No Surrender

"I cannot help but hear his voice, I only wish that I could listen without shame."

- Amanda Marshall

~

What is the value of what we create? Someone recently said to me that the only thing that mattered is that you are alive when life decides to change the course of your plans.

Decades of experience and words, notes, and pictures could be licked by flames not of my own doing, potentially taking away all that I've created along my walk in this life. This is part of me, this is my soul. So much much so that I backed up those pieces of myself in a way that made its way out of a disaster.

I am not taking chances losing what I've learned along the way.

Legacy is my responsibility.

And anybody who's created anything would understand exactly where I'm coming from. This bothered me for a bit until I realized that I'm not the same as other people that create who might say oh well, you start all over.

No, we don't. We do our best to safeguard the magic that we create. It's our charge as musicians and writers to ensure to the best of our ability that what we put down on the table survives time. More than my life because this is my life. How the fuck does anybody else that's ever given themselves to the art of creation not feel the same is a mystery to me.

Even when I'm distant, my brain is still working to create.

It's going to take a whole lot more than flames to snuff out this home that I've built over 30 years. And in the end, I will bring it just like I did before.

I'm getting stronger by the day.

Hang on JBI, the next stage that I perform on might even surprise me.

"Don't you dare point that at me."

Furniture Karma

  

Everybody's Got To Learn Sometime  

- The Korgis 

~

I'd rather live with broken things than borrow somebody else's trouble.

While staring out a window at a snowy day recently I saw a neighbor's kid throwing out furniture; a couple of dressers that appeared to be in good shape. I immediately thought of a dresser that I use and how the inside rails on the top drawer are broken so I have to wedge the drawer in using my magical powers of ghetto rigging which I was taught from a young age.

So as I stood next to the window I thought to myself, ya know, I could go out there with a screwdriver and take the rails to fix my broken drawer when I discovered after much thought of a phenomena that Scientists should do some research on: Furniture Karma.

I'm pretty sure I invented the term, so don't anybody go trying to Edison my astute realization and life altering discovery.

In that moment it took me back to when I was a kid and some of my brother's would walk around the neighborhood on trash night to see if anybody threw out anything of worth. Not that we necessarily needed anything even being poor, but they liked to fix things much like I do. TV's were usually the thing that caught their eye. In those days TV's were tube based so in a lot of cases you could fix them for the cost of a replacement tube or two.

That happy discovery on a sidewalk on a Wednesday night seemed well meaning enough until they brought home their sidewalk treasure and the inhabitant local roaches came pouring out screaming 

NEW HOME!

See that's how the roaches migrated in Philly back then. Kind of like backpacking around Europe back in the day.

Thus my first interaction with Furniture Karma. You inherit what you bring home. Much like a STD without the needles, medication, and judging doctors; but enough about Charlie Sheen.

So understanding that principle over the years I've had people offer me furniture and I'd usually turn them down. 

In one of my first apartments in the 90's a guy who was jamming at my Drummer's studio offered to give me a couch. Seemed like a nice enough offer until he dropped it off and left and a few minutes later the roach expedition came roping off the sides onto the newly discovered land of my floor. I put that shit out faster than Fred did the cat at the end of the credits of the Flintstones.  

I remember the guy asking me a few days later how I was digging the couch. And I told him that I had to throw it out because he failed to tell me about the tenants in the couch who'd already claimed their stake long before I received that "gift," of generosity. Of course he denied the invasion force were from his house. Maybe I should have tied up a few of them with some dental floss and interrogated them?

So with that experience in my mind as I watched the flakes accumulate on top of the dresser I thought do I really want to tempt fate again? It's only a couple of plastic rails and a few screws what would go wrong?

Being older now I think about these things. We are what we surround ourselves with. So avoid filling your space with other people's bad energy. 

As I said, I'd rather live with broken things than borrow somebody else's trouble.

"Further down the corridor, he can see some people; all kneeling. With broken sighs and murmurs they struggle, in their slow motion to move towards a wooden door at the end." - Genesis

A Different Kind Of Temporary

"You're already falling. It's calling you back to face the music. And the song that is coming through. You're already falling. The one that it's calling is you." - The Moody Blues 

~ 

Sometimes we derive direction and inspiration from the strangest of places. It's only when we're facing serious problems that we stop to reflect on just how far away that logic might take us. But the willing will listen and know internally with every ounce of their being that there is a truth worth  investigating. But only when we still our mind to reflect that we realize how much some of us have in common with the most uncertain of characters.

Into the hallway with the cages something worth hearing awaits at the end of our steps forward.

The dog in the cage in front of us is "Punchy," as he's ultimately named. He seems broken and destined to be at the end of a needle that erases his chance at happiness. He could have a few choices to react to his situation. He could become withdrawn, seeking shelter in a corner waiting for his trip to the line that never ends. Or maybe he could become angry snapping at everybody who looks into his cage regardless of their intention. But he would also prevent anyone from seeing the other side of him outside of the cage that now binds him. A choice must first be made before he can examine which of those paths fits his situation.

So there he lays in his damp dark corner hopeful, staring around his world which is filled with other cages who's occupants make their transits in and out of his orbit which now is limited by his circumstance. He wasn't always in a cage, but those memories seem to be falling further and further away to greet his new reality. The dream wasn't suppose to end this way, he might think.

Time greets an identity shift caused by self-realizations inside a cage. No amount of pity or soft voices makes that shift any less brutal to the psyche. His day used to be surrounded with sticks and open space. And like a performance monkey he ran quickly into the wind with a purpose he thought was his own. Unknowing what retrieving that stick the one last time got him. He never noticed the car drive off slowly and out of sight.

Maybe he was scared when the daylight wound down around him with nobody there to run back to. Holding his stick as a prize confused. The night followed through as she will always do. And with her she brought the sounds and shadows that occupy the darkness. Punchy intently watched the road as the cars passed along with the headlights performing their dance uncaring to the vision of the already strained animals eyes as he eventually gets spooked and runs into the woods. 

He knows this isn't his world as he runs faster and deeper into the darkness. Unsure of distance or direction, it all becomes a blinding blur of confusion. Until he fell into the ditch blacking out, then briefly waking up to the net over him and strange voices talking about him and how he wouldn't let go of his long since retrieved stick. When he woke up the next time the men who captured him were throwing his stick into the parking lot. Won't be needing this where you're going buddy, they mused.

Some things just aren't meant for cages and boxes to be forgotten about once out of sight and mind. The not so temporary permanent looms. Hidden behind the thin bars and stale smells of the long hallway. But it takes someone who's been hit in the face a few too many times to figure out the strategy that Punchy applied while waiting for someone to open his cage and ask him to risk his expectations again to a stranger. Is it the common theme they shared over being told they were nothing and couldn't do better? Is it feeling of knowing that everybody is wrong and no matter how many times you get hit you aren't going to stay down?

Like some kind of a test, pencils and paper beware, some things lack a place in books that collect dust on shelves. Freedom is an unseen choice on a menu that has everything but the unadvertised that isn't spoken of. The feeling inside your face when you hold back what used to come naturally. For the sake of sound? For the effort of distraction in a place that never felt like home we give up the pieces that we needed to make us whole. So what has your stick become? What are you chasing after? And who will you run back to when you find it?

To become a living window with others just looking through and never really understanding the complexity that allows them to feel safe behind something that keeps the bad things out while allowing the good things to shine inside. Throughout our best of intentions that isn't always the case is it? One crack away from becoming secondary and replaceable. Unknowing becomes the intrigue that guides us.  You can choose the cage but you cannot choose yourself. And regardless of your social stature you will one day confront that reality. You can put it off, but the day is coming. Spinning illusions won't complete the riddle that you've spun inside the illusion; through that window that remains with lights approaching from the west.

So, what does this all have to do with a guy with a birth defect and a dog in a cage? There must surely be a point to all this ramble.

Right, you want to know that don't you?

Ok, here it goes.

Up is no longer down, and we aren't always influenced by things that benefit us. And some people come along to remind us to see beyond the things we thought we could do. We only get so long to write the pages that matter.

Aesop's Fire

(Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons - Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard Grandville (1803–1847) - Illustration from the 1855 edition of La Fontaine's Fables)

 "Telling tales of drunkenness and cruelty." 
- The Kinks

~

On Pink Floyd's 1973 Dark Side of the Moon "Time," track, there's lyrics that I hear as "Home home again, I like to be here when I can. When I come home cold and tired. It's good to warm my BALLS beside the fire."

Now when we think about a man warming his balls beside the fire we instantly get an image in our minds of a man in a dark place naked laying next to a fire with a stoic look on his face.

In the reality the rest of you live in the lyric is really BONES, not balls so you don't stop to think about it very much. You just travel on to the next sentence not truly realizing how much the song's meaning might change by simply modifying one word.

Think about it for a moment. Would Stairway to Heaven have worked if it was Stairway to Detroit? Or Freebird were Free Pigeon?

A certain amount of effort ensures that these word choices are given proper thought and evaluation before the public ever gets to consume them. Because once they are "out there," for the world to see and hear you seldom will ever get a take back.

But let's get back to the man sitting precariously close to a burning fire with his balls. He's been through quite a lot of stress. He's let 10 years get by him without doing anything. Now unless he were in a coma in which case we might excuse and forgive him for his prolonged absence. Will the Post Office hold your mail that long? Then he's just been toiling along scribbling at something. Looking for words that work together so he can release his 10 year long process for the good of his soul. Maybe in an attempt at creating a legacy, or maybe he was composing a really long bucket list without actually doing anything to experience life but living within what he'd written.

I think I'm starting to understand why I got funny looks when I turned in book reports in school.

But what if the Time song were written about a tortoise? One who'd spent 10 years thinking about a race. One he thought he had with a hair?

See how that one word difference changes everything?

Of course a slow moving tortoise would win a race against a hair. In the mind of this particular animal he sees inanimate objects as real so it's his projection onto this hair that allows him to think that the hair is boastful and full of itself. So to the dismay of his friends who think that Torty is off the wagon again, they play along and allow the race to go forward anyway.

The story would make sense then wouldn't it?

It's his envy of the hair that finally gets Torty out of his shell. But in the end he learned much more than simply winning a race of one. These realizations came after many therapy sessions at the Animal Hospital. After all he'd spent 10 years thinking about this one event and reflecting on how it changed him forever. You could even say he was stuck in that moment. And even after making it to the finish line alone he turned into the very thing he was racing against; to the whispers of his friends and the shallow looks of those not understanding. Torty's celebration was a life changing moment.

And that man with the balls warming by the fire? I must clarify that I guess before the rumors start.

Maybe he's a cricket player in the UK and the balls weren't actually HIS bits, but real cricket balls so in this case it would be perfect legit? Unless we really want to go there and start this all over again to wonder if any real crickets were in fact harmed in the making of this illusion?

But you knew that right?


IN MEMORIAL OF TORTY

Quarter for your thoughts

"Show me how it ends. It's alright. Show me how defenseless you really are. Satisfied and empty inside. That's alright. Let's give this another try." - Breaking Benjamin

~

Steps with a sense of determination guiding; notes detailing the curious mind along the streets long forgotten. Simple things that most take for granted until someone comes along and remembers and then thoughtfully takes the time to frame the past in words. 

I started thinking that I forgot what I was placed here for. I feel that doubt slipping away. Moments given, and memories taken between those movements. The old shops that have long since closed, and others now too far away to reach. My childhood framed inside things I could only describe had I enough time to do it proper justice. I don't need to run from place to place to experience the illusion.

I'd strafe the doorway walking inside to look up at a machine that captivated people. A small line formed. Anticipation followed. To guide a simulated sprite across a screen for a high score that would stand until the next person came along to change the rank. Then after you'd earned the honor of putting your initials into the high score table; quarter after quarter, turns to the left and right hoping to achieve something that would be gone in the morning.

When all the sound fades, incomplete as it may be memories of what went wrong leave time to reflect.

We start from zero and work our way up relying on our experience to guide us. Sometimes those things get forgotten after not having played the game in a long time. But at some point the memory of how the patterns worked come back to us. After time has changed the patterns that we once remembered and forced us to think differently a new pattern emerges.

Each level of our existence is exactly the same whether we realized it or not. It’s our perceptions that make it seem different. Long after we walked away from something that used to give us pleasure and helped us kill time. We realized it was time that was playing us; stealing those moments that we could have used more efficiently. Caught up in the distractions and faces that looked past us we find ourselves inside their projections. 

I’m done reflecting. I’m done ignoring. I’m done waiting for people to understand.

I am the pages that I’ve left behind. And before I finally turn away from the apathy?

New chapters will emerge. Starting right now. 



Editor's Note: I'm home now JBI.