It's Dec. 12, 2022. 122222. I'm back home after a second week-long run up to Nashville through Alabama. The first one, in November, went pretty well. I managed to pick up enough spontaneous tips-gigs in coffee shops to keep eating and have enough gas, and when a coolant hose blew in my van, my old man helped me out with a tow and covering the shop bill as my Christmas present. Thanks, dad.

The second round went differently, starting with a Dec. 9 show in Gainesville that I went to and from via motorcycle in the same day, not heading off proper (in the van) until the Jacksonville show on the 11th. Gainesville was an actual show instead of me cold-calling some coffeehouse. The guys from Painted Lady records, Quincy Allen Flint and Kyle Keller, held down some rock solid sets of finger-picked campfire country and honest lyricism. I did whatever my acoustic set consists of; decent songs offset by a bitter and harsh sense of humor. After a very cold ride back to Ormond through the densest fog I've ever been in, I made it back with a few extra bucks the people there were kind enough to give me and called it a successful night.

Jacksonville was a good yet quieter show, but mostly because there were much fewer people there. There was a bike race happening somewhere else in the city that night and some football game going. Rambler Kane, the original Jacksonville local, had to drop off the show due to Covid, but Quincy Flint happened to be in the area and sat in for the second set to help me out. An old friend of mine from high school who lives in the area came out to the show and treated me to dinner at his apartment with his fiancée and their two cats. We smoked a bit of grass and got into it "trading notes on the journey", and apologizing to one another for the unceremonious falling out that had occurred some six or eight years earlier. Amends were made, and a mutual appreciation seemed to be shared all around. That was nice. His girlfriend called me out once, quite accurately, saying "you have issues with women, don't you?" I responded, "fuck, I'd hoped it wasn't that obvious." Steak was eaten (delicious) and laughs were had. It was a healing night for me, reconnecting and smoothing things out with an old friend and seeing how far he's come since we last knew each other.

I saddled up and drove through to Tallahassee that night after dinner. I got there at like three in the damn morning, quietly pulling in behind the same Cracker Barrel I stayed at the last time and going to sleep. The next day, I woke up and an unpleasant part of my reality hit me. I hate when it does that. I'm sleeping in the back of a van behind a fucking Cracker Barrel, I have very little money and no show to play in Tallahassee. I got myself out of bed, eventually, and rode around looking for a cheap breakfast. After swallowing a couple McGriddles and coffee, I went to the Planet Fitness and got a decent arm and shoulder workout in. Laterals (which I can do with 20s now, quite proud), preacher curls, overhead tricep press and machine overhead press. I needed something that felt like candy, so I trained arms. Cut me some slack.

I showered and went off in search of something to do. Had a period of reflection in the park, going over the night before and feeling all the well-deserved self-hate for the guy I was the last time my friend and I knew each other. I have grown a lot and become much more than I was, but that mother fucker is still in me somewhere and I struggle with him all the time. Every time I stub my toe or spill a drink, the little voice in the back of my mind whispers "You're a piece of shit and you make everything worse for everyone around you, you don't deserve to live and you should kill yourself. All you do is make other's lives worse and use people, so for the good of humanity you should eat a bullet."

That little bastard used to run my life, now he's more of a pest that comes around every so often to make sure I don't forget him. Walking around the park, trying to film something for TikTok about how I'm "all about being honest about who I am" and how "radical honesty" is the best approach I've found to personal and spiritual growth, I became aware that I'm still the big fraud I always was before, at least in part. I have grown a lot and brought much more interesting and positive stuff inside the warehouse of my personality, but the dark dusty corner is still there. Might always be. My inner work, at least for now, consists of learning to love myself despite those aspects and to forgive them and soothe them instead of letting them win. I'm making progress and gaining ground, getting stronger. Going for it with music the way I am is helpful, despite how stressful it is.

The next day I did a little thing in Tallahassee at Square Mug Coffee, but I played maybe five songs then bailed. Ms. Donna, the owner/manager, gave me some food for the road, $20 and a free coffee. I felt horrible about bailing, but knew with the mood I was in, things weren't going to improve. The handful of college students there weren't really engaging with the music and I didn't have the jing to win them over that day. So I left, rolled slow up to Montgomery, taking my time and enjoying the back roads, calling places up there to set up tips stuff for the next few days.

After a day of down-time and more venue calling, I managed to swing three shows in a two day period. Two afternooners at a Vintage Cafe on Cloverdale, and an evening slot at Goat Haus Biergarten that ended earlier than I'd been booked for, but ended at the perfect time. The folks at Vintage Cafe were particularly kind, especially one of the managers named Jud, a 25 year old guitar wizard who shared some grass with me, took me over to his place after the first day to jam a bit.

It was a great time, I got to play around on his drums and we played for about an hour straight just letting it happen. I got a bit paranoid and had to dip to go get some introvert recovery time before hitting the Cracker Barrel for dinner and sleep. The next show at Vintage went about as well, I sold a shirt and made some tips and new friends/fans. That night at Goat Haus, I ended up playing at the same time as a holiday party for a bunch of Airforce folks. At first the pairing seemed like a miss-match, but they warmed up to me quickly and tipped me very well. A few folks who knew me from my first roll through in Montgomery knew I was playing and came out to see me, buying another shirt.

I'm looking forward to going back to Montgomery to play more shows, the people there are really kind and genuine. The holiday party came to the bit where they do various games and present-swapping right as I was ending my set, so I took the que and headed out a bit early. There was a four hour drive left to do, plus dinner to find and gear to load before I could hit the road.

The van held up fine almost all the way to Nashville.

Roughly ten miles south of Franklin, however, my volt meter suddenly started running about ten volts; it usually holds about 14 or so. I was still a long way from Nashville and the next day's show. AAA offices were closed at that hour, I was too broke to afford a tow and I really wanted to make it to the next day's show.

I knew the alternator was wearing out and would die eventually, but why now? was all I could think. I started praying out loud, loudly, saying "Please, Lord Jesus Christ, just let me make it to street parking on McGavock behind the venue for tomorrow's show."

He was kind. I made it, barely. I don't know how I managed to get there without running out of juice first, but it worked out. I conferred with a concierge running overnight at a hotel across the street who said I should be fine to park where I was through the night and probably the next day too. She gave me a hug; she could tell I was a bit shaken.

I arrived at the parking spot around 2, finally fell asleep in the cold van around 3 after all the late-night partiers had gone home, and slept pretty good until my alarm went off at 8:30 to get ready for the show at 10 AM. I got dressed, grabbed my music stuff, toothbrush, pomade and walked around the corner to the venue to get cleaned up and play.

The folks at Just Love Coffee on Music Row are really kind. They gave me coffee and breakfast for free and listened to my set despite there being basically no one at the shop that morning. Only about twenty bucks made it into the guitar case that day, so I called it around 12:30 in the afternoon and opted to try getting the van to an AutoZone about three miles away. By sheer Grace alone, the van cranked. After a very tense fifteen or so minutes watching the volt meter creep slowly toward the red on the bottom end, I got her parked in a spot in the sunshine where I could work on her.

I'd checked before I'd left to see if the AutoZone had a new alternator, low and behold they did.

$186 for the new alternator. I put out a plea for help on my Instagram Story, some kind listeners sent in money and I ended up with a bit more than I needed! I got out my tool bag and went to work, removing the fan shroud and getting it out of the way, removing the serpentine belt and pulling the mount bolts for the alternator. Once the old one was removed, which took some doing because of time and corrosion, I got the new one installed. With everything battened back up, I said another quick prayer and hit the ignition. She cranked to life immediately and the volt meter read just over 14! We were back in business.

I nearly cried. It was stressful and I'd never replaced an alternator before.

I took some of the extra money and got dessert after dinner at Cracker Barrel. Slept good that night.

***

The next morning, I went back to Just Love and did another short set, but it was a Sunday the week before Christmas in a tourist town. It was pretty dead. When I'd figured no more folks were coming in, I took a look at my prospects for more road time and decided it would be better to call it and head on home. I hit the road for Daytona that afternoon and got home around 2 AM. Still breathing.

With many things, the reality is a bit more involved than we're ever quite able to reduce into language.

It's a conundrum that's confounded linguists and philosophers of language since those disciplines began to develop in earnest - my personal feelings are that the problem of language's inadequacy is precisely what dragged those fields of study into existence.

"Dennis" as a work is no exception. The true life of the person the song is "about" (whatever that means) is no less opaque to me now than it was when we first met.

I was still living in Los Angeles at the beginning of 2020, before the whole Covid shit hit the fan. I believe it was late January or thereabouts. Chris Veilleux, a long time bassist/saxophonist for my project and a dear friend, and Anthony Guerra, who contributed guitar to my live act frequently when I was in LA, and myself on drums served as the backing band for another artist we knew at a one-off gig in Las Vegas.

We loaded the gear and bodies up in Anthony's cramped mini-SUV and hauled ass across the desert blaring "Cheeseburger in Paradise" like a low-budget Fear and Loathing spin-off. After our set at a forgettable bar in a forgettable part of Las Vegas well away from the strip on a bill with other unknown LA-based artists, a tall guy in a sweatshirt with the hood up came over to me.

"Hey man, I liked your drumming," he said in a low, strange voice; actually difficult to describe, that adjective isn't a cop-out. He's a tall dude, loomed over me while I was sitting there feeling out of place.

I said, "thanks," and asked if we could step outside to chat about music.

His name, obviously, was Dennis. Mid-thirties, scruffy goatee, walking with a strange gait and not moving his left arm very much, though it held a small bag by the handle.

We talked for a while about how he used to be in a band called the Erudites, how he'd gotten way into cocaine and semi-recovered, how he used to be an alcoholic and semi-recovered. His dad left when he was pretty young and had only very recently come back into his life. His mom died when he was in high school. His sister lived in Henderson, Nevada, a small town in the south side of the sprawling Vegas monster. He had lived with her for a bit after he got out of the hospital and now lived on his own with some roommates down that way.

What put him in the hospital was a .38.

That he'd fired.

Deliberately.

Things had fallen apart with a long time girlfriend, things had fallen apart in general. Feeling that the best was over, never again to return, he decided to cash his check and call it a day.

Gun to the head sounded like a solid decision, very low chance of survival, or so he'd thought. The bullet went through and definitely did some real damage, but it didn't kill him. He ended up in the hospital and then a physical rehabilitation center where he, in his thirties, would relearn to walk and write his own name. In a manner of speaking, it may have been a sort of reset. Something he didn't realize he wanted when he pulled the trigger - not the damage, difficulty, pain or handicaps; but some kind of hard reset on his life.

Somewhere in there his dad came back around and they fostered a new relationship. His left arm is mostly paralyzed but it keeps its hand closed around an object so long as he uses his other hand to open and place the object in there.

I bummed a smoke from him and we stood outside in the chilly Vegas evening while he told me all of this.

I was floored by the story and deeply impressed by his total vulnerability and candor with a total stranger. Maybe he felt comfortable because I was willing to listen, even earnestly interested in hearing his story. He was clearly sharp and still pretty with it, cognitively slowed much more by the beer he'd been drinking than the lasting effects of the brain trauma. Not that there weren't the obvious signs of severe damage, some were present when you looked for them. But Dennis is still by no means a stupid man.

Dennis said he's pretty well resolved to not try again, to let death come on its own accord like it should. I was affected by that, too. Someone whose life was seemingly ruined by the all-too-common will-to-suicide was actively choosing life after their attempt. It's poetic. As someone who's spent far more nights than I can count with loaded guns, sharpened knives, bottles of liquor and all the rest trying to get the nerve to turn it all off, I could relate to the guy he'd been before the event. Meeting Dennis was a turning point in my own struggle with suicide because beauty in his newfound gratitude for life and his newfound resilience was undeniable.

Human beings can do amazing things. Terrible things. But I think it's important that we're here, doing the thing called living. To live a life for the sake of living a life is the freest thing I can imagine, now.

I highly recommend we all try that approach. If you know anything about me or even just listened to Aries, you probably know I've wrestled with similar evenings as Dennis did, only I never got the resolve together to pull the trigger. I still wrestle with thoughts and feelings of that nature but no where near the way I did when I was younger, thank God.

Meeting Dennis, for me, was like meeting an alternate universe version of myself. A version of me where things had gone worse in several different ways. It made me both grateful for how well things did go and painfully aware of the ways things could go in the future unless I got properly serious about actually wanting to live, and live well.

I'm grateful for Dennis. I am legitimately glad he survived. I see his posts on Instagram periodically and it looks like he's doing ok out there in Vegas. I don't know what I can do to make his life any better, but maybe there will be something I can do once I have some extra money and time. For now, I just pray for him and me and everyone. I think a lot of people pray for someone to come and save them; what I've realized in the last few years is that if God is going to send someone to save them, it's going to be them. Jesus Christ is helpful, a figure to hold in your heart. Someone to consult with. To measure against and receive some forgiveness from because we won't ever fully measure up to Him. That said, we should still keep measuring. We might just get taller.

***

My memory isn't great about this sort of stuff. I have a tendency to white-wash the past with poetics to make it conform to some notion of the "good story" version which may be close to the truth, but always slightly off.

When I play this song live, I usually say, "this is a rock song, dedicated to anyone who's survived. It's about a guy I met one night in Vegas, who I saw a lot of myself in. He told me about his life's story and it broke my heart, so I asked him if I could write a song about him. He said, 'Please'. So this song is about Dennis, it's for Dennis, and it's called 'Dennis'."

My grandmother died unexpectedly.

I was living in Los Angeles. It was 2019. I woke up one afternoon, checked my phone and saw multiple missed calls, a voicemail and a text saying "please call me when you wake up", all from my mother. I didn't even have my eyes all the way open yet, but immediately called her. "Gammie is in the hospice center and things aren't looking good."

I was never close with my grandmother. I'm not extraordinarily close with anyone in one in my family, mostly due to my self-involvement and tendency to not keep up with people. Nonetheless, it surprised me and I could feel that it was a really significant moment, something I needed to address with care and serious and to act on it right now.

My roommate was getting ready for work but still had a little time to kill. She did me a huge favor and ran me to LAX, getting to work just in time and skipping out on prime pre-work chill time for my sake. I was on a plane headed back to Orlando, Florida less than two hours after waking up.

I landed at MCO, Alexis scooped me up from the airport. Despite the very unpleasant and unfortunate circumstances, she was really glad to see me. We didn't get to spend much time together then, being on other sides of America and all.

We zoomed back northeast from the airport and arrived at the hospice center around sunset. My mother was there, with my stepfather. With them were her younger sister and her husband. Gammie was in a room, laying in a hospital bed, tubes everywhere and breathing with great difficulty. Jagged, horrible breaths. Unresponsive but still there, somewhere deep down inside. Closed eyes. She was waiting for the last of her three daughters, my mother's older sister.

Mom and the younger aunt were sitting inside, doing their best to get physically comfortable in the somewhat cold room. The husbands came in and out of the room, consoling slightly but mostly keeping a distance from things. I went in and found a chair.

My mother and aunt took turns talking, recalling fond family memories, remembering PawPaw (who passed about seven and a half years before - mom had been Gammie's day-to-day caregiver ever since.) Reading Bible verses.

After a few hours, Alexis had to go home and I was starving. Hadn't eaten all day. She drove me over to my dad's house where I scooped up the motorcycle he always lent me when I was home in town. I went through the Steak 'n Shake drive through and grabbed some dinner.

I ate in the lobby of the hospice center, chasing the bad burger down with shitty, cold coffee. Awful couch. Harsh lighting dimmed for the late hour. It was quiet but the whole place felt plastic, off-putting. It was probably just the circumstances, truth be told.

The oldest daughter and her husband arrived from Maryland sometime late that night. May have technically been early morning, which sounds more right now that I think about it. Road-beaten, they'd driven the whole way in a single go.

Everyone piled into the room, but for some reason the husbands ended up leaving again shortly after saying their goodbyes. I, my mother and her two sisters remained.

When they were younger, the three of them toured the Southern Baptist Convention a little bit as a singing trio. Gospel and hymns, three part harmony. There, gathered around their mother's deathbed, they began to sing again.

"Blessed Assurance" - an old Franny Crosby hymn that my grandmother loved dearly. Three part harmony. I sat there dumbfounded. Something happened, that I cannot even remotely capture with words. They sang transcendently. They were crying. I was crying. Gammie was with us still. Then, she was no longer there. Her body remained but the soul had taken flight. They finished the song and broke into deep sobs. My mother collapsed for a moment with her arms thrown across her mother's body, as if to try to hold on to her for a moment longer. Husbands returned to the room to console their wives. There were now seven people and a body where once had been eight people.

She had waited long enough. In a way, I felt like she'd been waiting the entire time since PawPaw had gone on. The final hours of waiting were likely the hardest, but the passing seemed to be easy, oddly gentle. Her daughters, singing of Christ's promise, and no doubt a small, growing opening through which she could see Him, the Most-High, and hopefully something of PawPaw too beckoning her to come in, away from the pain and misery of this earthly place and into that peace that comes with the fulness of Eternity.

I hung around town for a week or so after. One afternoon sitting alone at Alexis's house, I felt the old familiar urge to write a song. I'd been listening to almost nothing but old outlaw and traditional country music for over a year and was embarrassed about how badly I wanted to write a country song. I kept trying to come up with something not country but all I could seem to pick out was that steady "horse-rhythm" that opens the song. I guess "The Quiet Sounds of Sewing" is really my first country song, the first of many to come.

I wrote out the first verse and got down the chorus, debating the "domiciles and suicides" line for a long time. I was afraid of it being too harsh for people. I went with it anyway. The second verse came as a self-criticism, a recognition of how short time is and how much of it I have wasted.

We must make something of ourselves here, I'm sure of that. I'm confident that this realm is for learning, growing. I don't know toward what. But what is most important above all else is that we remember this place is not the end. This realm we're in is merely a way station on the road to somewhere else.

I can't really say much else about that night or the song.

I hope you like it.

2018.

I'd just spent the last year or so pulling my hair out trying to finish Aries, a task I wouldn't complete for about two years yet. I'd also spent the last year or so pulling more of my hair out in the final installment of a very toxic roller-coaster relationship. We finally broke it off for good and I spent September drinking and being pretty emo about life in general.

Now it was October. I was frightened, confused about who I was, unsure about basically everything, but I'd just started hanging out with this really rad girl named Alexis. I wanted to write a love song but wasn't quite sure how to - I usually wrote songs about pain, not joy.

I got off work at my shit-detail restaurant job pretty late one night about a week or two after we met. Instead of going to the bar to get drunk and ride a motorcycle home, I decided to ride out to the secluded strip of beach I liked to go to and think.

I parked my bike at the beach approach overlooking the ocean. It was a clear night, lots of stars.

Suddenly, a massive wave of "holy shit reality is 3D" washed through me and I kinda lost it.

"Oh my fucking God, those stars are real. What? I can't handle it. That is a distance, not just holes poked in a sheet of black construction paper. The white dots are PLACES. When I look at the spaces between them I am literally looking at an infinite distance."

I was thinking out loud to the empty parking lot. Yelling, really. The fullness of it hit me really hard and I thought I was going honest-to-God crazy.

As is my most natural impulse, I had to write it down. I ripped my phone from my pocket and frantically wrote down the whole first verse as it appears in the final recording.

"Whoever hung those stars up there, whatever chose their place, is playing out a symphony with such Amazing Grace. The virgins and the prostitutes, accountants, rakes and fools, God must be an Artist if God is what made you."

The unbelievable detail of the Universe came flooding in. It felt like I was on psychedelics. I was not.

I laid back on my motorcycle, staring upward for a long time after that. All these people here on Earth, all their desires and plans, all their love and hate, joy and sorrow, all their pleasure and pain occurs with all this other stuff happening around it all the time. It's there right now, as I'm writing this. As you're reading it. It was there every time anyone has ever had sex. It is present at every death. Beyond the mere planets, beyond the machinations of any being, there is a fundamental something present. A Highest Thing, an Oldest Thing. The Ancient of Days, if you will.

I caught a terrifying but beautiful glimpse of that. I was rolling with laughter at this point, completely convinced I had snapped and gone crazy but weirdly fine with it. If it meant seeing this forever, I was into it.

The rest of the song came out over the following couple weeks. This is where the love song bits started to come through. Thinly veiled sex references, but also hints of my disillusionment with political ideology of any kind. I was losing my allegiances to the "Left", not to pick up the slack with Right-Wing bullshit but to try and escape that kind of thinking entirely. It took a while before it turned on completely, but the second verse to this song points toward it pretty plainly.

I also deliberately used the second- and third-person perspectives in this tune. It was an experiment. I felt like I used the first-person perspective far too much and wanted to try something equally personal but less "me me me." This song shaped itself as an exercise in perspective jumping, which was very fun and taught me much.

I've lost touch with that blown out feeling in the years since it that night on the beach. I'm sad about that. I get a little sensation-memory, a little aftertaste of it now as I write this. I should go outside tonight and lay down for a while.

I introduced it to a version of my live band when I lived in LA, I think we may have played it at the Troubadour gig and definitely played it at Indie Night at the Federal to a very unenthusiastic audience. When I play it solo now, sometimes I get a pretty cool response.

I hope you like it.

Things got weird in 2020, as we all remember. For me personally, that meant added complications for my then-long distance relationship with Alexis back in Florida, because I was still living in LA. I found myself hanging out in Florida for an indeterminate amount of time, hanging out on her dad's front porch at night a lot to try and clear my head.

That spot and that general hour of evening yielded some writing, most notably "Praying" (out later) and this song, "Sky Pink".

The sunset was just beginning to wane into nighttime, and I was feeling despondent and lost. (Shocker, I know.)

I went inside and quietly stole Alexis's guitar. Settling back down outside on the step, I jotted some lines down about an imagined situation where she sat me down to show me a new song she'd written. I love her music, so it wasn't hard to come up with the whole little scene in about five minutes. I love the CMaj7 chord shape a great deal, it always sounds right when I'm feeling melancholy. I decided to just hammer on it for a while and call that the "chorus" section.

As my mind wandered, I flipped to a more unpleasant mental channel. For some reason, the imagery of WWI trench warfare has stuck with me for a long time. Probably because of the uniqueness of its brutality, the really unbelievable savagery that humans are so good at unleashing on one another. I tried to put myself in the mind of a young, terrified soldier just trying to stay alive, a psychopathic Col. Kurtz-type commanding over me demanding the most creative bloodshed I could be capable of. The trauma of actual combat that so few in my generation are meaningfully connected with; an experience I myself have no first-hand experience with. (Thank God.)

The last section is all imagist poetics, my take on the human condition. My tendency to elevate my lover, the human spirit elevating an image of oneself as embodying our highest potential, a vision of Christ, all mashed into one blurry image hanging there in that Floridian sunset.

I don't think the song resolves lyrically, but it doesn't really need to. It's an impressionist snap-shot.

I hope you liked it.

I was walking around the guest bedroom of my mom's house in Florida, on a short trip back home while I was still living in LA. I had a small coffee shop gig the next morning at Gold Leaf and was nervous. I hadn't played there yet and wasn't sure what to expect - this was several months before my first long motorcycle tour and I had not played in front of people in roughly a year because of Covid.

I was feeling insecure. My fears about folks not liking or understanding my music and lyrics was really present at the time. I felt compelled by this fear to write something new, to write a song that could get across the fullness of the persistent feeling I often try to articulate through my songs in a language that other people could actually access.

The result was "Let 'Em Bleed".

"I don't want to go to work in the morning, and I don't want to go to sleep." The lyrics appeared in sequence as I strummed vaguely on the guitar. "I don't want to go to Hell when I die," was a natural extension of this foreboding, reluctant feeling I get frequently. "I pray the good Lord, my soul to keep," was something of a literal prayer at the time and often is when I perform the song. I want to be held in the good, not abandoned into meaninglessness. I know what's down there and it is much better to fight for meaning than to relax into nihilism; should that juxtaposition present itself.

"But it's hard to keep it moving, when you're walking on bloody stumps." Grasping for some imagistic description to hammer in the point, there. It may risk being a bit purple, but so is the subject I'm trying to paint. "I'm just two miles from where I'm going and it just became an all day hump." The contradiction of knowing simultaneously that your end goal is very, very near and that it will still take you quite a long time in your present condition. To make things move faster, you need to heal fully; you still feel the pressure of passing time and a need to push on despite the pain, however.

Bringing my mind's eye to the meta-moment in which I was writing the song, out came the lines "I think I ought to move to Nashville, but I don't want to leave LA."

It was true. I didn't want to leave Los Angeles, though I'd spent all my time living there openly detesting it. I had grown comfortable in my little room and with my little routines. I got a sense of satisfaction from going to the Echo Park Von's with my backpack and duffle bag on my motorcycle to grocery shop. I got a little thrill out of riding out to the PCH and up the coast. I finally knew where things were. But, like all spiderwebs of comfort, it had to be forsaken and sacrificed at the altar of higher purpose. Los Angeles was prohibitive of my further expansion as a person, a partner to my girlfriend and as an artist. It was time to move on, to embrace the next phase. There was a sense of trepidation because of how comfortable I was. I admitted this to myself for the first time when I was writing this song, that I really did like Los Angeles despite all my still-remaining gripes about it.

"Because I can ride my motorcycle, there, twenty-four hours a day." The kind of endless summer that LA seems to have as weather also describes the feel of the city to me. It's always the weekend, work can come later. It was a hard environment for me to buckle down and beat the horse in.

"But it's time that I got it moving, because I've got a mouth to feed."

"Feels like there's nothing, now, below my ankles; so I'll just let 'em bleed."

It's ok to let it hurt. All of it. Don't run from the pain, observe it. Take note of it, follow it back to its causes. Only then do you have a chance at untying the knot, at healing the wound. The first step is to breathe and let it bleed. As the old cliché goes, "we may have lost the battle but we have not lost the war" or something like that. Sometimes you just gotta accept yourself, wounds and all.

As for this blog entry, the song itself probably explains my point much better than all this exposition can. In that way, I feel like I hit my aim well with this one.

I have a new song coming out on October 1st called "Would You Like to Come In?".

One night when I was still living in LA, I got the itch and started pacing around my tiny room trying to write a song. Strumming out some basics, I felt drawn toward a simpler set of changes than I would usually allow myself to work with. It hit differently than what I (mistakenly) thought I was "supposed" to sound like. It was satisfying to play, and easy.

Grabbed my pen and notebook and started scribbling down some vague, impressionistic lines. Running mostly on the feeling, connecting the images based on the mouth-feel in my mind. The moment of bone shaking awe when looking upward, seeing how literal eternity is and that eternity's face is directly above our heads at all times. Clouds parting and ineffable light streaming in through this momentary portal into that infinite space we reside in already. Then shifting in time to moment that follows this initial grand vision, when the feeling is still very much present but the more typical reality experience begins to reset itself. A red-tailed hawk flying through the air below this mystical cloudbank. Tears falling at the beauty of the moment. Recognizing that if God is anywhere at all, it's right Here. Remembering That. Knowing that That is where you really come from, what you really are.

In the various promotional materials for this song I've said that it's about "a drug vision, a nightmare and falling in love." That's mostly accurate. It's really more like this: "'Would You Like to Come In?' is a finger-picked ballad about a series of mystical experiences that occurred sober, or meditating, or under the influence of THC or under the influence of 5-7 grams of dried psilocybin mushrooms all drawn from to paint a more archetypal representation of the mystical experience without reference to any specific spiritual or philosophical doctrine."

And that's just the first verse. A bit long, especially if I wanted to include the other things the song covers.

The second verse paints a different scene, one from another camp entirely. As a child, and I don't know for certain the when, how, why or even who with of this memory, I witnessed a car completely on fire on the side of US-92 between Daytona Beach and Deland, Florida in the middle of the night. I know that I was very young. I remember that even at the time I knew I was seeing someone's charred, dead body there. The memory popped up in nightmares more when I was a teenager going through some severe depression, and I never forgot it.

When writing this song, something about that memory and the dreams associated with it seemed linked in a sense to the experience described in the first verse. Maybe it's the gravity of the two scenes, despite their marked differences. After all, "the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom."

Finally, the last verse came about specifically because I was missing my girlfriend. The scene described actually happened and pretty much the way I say it in the song. I woke up one morning on a trip home to Florida to see her and my folks. What ripped me out of sleep that day was a pretty strong allergic reaction to some dust that had collected under her bed, closing off my throat and stopping me from breathing. I awoke to the sensation of being suffocated.

As my mind slowly cleared and my windpipe slowly opened, I became aware of my surroundings. Birds outside chirping in the clear morning air. Her soft, warm bed. Her cat at the end of the bed, sleeping. Her next to me, sleeping and looking like every bit the angel she is. A strange ambivalence set in as the joy and gladness struggled with the fear and anger of being awakened by suffocating. She stirred slightly, then half-way opened her eyes, oblivious to my plight. She blinked sleepily and asked if I wanted to scoot closer and cuddle. After getting up to clear my sinuses and drink some water, I did. I was fine. Breathing again. We went back to sleep. I slept great after that.

The point of the song, as seems to be the overarching theme of much of my music now, is that beauty is real. Beauty is completely real and is at least as strong as suffering is, if not stronger. There is meaning in reality, in living. It is here and can be experienced. There is room for life to be worth something, it just takes the courage to be sensitive enough to pick up on it. Whether it's in the recognition of how short our time is, or how immense the universe is, or in the moments when unfiltered humanity shows up as sweet, as loving. We've lost that to a great degree in the West and much to our detriment. If there's no point, we have no excuse to try and will allow ourselves into worser and worser situations both personally and communally until we have nothing left but only pain and only suffering. To take on the responsibility of meaning is the very thing that saved me from suicide and crippling depression.

Since this is the first blog post, I'll end with my favorite poem. It's relevant to the point I've been driving at. It's a Charles Bukowski poem called The Laughing Heart:

"Your life is your life

Do not let it be clubbed into dank submission.

Be on the watch.

There are ways out.

There is light somewhere.

It may not be much light but

It beats the darkness.

Be on the watch.

The gods will offer you chances.

Know them.

Take them.

You can't beat death but

You can beat death in life, sometimes.

And the more often you learn to do it,

The more light there will be.

Your life is your life.

Know it while you have it.

You are marvelous

The gods wait to delight

In you."