JOSE DIAZ

It's not that,,,

I may not be here for now but I am not gone for good. God ain't called yet. That album I'm sitting on is one I don't listen to every day. Still, when I do,,,

I've yet to fully settle into the new studio. Truth be told, the day job really takes a lot of energy. My dreams are still there seething away beneath my cranium, but 

Most of the time, it’s not painful to visit my children’s

You can achieve anything you dream to achieve. Ninety-nine-point-ninety-nine percent of the time you will have to push that dream yourself.

Inspiration can come from anywhere at any time. It can also languish just out of reach. It might be elusive for less than a moment, or even for a lifetime. Either way, the lack of it can be excruciating.

As artists we all will eventually contemplate our “image”. How the world sees us is important. It may not be readily perceivable but the impression we make will affect how far we go with our art.

Are we supposed to be here? I can’t answer that one but I will tell you this; “We don’t belong here.”

Sadly, to me at least, the world seems to have fully embraced MP3. That’s what seems to move the most even though it pays the least. Gone forever are the days of artist making big bucks on single song sales. Unless you have a stellar song that goes viral,

That first single was the first “nail” in the coffin. The MP3 is one of the latest. I love the warmth of old analog recordings. The scratch of the needle on vinyl, and the hiss of magnetic powder on tape are part of the dynamics that make the listening experience such a sacred endeavor.

It started, I believe, a long time ago. Ok, maybe a long, long time ago. When the practice of putting out “singles” began the way things work in the music industry was forever changed.

“Failure is not an option.” What a crock that is. Do we really have a choice to succeed or fail?

In our youth we give little regard to our body’s ability to heal the damage we inflict to ourselves on a daily basis.

Not all music is a reflection of the real world but most popular music is at the least in the ball-park. Unfortunately the real world is rarely as pretty as we want it to be.

WHEN MORNING’S LESS THAN GLORIOUS

WHEN THE DAY IS LESS THAN GRAND

On the outside I’m a 47 year old man with a few physical bumps and bruises. On the inside I’m a kaleidoscope of scars

The possibilities in life are not infinite. There are not an infinite number of ways to mix and match the possibilities. We can however achieve infinity,,,

Every artist deals with the world in their own way.

It's not easy to keep up with all the things I want to do. The things I have to do always get in the way. Right now the things I have to do pay the bills. With that in mind, I have to keep doing them.

Hobbies are burdens we love to bear. They outweigh many things in our lives,

As a child growing up at 3112 South Laurent (highway 185) the world seemed like a perfect place.

What I love the most about making music is that there are no rules!

The road to originality is paved in imitation. Musicians usually start out mimicking their favorite artist

A bold splash of color, a sudden explosion of sound, or an ethereal mental dawning of a twist in reality you never expected;

Success is an adventure with many avenues to take.

Fate could care less about our vulnerabilities. The strengths we nurture within ourselves are the lines of defense that we struggle to hold thru every waking moment.

As the human race advances on its road of existence, the base of knowledge it must stand upon grows exponentially. That well of information is what

“Think about it Joe.”

What an odd thing to put on a billboard. I see the fine print down in the right hand corner. “66.6 FM Hell Radio”.

The final bars of the tune are fading away and with a little relief to me the DJ chimes in.

I was just accelerating back to speed after passing an old weathered billboard on my right. I glanced back to see if

“I cannot for the life of me remember how long I have been driving on this road.

Fans, without them artists would be virtually unknown.

The drive to succeed is a quality that is easy to underestimate.

11-9-2011

It’s not often that I update anything in the studio

11-11-11

My current mental state is

Trust is priceless. It’s always pristine. There is nothing else in the world that would be a fair trade

Under the onslaught of this thing we call reality I find myself drowning in melancholy. I miss the muses

Someone once told Bob Dylan to “shut up and play!” I am no fan of my own voice for that matter

There are times when even the sweet enticing nirvana of music is not enough to pull me away from reality.

Reality in all of its annoyance can never be ignored. If it is not dealt with the consequences can be dire

A strong imagination can be a dangerous thing. It must be wielded with caution. There is a fine balance that must be maintained between dreams and reality. In dreams there are no limits. In reality, limits abound.

Sometimes inspiration hangs right in front of us. We miss it too easily because we are focused more on the big picture than the little things.

When we stumble along the road of our lives and we feel there is no one there to catch us, when we see no safe place to land, when we clench our souls tightly in preparation for the inevitable impact, they are there.

Give a guitarist a few toys and turn him loose. You never know what might happen.

8-24-2011

We have no control over muses whatsoever. 8-25-2011

If we do not remember the past, then we are condemned to repeat it. The source eludes me right now

The act of putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes can be an inspirational endeavor.

The muses seem to have thrown the floodgates wide open again. I’m ever grateful,

INTERVIEW WITH AN IMMORTAL:

(A short story by Jose Diaz)

“Squee-click!

In the early days music was a vehicle for minds to ride off into the sunset on so to speak. Tunes were created for the pleasure of being listened to.

The lessons life teaches us are only as important as we allow them to be to us.

6-28-2011

I awoke to the sound of soft laughter today.

I live for music. From the moment the song starts I’m on a journey. I want to hear every note.

Music is something that can be loosely interpreted in many ways. Scholars will frown on that thought

Killing the Mantis

It was a strange dream, the one last night.

Love is limitless in power. It can forge ahead as cumbersome as war, or creep along as lightly as a wafting dandelion seed.

I lost myself in her

Now the search is on

My heart and mind concur

There is nothing wrong

Sunday, June 5^th was a good day to be in the studio. I had a basic arrangement track of rhythm guitar in

I look out over the vast sea of flickering lights. Some are red, or orange. Others are foot-long columns of blue with red or orange tips.

Not everything I record comes out the way I want it to. Maintaining a bit of ignorance about what sounds good or not is par for my course though.

I sometimes wonder if I run the chance of attracting the ire of muses. In this blog

Each and every day is a storm that must be weathered. We awake when we must, look back on dreams perhaps, and yesterday. We hope we will eventually return to the solitude of sleep.

The romantic heart is like a lump of coal. Any ‘collision’ can produce enough pressure and heat to turn it into a diamond. Two diamonds are far better than one but even a diamond paired with a piece of coal still shines.

The music I create is not for everyone. I’ve never entertained the idea that it would be universally accepted by the world. It’s my psyche in the raw.

I give my heart to my main muse as unconditionally as I can. Life has other ideas though. Bills have to be paid and those monetary tasks are the grains of salt that must go into the pot every month.

4-20-2011

Life is fragile. If you let it get to you, then you may also become ‘fragile’.

4-20-2011-B

You know that song that gets stuck in your head all day?

4-21-2011

  I fired up the two little whispering monsters last night.

4-25-2011-B

It’s not hard to look around you and find somebody putting up a great fight against whatever life is

  How do you describe a thing you created to the world at large? The muses have moved you

  “The dawn of man” (to be politically correct:”The dawn of humankind”) whoever coined that hogwash of a statement never saw the real future approaching. Here was a

...One thought lingered at the periphery of my mind, wanting in. I was reluctant. I was sure that if I let it in amongst all the other ideas, brainstorms, and daydreams, I would surly loose all my physical senses. Blindness, deafness, and dumbness, would be my only tools left...And then I wondered (without perishing the thought), might I still trust my sense of taste, touch, and smell?...

Jose Diaz (just a thought)

 

  Failure and success both come with emotional baggage. Suffering either circumstance is always optional.

4-1-2011

 Bridges, we cross many of them as we go thru life.

4-5-2011

 Artists create thanks to muses. 

4-5-2011-B

  I think humans can only create art.

  We sometimes see them coming, but not always. They usually don’t move on us in predictable ways. Problems can approach from any vector and when we discover them our personalities have ways of dealing with them, or not.

  The engines of imagination are microscopic. Their gears are empty space.

  Hooks grab the mind and stab deep like a lions fangs sinking in for the kill.

  I never want to be accused of being ‘down to earth’. I prefer to dream of faraway places ad infinitum.

  Flexing the imagination is great exercise for the mind. In my case it opens up vast playgrounds upon which anything simply thought of can be created. However, not all the energies go towards things that do not exist.

  It feels good to finish that tenth album of tunes. The cover art is still in the works but I’m in no rush whatsoever. There is of course no budget to speak of and so there are no deadlines to keep and no outside stress to deal with.

 

I recorded an instrumental the other day and another song with vocals. They both started out as

1-26-2011 thru 1-28-2011

 

From 1-6-2011 to 1-25-2011. Here are several post.

  Life approaches like a Bengal tiger thru the bamboo. You can clamp down on your emotions but even under control they still act like guardrails for your actions.

 

  We bathe in the light of a new day. The embers of yesteryear waft away on melancholy breezes. We re-learn the act of balance with our first step into the unknown.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!

  I recently finished another piece of science fiction. Halfway thru it arthritis attacked and I am still recovering but coming along well. Aging is indeed painful.

 

  Particles and photons from the nearby star slammed into the surface. They emanated from a little more than a safe distance away.

  Our lives are ever evolving equations. They start out something like this; (I=> 0). They end up something like this; (I=< 0). We are born, we live, and then we die.

8-20-2010 I’m a fan of loud music.

8-20-2010-B I am appreciative of every muse that has ever inspired me.

8-21-2010 Life is a conglomeration of triumphs and tragedies,

8-21-2010-B Bad things happen to good people.

8-24-2010 A few months ago I attended a safety and orientation class

 

 

7-29-2010

Lyrics tell the story straight from the artist heart.

7-30-2010

  “There is no new thing under the sun.”

8-9-2010

  And so it was a vacation to remember.

8-15-2010

  As long as the ideas are cascading from my synapses...

8-16-2010

  There are enumerable ideas on back burners in my mind.

8-18-2010

  When fantasy and reality collide they will release infinite energy.

7-26-2010

I whirled like a dervish across the world-wide-web.

7-27-2010

  Creative lulls are the respite of artists.

7-27-2010-B

  Following tried and truly tested formulas is one way to produce something entertaining.

The Rocknauts (epilogue)

  Generals had gathered around a small table in near darkness. Subdued glows from nearby wafted lazy shadows over every face. There were by this time very few of them left.

 

Here are the last three episodes of THE ROCKNAUTS!!!

The Rocknauts Part VIII

  Over the next several days the Rocknauts played many different songs. Each was broadcast around the world and each was unique in its own right with a message that was conveyed with volume and conviction.

 

The Rocknauts Part VII

  The whole world was listening in anticipation, rollicking in the ‘mood’, or waiting in fear for whatever would come next. The tension was building to a head like a coiled magnetic field. Something was about to break and every soul on earth knew it, ‘felt’ it, and either looked forward to or dreaded it.

  Suddenly ...

The Rocknauts Part VI

  The four stages began to rotate clockwise in a slow orderly fashion that fully belied the massive detonations that were occurring just outside of their protective shields. Several extremely massive pieces of ordinance were currently finding that shield as impenetrable as all previous fire had.

The Rocknauts Part V

  There was a deafening roar from the so called ‘defenders’ of this world. Metal engines screamed along with human voices, protesting horses, ringing swords, and popping composite rotor-blades. Safety latches were releasing in a wave sweeping back from the front of the line...

The Rocknauts Part IV

  Somewhere in the middle of the Sahara, four beings rested under the mid-day sun. They kept cool in their UV filtered bubbles of atmosphere and scanned the horizon by floating slowly in a circle. Just over that horizon, and in every direction, armies were gathered. The attack was inevitable, the visitors knew. They just hated to have to fight in the first place.

 

The Rocknauts Part III

  They sat on the ground in the center of the Sea Of Tranquility, facing one another. The four of them sat cross-legged, meditating on recent events. Air-shells were swollen into one amoebic mass and they shared subdued conversation.

“Most seem to enjoy our presence.” Guitar spoke with a relaxed tone.

“Yes.” Drum added.

  Bass took a deep breath, contemplating before exhaling with, “Their ‘leaders’ give in to fear and attack.”

 

The Rocknauts Part II

  The four visitors fell into a soft lullaby-like song. The apparent ‘leader’ repeated his message several times as all four ‘flying stages’ drifted around the towns’ central square.

“Who will welcome us to this world?”

 

  As a novice writer I’m always downplaying my proficiencies in composition. I simply focus on getting some message across and not on impressing you

6-25-2010-B

  I do not count the days of summer. Winter will get here eventually. The humidity will ease away and the days will shorten...

  I plugged in the ‘guitfiddle’ and powered up the Crate stack. Right after I tuned up that sweet little Fender, the phone rang! (This is by no means the first time.)...

  I am the proud owner of two high-powered amplifier stacks. One is a 120-watt all tube Peavey Heritage with two 12-inch speakers.

  I don’t pick up a guitar every day. In that respect, I’m always longing to do so.

Each day is like a...

6-15-2010-B

  The summer heat in Texas can inspire in many ways...

6-16-2010

  From the outset we have been a destructive lot. Even in a vast garden full of choices...

  Music is an object of my affections...

  There appeared to be four small discs approaching from the east. In the distance we could see a lone humanoid standing atop each one. They came forth in a diamond formation...

As far as I am a musician, my tools of the trade are varied, and usually expensive. Guitars and amps are my mainstays and my dreams are always filled with extreme examples

  Who can say that they never had dreams to become ‘something’ when they grew up?

  Delusions come in many sizes. Some twinkle at the very edge of existing, while others dwarf the entire universe. There are no rules to govern...

6-2-2010-D

‘swing-away’!

6-3-2010

 The only thing your soul will relinquish is a lazy sigh.

  From here I look back over the distance I have traveled. Many occurrences along the way have become permanently imprinted upon my psyche. They will remain there for the rest of my days as reminders of who I was,,,

  The grindstone can become red hot at times. Such hypothetical radiation keeps us on our toes. Customers come at us from many different angles with many different problems and they all seem to need something as early as yesterday.

  Saturday afternoon I was watching a Five Finger Death Punch DVD. I paused it in the middle of a tattoo slideshow and brought out a little amp and guitar.

There are many young people today who are finding their way into the wonderful world of music one way or another. Some have found band class in school to be the perfect learning experience while others have found a pickup situation after school more to their liking. Theirs, one and all,

  Revisiting what to me is historically the birth of Legasys brings all that emotion back up and into sharp focus.

  “You have the key to all your own questions in your hands.” She wrinkled her nose and brow together and looked at her hands. They were still in that prayer position. “Take a deep breath and hold it for a moment.” I watched her chest rise.

  The spark of an idea can never be forced into existence. The kindling is something you have to simply acknowledge either lightly or with determination until some force within or without causes it to ignite. You can think long and hard about it or without even so much as a passing whimsicalness. The best technique to use is no technique as far as I’m concerned. That’s one sure way to insure spontaneity. You can approach being creative with anything from a concrete methodology to letting the ‘accident’ happen. It doesn’t matter how the sparks fly, just that they do.

 

  Being schooled exceptionally well in music theory, poetry, and the ways in which song combines the two or separates them is as much a guarantee that you will find success in the music industry as a guarantee that a snowball will not melt in Hades. To be disciplined 100% in music theory can easily blind you to other ‘outside-of-the-box’ possibilities. The same can be said of any profession (but don’t ever apply that reasoning to any profession outside of the arts, except maybe computer programming or game designing which to me anyway, are art forms). Having never attended college myself, (“You dare say!” I feel the fingers pointing down at me!) in no way means I have any disdain for those who have. Education was simply a luxury I could not afford to extend. With that said any artist, worth their mettle, that can cram for exams and ace the test, will, when it comes to creating new original music, use far more of their knowledge to create that music than just their music theorems.

 

   I regard musical theory with respect but have no formal training. When I notice I might need to study a particular part of it, I will open one of many books or magazines I have on the subject and glean whatever I can for my particular need. I can’t read music nor can I write it on the staff. I can however learn a piece from guitar tablature. In any case, most of the songs I learned from that medium I soon found myself making personalized changes to the arrangement of. In my self-imposed ignorance I rely on my heart, mind, and gut instinct to tell me what something should sound like. Right or wrong, I do indeed take pride in the fun that I have.

 

  Having no knowledge of music theory does not necessarily mean that you cannot or will not be able to create music. Not being able to ‘carry a tune’ doesn’t mean you don’t have a chance to succeed. There are some genres of music that exclude all theory and simply flow at will or within some form of structure wholly unrelated to music. These forms are music simply because, either their creators say it is, or dedicated fans do. That stuff is far off the beaten path but still, I have found a few gems there. I will elaborate here however, that I am certainly not talking about Hip-Hop or Rap. Those two forms are ‘music’, they are ‘art’. So are Metal, funk, soul, blues, jazz, and any other ‘genre’. You can fuse any of them together in any way imaginable and it will still be art and music to me.

 

  Music sans-theory can be as simple as a silently panning scene in a movie. The images that you are presented with occur at the directors whims and are filmed under his guidance and edited to evoke your reaction. You might find quite a few of these at the beginnings of films. The other side of that coin of silent scenery might have a few sparse sounds. A breeze might rustle leaves, a hummingbird might flit by, or a dog might bark unseen in the distance. Some of the best examples can be found in anime. Granted there are many opening shots with the full fanfare of musical score, to limit yourself to those is to limit your own knowledge of emotional possibilities. Think about this question; how many times have you heard music in your head as you watch such a silently played scene? You are not insane. You are musical. I hope you hold that thought all day and apply it liberally in as many situations as possible. There are o exceptions, t the ‘muse’.

Album number nine is of course finished. I am working on the cover art and hope to release it as soon as I can. The day job is flared up into one of the most busy year startings I have ever expierenced so I may become scarce from time to time here. Your patience is deeply appreciated and I hope you can survive for a time on the old material here under the "Music" tab. The new stuff will arrive and I hope it gives you as much pleasure to listen to as it gave me pleasure to creat it. Keep It LOUD!!!

THE MARKERS It was a dreary day for such a long drive. A slight mist of rain was falling from the grey overcast. At times the drops got bigger or smaller but never really stopped. The horizon floated in and out of existence as if it were hiding the sun and some place warm and comfortable. There was, thankfully, enough light to brighten the green grasses off the shoulders and in the median. All three ditches were carpeted brightly and hop-scotched with puddles. The tank was full, the headlights were on, and I was too far from a major city to catch any radio at all. I was really missing my satellite stations. The ‘AM’ faded in and out without bringing me anything in English. The highway meandered thru man-made cuts sliced into small mountains. Walls of valleys with long stripes carved out by explosives long, long ago whisked by. Sometimes the tops of the valleys were shrouded in a denying layer of mist. Other times the roadway far ahead disappeared. I crested a hill in one such valley and caught a fleeting glimpse of the horizon. The twin ribbons of the road snaked all the way there and dove over. I scanned the scene and then brought my focus closer and closer to my current position. A small patch of the carpet to my right caught my eye abruptly. There in the middle of the ditch was a short fat cross. It was pitch-black with no hint of any detail whatsoever. My first impression was that it had been stuck into the ground there and then ‘spray-painted’. The grass immediately below looked black, or brown. As quickly as I noticed it, it zipped by and was gone into my traveling past. The radio hissed and crackled a bit. I scanned the instrument panel and then looked at the clock. The frequency was still showing ‘1250 am’. I checked the road for a moment and then reached over and hit the ‘clock’ button. The ‘1250 am’ remained. I frowned and scanned the road again, ‘keeping it in my lane’. I hit the button once again and still nothing happened. Then a rapid succession of five ‘finger-punches’ produced the same outcome. I hit the ‘scan’ button and the readout ran its course thru the bandwidth range. There was nothing to lock onto except for what were probably distant lightening strikes and the cyclic whistles of the earth’s magnetic field. I rolled my left hand over and looked at my wristwatch. A couple of seconds told me the battery was probably dead. I sighed and made a mental note to either buy another battery or another watch at the next truck-stop. As I dropped into the floor of the plain I had just seen, another black shape caught my eye. This time it was in the middle ditch. It was the same size, color (or lack of), and shape of the other one. Still frowning from my little ‘time’ ordeal, I raised a brow as I watched the ‘marker’ go by. I was wondering who it had been placed for. I also wondered about the first one. Such monuments were put on the sights where somebody’s’ loved ones had left this world. I strained to read any word or words that might have been applied to the face of it but found nothing but an unnerving empty ‘blackness’. The three tips gave the impression that it was made out of curled iron or cast. The edge was similar to decorative accoutrements found in cathedrals but, I could discern no detail except for the outline. Oddly, it looked ‘heavy’. I scanned the instrument panel and then looked up at the temperature gauge in the overhead center console. “46 degrees” it said. Eyes back on the road and I bounced over a small bridge. Not much chance of ice for now but come nightfall, maybe. I was whishing that I’d brought my little weather radio. My mind drifted back to the two crosses. They were identical, I surmised. I didn’t even notice an edge to them, although they looked ‘thick’ and the ‘overspray’ gave the fleeting impression they actually were, they did seem out of place. With a firm memory picture formed in my mind, I looked over along the opposite side of the road and saw the third one. I might have missed it were it not for the deer carcass. I thought the carcass had just moved a bit. A head of massive antlers was lying just upon the improved shoulder and the hindquarters were settling out of a quiver. I thought it might be alive but the bloodless entrails begged to differ. The ‘marker’ stood stoically, just off the black-top in the grass between the hind and forelegs. The same overspray was all too apparent. With three markers behind me I scanned the instrument panel again. The tank was full, temperature was within normal range, oil pressure good, speed 75, and radio crackling on ‘1250 am’. I added the mental notes about the broken clock button, my broken watch, and the tasks I needed to attend to at my next stop. I was halfway across the rock-strewn plain. Number four caught my eye in the center of the median. I know I saw it moving upwards. Along with the chill that shot down my spine, my feet shot down onto the brake pedal. The tires hissed and screamed softly across the asphalt. The ‘ABS’ left me with enough steering to glide over to the inner shoulder. I came to a full stop right next to the cross. I know I saw it moving upwards with my first glance from 75 miles an hour. Now I was looking over at it as I lowered the window. My finger was digging into the toggle and it was hurting way before I knew what I was doing. It was maybe a foot wide and a foot and a half tall. Short and fat looking but black like nothing else should ever be. The ‘overspray’ was there too. It was a mixture, I now realized. It was a mixture that moved. Black and brown danced an intertwining jig like a macabre shadow of a flame. As the ‘shadow that should not be’ ‘licked’ about, the green grass that it touched went brown, dead. The pain in my left index finger screamed me out of my trance. My right index, I found, was buried in my moustache and over my lips. My right thumb anchored beneath the heavy beard under my chin. I blinked hard and reached thru the hoop of the steering wheel to activate the hazard flashers. Set to ‘mist’, the windshield wipers micro-thumped noisily across the glass in a two-step cacophony. The rain was easing up. A loud ‘cla-click’ told me I had opened the door. It swung away and my left foot fell to the wet surface. The grass was cold. I felt the iciness thru the hard leather of my shoes. With each slow step my ankles sank just below the tips of each blade. Droplets soaked thru my thin socks. I knew I was shivering but it wasn’t from the cold and damp air. There was no breeze. I stopped halfway down into the shallow ditch and stared at the strange blackness of the thing. There was no detail except for the scrolled outline. It seemed to be facing dead-on at me. I stepped to the right along the embankment. After five or six steps I took no solace in the fact that the cross was still facing me ‘dead-on’. Stepping quickly and almost losing my footing I treaded into the other direction. The same thing happened. A cold gust suddenly rose up. The shadow of flames around the base of this dark intruder flickered in that breeze. More grass died and I heard an eerie crackle as it did so. Light wisps of smoke scattered into the wind. The tires protested the engines reaction to the floored accelerator for what seemed like a lifetime. The left rear peeled off a few tens of yards of bright green, throwing it into the air in a mixture of sparkling blades and light brown soil. Once the rubber had sufficient purchase I stole a glance backwards out of the open window. The rain was picking up and the larger droplets stung the right side of my face. The black cross was falling away, still facing me, reflecting nothing, and burning the grass. I crossed the roadway into the outer lane and put the window up. The heater was slowly replacing the cold air and I was shaking, and sweating. I wanted to get to the horizon and noticed that it was once again shrouded in mist. A small black object approached just off the right shoulder and I yanked the wheel left. The darkness swung around to track me. Another came on from the median and I jerked the other way. Several appeared off the far shoulder and I gave up trying to ‘zigzag’ my way fruitlessly down the road. A cluster appeared in the median and in their midst I saw a black teardrop flow up into the air. It swung open and snapped to shape with a quick flick. Droplets of mist flew from its arms. The entire group followed me as I flew past. Each dark face stabbed into my soul with that much more of an icier sting. There on the right one sprung up with a side to side shaking motion, like a plant sprouting from some malevolent seed. My lower field of peripheral vision took in the speedometer. It was probably pegged out by now. I reached the small rise that was on the horizon so long ago and went over it. The sky was still gray and the rain was still falling lightly. A black cloud of markers was racing ahead of me on three green lanes. A wave of brown and black was following quickly behind it. The radio was still crackling and displaying ‘1250 am’. My watch was still broken. The tank was still full. My knuckles were white as snow. I was thanking God that the ‘check engine’ light had not come on. The hazard flashers kept double-clicking.

Seasons greetings! I'm on the last day of a mini-vacation and enjoying every bit of it! I just finished a ten track album and have the cover production as well underway as I can manage. The novel I'm working on (not today though) is developing nicely. Its plot is forming up well and the characters are evolving 'properly' into the individuals I need them to be. You’ve caught the first chapter or two here recently. The tree is glistening and I have the pictures to prove it, finally! Holiday cheer is in the air and I hope it's infecting all of you they way it's infecting me. I’ll get the pictures to you when my net access allows. As I write this I am getting kicked off repeatedly. Oh well, that can’t dampen my spirits! The pork is on the boil and tamales’ will be assembled this evening. I made a Serrano chili-sauce the other day and will infuse some of the corn-husk packages liberally! My muse is asleep right now as she stayed up late as usual last night, or rather; she was up way too early this morning. I stroll in from time to time with a cup of coffee to tease her sense of smell. Last nights dreams found me in the company of a recently departed friend. I smoked a cigarette (I still have yet to pick that habit up again!), and milled about a mechanics garage. There was a light ‘hint’ of another friend passing away and that other friend was one of my deceased buddies’ closest friends. I’ll refrain from names out of respect. All these people from my past are embedded in my memory for life. One instance found me and my friend walking around the front of the mechanics bays and he reached over as he told me something. I faintly remember it being an anecdote of wisdom. It went something like, “You live a long clean life and then ‘this’ happens”. That’s as close as I can get. Dream memories are sometimes vague. In any case, as he told me, he plucked a big tuft of hair off my chest. Yes! It hurt! Now, I don’t have that much of a hairy chest but if there’s anything to be gleaned from that scene I hope I figure it out someday. I distinctly remember the motor-oil and grease on his hands as he was an excellent mechanic. There was a reference to cancer but my friend died suddenly of a massive heart attack. Truth be told, I was glad to see him. I have dreamt of many souls who are no longer among the living. Each and every time it was a good dream. There were smiles and never frowns. There were good words and never once was anything coarse ever said. Some spirits surprised me by simply walking into the room. Others were just there, some place I went to. This dream had a dark thread far off in the background and my ‘muse’ and her daughter were there as well. They were worried about me for some reason and crying. I made a full circuit of the shop and met them in a hug. Then I was awake. I draw my own interpretations when it comes to my dreams. To be graced by a familiar face, voice, and the soul of the ‘character’ I once knew, is a blessing I hope God keeps visiting on me for the rest of my days on this earth.

The holidays have always inspired songwriters. Old favorites are usually re-worked into new presentations sometimes referred to as modernizations. Performers give us their best and our spirits lift up and fly away from the year’s tedium. Staple tunes ring out from all media. Even print is not left behind. Familiar phrases grace many a page of newsprint, magazines, billboards, and festive department store décor. It seems to be easier to smile at each other in these times. Compassion percolates along with cheerfulness to brew a cup that begs to be shared. Some sip eagerly with one another. Others maintain their stoic indifference. The former are embolden to stoke the flames of happiness with good intentions. The latter are believed to be ever weakening in the eyes, and hearts, of the former. The latter are likened to stone blocks that the former will enjoy chiseling away at. Happiness has fun smoothing rough marble. Many artist release their proverbial “Christmas album”, or to be politically correct, their “Holiday album”. Homage to the season knows no bounds when it comes to genre and there are new tunes to be enjoyed by all. No one is left out when the celebrations begin. Those who are, refrain from the festivities by their own accord. All are welcome to participate and all are enthusiastically encouraged. Be it serious ‘crooning’, or whimsically delivered, ‘be-bopped’, a cappella, or ‘jazzed up’, diversified renditions abound. From Grammy winners all the way down to unknowns, everybody is singing a song. Muzak follows the seasonal trend and fills our ears with hauntingly familiar renditions of “Jingle Bells”, “Deck the Halls”, and more. Ringtones follow suit and people just can’t wait to be called. Sleigh bells ring out and cash registers ring up. The music of the holiday season incapacitates sadness and refuses to resuscitate it. The words of songs perforate the walls built between people, by people. The winds of celebration whistle thru jubilantly. Faces glow and hearts melt to form rivers of joy. If you can’t feel it yet you may want to go see a doctor. If you’ve never felt this don’t worry that you might have to “hope” to. We will gladly do the “hoping” for you.

The wall behind him hissed like a cornered snake about to strike. Local electromagnetic signals swam in and out of that sonic ‘snow’ as well. The occasional trucker even barked thru, loud and clear. At his feet small green, blue, and red lights told him what signal processors were on, or off. The lacquered wood and metal contraption in his hands hung from a shoulder strap like a gun too big to tote without the extra support of a thick leather strap. Twenty-four jumbo frets running between a graphite nut and a brass bridge and tail-piece reflected the rays of a single black-light bulb that glowed overhead. Two sets of double coiled, passive magnets sat in recesses in the wooden body. Six lengths of uniquely diametric wire ran just above the frets and magnetic pickups, waiting for fingers to dance upon them. Four potentiometers and a toggle switch waited to be flipped and turned to the players’ whims. A foot reached out to tap a few buttons. Lights changed color, turned on, or turned off. The right hand went to all four knobs and checked their positions one after another. It then checked the toggle and pushed it down to select the rearmost ‘pickup’. Far away clicks echoed almost silently from the ‘wall’. Fourteen twelve inch transducers moved back and forth in microscopic increments. They were the ‘wall’ that produced the ‘hiss’ sound. They moved a bit more to make the ‘clicks’. Now they moved even more as the hiss rose and fell slowly under the effect of some of the processors. The right hand went to one volume knob and slowly turned it towards full. A low moan emerged from the wall and slowly got louder. A stratum of dust faded up just above the floor. The moan mutated up thru sympathetic harmonics. Higher and higher it went fusing new notes into the moan until the ‘scream’ sounded like the very air was being burned. The lone bulb above swayed out on its long cord and floated uneasily at an odd angle. He braced his feet a bit more firmly on the floor. He released his right palm slightly and the magic of the disappearing pick was reversed as a red plectrum fell into his fingers. He leaned back just enough to still keep his balance and brought his pick-wielding hand up and then down across the strings while at the same time his left grabbed a handful of E major. The thin layer of airborne dust immediately in front of the speakers rose up like a cotton tidal wave and crested outward. Just as the ‘wave’ reached him he leaned backwards even more. His hair joined in the aerial ballet with the dust and then he brought his right hand back to the strings once again. Alternately he started to pick the low ‘E’ as a pedal tone and walked a scale up and away from it. The pedal tone intermittently punctuated the run all the way up to the highest ‘E’ he could get on the fret board. Once there he pushed that note up to an A flat and let a rain of harmonic feedback slowly vaporize it. Soft, pastel photons began streaming away from the black light bulb overhead and from the many lights at his feet. Back at the wall and sitting on top, the same thing was happening to the powerful wattage heavy heads sitting atop the two stacks. The cords linking the guitar, effects modules, and the amplifiers were whipping forward in the sonic wind. A bandana around his arm untied and flew away. The left hand began dancing out a rapid, rhythmic pattern and the pick hand followed with chipping synchronization. The flurry of high notes was like a billion hummingbirds screaming a tune in unison. His right foot went to a pedal somewhere down in the debris field and rocked it back and forth in a backbeat. The tones of the hybridized scale swept thru a deep, rich, and thick midrange with a soul searing ‘aww-wha, aww-aww-wha, awww- whaaaa-awwww!’ He settled into a seven note repetition on the two thinnest strings and then began injecting flatted notes. He then began sliding the entire short scale down half a tone at a time, all the way to the open notes, speeding up all the way until his fingers were only a blur of motion. Without a hint of the change coming, a powerful ‘G’ on the third string at the fifth fret appeared out of nowhere and cut thru the echoes of the last notes of the former scale. It came readily fused, by a brush of the picking hand thumb, with a higher harmonic scream that sent a wave of rippling pressure across the room. When the reflection bounced back thru the wind another wave formed in the air and the focal point of battling sound waves began to glow with heat. He pushed that ‘G’ up thru ‘A’ and to a ‘B’. The scream intensified and his eyes began to water. He squeezed them tightly shut and released the note back to the ‘G’. He then went to the seventh fret and popped off a rapid succession of harmonics on the third fourth and second strings. He then muted the same strings and raced thru a scale at the same frets as the harmonics. This high speed chugging went to light-speed as he accelerated it gradually. He then dropped down to the open low ‘E’ and started a run all the way back to the highest ‘E’. A sprinkling of dissonant and augmenting notes gave the new run a much different and ‘dirty’ flavor. From the high ‘E’, and without stopping, he danced the notes back down, speeding up to another blur. Halfway down the neck he broke into another run of purely harmonics across all six strings. This rapid fire of whistling screams he decelerated in small increments until he was walking them out in a slow bell-like toll. Lastly two of them formed a chord as he stepped on a pedal and activated another echo effect. He ‘hid’ the plectrum again and grabbed the toggle switch. Slamming it back and forth he produced a popping ‘on/off’ rhythm that he took from fast to slow over a few seconds. As he left the toggle in the ‘on’ position he rolled the volume knob back down slowly. The sonic wind died back down to a winter-land-hiss. The dust settled as the glow in the air faded. His hair wafted back down to his shoulders and the pastel photon streams faded away like melting snowflakes.

Tears will fall. Lamentations will materialize. Someone will shout: “Why?” The possibilities are endless each day. What will happen and what might happen are two things that hover just under our thoughts throughout the day. With nightfall we might even allow some of our wandering thoughts to rise a bit closer to the surface. Things we have no control over might find their way into our dreams. The answers our minds concoct may or may not remain with us when we wake. The way we may have thought we would face tomorrow may not be the way we face it when it arrives. The things we can control will soothe us somewhat as we tend to them. Our lives are our finest acts. We will juggle every aspect that we can with bravado and optimism. The audience of the world will watch, each from their own stage. The band-pits will be littered with the shards of fouled performances. Those shards will echo footfalls from the sky as embarrassed ‘actors’ attempt to regain their composure. There is no band down front in those ‘pits’. But the shrapnel itself will inspire music all too well. Songs are born while we are children at play. Many of those are lost to the winds of time as we grow older. Songs are born as we learn to love. Many of those are lost as we lose love. Songs are born as we flounder in failure. Many of those are lost when failure overtakes us and delivers us to the doorstep of death. Songs are born when we re-invent ourselves and rise out of our tragedies. Many of those are lost when we stop believing in the things that saved is from ourselves. No human act exist that cannot give birth to a song. There is nothing under the sun that cannot inspire a tune. Songs only die when we allow them that ‘honor’. The hiss of a speck of dust floating on a sunbeam, the whisper of the full moon on a clear night, the thrash of waves onto the beach and the scream of the sun breaking the horizon, these are a few of the things that can give birth a song. Anything we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, or even imagine can find its way into song. Interpretation knows no limits. A cigar-box, wooden stick, and a length of twine are ready tools. Just as easily, so are computers. Electricity is not required to create songs but I do like the enhancement that it provides. The wood and wire contraptions known as guitars would still be quiet background oddities if it were not for the advance of guitar technologies. A heard of stampeding horses, a lonely whale, the swish of a breeze, the howl of a hurricane, the rumble of an earthquake, the squeal of a tornado, an eagles scream, and more, all can be duplicated to an extent with an electric guitar. Most of those sounds can be made much to the ‘irk’ of musical purists. They are but the tip of a berg that comprises what a guitar can do. Defend synthesizers as you see fit. I respect them but feel far more comfortable with an ‘axe’. I have “kissed the sky”, and it “kisses” back!

12-2-2009 No other species on Earth can tell a good story like we humans. ‘Whale-song’ is beautiful in its own right and ‘dolphin-speak’ tickles the hearts of those who hear it. The long lonely howl of a wolf in the dead of winter can bring comfort or chill. Voices, words, music, and even images, on the other hand, are the tools humans mold and fold into stories. I developed a love of reading, writing, listening and watching far back in my youth. The Bible was my first book and I was lucky enough to be exposed to several versions in several forms. There were the standard King James Version, a large format ‘Mason’ styled one, (I still have two 25# ones!), and an LP or two with accompanying book. Hymnals, Catechisms, and stained-glass windows drew my curious attention for many years. The television traumatized me early on with images and sounds of human follies worldwide. Violence and conflict, murder, war, and the lamentations of many, many nations fueled my imagination and my developing character. I watched along with the world as history happened. When I got bored with that medium, I turned to two collections of encyclopedia, and libraries of books in schools and in downtown Victoria. I grew up watching the information that was always there transmogrify into the worldwide collection it is today. Stories are things I love to plant myself deep into. Be it a novel, news report, or a blog, I play an inspired movie in my head as I read. I sit there by the fire with people I have never met. I react in unison with the characters. I walk, run, and fly alongside them thru their every endeavor. Be it words, music, images, sounds, or any combination of them all, I ‘live’ the action in a storm of synaptic mind-quakes. From the factual, to the far-fetched, the journeys are always worth the thought it takes to embark. Push a button, or turn a page, and there it is unfolding into ‘real-time’ thoughts. Many things cause the births of stories. Some are dreams simply recorded in some fashion, with or without the intention to be shared. Many are factual truths someone has deemed it imperative we ingest mentally. Some are straightforward, simple, and clear in presentation, while others can be hidden deep within complicated forms of expression. Whether the meaning is apparent or vague, rest assured, there was a reason for the way it was presented to you. Many ‘stories’ create spin-offs of other stories like sparks flying off a grinding-wheel. There will never be a limit to the stories we can tell save for the longevity of our species. Our stories will end when we the last human ceases to exist. 12-2-2009-B There are some emotions that are better left in the graves we dig for them every day. Somehow they arise time and time again to block even our best efforts at maintaining our dream of what civilization should be. Though they are an integral part of what makes us ‘human’, many of us still expend the defensive energies we hope will vanquish them forever. We hold the line every day and peer across the misty meadow of each morning hopeful they will not show. In certain seasons, when the winds of joy are whistling with their loudest gales, those antonymic demons of human emotion bear their teeth and claws in ferocities with all too familiar precedent. Those times, when the kites of our hearts are let out the farthest and our spools of memories are being spliced with newly woven cords, are when they lash into reality and do their best to fray and part the strings that hold our souls together. They cut us, and we bleed. We parry and they thrust again and again. Finally, we lock our spools into place and find the perfect splinters to thrust between those emotional tiger’s toes. When the smoke is going down, the best of us stand by. We wait for the proverbial opportunity to become the mice that will pull the splinters out. While we wait we shovel deep places out of the end of the day. Graves for emotions will be filled when the rapid infections of wooden shrapnel fells the beasts that have once again delivered their dastardly assaults. All human emotions are sown into place either genetically, or environmentally. We have little choice but to learn to ‘properly’ use those that our parents or parent gives us. Those engrams finally affect the emotions we develop from the environment(s) we grow up within. Barring an injury or disease of the brain, the emotions our characters will eventually come to utilize can be predicted somewhat. At certain crossroads in our lives, we discover which emotions we need to discard. We also discover which ones we should keep as well as which of those ‘keepers’ we need to augment or mitigate. We humans cannot write the instruction manual detailing the many changes our species needs emotionally. We, after all, are the product and only the ‘developer’ can do that. Sadly, the last time I checked, there were no publishers with any new manuscripts from God. I for one will keep dreaming one is on the way. Few human attributes can inspire art the way emotions can. Many a muse has been the specter of soul searing emotion. Love, anger, hatred, compassion, greed, envy, solace, despair, jubilation, lust, hunger, and the list goes on forever. Synonyms upon synonyms, even though they are simply words with the same meaning, give us a multitude of names for our emotions. I know my definition for each of these emotions I feel, but yours will surly differ, even if the word for said emotion is spelled the same. Love is love but you and I may assign differing meanings to it. Furthermore, there is no limit to the art that emotions can inspire. Human actions come in a distant second. 12-3-2009 Let me count the things I tend to hoard. 1. Guitar World (magazine) 2. Recording (magazine) 3. Heavy Metal (magazine/comic book) 4. Tally-books (it’s an ‘oilfield’ thing) 5. Severely worn guitar picks (it’s a ‘tone’ thing) 6. Battered old T-shirts (oilfield uniforms chafe!) 7. Bandanas (the latest was a gift a friend picked up in Roswell, NM. Green aliens on black.) 8. Fossils (from west Texas) 9. Rocks (collected from Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and New Mexico.) That’s just a loose list, to be truthful. I could add a few more items like guitars, guitar amps, business cards, stickers, ink pens, and more. Nothing is overflowing as I do ‘clean house’ from time to time. ‘These are a few of my favorite things.’ One item that has served me well for many years was finally passed on to a better place. The old tree has found new life with Glenda’s Mother. I bought it long before we even met, almost twelve years ago. It stood the test of time and survived a failed marriage. The best memories with it are obviously the last ten years of decorating that it has withstood from my ‘baby-doll’. (She calls me that too.) Each year it looked different and Glenda now has several different sets of decorations that she eagerly mixes and matches to stun the eyes. This year we start anew with a new tree from JC Penny. Its lighter needles have brightened the room and it is hung with a beautiful set of oriental ornaments, red and black balls, silver trimmed black bows, and poinsettias and red ‘lazy-sticks’ at the top. We did this the night of December the 2nd and I know even today that she is nowhere near finished. As for presents, well, let’s just keep our fingers crossed. That’s another blog altogether. 12-7-2009 Last night I finished a new set of lyrics. I read it to my muse and she seemed to like it. I am enthusiastically dreaming of the music the number will require for telling its story. The words allude in one place to the album title. At the outset, whenever I begin to write lyrics, I put the date and time at the top of the page. When I finish also add that date and time. Most of the published pages of lyrics on the web have these dates and times but I don’t know exactly why I write them in. Maybe it’s a memory thing. Emotionally, the source of the lyric is usually my memory of a past experience. Other times it’s just a “brick-out-of-the-blue”. The inspirations I get run from the past, thru the present, and beyond hopes and dreams of the future. Time is both relevant and irrelevant to me. The moment I react to inspiration quickly dives into the past. Having a date and time written on the page is like having an anchor point in time to mentally go directly to. I have probably written thousands of lyrics over the years. Those that I’ve been able to save are still there in written form or on back-up discs. I sometimes get on a kick and write during every spare moment of the day for weeks on end. I have a primal need to get the stories in my head down on paper or hard-drive. The lucidity with which I operate in is deep and always a mentally welcoming challenge. Poetry plays a part in writing lyrics but not in the sense that there needs to be a rhyme to every passage. The art of rhyming is only a single tool that can be employed when writing words for songs. The last words can be the rhyme, the first words can rhyme, the rhyme can be in the middle of the passages, or anywhere else. You can also create rhymes with single letters. The strategic placement of words to facilitate such vernacular synchronicities is a feat accomplished by thought, and writing, working in tandem. The easy way is to write things out and then play with the word placement on a scratch sheet. The hard way is to think it up on the fly as you write. I tend towards the latter as it provides the mental workout I really crave. One look at any original handwritten lyrics will divulge the extent of my word wrestling, not to mention my bad handwriting. Likewise, a look at any printed out sheet on the music stand will likely be covered with arrangement notes and penciled in corrections. A long drawn out lyric will sometimes get whittled down to a short, to the point song. Sometimes I’ll have to write in additional lyrics to ‘stretch out’ a sparse set of verses or a chorus. Digital, or pen to paper, nothing is ever ‘written in stone’. Changes are a part of any songwriting endeavor. Muses can change their stripes just as readily as the words that form in my mind can be changed by my intuition, some necessity, or my imagination. When the words change it’s my prerogative. When the muses change the song can still remain the same. Change is inevitable. Inspirations, and their many eloquent flavors, can last forever.

To have not can weigh heavily on a man’s heart. His children look up expectantly and he hurts with the knowledge of all that they want, that he cannot give them. His imagination is flooded with tears but his countenance is kept dry by pride. His stomach and his mind roil ceaselessly, both trying to arrest his attention by forming knots around the barbed-wires of life. Had he even a little to give, he would easily do so. Emotions, no matter how well intended, will fill no stomachs. The memories of smiles may last a lifetime but the memory in the muscles will fade just as quickly as the smiles fade into the past. There are those in far worse circumstance, and those in far better. In between those two extremes is the filling of the pie of life. The lower of the extremes has always outweighed the upper. The scale has always been tipped unfairly. All attempts to adjust it have failed miserably. The many small pockets of great success have yet to weave together into a flame of change this world so desperately needs. Wealth is curdling on the top. Poverty is fermenting below. The bucket is rusting thru and thru, so how do we save this ‘only batch’ that has been drawn in the dead of winter? I have ‘dropped coinage’ into the red buckets more this year than in any other. I can only harbor hope that I am making a difference. I am not up in the ‘curdle’, yet I am not too deep into the ‘ferment’. I know exactly how far my ‘dollar’ will stretch before it breaks. The faces of strangers chill my heart as I see them hoping for the best in an economy that promises the worst. I don’t look up in contempt thru the ‘curdle’. I simply look up for encouraging warmth. As sparse as the inhabitants are up there, in the ‘haystack’ of wealth, one can find a few shiny needles of warmth. While some look in with longing, only seeing the materialistic, others look in and see lonely clusters of happiness and rare glimpses of ‘goodness’. While some look out in ignorance of reality, seeing only a world keen on coming to take everything away, others look out and contemplate how to best ‘make a difference’, and allow their synapses to burn with compassion. How easily the places of those looking from one side of the glass could have ended up on the other. ‘I can achieve that status.’ I promise myself that if I do, my conduct will never disgrace my name. I remember that with all my struggles to date I may still be in the strata where all those above look down and are ‘disgraced’ that ‘we’ exist. From lofty towers that most take for granted, because lying to themselves is too easy, we are perceived as the ‘disgraced’, and that that is our predominant mindset. But, we are proud for the distances we have crossed. We are proud for the dark chasms we have bridged. We are proud for the many ‘little’ achievements we make. We are proud of our survival, and our pride is the cement of our strength from God. We are proud for the content of our character. We are proud of the strength in our hands that carries us thru each day’s labor. The law may take our progress from our plates before our forks and knives are near enough to cleave a morsel, but that unfair portion stolen by words is but another sacrifice forced upon us that we bear in our mediocrity, side by side. I can wish all I want that I was ‘rich’. When I really think about it, I am. ‘Rich’ has nothing at all to do with money or possessions. Those documents and epaulets of convenience were never, and will never, belong to those who have to use them to simply survive. True treasures are family and friends. Each smile amongst those ‘tribes’, (thanks for such a sweet word Coolgranny!), is like a handful of ‘kimberlitic’ soil. Just be patient enough to turn it over a bit and you will find the diamonds that have always been there. I will always dream for the best. I will always fight for a fair slice. I will always keep a handful of the burned and blackened bottom crust, and I will always keep trying to get just a little of that ‘bittersweet’ upper crust under my fingernails. Even anything less than a grain of cinnamon will do, but my pride will always prevent me from asking for it. I only want to earn it rightfully and in the most honest of fashions. In that way, when it becomes a gift to my progeny, the pride I feel will be truly mine to feel. Until then, I will sing of my dreams and my muses will keep me crowded with good company.

11-28-2009-12:16am The force of life is powerful enough to build machines that can leave the solar system yet it retains the power to destroy every bit of evidence that it was ever here. It can be as tender as the flow of endoplasmic-reticulae, or as harsh as billions screaming in unison. Its diversity stretches from the nano world of viruses and bacteria all the way to the behemoths we call blue whales. The species that seems to regard itself as the most intelligent on this small, blue marble argues over how and when the initial spark that created life occurred. It argues over the lives of its own unborn. It argues over politics, religion, land, resources, and anything else it can think of. It also seems to be keen on the destruction of itself along with as much of all other life here. Countless tons of chemicals are used to grow countless tons of food. Countless tons of fish are pulled from the oceans. Countless more tons of waste are generated and pumped back into the ground, air and waters. Countless facts are yet to be discovered about what effects all this is having on the ecosystem. Much has been learned about how the world works after the damage has been done. Many fight for the earth but countless more could care less. Some dreamers would change everything to reflect the utopias in their minds. Some would change only their immediate world. Still, others would change a few specific aspects the world over. Good or bad, dreamers will dream. These days seem to have no shortage of “bad” dreamers. They make the news far more readily than the good ones. My music will always reflect my dreams, and my nightmares. It will always be influenced by the world around me, the past, the present, the future, and my imagination. Inspirations will come and go like the tides. The end products they instigated are but a record of their existence and influence. My music is not a collection of gems that I have cut and polished in my own way. My memories of the muses are the bounty in the box I am trying to bury on an island. My bare hands are my shovels. The sand is heavy with water. I stop for a swig of rum. I look into the box and realize that no matter how deep I bury it, every memory will still be with me, nestled into my synapses. With any luck, some of them will be equally at home in the synapses of a few others I was allowed to share them with. 11-29-2009-2:10pm When I sit back and relax my mind, it jumps into a daydream mode all by itself. It pulls up references from memories and yearnings, dreams and nightmares alike, and it uses such things to ‘create’ small movies. A rapid succession of these sometimes barrels, like so many freight trains, thru my thoughts and across some lower screen of my visual cortex. Sights, sounds, textures, and emotions weave a new universe that becomes a momentary playground. Sometimes there are multitudes of ‘other’ characters there, other times I am alone. Small crowds gather, or not, and the scene evolves. Everything my mind creates becomes something I have to find a use for; Plants, animals, machinery, ‘beings’, elements, compounds, planets, stars, galaxies, universes, and laws of physics that have to be applied, albeit sometimes in a very imaginative fashion. There are no boundaries to what can happen, no depths that can remain unknown, and no heights that cannot be attained. Chasms are bridged. Barriers fall. Lifetimes pile upon lifetimes and I feel from the perspective of the very soul. In the blink of an eye I am re-born back to reality, and back to the necessary pain that reminds me that I am only human. I peel myself from the chair, couch, bed, or where I was standing, and get on with what is left of the day. In the back of my mind the remnants of a daydream settle out of the air like so many dandelion seeds, made of so many, many, shiny things.

I'm still in a turkey coma, and it still feels good! I can't wait to get into the slow "dosage-reduction" phase over the next day or so. I'm very thankful for yesterday’s company. One surprise guest with a great "fruity" bottle of wine really capped it all off with the perfect vintage, for a perfect meal, with the perfect company. As usual, we all gave our individual thanks one after the other and then proceeded to eat and converse across many interesting subjects. Contentment abounded and no rib was left un-encumbered with the heavy press of turkey and all the fixings. The evening wound down and the kids decided they would make it out early for “Black Friday”. My “Muse” became the luckless driver for that foray. I slept in. I have many things to be thankful for. I am blessed with much and I thank God for all that he has seen fit to provide me with. It is said that as long as we remember where we came from, we will always know where we are and where we need to go. (Don’t ask me who said it, I just think that philosophy is one of many important ones.) With that stated, I want to share something else I am thankful for with you. I’ll do that in my own unique way, and, here goes. One Of My “Most Thankful For” Things: I had been sleeping that night, in the living room. In my own fog of destitution I had been kicked out of the bedroom. I did not know the hour when fate scratched the ceiling and dusted me with its own form of “glitter”. My chest tightened and my lungs began to feel as if they had disappeared. My jaw clenched and my eyes snapped open wide. I could see in the darkness as if it were day. I yelled out thru my teeth as I felt what I thought were my gums ballooning up to explode. “What is it?” she asked simply. I looked up thru watering eyes and tried to communicate a “dial 911”. I thought I conveyed it clearly. All I got was “What?” That was the last word my mind recorded as I tried with more and more difficulty to get her do take action. Hand signals and what little I could get thru my teeth all seemed to elicit the same response. Dumb, wordless questions drifted into my ears and I realized that one, I might well be having a heart attack, and two, she seemed to be waiting for me to die. Somewhere in all this she may have gotten the phone in hand but I clearly recall she never dialed any number. I felt a single tear roll out of my right eye and across my temple. My head, gums, and chest felt like so many sticks of dynamite with only a nano-meter of fuse left. After a few moments looking up into those eyes I knew what they wanted to see. They wanted to see me dead and cold there on the floor when an ambulance arrived. I knew no call would be made until I had left. There and then, the sparks of a vow were initiated. I vowed that would be the last time my heart was ever broken. As it shattered I let the pieces fall where they would. I could pick them up later, this time. The screaming freight train slowly faded from my head and the painful puff of my gums diminished. The dull stake thru my heart seemed to withdraw along with the “concrete” air that had “set-up” in my lungs. She was still there, speaking in questions I will never care to remember, as I emerged from the “attack”. I let her ask a few more times before I gave an answer. With each moment I could see she thought I might really be on the way out. When her eyes widened slightly I gave her a sighing, “I’m okay.” I’ve never seen a clearer dismay on a human beings face, ever. She was clearly disappointed that I was still, alive. “I’m okay.” I never went to the doctor for whatever had happened that night. My speculation points towards my own personal problems and anxiety more than coronary. In any case I will always be thankful to God that then was not my time, and that my “would- be” murderer had failed to enjoy her front row seat to my demise that she so clearly wanted to “watch”. As for the person I was way back then, there is no doubt that either of us would have eventually found a way to “get rid of” the other, sooner or later. I eventually “set asunder” what God had joined together and that is one weight I have no remorse about having to shoulder. Whatever penance I owe or is owed to me, God will balance the final scale. Where I’ve been, where I am, and where I’m going, are all a part of who I am, and who I am thankful to be.

Chapter I FROM THE WALL OF DEFEAT I was in the little 8 X 8 for a long time. It was one of twenty thousand that made up the “wall of defeat”. That wall faced bow-ward across fifty kilometers of deck-plate. The pitch-over of the forward “command-decks” assembly gave me an inspiring view of the stars ahead. That view mostly inspired my dismay as I had a front row seat to every attack this behemoth had been a part of. Planets would come into view and one of two things would happen. If launches occurred from the surface, a fleet of various sized ships would launch in seconds and race out in small burst of speed like so much water falling away. A staccato of hisses and thumps, bangs and pings would echo hauntingly thru the dark cathedral, sometimes for hours, as life was being destroyed just ahead. If there were no launches from below, then a dip-nosed orbit would be achieved. Not much longer afterward small needles of blue exhaust would drift out and head ground-ward. Everywhere they touched the atmosphere would move aside and the ground would bulge up into a blinding little ball of light. Shock-waves would race outward and blend together. I watched many atmospheres swell to many times their normal thickness and then simply, evaporate into space. The Niaro are bi-pedal. They all stand exactly 9 meters, 9 centimeters, and 9 millimeters tall. They were thought to be machines until the first “conversations” with them were translated. Their greetings were always the same. “Our carbon base/liquid/chemical data will live. You will die.” Even when looped and left in the “fuzzy-logic” translators, nothing any clearer than those words has ever came out. Very few of their fallen have ever been recovered. They are living creatures but not like anything ever encountered. We don’t even know how long they might live. The only things for sure are their 9-spiral-DNA, four extremely good eyes, and four massive arms with four-fingered hands on each. They use high energy slug weapons as well as knives and swords. They also use hyper-yield fusion war-heads, “planet killers”. They are on an inexorable slow march thru the spiral arm, towards Earth. We still don’t know how many there are or where they come from. They don’t seem to care much about new tech and so have not developed anything like our worm-hole propulsion systems. Below the speed of light, they still advance, however slowly. Every so often two or three would come in front of my cage and carry on a conversation in that gurgle-click-whale song-moan-scream that they use as language. One always had some type of data device that information seemed to be put into and taken out of. It looked like a 2 meter by 2 meter piece of glass. I have never been able to decipher any of the symbols I have seen in reverse from my side. I have picked a few out though. The view I had was a triple-edged sword. It was breathtaking, but gut-wrenching as well. To any attackers the utility of my front row seat should have been immediately apparent. The silver bars would have been clearly visible thru a small telescope against the black metal of the hull. I’m only guessing that the “canopy” that was my sky for so long was made of a single huge sheet of a carbon matrix. Who can make space-worthy “diamond-glass” sheets that big? Who could make enough to construct thousands of ships, each 99 kilometers long? I was with the fourth fleet that was sent out to engage them. We were decimated in a few days. We refrained from frontal attacks quickly after we saw the prisoners of our earliest moves paraded in our faces. We wanted to rescue them of course, but the Niaro had other ideas. They were a constant destabilization tool. Watching them being tortured really did a number on a lot of people. One day the cells would be full, the next, completely empty. One day they came upon a large patrol-cruiser. The battle was of course short, but spectacular. There was no surrender, but there was a surprise for me. An errant single seat fighter was “tractored” into the cathedral with the canopy slid back. Aside from a few burn marks it was intact. Even the fat tires still had nitrogen in them. The flickering lights in the cockpit told me there was an electrical problem. It sat there for what may have been months. No problem with the energy cells depleting. Small fusion reactors would have kept them fully charged for years. I was beginning to worry about my fate but also thinking of escape. One day, “Repair!” I was bolted from a daydream by a booming voice from just outside the upper right of my “gate”. And then it rang out in baritone again with a mighty, “fix! Shall! You!” The translation of our language seemed to be easier for them than theirs was for us. I fully understood what they wanted of me. “Yes!” was my reply and the gate swung open. After a half kilometer walk in which I actually had to jog to keep pace with my chaperon, I was allowed to give the little fighter a full inspection. It was an F86-wedge, with a fusion powered drive and full worm-hole capability. The armament consisted of the standard twin lunge-barrel 30mm proton rail cannon, the 60mm hard-beam fusion cannon on each wing-tip, and the 10mm fusion marble launchers on either side of the lower fuselage. Even thru the flicker of lights I could see that all magazines were still at 100%. The tactical helmet was sitting upside down, just behind the headrest with every lead still plugged in. The malfunction was easy to find by simply looking at the center screen on the main panel. The pilot had forgotten to half-arm the ejection seat in-flight system. It’s one of the things on the rapid launch list that should never be skipped. When he or she did, that left the canopy latch at three-quarters engaged. When the throttle on the left is set to attack speed many get the back of their index finger banged up on the manual latch. The canopy slides back and… I finally noticed the black, almost red slime that had coated the entire micro-habitat. The harness was still buckled tight. Very small pieces of uniform were still in the seat and maybe even a few bits of bone. Right then and there I resolved to seriously plan an escape.

At the fringes of my imagination I am playing with my comprehension of distance. It is a mental strain to attempt to perceive the target location but, the attempt is the basis for the exercise. There is no mental relaxation that I do for this. I just concentrate right off the bat. Two points are seemingly close enough to almost be one. I then mentally zoom in while keeping both in perfect focus and in place. As I zoom in I also scale up. The side effect of dizziness is easy to manage. Vertigo is a bit more difficult but not too much so. A point of threshold nears and the mental image begins to buffet slightly. Just past the threshold I enter uncharted territory. I push the limits of concentration and enjoy the pristine taste of the new. My mind’s eye splits in two. One looks back and causes part of the illusion to ripple almost out of control. The other maintains the course of transmogrification. Tension builds between the two in the form of synaptic feedback. They begin to switch internal views back and forth at an ever increasing speed. They bifurcate and compress. A tone explodes just within the highest frequencies of human hearing. The high decibel white-noise slowly drops in pitch like a whale carcass drifting into the abyss. A lifetime later it almost hovers forever at the lower limit of hearing. Then, it starts again from the top. The staccato scene-switching begins to take on a steady rhythm. The flashes produced are direct harmonics of the infra-ultra-tone. When the tone and the light exist at an even pace I mentally push myself the final distance and latch onto the second anchor point. The light sweeps a spectrum in conjunction with the sound. With one foot at home and one foot here everything trifurcates. I am home. I am there. I am here. I am halfway between both and looking both ways. Due to the orbit of the target world, I slowly unbalance. My right foot, calf, and thigh begin to twist unnaturally. I slip off and catch a few glimpses of civilization as I whiplash back to my singular self. The taste of things unknown permeates my mouth. My ears ring with the cries of aliens. My retinas are burned with the afterimage of strange colors and my olfactory bulb is still laughing almost uncontrollably with smells it cannot even begin to identify. I look up and the clouds have begun to creep back in. The stars are still shaking.