If I had to choose one song to live with for the rest of my life, it would be "Ana Ng," by They Might Be Giants. The staccato fuzztone guitar, the heartfelt-yet-cryptic lyrics, the weird triumphant feeling in the chorus... All of them combine into something ineffably perfect for me, and whenever I pick it out of my CD collection I invariably listen to it ten times in a row.

They Might Be Giants, however, always makes me think of a friend I made one day at The Training, back when I was twenty, and drifting madly, and my parents were forced to watch helplessly as I pissed all of my hard-saved money and hard-earned scholarships away on skipped classes. In an attempt to give me some purpose in life, they paid $400 to send me to The Training for a weekend.

The Training was what EST had evolved into, but it was pretty much the same: A focused psychological breakdown. The Training was famous for claiming that things were "bullshit," and that the only thing that mattered in your life was results. Had a problem? Get past it. Worried about something? Get past it. Low on money? You can beg. They called you on every lie.

But they did this by making you hyper-aware of your own thought processes. The Training was a form of flensing, basically making you extremely aware of all the excuses you make in your everyday life to get by... And goddamn, we have a lot of them. The word of the day was choice: You choose everything. The question they wanted you to answer was, why do you choose that? - and that was a question nobody wanted to answer.

It's easier to pretend that you're powerless. The Training was about empowerment. By the time you came out of The Training, you had no excuses left for anything bad in your life. You would either fix it or accept it.

And it was exhausting.

Nobody could keep The Training up for long periods at a time, because what you discover is that excuses are easy. You can tell yourself, "Hey, I can't do anything about work" and then settle into bed, comforted that it's all out of your control and there's nothing you can - or need - to do. Whereas the truth is always hard, and you have to scour your soul asking, "Is this bullshit?" and even when you finally figure out what the problem is you have to fix it. If work's really fucked-up, guess who has to stay up until three in the morning figuring out what to do about it?

Imagine doing that for every aspect of your life: Family, friends, lovers, jobs, future career hopes. It's a lot easier to pretend that you're not in charge, because when you're the boss of your own life you put in a lot of overtime.

But at the end of The Training, they made you choose a goal. Oh, you couldn't just walk out of there with a general, "Boy, my life'll be all better now!" No, you had to walk out with something you planned to accomplish within the year. Me? I said I'd write a novel - which I did, and then I shelved in a drawer. Technically, I believe I promised that I'd publish a novel... But that's a goal I have yet to meet because I'm a slacker.

But the guy next to me completely floored me, because he said he was going to be the drummer for They Might Be Giants.

At the time, this was bizarre. Not only were TMBG one of the larger indie bands because they had just hit it big with "Flood," but they were notorious for their use of drum machines. I'd read interviews with the two Johns where they said they didn't want a drummer, because they liked the way they could program the rhythm tracks exactly the way they wanted it - and besides, most drummers couldn't handle TMBG's wild usages of polyrhythms and syncopation anyway.

And their drum machine techniques were excellent. As a drummer, I listened to TMBG with awe, admiring the way they had fought past the blocky rhythms that drum machines usually engender to bring a warm, live sound to their recordings.

It would have been audacious to say, "I want to be the drummer for R.E.M." To claim you'd be the drummer for a popular group that didn't even use drums was insane.

I told him that. He shrugged. "I'm going for it," he said. "Why not?"

Eight months later, he was their drummer. I saw him on stage. He kicked total ass.

Now, of course it's entirely possible that he had some inside information. Perhaps he knew one of the two Johns in the group and knew they were getting bored with punching in kick drums.

But the lesson for me was this: I don't know what's possible. I brushed him off at the time because he was a loon... But what might have happened if I had decided that I wanted to be They Might Be Giants' drummer? Maybe I could have made it. Maybe today, I'd still be on their drum chair.

Nobody fucking knows.

Every time I think, "Jeez, why should I bother sending my story to this place? They'll never accept it," I look back to my crazy drummer pal and say, "Shit, I didn't know then and I don't know now. Take the damn chance."

And I take the leap. It usually doesn't pay off. Usually, I fail horribly.

But when it works, it pays off big.

My drummer friend taught me well. Maybe you should listen; you never know when you might become the drummer for a band that never wanted one.

(51 shouts of denial | Tell me I'm full of it)