Thunder Drum

I’m lying here alone and

Stoned on the floor

I don’t feel love

No love anymore

Twice I’ve set

Our hearts on a pike

But I won’t take it

Tonight I’ll fight

Suspend your wings

On a heavenly flight

Gonna live our lives

We’ll be living them right

Don’t look back

‘Cause you know what you’ll see

Take back time

Like you want it to be

I will take my chances

The dream advances

We’re marching on

Send the word on high

Don’t it go by in a blink?

We’re on the brink

On the threshold

The dwellers

Of a dream

Revive
Revive!

You’re alive

And I will take my chances

As the dream advances

We’re marching on

Send the word on high

Don’t it go by in a blink?

The Dweller on the Threshold

I've started a new project called On the Threshold; it may end up a screenplay or even possibly a novel (fingers crossed), and in 'googling' the title to ensure it hasn't been used very distinctly by someone else, I was surprised to find that the first search result was a Wikipedia article called "The Dweller on the Threshold." This is absolutely fascinating stuff.

Apparently, the dweller on the threshold is an "invisible malevolent entity that attaches to a human being" from said individual's past lives' negative personality traits that have remained unconquered. This dweller follows one around, through all their subsequent reincarnations, until all of one's soul's issues are adressed.

"Each life sees some progress made; some personality defects [are] straightened out, and some real advance [is] effected. But the unconquered residue and its ancient liabilities are numerous," excessively potent, and eventually there emerges "a life wherein the highly developed and powerful personality becomes, in itself, the Dweller on the Threshold."

Heavy business, right? And considering that On the Threshold focuses on themes of one's past haunting all of their attempts to outrun it, the aging of youth, and the question of whether we are the dream or the dreamer, I'd say this little bit of bizarre and questionable science fits in rather nicely.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dweller_on_the_threshold

            Should one blog even when one doesn’t necessarily have a lot to say? The Revival played a show last night, and it was a really incredible experience. I mean, it was lacking what the movies would consider to be an incredible show. Such as: the mass amount of fans who somehow know when and where to show up (and actually do), the major label talent scout who just happens to be in the neighborhood and is drawn in by a sound he just can’t pass up, the magnificent sound system, the fact that the show only consists of one song (and it’s the best song ever written), or the perfect amount of feedback that happens when the guitar player plugs in or the singer steps up to the mic.

But it was great and instead of all that, it was a real show. Even opposed to what most bands (including The Revival) would really prefer to occur, it ended up nearly exactly the way I want every show to feel.
           We started playing to four people, give or take. For probably the first 45 minutes, there was hardly a soul in the room and the applause after each song felt awkward. The Revival, though, has this great ability to play as if every show was the biggest and we never let it appear that we feel just as awkward as the four people turned around at the bar. What that really feels like is failure. It feels like you’ve done what you could to get people out, and they all decided they had better things to do. It feels like it’s your birthday, but there’s a party going on elsewhere; you get some nice text messages and well wishes but they’ll have to catch you tomorrow.

We kept going though. I personally believe that pain (and trust me, to play to no one is most definitely painful) brings out the best in me. My father always told me “competition breeds excellence,” and I feel this is a good example of that. When I’m on a stage in the middle of a big city: that’s me competing with the night. I’m competing with all the other vices and excitements that are going on all around.

And by the time we came to the last song of the first set, I was all fired up: feeling useless, thinking a million thoughts at a million miles an hour about how I had totally failed all of my dreams. So I was really laying it on thick in the solo section (like I do), and there were suddenly cat calls and hollers. I looked up and, behold! There were people walking in (sure, not pouring in, but the randoms were showing up), a great-looking couple dancing real sexy-like in the middle of the floor and applause for every slide and growl. Out of nowhere, it was rock and roll.

The set ended and it was like they had been there the whole time. Requests to keep playing and the classic drunken monologues about how well we play, how they used to hang out with so-and-so from the Grateful Dead (et al), and how we should really listen to them 'cause they "know how the music scene works" started flying. Beautiful.
           The best part, though, was that we weren’t trying to slam people’s hearts through their spines with sheer volume and action from the word go, like some sort of cartoonish, rock and roll Jason Statham movie. At ‘bar gigs’ (shows where we play extended sets, solos and songs, add in covers and blues, there are no set times, no opening bands, no cover charge), such as this one, we just do what we do. They are the shows I love the most. It’s vastly different from the ‘rock show’ which usually sees us on a bill with at least two other bands, with whom we typically have absolutely nothing in common (i.e.: a punk band, followed by a death metal group and then us as the headliners – bizarre), it costs about $10 just to get in, the bar will close immediately following the last set (no matter what time it is), the set is only 30 minutes, there’s a ton of stress in-between bands concerning load-in/break down speed, the sound guy is stoned, the stage is too big, and they never, ever pay – they basically just pretend to be bigger than what they actually are, or maybe just give a lot of bands a nice fantasy of being bigger than they are. But seriously, try getting people to come out to that a few times a month.

             In direct opposition to that, The Revival really gets to shine when all the stupid pressure is gone. Anyway, this has been a very long way of saying that the second set was as real an experience of rock and roll as history can provide, we ended up bringing in a pretty good amount of people, none of whom did we invite or know beforehand, and that the music just felt good, felt right. And that’s something money can’t buy. That’s something that doesn’t even happen that often with really great bands. That feeling is worth just playing for thirty people with beers in hand and smiles on their faces. I could give up most things for that.

Random aside: I really should stop watching, or even looking up, lonelygirl15. That shit is just too intense, and it really affects me. Really. Addicted much? Goddamn. Wait, what? Who's got a crush on Jessica Rose?

In Reference to Previous Entry

 So here's the deal: I've decided not to leave the city, and not to quit The Revival. See, last night I was eating a pizza, watching a movie, minding my own business when my roommates came into my room and asked me to come join their party, so they could prove to their friend from New York that they knew the greatest guitar player in America.

             This was certainly flattering (though it was obvious to me that they were not, by any stretch of the imagination, sober), and I appreciated the invitation. So I grabbed the bottle of merlot I was quietly nursing and a guitar, and headed into the living room.

             It turned out to be a really good time (I won't say 'night,' because the whole thing started at 2AM), where we all played guitars and sang for several hours. It became obvious after only a short time that what these guys were doing was not so much boozing as snorting coke. They offered it to me and, for the first time in a good while, I successfully turned it down. This was a small, but impressive, personal triumph.

             So we made noise and they were high as hell, and I got to work out, with my very enthusiastic roommates, some melodies I've been struggling with (see previous blog entry) and vent about my frustrations with my own band and recent shortcomings as a writer. It took such a load off of my shoulders that I just stayed up with them, totally sober, until 7AM when they had to drive their friend back to the airport.

The most successful part of the whole experience was that I went to sleep happy. I felt lighter, clear-headed. It's been a very long time since I've really enjoyed myself, stayed up all night, and jammed so sober. So I decided that it wasn't time to go, that all was not lost, and that I could still succeed here.

And, in reference to my previous entry, instead of escaping the city, I've chosen to take a solitary road-trip to Chicago, blues Mecca and a place I've never been. It's going to take a little while to get my affairs in enough order to be able to go, but I know it's going to be worth it. I'm not fooling around with any insurance, or the clearing up of tickets, or anything like that. No, namely just replacing my missing headlight, changing the oil, and gathering up enough cash (which really isn't too much) to survive on the road.

             I’d say a new adventure is certainly in order and, no matter how manic I am (which, judging by these two back-two-back entries, I very clearly am), it's very exciting to be getting back out on the road.

Thanks for All the Beer

I don’t feel the same. I’m sitting in a room that I haven’t paid for in two months, drinking red wine, wondering why I can’t write anymore. I suddenly realized tonight that I just don’t feel like I used to about so many things, and most of them happen to directly affect the course of my life. I used to believe that, if I failed as a professional musician, I would, instead, write for a living. But, strangely enough, it’s the writing that’s left me and only the music that remains, without the allure of fame. I mean, sure, I’ve never been the world’s greatest songwriter but now it’s like I’m forcing tiny droplets of mediocrity to just eke out of a canteen long-dry.

I don’t want to smoke myself to death anymore. In fact, I don’t even want to die anymore. I had this wild desire all through my teenage years to go like a fireball and then wink out in supernova by 29. Well now I’m 24, and 29 doesn’t seem all too far off anymore. Don’t get me wrong, it still doesn’t seem young, but it’s much, much closer.

I just thought that, by now, I would have accomplished something; that I would have met that certain someone who would alter my career forever. Instead, I’m in a really talented band (The Revival) that started out like a dream come true, but has now started to fizzle and sputter with all of us wondering where the impetus to create is coming from and whether it’s even coming anymore.

I can’t write anymore. It’s just not there. I used to be unstoppably prolific. Endlessly streaming lines across page after page, I was a machine. It was like I had a typewriter for a heart. Now I scratch out some words and try to convince myself that, though they seem simple outright, they hold some much deeper meaning. It’s not really true though, and I know it. They’re completely meaningless meanderings in poetry gone wrong. I think writing songs is what killed my inner-writer. And from now on, I’ll never be anything more than a shadow of my former artist, constantly attempting to regain what I’ve lost. But I am no fool. I know it’s gone.

This is very depressing. I wake up every couple days feeling sure that it was just some passing mood. But then it comes back, again and again, and again. Since Ambra, I have been without song. It’s not that I miss her (because, strangely enough, I really don’t even think about her all too often), it’s just that since I wrote The Sharpened City and had it constantly battled and ultimately defeated by Benjamin (Ben Hart, my bass player, friend, and self-appointed surrogate father figure - basically the guy who tells me I'm wrong about everything), I’ve been dry of all inspiration. That moment could have and should have been capitalized upon, not shunned and shut down because its first output wasn’t to his immediate liking. It was what I, as the band’s fucking songwriter, was going through and being inspired by. Since I had to turn that off, I’ve felt numb to everything. I don’t have sex, don’t really even care enough to, I don’t go out anymore, I don’t strive continuously to pick up the next gig, I don’t even really care when another one comes up. Sure, I get more joy from playing on the stage for people and having them awed and fascinated than doing anything else in the world, but it just doesn’t seem so immediate anymore, which makes me think that it’s over. If it’s not immediate, then it’s not anything. It’s not even real.

It doesn’t help at all that I’m fighting the most intense writer’s block of my life while Ben is constantly on me to write what ‘people want to hear,’ and not just excuses for instrumental escapades (which, in case you weren’t aware, is apparently all I write). I need to be inspired so badly, I feel my heart is empty. And sitting around here, even in this awesome city, just floundering to live, not really being touched by anything or certainly anyone, waiting around for something that’s not coming is not cutting it for me. It ain’t workin’. And, beyond that, I’m sick of it. I need to go, goddamnit. I could scream! Why does he try so hard to keep me here if all he’s going to do is tell me that I’m not doing it right?! If I’m not the one, man, then just let me go!

I know I’m a star. I know that if I just keep going, then I will succeed beyond any of my obstacles’ wildest imaginings. This however, this whatever-it-is that I’m doing now, is not what I consider to be ‘keeping going.’

I need to do something drastic. I need to go somewhere that no one knows me, or even if they do, they don’t expect anything of me. The Revival is nearing the end of its story, and I’m getting too old to sit around and pretend that it isn’t. There are some serious roadblocks keeping me back right now, but how is that any different than when I left Texas the last time? Hell, then it took me five months to get away.

I need to get out of this city, or I am going to grow up here; grow up and grow old. I should just go. I mean, no matter how hurt they act when I say it, or how much they say I’ll be leaving behind, what do they have to offer me? Friendship? Ha! Is that it? I need direction right now, not friends. I need to feel like I am accomplishing my goals, not having fun in my comfort zone. I need a future. I need inspiration. If that’s not what you’re offering, San Francisco, then I’ll be moving on. Thanks for all the beer.

A Study in Character: Bree, of lonelygirl15

I can’t seem to get my mind off of it, so I figure I might as well write about it. Lonelygirl15 is quite possibly the most intense and emotionally wrenching coming-of-age story I have ever experienced. I use the word ‘experienced’ because one does not just watch lonelygirl15. Not only did I sit for 12 full hours, mesmerized, allowing the entire first season to unfold, it is a drama/sci-fi (in a strange turn of events) that plays out entirely on YouTube in the form of various video blogs recorded by the main characters, which includes mysteries requiring the viewers’ input and “comments” to carry on the plot. The blogs begin in various bedrooms of suburban California but, along the course of the story, are often recorded on the run or in hiding from the elusive and ever-mysterious Order, across the entire country.

Bree is the main protagonist, and also the focus of this study. She is a convincingly normal sixteen-year-old girl who clearly yearns for adventure in the same way that all youth do: without the understanding that adventure is most often a synonym for disaster and danger. Without the understanding that once you’re in, there’s no getting out.

It’s hard to say why I find her such a compelling character. Maybe it’s the fact that she’s female, as most protagonists are males who I definitely hold as role-models but ultimately end up having little in common with, save the genitalia and sex-drive. Whereas females I have always shared a certain emotional connection with. This could be perhaps because I am slight of frame – I certainly don’t have the look of a classic hero – and tend to steer toward the more analytical side of action. I’m a planner, not a killer; a sympathizer, not an assassin.

There is much more though, I think, that draws me to Bree’s character. She is homeschooled but also has experience with the public school system, and in her short time there was ultimately shunned as a bookish outcast who just seemed to be out of tune with the rest of the world. She is being raised by religious fundamentalists who never really provide a firm grounding for their blind belief in an almost frightening system. She is heavily sheltered from the outside world, mostly spending time in her room, with her books, and only a sea of strangers to communicate with, which can only be accomplished clandestinely by dictating her thoughts on the internet. And lastly, she has that special something that she did not ask for, that she did not seek out or train for. She is no super-heroine, but she was born gifted, and there’s nothing she can do about it. There is no way she can escape from it.

These are all traits I see in myself, and painfully close calls to my own past. Thus, I think that what I’m experiencing in this feeling of closeness with this character is that her story is my story. Even the title itself speaks to me: I could have easily been, given the right time-frame, lonelyboy15 (before all the science-fiction enters the plot, admittedly). She is the first real hero(-ine) that I can see myself actually reflected in.

And then, there is the fact of her innocence – which is something in my own adventures and mishaps and pitfalls that I miss and wish to return constantly. I have some strange abhorrence for the undeserving youth’s loss of it. It pains me to watch it. Never before lonelygirl15 have I seen it so truthfully, so brutally portrayed. We watch, over a period of just over a year, as Bree’s childish spirit falls from its lofty heights in an excruciatingly happy – yet, for her, “boring” – sky to a harsh, violent and shattered earth which has laid its designs for her bare and plain. We watch as her soul rebounds again and again, retaining some of its former glory and shimmer, just to have its hopes dashed, loves chided, its dreams lost.

Eventually, we see her stagger; we see her begin to lose hope. And finally we see the Order threaten her with the one pain she cannot endure: the theft of another’s innocence in exchange for her own freedom. Knowing as well as she does that she can never reclaim the naivety of her former life, we watch her give in, not without designs of her own, but at the cost of her soul. They do not just take her life; we watch the Order take her friends, her family, her very expectations of a future guaranteed in her sixteen-year-old mind. We watch a whole world hatch and then burn, unmercifully.

Bree is the most successful hero(-ine) I have ever seen depicted. She chooses to sacrifice herself for the sake of all the others like her. She knowingly goes to her death in order to guarantee life, forsaking all sense of memory and reputation. In all literature, heroes face this choice. But how often do they ever have to actually pay the price? Nearly every time, the hero survives because that’s what we want; even though we know that it could never actually happen. But in one of the most shocking and rapid climaxes of any adventure story, we watch an unconscious Bree’s heart give out, as the last of her blessed blood is drained from her body, in order to stay the life of an elder of the Order.

“The innocent die, so that the guilty can live.”

This may all read as terribly cliché, but you just have to experience it for yourself.

See, she seems so definitely real to us as viewers because for the first several episodes, Bree is just a “dorky,” quirky-but-cute homeschooled girl whose only friend is a neighbor who has a crush on her. For the first hours of her story all we see is her playing and laughing, joking about everything in a world so full of promise, without even so much as a shadow of the doom that awaits her.

And the most incredible part is that it was all thought to be real. In 2006, Bree, the eponymous lonleygirl15, portrayed by New Zealand-raised actress Jessica Lee Rose, was perceived as just another video blogger in a million. Everybody believed in her authenticity until her story spiraled so wildly out of control that it caused us to question: Is this really happening? As an unsuspecting audience, we believed in her until her world made us afraid.

Goddamn. If that’s not art, I don’t know what is.

Short, Sweet and Slightly Buzzed

It’s 5:30 in the morning and that doesn’t mean a thing to me. I hung out with my roommates tonight, as it was one of their birthdays, and played a very long drinking game with them and their girlfriends. Then I watched them disappear and hook up with each other two-by-two. Then they all fell asleep.

I’m a little drunk, but that has more to do with the fact that I took a few of their beers and a couple cigarettes, knowing that I was going to be up for the rest of the night. I swear, man, drop just a few beers in an innocent gut and you get a porn star, or at least a stripper. Drop a few beers in an artist and you get hungry or, at the very least, poignant.

Roots of Animosity and Jealousy Discovered

                 I believe that all animosity is rooted in jealousy. Based on this fact, I have been attempting for some time to understand what it is about my roommates that bothers me so much. On first inspection, it would be easy to blame it on the fact that we’re all young and musicians that, more or less, are in competition for the big win. But I’ve been sure that it was deeper than that, because they’re not very serious in their vision for their band beyond drunken/stoned conversation.

                Then I thought that it must be their intense and constant drug usage. I mean, I drink. A lot. So much so that right now I am trying not to. I’m succeeding but, hey, it’s also only been two days. Anyway, they are always doing coke, rolling on ecstasy (often by themselves in their own rooms! Bizarre.), dropping acid, they smoke tons of weed and are in some strange sort of competition with themselves over how many bottles of whiskey they can swallow, no matter how little they like it or how awful they feel every day.

   See, this is strange to me, but not because I’m straight-edge in any sense of the word. I am a self-admitted chain-smoking, booze-hounding, hooker-loving, cocaine-addicted (I try to stay away from it; it’s a compulsive thing these days, brought on only by drunkenness), sleep-deprived, party-hardy, late-night bohemian who has been addicted to meth, done LSD, mushrooms, any pill you can think of in high doses, smoked plenty of weed by now (not even interested anymore). But I take my independence from my previous vices very seriously as a real mark of personal accomplishment. For all those past were followed swiftly by heartbreak, failure, poverty and death. These are experiences I would rather not relive or, at least, relive them unnecessarily.

                Right now they have just returned from a rock show with their girlfriends and are having quite the drink, dance and smoke party. It is taking every single fiber of strength in my being to stay here in my room, hardly even separated from them, sticking to my original plan. I have already redressed and stood up twice to go join them. Both times I have stopped myself, and that led me to wonder why they do not fear their clear dependence on their vices for fun, as I often do. I can tell I’ve lost control of mine, and nothing bothers me more than not being in charge of myself. I mean, if you are not deciding for you, then who the hell is? Seriously, think about it the next time you wake up feeling like an asshole, with hardly any memory of the night before, a nasty stomach ache and a desire to change your life.

                In this reverie, I have suddenly figured it out. I have discovered the root of my animosity toward these people. For the same reason I always want to professionally switch from blues and jazz and rock to really simple and fun rock ‘n’ roll music, I am jealous of their sense of innocence. That’s why they don’t seem as into their music careers as I feel that a band that I would consider “competition” should be. That’s why every night they party like idiots (really, it is quite immature and I never know how to behave when I hang with them) even here in their late twenties. Their naivety is rescuing them nightly. They are rebelling against the parents that they still have. They are living “while they’re still young.” Thus, I have discovered my jealousy: I have seen and lost entirely too much to believe in that youthful, wild abandonment of the future. At twenty-four, I am older than my roommates of twenty-six, -seven and -eight.

Let it Last, Like it's Already Over

    “Mama, why do we have a big world?”
    Three days ago, Oscar Grant was an eighteen-year-old black kid doing his thing in San Francisco. Yesterday two cops pulled him off a train to Oakland. They pinned him down, unarmed, and shot him in the back. Nobody knows why.
    And the little boy said, “Mama, why do we have a big world?”
    Stoplights, hybrid streetcars, cigarette smoke dot the night. They twist and sing down Columbus Avenue, across the world. Drifting, my mind – or maybe my soul – computes and comprehends. Conveying madness isn’t easy, I tell you. Don’t even know why I’m writing this. Soon enough the planets will align, magnetic poles will be fucked, and this page – eradicated – won’t mean a thing.
    All the love, all the magic and art of what it is to live will be gone. Eons of learning and invention, discoveries of world-changing proportions will be swallowed by the greatest unknown. A gamma burst from some not-so-distant star, or four horsemen, or Barack Obama, or this ancient Mayan calendar have foreseen our doom, I’m told. Wouldn’t it be better for the world to end without knowing it? Will God even let us be right?
    The beer mat I’ve written this on is beautiful. I mean it. There’s a watercolor multi-tinted bird gazing absently at me with only one eye, perched on some spindly grass that surely smells wondersome. The cigarette I’m about to smoke will be lovely, too, as I wonder in the micro how it will kill me. What difference does it make?
    I’m going to write like the world is already ending. Maybe it is. I’ll play along like war in the Middle East and fear of the bomb are new developments. It’s sad that this, these words are so useless. I feel the most terrible need to put them down.
    “Hey, man. Hey! Yeah, you. You know the world is ending, right? Just give it up already.”
    There’s the bass solo. I’m so sad it’s over.
   
    After this beer I’m going home. Or at least back to my newest hotel room. I’m staining my own writing with this glass. It’s worth it, I think. Will all this hard living destroy me, or should I be more afraid of the stars coming down? I don’t really know which is more likely.
    Let’s collectively cry. Weep for days unseen. Maybe for the first time. Rejoice for years spent living. Pity those whose time is cut short. Sons, daughters – I love you, and I’m sorry. But the postman doesn’t know where to send all these unanswered prayers. Mama, where will this big world go?
    “I don’t know, kiddo. I don’t really have a good answer for that one.”

Wicked Angels

I spread my arms out to the darkness and welcome it with a love that the stars have never known. Sitting in my little halo room, hanging on the windowsill, I glance out at you two floors up. Water cascading down around your bare shoulders you know no one is watching; but a cursory glance out the small and foggy pane exposes this young and dark bohemian with dragon eyes and gypsy smile. You cut your emerald green lance across the small expanse between our souls and it is known that love is all around; and the magic that surrounds the two of us is one made of cool night and imperial conquest. Together in our oneness it takes but a moment to realize you’ve betrayed the old world and thrown out the threadbare shoddiness of yesteryear.

Hands reach out toward a midnight sky lit with the purple twilight of young lovers. They grasp each other by touching only the air, and it speaks so softly only a poet could ever understand what the wind was saying. It coos in both ears, deep below skin and touch where only the mad rush of youth and blood can breathe. You shiver. I watch. Wings spread above, between, below, within and out behind both of us as we clash like wicked angels where only heaven and hell are permitted to battle. Are you truly so pure? Are we able to believe in our old innocences?

We offer our arms out to the darkness and receive it with a laugh that defies the devils of all worlds. Twisted smiles and thorned souls prick out the clean ones and leave only the beauty and raging blacklight inferno of this symphonic supernova. Towers sway to the composition and searing solo of your body versus the night as you sing to the backdrop of a crescendo rising, rising and crashing down into you until music is only whispers lost in the fog.

You Can't Sing the Blues 'Til You Got 'Em

On the darker side of American music is where I've always wanted to really be. And I didn't discover the Blues 'til I was about 15. Really discover them, you know? See, I didn't have that whole thing where I grew up in a family that always listened to the Blues. 'Cause my daddy, you see, he was a preacher, and blues wasn't something we were really allowed to be involved, or even interested, in. If you'd said 'rock and roll' to me when I was a kid, I'd have figured you meant a stone and a ball.

I didn't really meet the Blues 'til I was just about sick of trying to figure out how those rock stars made blistering space-age solos come out of their guitars; and just out of nowhere, like some wild comet, a man called Jimi Hendrix showed me what the Blues was. He played me a song called 'Hear My Train a-Coming.' And just about a second after that tune ended there I was, entranced, legs hanging over the side of my bed, picking at that Fender Stratocaster.

I felt it then but I've always believed, even before I knew what it really meant, that to sing the Blues you've got to know 'em, and to know the Blues you've got to have 'em.

So as I was growing up, I always felt that blue sting in the back of my mind, my soul's mind. I ended up figuring out how to do all that rock solo stuff, and hung on to it for a long while, playing around Texas in several bands. Eventually a friend of my father's said I should come jam at these blues clubs, that anyone could do it and I was at least half as good as they were. He was wrong about that last bit, but my ego was tough as nails, still is, and I went – secretly terrified, of course.

So I started sitting in on those sessions, meeting a few cats who really dug me 'cause they thought I could be something, and several others who hated me for the same reason. But I was really loving all that Texas Blues, even though everyone wanted to be and some really believed they were Stevie Ray Vaughan. But my hero and mentor – though long since passed from the physical world – was Jimi Hendrix. So I didn't really want to be Stevie. It was more like he and I just had something in common.

Well years passed and I had my own band eventually after really getting the shit kicked out of me in Boston, where I'd moved to in order to marry this lovely little chick – whose name was Hendrix, mind you – and I realized over time as life became more and more fucked up with drugs and love and hate and money that I was really just wanting to play the Blues. The real Blues. But I still didn't really know 'em, and I was fully aware of that.

So I let it go, with my daddy always telling the band that we were really better at the Blues than anything else, even though the other members couldn't stand 'having' to play them. Which was sad, 'cause I really wanted our sound to be blue, and they just weren't about the soul of the whole thing.

Then dad died, and I got confused and scared, terrified even, of death and myself and my mind and all the things in the universe that I realized I didn't really understand but that were major players in the lives we all lead. It was a mind-bending experience. I was out of the world, out of time, and totally out of control. After I finally composed myself enough to get back on my guitar, I'd just spend hours by myself in our little makeshift studio, playing. And it was Blue.

I wrote all sorts of new pieces, but couldn't put them together like my soul was telling me to. I didn't get that what I was doing was playing the Blues. Because I really knew 'em now. I'd been introduced in Boston and then formally beaten by curving roads with no ends and no beginnings – leaving me wondering how the hell I'd even got there.

The band couldn't get down for it, but I knew I was playing for my dad. And for Jimi. And so I let those cats go. And I came out west to really be myself, and I think I'm finding what I've been looking for by really not finding anything at all.

Eastern Cliff-Side Blues: A View of the West

Come back. Come back. Come back.
Just as the song's chorus repeats, the sun continues. The setting will never end; the dawn sinks within. Beginnings are over, but the end's just come in.
"Hello," I say, knowing well the definition of fruitless. Wasn't it the Beatles who wondered why you say goodbye when I say hello?
This is tragically beautiful, like a heavy leather Stratocaster.
This is a space odyssey.
Come with me.
Come back. Come with me. Come back.

Eastern Cliff-Side Blues: The Precipice

A soft breeze caressed the eastern face of the cliff-side, and a young man, barely into adulthood, crept out into the blackness, wondering how he had come to where he was now. It seemed odd, after being one so in-charge throughout his adolescence, that he would be so lost; so lost, and still completely in love with the one fleeting bit of his past he wished would both disappear and return to him.
He dreamed often. They were vivid, lucid dreams that felt more realistic than even waking life.
But who is to say what was real? That was the only question that began to matter, when time took its slow-turning blend into malevolent mindsets.

You raise up your head and ask,
“Is this where it is?”
And somebody points to you and says,
“It’s his!”
And you ask,
“What’s mine?”
And somebody else says,
“Well, what is?”
Oh my god, am I here all alone?

Life came fast, and will probably leave just the same. But so far all is fleeting, and feeling maimed. Though one thing he is sure of, our hero the artist, is that it is.