Follow the breeze

Sometimes I sit back and contemplate what life has taught me and I realize that In all my years of trying to figure out who I am, I lost myself. I lost myself in the world of self doubt, self hate, self loathing and lack of self esteem. I lost myself when I became too interested in someone else to care about how I felt about situations and I lost myself when I stopped writing music and I started letting someone else direct my life.

At some point in our short life here on earth, we allow other people to take the wheel and control our destiny, and we don't know where they are taking us, or how we will get back, we just let them assume control of our lives and they direct us and tell us where to go. Its like following the breeze. Like being a tumbleweed on the great highway of life, blown from side to side, and every once in a while there comes a long a big truck that snags you, and you are just carried away....

I used to feel like that sometimes, like a tumbleweed being blown where ever the wind wants me to go. But in recent months, I have decided to forge my own path. Make my own highway on the road of life. Its hard, and time consuming and the materials I collect for the job are rare and few and far between my destinations.

Growing up I can remember sitting front row at Antons in Austin, Texas with the likes of Stevie Ray Vaughn, Jimmy Vaughn, Muddy Waters, and BB King. I was 10. I was 10, and In a city where the music rolled endlessly through the streets, singing of glory days passed and lyrics to come. Now, at 30 I sit here and I can actually hear the words to the songs I didn't understand back then. I understand why the lyrics were important and why the person sitting on stage in this smokey, sticky floor, dingy club sang with his heart and the souls of his shoes instead of getting on stage and being another figure in the spot light.

I understand where the feelings come from and the heart filled words, I understand the women who loved those men, and the men who loved those women. If I could go back to that night, to those days, sitting under the old oak tree in the Travis heights park, listening to the Sex Pistols for the first time and Red Hot Chili Peppers on an old sony walkman that a kid in class brought. To chasing and being chased.

To staring at the woman driving the pink thunderbird, and watching the punks lounge in college square behind UT. I remember my nanny with a clarity, Sandy was her name. She took me to college square to the no name record shop where they played the punk music our kids consider cool, where the posters on the wall showed guys with freakishly large Mohawks and tattoos, the place where they carried Jerome Russell's punky colors back when only the "degenerates" and the "troublemakers" knew what punky colors was.

So I find myself back in that bar tonight, reminiscing and longing for days of old. Only now, I long to share those thoughts with someone. To share that music, and awe inspiring depth. It's few and far between that we find someone as compatible to ourselves other than ourselves....


Well, It's time for this allekats bed time, until I get inspired again....