Led by ears & eyes & surprise, we sent out
seeking at the age of 17, collecting want & wisdom, song by song. Standing
in line for tickets & saving ticket stubs, the mystery revealed itself
inside record albums & lyric booklets & radio programs & live
concerts.
Rock ‘n’ roll provided & still provides the
soundtrack to every life lesson, a cultural lineage & cross-country
itinerary to ineffable inspiration & dancefloor insurrection. Going to
shows & meeting performers & hanging with other fans—this movement
& motion of music & magic combined both hobby & vocation in a
lifelong passion to discover the divine inside poem & song.
Beware what happens when such a traveling urge gets
under the skin, when adventure battles to beat responsibility, when luxury
seems more necessary than necessity. Pack a powerful medicine bag, pray an even
more powerful prayer—& pray that others are praying for you, too. I never
quite learned or discerned the proper distinction between the careless &
carefree, & it’s nothing shy of miraculous that despite some quite visible
scars, I’ve still survived & thrived relatively unscathed.
The song on the wind would carry me in every
direction across terrible & beautiful terrains, from bicycle pilgrimages
down broken-bottle alleyways, up to abandoned rooftops & down to barroom
epiphanies. We followed many trails up many mountains, leap-frogged fears &
followed detours & dead-ends & dirty gravel gunshot grooves.
Chasing butterflies across hilltop utopias, I lost my mind & taught the blind
to lead the blind. Rattlesnakes & moonshine couldn’t cure an itch as I went
from suburb to inner city to rural backwoods & finally empty-handed to a
rented-house in a college town. Slowly finding my voice & losing it &
finding it again. Certain constants carved tracks in the sand only to get
washed away by the tide. Certain mercy & meaning hung loose only to get
choked out by ego & pride.
Like cyclists seeking cover from a downpour, like
spelunkers seeking light, we sought help like a drowning man desperate for dry
land. So many illusions like guns to bury in the ground! So many apologies
& too many mistakes & taking a mulligan on the 18th hole of
life! We lost the ability or reckless desire to stay up all night, but we
deliberately refined our meditative embrace of every dawn. Each day the reset
button blinks brightly, our daily bread nourishes us to travel lightly. Never
stop looking, never stop listening, never stop living just one day at a time.
Lots of different names for the incomprehensible
& infinite love, but I am sitting out the argument game, dodging dogmatics
& saving semantics for another saving time, for at least two hours sublime tonight.
There’s a soundtrack that speaks wonders about the wonderful, & this is
only one installment, & I’ve decided to play it loud.
There are different mixtapes to different life
stories, but this collection of tunes tonight is mine, an audio autobiography
if you will, & I want to share it with you.
