The Warrior

There's nothing that compares to the feeling of playing a great show.  I can only get better from here.  I just want to play more.  I sound like a child.  It was a good crowd last night, a fun crowd.

The world is changing, all around me.  I feel like I can't keep up.  Each day my shallow beliefs are challenged and compromised, and the paradigm shifts again.  Stability is evasive in an unstable world.  Most unfortunate is the notion that we live in the end times, that life could not possibly go on much longer for a race plagued by selfishness, disease, death.  Look around.  It's everywhere.  Last week, I came home from work twenty minutes after a man had been shot and killed just outside my door.  I have to get out of this town.

Once upon a time, I had dreams of family, of fatherhood.  I used to look back on good times I had with my old man, when he would grill steaks for dinner and have a catch with my brother and me.  It was the American dream for our family, warm and blue-skied, with the smell of charcoal and the giddy sounds of kids laughing.  My childhood was filled with bike-rides, baseball games, and even ice-cream trucks.  And that reality has faded into the grey matter of my mind, a collage of memories that's so overlapped, I can hardly tell one from the other.  

Now, the American dream is decorated with credit cards and cell-phones, with sexual promiscuity, with divorce settlements and child support payments.  On every corner is a lost soul begging for food, behind every other door is a single mother without health-care for herself or her children, or a man whose ambition drove him over an edge into loneliness and isolation, desperation to meet some standard of success.  It's a Dark Age for us, I believe.  I'm really bumming myself out.

I'm spinning wheels here, but I know this:  if we are indeed living in the final days of humanity, then every hour is a unique opportunity to love others, and I will not leave this world a coward, but a warrior.