name. In the great room, the holes held up pictures of our kids in various stages of growth and life. The pictures comforted you in the calm of the late nights as you watched TV.

And the alcove that held the TV, hours of shows, bike movies, and video games were logged there. Friends and family gathered around the fulcrum of home entertainment for Superbowl parties and Cougar football. I think about my office where I spent so many hours working on creative projects and slaved away on my studies to get my masters degree. On the walls, vinyl records of my life changing albums were hung. I produced both videos of the first birthdays of Son #1 and #2 in that room.

The garage was a shelter away from the world much like the office. Son #1 learned to ride a bike and a skateboard there. The wall was tagged with his initials in graffiti. Both Son #1 and #2 scribbled their art work in sidewalk chalk on those concrete floors. Pictures of dinosaurs, cars, monsters, and even family were there at some point. Back inside, I remember putting Son #1 to bed in our bed and counting the ‘stars’ on ceiling from the lamp left to us by his grandmother. I hated to put him to bed in there and only to pick him up and carry him to his room later. What I wouldn’t give to have one night with his limp sleeping body in my arms as I stumbled down that dark hall to his bedroom.

And the boys’ bedrooms have so many memories. I struggled to paint and decorate the room of Son #2. I worried that I wasn’t going to love him like Son #1. While we knew he was miracle baby, we were a slight bit uneasy when we found out about him. The room is the physical ramification of the memory of that internal conflict. I can’t even begin to imagine a life without him now. In the other boy’s bedroom, Son #1 at the ripe age of 21 months stood beside his dad as I painted the Seahawks logo on his window in honor of the team’s first Superbowl. I can still vividly remember the night where I built his crib before we brought him home.

Every room has something; the master bedroom with our framed vows hanging, the words describing our commitment, the bonus room with hours of foosball while my wife was pregnant with Son #1 and tournaments on holiday get-togethers, the torn up back yard from my hyperactive dogs, and the ‘ghosts’ who kept the boys entertained and safe in the entire house. The memories go on and on and the emotions grow and grow.

This was the house that we brought both of our sons home to. This was the house that both knew as their home. Yesterday was more difficult than I thought. It was intensely hard to close that garage door for the last time. I wasn’t coming back later. Ever.

I snapped a few photos in those last few moments in the house. I always wanted to shoot my fake MTV Cribs video there and never got around to it. So many rooms and so many memories are in that house. I feel like I’m letting my family and that house down by closing this chapter and venturing in a new direction. It’s like this edition of the book is complete. It was tough to not shed a tear or two as I walked out of the garage for the last time. I locked the door behind me and left the keys inside. The phone rang. It was my realtor passing on that the sale had recorded with King County. The house was no longer mine. It was officially sold and those memories are now a wire transfer into my savings account.


That was our house. Those were our memories. I can only pray that the new owners take good care of it. We now have to move on and begin to author the next volume in our family history. While the concept of that’s exciting, it’s equally scary and uncomfortable. Still, it hurt to drive away from our old home. So many memories.

The prospective of this move has been pretty strenuous on my soul and my family. I think under normal circumstances, (and when I say normal I mean when I was 25, had no kids, no bills, no wife, and no stuff) this would be a slam dunk move. However, I have stuff now. I have baggage. I have kids.

Now the last three or so entries have briefly painted the picture of our current home issue. So let’s have a comprehensive recap:

We are pretty fortunate to be in a position where we can sell our house because we want to and not because we have to. At closing, we stand to garner some net proceeds from the appreciation of our home. It will be nice to pocket that cash even if not as excessive as our home sale in Long Beach six years ago. This time around, we opted to throw our house on the market to see if any first time buyers would use their tax incentive on our humble abode. A side note is that we knew that moving was inevitable. We weren't in the school district we liked nor did we really like the surrounding neighborhood. Now that I’m growing up, I realized that I needed to make decision about our future based on the best interests of my family. Specifically; my children and their education.


That realization doesn’t come without elements of surprise and disappointment. We decided up front that we'd sell our house outright and then look for a new home in our desired areas. This would give us the greatest financial leverage in negotiations. But it also exposed us with the largest risk to be homeless. Our home sat on the market for about 45 days with a steady flow of showing appointments. But we were always the second choice despite showing well. We're in a neighborhood where the comps were Soundbuilt homes which artificially influenced value. In a buyer’s market, a seller is a price taker. So we stood to not profit as greatly as we would have hoped.

Finally, a couple placed an offer on our home at list price with very little concession. The buyer’s inspection was effortless and we had only two items to clear the sale. Following that, we knew we could begin to search out a replacement for our house. We only had one more hurdle in the form of the appraisal. We needed that to come in at list value for the buyer’s financing. We've looked at a ton of properties and it's become painfully obvious that my wife and I are very picky. While we were instructed to do a philosophical cost/benefit analysis of our must-haves and nice-to-haves, we collectively decided that we didn’t need to compromise our wants. Sure, there were areas that we could be more reasonable. But this new house is it.

While searching, the clock was ticking and we knew that if we found a prospective home by ‘this’ date, we could coordinate closing and not be homeless. Well, that point passed and we had to find temporary housing. Understanding that we had high standards for our new home, we realized that there was little chance that our homelessness would only last a week or two. So we sucked it up and began to consider apartments. I haven’t lived in an apartment in 11 years so this was going to be a significant step back.

So here we are today. We have a lease for a three-bedroom apartment signed and we are scheduled to return to the search in the near-term. We move into the temporary housing this week. A move like this makes you focus on just what you need to live comfortably as the lion’s share of our possessions will be placed in storage in my parents' garage. So we will be doing a double move; out of our house and into storage and an apartment. When we find a home, it will be another double move; out of storage and an apartment and into our new house.


What’s kept me sane during the process of not being able to sell, not generating the amount of proceeds I wanted, not finding a suitable new home, and the impending job change at work has been my very best friend; my wife. A couple of disagreements and some silent treatment are really the only issues that this pressure cooker of a move has created. We're pretty lucky. I can only imagine what this situation is doing to the boys. It seems like Son #1 is handling it like an adventure. But Son #2 has been a lot more inconsolable lately. He won’t eat much and fusses ALL of the time. He was loud to begin with but this is now a noticeable change. We can’t help but wonder if the uncomfortable nature of the environment is affecting him. I’m looking forward to getting this behind us so the boys can be happy.

So we are looking in specific neighborhoods for homes with very specific requirements. Tunnel vision like that limits your options. However, when that nugget is found and you have mitigated your compromises, you will be completely content with your purchase. It feels like we're literally ‘knocking at the door’ right now. Stay tuned.