The True Inspiration

I'm writing in the dark at a hotel right outside of Louisiana. Its not really dark. Its 915 am and the curtains are closed. I was squashed in a van with 12 other guys for a grueling trip out of Austin yesterday en route to Atlanta. I was very quiet for most of the day lost in thought and trying to keep an embolism from happening in my ankle.

There is stress everywhere in my life right now for a long list of reasons I'm not going to go into. I was on the verge of second guessing my decision to live my dream at a very advanced rock and roll age somewhere out on that highway yesterday...when I thought of my sister. I have not talked about Meaghan for a long time here, but she has been on the cusp of my psyche constantly. I felt a strangely renewed sense of a fierce need for tapping into my creative side after she died. I had been coasting along in cover bands, barely writing, depressed, stressed out and rattled by my blue collar future. I learned so much, albeit painfully while she struggled for that last year and a half...and one of those invisible lessons was to use the time you're given..it sounds so trite...but it really forced me to break out of this non committal shell of considering myself an artist.

I guess that's why I'm here...singing in a band and scrunching into a van.Because she reminded me what I was really put on this earth for again. To create. It has put a hard and heavy load of burden, fear and stress on the two people I love back home and I have a weighty heart when I lean against the van window and contemplate my choices...maybe nothing will come of this that would lead to anything of a career in music...but I have to believe as an artist that I'm doing the right thing.The real thing. My sister is still up front stage right..resting her arms on the monitors and singing along. I see my wife and son there too..proud of me and singing along..with little earplugs in Hudson's ears of course.

I hope to create new masterpieces somehow from the tales spun on this angly trek though America...and someday share them with whoever will be among the crowd.