“I have found my profession. I am an exterminator.”
I have not played on a cruise ship in over 15 years.
The name of this site is a reference to Exterminator!, a book of short stories by William S. Burroughs, partly about a menial job he held early in his career. I take it I don’t need to spell out the connection.
When I created this site, I was working as a drummer on a sternwheeler on the Columbia river. For about six years it was my main source of income, and I was a little bored with the down time, and I was taking a lot of pictures of the other musicians looking bored, and wanted a place to share them.
Long after I quit that job I started posting things actually related to drumming, and I couldn’t think of a serious site name that didn’t suck, so I decided to keep the name— I didn’t have any grand plans for the site anyway. The name was ironic, and it kept expectations low, so I would feel more free to write whatever I wanted.
And, the way “branding” works, people quickly forget literal meaning of the words, and it just becomes an abstract label very particularly representing the thing. Nobody laughs at the Beatles for conjuring the image of a vile, scuttling insect with their name.
As my readership grew, it occurred to me that hey, dummy, maybe it’s time to change it to something more serious, but all the serious names still sucked. After more than a decade doing this, it just seems like a pain, and dumb, to change it.
So the heck with it. We are CRUISE SHIP DRUMMER!