Years ago when I lived in Austin, I had a mustache (oh no) and a bad attitude (cool) and my girlfriend hated me (nice). I was drunk every day of my life and I slept three hours a night. It was fun . . . for a while! And then it got to feel really sad and pathetic, which is how it should have felt all along.

Anyway: I used to go to this bar-thing near my house called Spider House. I went there probably four nights a week. And on Sundays they had music, which was real cool. This girl named Hailey Tuck played a lot and somehow I always ended up there every time she did. She sang that turn-of-the-century depression-era jazz stuff, which I honestly couldn’t give two shits about even if I tried, but she was good and I liked being there when she sang or performed or whatever you want to call it. I remember her dad was her drummer. Man, she was cool. Good ol Hailey Tuck.

I looked her up one day and saw that she had absolutely no website to speak of. I was depressed and had too much time on my hands, so I approached her after one of her shows and offered to make a website / Soundcloud account for her. She got real excited and told me to go for it. She bought me two beers (!) and told me to email her whatever I came up with. Next Sunday I brought my laptop and ended up designing the entire thing in a booth outside while she was on stage. I showed it to her afterwards and, lo, she bought me two more beers. Whew!! No wonder I was a quote-unquote functional alcoholic.

The thing I made was real classy. I mean it was all right I think. I made it feel velvet-y and old in a good way maybe. She liked it and she sure did use it. She would email me every other week and have me post dates for her upcoming shows.

Then she moved to Paris at the end of the summer. I looked her up and she’s still there. This would have been six years ago. Whoa.

Some time ago now, never mind how long, she emailed me and asked to transfer her domain into her agent’s possession. He said she needed something bigger and flashier. I have checked her website once a year since then and have seen it get progressively more obtuse and overstuffed since then. The current iteration of her site cops Facebook’s color scheme, for instance. Hailey! Who talked you into this?? Hell, I don’t blame her. She’s busy doing other stuff. Who really cares what a website looks like when you really get down to it.

What I wanted to say is that I’m glad she’s still alive and making stuff. I also wanted to say that I am regrettably linked to her Soundcloud page forever. I am locked out of the account but my email address is still associated with it, so every single day of my life I get probably two or three notifications saying some guy in Saudi Arabia liked one of her songs. I have routed all Soundcloud notifications to a great junk pile, but lord, they sure do keep coming.

Yeah. Hailey Tuck is cool. Thanks fer those beers all that time ago, you crazy son of a bitch~~