Time to update the blog

Oh yes it is!

On Saturday night we barely decided to go out to a concert because no one wanted to go except me and a friend. So the two of us went, sat down and started drinking beer while other people were watching a basketball game on TV and yelling when Serbia scored.
Then some guy who was at my friend's girlfriend's birthday party came with his buddies and they sat down at our table and we drank more and after that we went down when the concert started (it was a Motorhead tribute band from Hungary) and after a few songs we started jumping and in the end we were pushing each other around, jumping into the crowd from the edge of the stage, yelling, took off our shirts and threw them around, etc. The music was way too loud though, my ears are still ringing even two days after it. I might take ear plugs next time I go to see a concert like this.
But it was wild and it was fun. Later we went through town singing songs together and it was just a fun night.

Also on Saturday, in the afternoon, we had our band rehearsal - now a bassist and a trombonist joined us, so right now there's 5 of us in the band and I think we don't need more people. The trombone sounds awesome, we just need to find a microphone for it because it's not loud enough. The bass is also awesome, although the bass lines for the songs we play are quite the same in almost all songs, so he's not having too much fun I guess. But we figured that he could do some wicked solo on the bass and maybe connect it to some kind of effect thing so it would sound epic when he did solos :D We're gonna have a concert in November.

Red River Rock!!!!!!

Haha, I've been looking for this song for such a long time and finally I found it. I heard it on the radio years ago and I loved the melody and the sound of the instrument (Hammond organ) but I couldn't find it because it's an instrumental, so how do you look it up on Google? When I went to America I asked my host father if he knew a melody that goes like that and he was like: "Yeah, I think it's Red River Valley".
So I found it on YouTube, but it was the rock version of the folk song recorded in 1959 that I was actually looking for. So after some searching, I found it yesterday :D
Now I'm obsessed with it :D

I started taking driver's lessons. It was about time because almost all my friends are driving and everything. So I'm driving a Yugo and it's so much fun. I thought I'd be more nervous about driving because you just have to look out for so many things - random people crossing the street, bicycles, other cars, etc. But actually it's not that hard and it's really fun. The only problem is that the lessons are at 6 in the morning because there's a lot of people who want to learn how to drive these days (some new law is coming out in November and everyone's afraid of it) and that's when they have time for me. We've been driving around town and tomorrow and stuff like that.

Monday - here we go again

Yay, another week of school and learning useless things just started! The weekend was kind of short because we had school on Saturday too, from noon until 4 PM.
I was there only until 2 because I was invited to a wedding and after that I went to my girlfriend's 18th birthday party.
And yesterday we had band rehearsal and we were talking about our next public performance and what songs are we gonna play, and we tried to play a song that I wrote but my voice kind of sucks and I have a fear of singing so I'll have to practice it.
Hopefully the bass player will join us next weekend because these days he is busy working afternoons.

The WorldWalk-Peacetour project made it to Mexico. Congratulations and keep going!

Somehow I notice even more how much bullshit are they trying to teach us at school now. Maybe America has made me more sensitive for discovering how some things are useless because things tend to be more practical over there. We have such new subjects as philosophy and sociology, they don't make sense at all, and most of the stuff we learn on other classes is also awful.

I got some kind of weird disease and thought I don't feel any pain, my vocal chords feel weird and my voice is all raspy and ill.
First I had a headache and now it moved to the throat. But it doesn't look like anything serious to me, so I'll be OK in a few days.

Under the pressure of pop-culture I decided to eventually join Facebook so I can stay in touch with people from America and view friends' pictures (and upload mine).
Actually, a Facebook profile might be useful to promote our band or something like that, who knows. After all, almost everyone is there now.

Here's a great song for the end:

The last first day of school

Today was the last first day of school. No more first days of school in my life, never ever again. I'm a bit sad that this is already the last year of high-school and I'm probably gonna leave my home town to pursue some kind of career or get a university degree. But OK, at least I'll try something new.
Actually, I think I was looking forward for school to start more than my friends because I wasn't here for one school year and I kind of missed all the craziness we have here in the Serbian schools.
This year we are graduating, so it's gonna be a different year than the first three - graduation party and ceremony, the second semester will end in May for us, etc.
But today in school was excellent - we laughed a lot, we were late to class because we went to a shop to buy Schweppes Tonic Water and after school we went to a caffe to hang out and chat.

Sunday was a big day also - Marko and I celebrated our 18th birthdays together at my dad's club and we invited around 40 people for this party. Almost everyone came and almost everyone came (just kidding lol), and the party was excellent, I saw a lot of old friends and people that I used to be very good friends with but somehow the friendship started to diminish through all these years because we weren't in contact too much. So now we refreshed our friendships and talked about the old days when we were 12-13 and how we did so many crazy things - rolled leaves from random trees in our notebooks and tried to smoke them under a bridge to get high, drew cartoon porn on math class, played soccer in the classroom, ran away from class to play video games, and so on. Good times. If I had a chance, I would probably go back to those years, and everyone who shared those years with me agreed that they would go back because it was so much fun and we were all little explorers of the big world and it's possibilities (I guess we always will be).

Also, Sulle, Milica (our friend who plays guitar) and I had our first public performance as a rock 'n' roll band on Sunday at the birthday party.
It was amazing and I really enjoyed playing with them and the audience also liked our show very much and they told us they were pleasantly surprised.
We all had a bit of a stage fright since this was our first time performing publicly, in front of 50 people or so.
I didn't really realize how important this performance was until I woke up the next day. That morning I felt some sweet little feeling like we accomplished something we were planning to do for a long time and I was proud that we did what we dreamed of all this time. And now we started to build our fan base, people started liking us and they like our sound, we're trying to make new connections so we can perform on other places as well and some guy told me that he plays harmonica and I invited him to play with us sometimes in the future.
To be honest, I feel like this band is becoming like some kind of family and the more I play with them, the closer we get and we understand each other better.
I'm really excited about the future and I'm wondering how far will we get. I started writing songs and we'll see how it's gonna work and how much potential do we have.

And, oh - pictures!

No beer today, nananananana

I just came home from a caffe where I hung out with some friends and we drunk coffee, tea and mineral water because we all felt too tired this time for drinking beer. Beer/alcohol makes me feel tired and sedated and I started hating this feeling lately. It does make me feel relaxed, but I'd rather talk and think more then just sit back in some pleasant feeling. Stimulants are for me, like coffee.
Today was a quite busy day, but that's good, because then I don't sit at home thinking what to do and is it worth doing it. My dad gave me a red automatic motorbike because they use another one for pizza delivery at his club so I can use this one for fun and riding around. I took it to the pool and back today and it worked just fine - breaks are good, switches gears smoothly, etc.
The other motorbike we shared with my Slovenian friend had a problem shifting gears and you would have to mess around with it and accelerate and slow down a few times before it switches. And then when you stop on a red light or slow down for some reason, you would have to switch back to the second gear with problems again.
We might go for a bike ride tomorrow morning, it would be cool. I just have to wake up.

Spending the afternoon at the pool was good. I started noticing that there's a lot of younger kids everywhere I go and that means that new generations are coming and we're getting old. For instance, the pool was full of these 12-13-14 year olds and I don't know any of them except my sister and her friends. People of our generations are in cities or somewhere where they attend universities. When I hung out in Novi Sad, which has a lot of universities, most of the people on the streets at night are around 20. Here in my town, most of the young people I see on the streets are 14-15.
It doesn't piss me off, but it's just strange that a few years ago we all looked up on people who were 18 or so, and now we are 18.

Lately I started realizing that everything that I need to make me happy is around me and there's no need in becoming famous, rich or anything like that. Doesn't mean that I won't attempt to become famous, but I want to say that I'm happy how things are working now and I stopped thinking that better times are gonna come in the future because I have everything I really need now.
My sister reminded me of a to-do list I made years before and she asked me if I crossed out new stuff. I took a look at the list now but it seems that it had a lot of stuff on it that was important to me then but it's not important anymore.
Making smoke-bombs, learning programming languages and such things. I've accomplished some things, like learning instruments, traveling to the United States and finding a girlfriend that I love.
Right now I have the following big plans that I'd like to do:
- Play a concert with the band
- Take part in bigger journeys like traveling around Europe on a motorbike
- Start living independently and get a job
That's it, pretty much. Other stuff is all minor trouble that's gonna be solved sooner or later and it's not that important. I'm gonna watch a movie now.

August: Slovenian friends, new band members

Summer's getting closer and closer to its end. Meanwhile, I'm still enjoying its presence. We went to the pool today and there was quite a lot of people there and we played volleyball in the water and teased some 14 year old girls.
In the evening, 5 of us went out to drink beer and play pool at my dad's club because our good friend Sulle came home from his two week vacation on Zlatibor mountain.
I was pleasantly surprised that he brought us some souvenirs - so called
"drinking licenses", it's a joke of course, and they look like driving licenses but the text says that this allows you to consume alcohol now.

So now that Sulle is here again, we're gonna start band rehearsals again and hopefully we're gonna have a brief performance on Marko's and mine birthday party (we're celebrating together, and we're planning it to be a big party).
Two girls contacted me because they want to join our band as singers and one girl also found a bassist so now we have everyone we need. Maybe we'll try to find a saxophonist to play some solos and stuff, I don't know yet.
But I'm pleased that we found new band members and we're gonna see tomorrow or some day how they new line-up works.
My parents are leaving to Croatia on Saturday so I'm gonna stay alone at home and sometimes my grandma's gonna come over to cook lunch or something, so I'm gonna throw parties and stuff like that. It's gonna be fun. I'm not feeling like going with my parents to the seaside, especially because my girlfriend is coming home from the seaside when my parents leave.

A friend of mine from Slovenia is here for a few weeks, so he joined us in drinking beer and going to the pool. His relatives gave him a small automatic motorbike to use it while he is here, so we go on motorbike rides from time to time and we toured some cool places and villages and went to cook food in the woods and stuff.
The police caught us one time and we had to pay 2000 dinars because I didn't have my license with me, he didn't have his helmet on and the bike was registered for one person only but there was two of us sitting on it.
Oh well, we paid the money in the post office and now everything's fine. It just pissed me off that day because there's so many people riding without helmets and licenses, even under the influence of alcohol, and they rarely get caught.
So this friend of mine from Slovenia told me that I should visit him in his country somewhere during the winter and we could go around Ljubljana (their capital) and drink beer and things like that. I might visit him, it sounds like a good idea.

We found a building in the middle of our town and it's under construction and it's empty, so we can go and hang out in it. It's 4 floors tall or so, and from the top you have a nice view on the surrounding buildings, the streets and the stars and the sky above (they haven't built a roof for it yet).
We went there a couple of times and it's kind of cool and I'm happy that drug addicts haven't discovered it yet so we didn't have to discover any of them there or some of their needles. All in all, it's a cool place.
I rearranged my room a little bit these days because I'm doing some kind of artwork for my girlfriend's birthday and I connected an armchair and my bed together and that's where I sleep now. It's kind of uncomfortable but it's alright and I can fall asleep easily on it after I had a few beers (like now) and I'm comfortably numb (Pink Floyd, yay :D).
I might post a photo of the artwork when it's done, it's gonna be cool if/when I finish it.

Retro party, hemp, cab driving

This somewhat cloudy August morning I woke up earlier to go to a driving school (I guess that's the right name for a place where they teach you how to drive a car) and some old guy drove me and two other students to Ada, a town just south from Senta, and then we joined some other people to take some kind of traffic rule test and we all passed it. Well, almost all of us. There was around 30 of us in that one classroom and when everybody finished the test and they checked them, while waiting outside for the results, a guy came out of the classroom saying: "Kovacs Zoltan? Would you please come in?" and then this little kid from the group walked in unsuspectingly and they closed the door. Another guy came out and he said: "Congratulations, everyone else passed."
I laughed so much. They owned that poor kid. Anyway, some guy I met there called his co-worker who's a driver for a company and that guy drove us back to Senta.
Now I have a license to ride small motorbikes :D I could get it at the age of 14, but I didn't really need it since I don't ride motorbikes. But there's some kind of trick, and if you have a motorbike license then it's easier to get a license for a car. So I wanted to get this one first.

On Saturday I went to some open-air disco because there was a retro party going on (which means they played disco music from the '80s and stuff). The place (which is in a village) turned out to be quite cool and even if the area where we danced was half-closed (it had a roof and walls, but no doors), they had all kinds of fancy things like projected video effects, sexy girls dancing on a stage, foam, vanilla-flavored gas, lasers, etc.
And the cool thing is that anytime you want you can go outside in the garden and you get a quieter environment where you can talk and have drinks. I'm still not drinking alcohol and I tried to drink a beer but I could only drink half of it and after that I felt dizzy. That Monday when I got very drunk made me stop drinking for a while :D
I always wanted to dance to "Hafanana" by Afric Simone and now I had a chance to dance to it and to some other cool old songs. The party was really good and we stayed from 10 PM to 3 AM. Then I called a cab and went home.
The cab driver told me how he likes his job and how it's cool for him to drive in the middle of the night, listen to music and talk to random people. Actually, he made me think about being a cab driver, just for some time. It's kind of cool that you get to talk to a lot of random people, drive in the middle of the night and listen to music. And you even get paid :D
So it sounds good, and this guy told me that he's actually enjoying it, so why not try being a cab driver sometime? I don't know, I probably have to get a license for it or something like that, but OK. We'll see. I'm 18 now so I can do a lot of things - get a regular job, get arrested and put into jail, legally drink and smoke, etc.

My good friend Marko is back from abroad so we're gonna go drinking tomorrow night and he's gonna tell me what did he do for this one whole month of being away from home. Other than that, I don't really have plans for tomorrow. I might go to my dad's club to play drums a little bit and some girl invited me for a coffee.
I listened to some Wes Montgomery tunes yesterday while mowing the lawn and later in the afternoon and I really liked them. I was actually moving and tapping in the rhythm of the music while pushing the lawnmower. People say he's one of the greatest jazz guitarists ever. I still like Django Reinhardt more.
There's like 15 things on my to-do list (I have to keep one because I forget things) right now, including getting my hair cut, finding a bass player, finding a sax player, talking to some people, suggesting some songs to the band, buying stuff for the drums and some adapter for MP3 players for cars.

I'm surprised to see hemp (cannabis) growing on random places such as by the railway station and on the edges of corn fields. I haven't noticed this before for some reason.