Skip to content

Tag: inspiration

Ameri Can

Published on April 26, 2025

America doesn’t need Democrats to save it. It doesn’t need Republicans. It doesn’t need liberals or conservatives, leftists or righties, centrists, Independents, old school or new wave, fundamentalist or radical, or any other kind of way to divide, disappoint, distract, dilute, dullen or deaden all of us. In separate boxes, on separate lists, in separate discussions, decisions, and definitely on separately and securely maintained documentation.

We need to stop writing this shit down so it can be spoken aloud.

That is not America. This is not America.

It may be an idiotic thing to say, but America is not that easy to destroy. If you believe in the ideal. If you actually live your life as if the ideals by which this country was founded are real, in the way that so many will swear that their own personal savior is alive and well and still talking to his people the way he talked to people 2000 some years ago.

The point is that all these folks who are in “power” don’t own America. They don’t even run it. They all work for us. They are our employees. The executive, legislative, and judicial branch, and every department, unit, field office, division, and individual representative. They report to us. And their employment contract is the Constitution of the United States.

Not standing up to a bully isn’t just cowardly or shameful. It’s breach of contract. It doesn’t matter what side of the fence, aisle, country, or any other dividing line you are. Or at what level.

I have one thing to say to all of them. Do your jobs. For me, your boss. Or you’re fired.

26 Apr 2025

Leave a Comment

The Salmon in the Streambed

Published on April 1, 2025

About 30 years ago I wrote something almost every single day: poetry, essays, lengthy monologues. I hung out with writers and attended a weekly open mic poetry reading. Like when I’m in a band, I write songs for that band to play. I thought a lot about “stream of consciousness” and usually just started writing until I stopped. Some interesting things developed as a result that’s for sure.

But it makes me wonder – when people say stream of consciousness, what exactly do they mean? And how, exactly, is consciousness anything BUT a stream? Is it ever a lake, or ocean? Can it also be a mud puddle, a leaky faucet, or a urinal? When we say we regain consciousness, are we talking about a merely awake state or an awoken one? If you are truly conscious, are YOU even really there? The Buddhists and some Hindus suggest that what you perceive, what you are conscious of at that lower level, is a mere aggregation of sensate objects and receivers, with no permanent or underlying substance whatsoever. Not a void or nothingness, but simply an absence of uncaused phenomenon.

Is there really any other place where we exist, EXCEPT in the streambed of inspiration, as the Celts would have put it? In that sense, does a fish comprehend the nature of water any more than a bird appreciates the nature of air? A medium for temporal energy dispersion, nothing more, and the outside that makes the inside stay where it is, at least when we’re not really conscious of how we are interdependently connected to each and every other thing across all time.

Imagination, creativity, inspiration, exultation, joy, happiness. Are these things actually anything other than the perception of truly being alive – those moments when the dull dust of every survival is rubbed clean away and we are able to connect fully to the universe? As I wrote a while ago, a place where “we are not lost in these woods, nor are they lost in us.”

If we are REALLY all connected, is it possible for any of us to actually disconnect? Or is that simply another illusion, a deception we buy into when we need for whatever reason some “alone” time? That’s another oxymoron, isn’t it? Alone time. If time is a never-ending spool that stretches back into the past and forward into the future, ad infinitum, with only a spec of a dot at the point where the Speed of Now creates the coordinates that look like us, how could we EVER really be alone? Wouldn’t we be co-existing not only with every other thing throughout time itself, but also ourselves in whatever the smallest increment of evolutionary change we can imagine might be?

So, is consciousness a stream? If it’s not a stream, is it consciousness? If we claim to be awake, or awoken, what is the state in which we are not? Is that not also part of the stream?

01 APR 2025

Leave a Comment

The Speed of Now

Published on April 16, 2013

What use is feeling sorry
for what might have never been,
some chimera of fantasy
that if it had appeared
might easily have torn to shreds
the life it would improve,
inspired to burn too brightly,
leaving nothing in its wake?

What use is sad reflection
on a course you left behind,
now overgrown in disrepair,
its signposts worn away?
The journey down that avenue
might not have led you here,
but who’s to say what’s for the best,
or where footsteps should lead?

What use is reminiscing
on the glory days of yore,
mad hours of strength and courage
when you and the world were young
and did not know of what to come,
of bridges yet to burn
whose light would fade out, in the end,
to soot and bitter ash?

What use is feeling sorry
for what still may come to pass,
imagining the road ahead
determined by those past,
a die cast in some yesterday
that cannot be undone,
a somber, gray formality
that withers into death?

What use in such pretending?
There is no course so set
that it cannot be altered
or made to turn or bend.
Leave off such mad dejection,
if you would live at all.
We travel at the speed of now
or stagnate where we fall.

16 APR 2013

1 Comment

Lay down

Published on February 3, 2013

Lay down your weary tune;
lay down your weary tune.
You’ve been singing it for far too long.
When others faltered, you still held on strong:
never a missed note or phrase gone wrong.
Lay down your weary tune.

Lay down your worried mind;
lay down your worried mind.
All those ideas that still carry you,
lost dreams and wishes that have not come true,
still doing nothing with nothing to do:
lay down your worried mind.

Lay down your troubled heart;
lay down your troubled heart;
You’ve let your flame go out and found the dark,
toasted with gasoline to find a spark,
and in the scheme of things, to leave your mark.
Lay down your troubled heart.

Lay down your weary tune;
lay down your weary tune.
Just find another, something more inspired:
outside the door where things are still not wired.
Leave that old one to quietly retire;
lay down your weary tune.

03 FEB 2013

Leave a Comment

Vintage Vinyl circa 1978

Published on April 23, 2008

If you thought the eight-track list was bad, check out the albums I owned in 1978-1979:

The Eagles – Greatest Hits 1971-1975
The Beach Boys – 40 Greatest Hits
Johnny Cash – Ring of Fire
Elvis Presley – Gold Records No. 1, 2, 3 and 4
Kiss – Double Platinum
Kiss – Ace Frehley
ELO – Out of the Blue
The Bay City Rollers – Greatest Hits
Queen – News of the World
Roy Clark – The Everloving Soul of Roy Clark
Linda Hargrove – Music is Your Mistress*
The Blues Project – Reunion in Central Park*
Freddie Hart – His Greatest Hits*
Maynard Ferguson – Chameleon
Columbia Jazz Sampler – 1958
The Music Goes Round and Round – Decca Vol. 1 – 1951-1954
The Music Goes Round and Round – Decca Vol. 2 – 1955-1957
The Music Goes Round and Round – Decca Vol. 3 – 1958-1959

* These I actually won in the fourth grade from a WKTN radio station contest for writing a Halloween essay.

Leave a Comment

Eclectic Eight Tracks circa 1978

Published on April 18, 2008

So here’s the rundown on my eight-track library circa 1978:

The Yardbirds – Five Live Yardbirds
The Yardbirds – Greatest Hits
Carlos Santana and Alice Coltrane – Illuminations
The Beatles – Love Songs
The Beatles – Live at the Hollywood Bowl
The Beatles – Rock and Roll Music
The Beatles – Singles*
Todd Rundgren – Runt: The Ballad of Todd Rundgren
Boston Pops – The Best of Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops
Various Artists – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (soundtrack)

The Beatles I got courtesy of my cousin, who transferred these albums from his vinyl collection to eight-track for a Christmas present one year.

The remainder were acquired in Kmart and various drugstore sale bins in and around Forest and Kenton, Ohio.

I listened to most of these albums A LOT. One bit of evidence of that is: I loaded up this Rundgren album and listened to it today, and knew almost all the words and every one of the vocal nuances. The piano songs and vocal style in particular were a huge influence on my writing at the time (1977-1979).

Leave a Comment

Home Bass

Published on December 7, 2007

Last night, a friend and fellow bass player commented that after having seen me play lead guitar (I usually play bass with Hardrick Rivers, but occasionally fill in on guitar when another bass player is available and wants to sit in), he understood my approach to bass. He classified me more or less as a “lead” bass player, and also made the comment that I was a better guitarist than bass player.

Bear in mind this is a person who thinks I am a damned fine bass player – probably the best of the bunch that plays around town with Hardrick.

I was, I’ll admit, a little taken aback by the guitarist comment. My original instrument (down the long chain of history) was upright bass. I’ve played guitar for about 30 years, but it’s only within the past decade that I’ve ever had the audacity to call myself a “guitarist”. In addition, when you look at my primary bass influences, while they do include Duck Dunn, Jamie Jamerson, Bootsy Collins and Ray Brown, the “heavy hitters” are really Jack Casady, Paul McCartney, Phil Lesh, Chris Squire, Greg Lake, John Entwistle and Jack Bruce. What’s the commonality there? Melody. These are “lead” bass players. After mulling that over, I felt a little better about being that kind of player. Yeah, that’s what I am. Not a “popper” or “slapper” or a “walker” even (although I can walk like a MF). Although getting someone to recognize that I am in the same league as these other lead players? Forget about it (but that is the topic of another conversation altogether).

Most of what I apply to one instrument, I apply to others. It’s the same fretboard for guitar and bass, for the most part. The scales from one are applicable to the other. Why shouldn’t you bend, hammer on, pull off, slide, etc., on both bass and guitar? Melodic and improvisational constructs are melodic and improvisational constructs regardless of the medium.

So am I a guitarist who plays bass, or a bassist who plays guitar? Hell if I know. Do people like Leon Russell, Greg Lake, Dick Taylor or Steven Stills have the same kind of identity crisis?

Leave a Comment