For those of you who are wondering how I am following the car wreck I am alive and for the most part unharmed.  I am sad to see my new truck smashed up the day after I bought it, but things come and go I am just happy to be here.  I don’t have any word on the other driver yet, but I will post up here as soon as I know how she is.

For those who don’t know anything about it, I was hit in my new truck by a young girl who ran a red light.  She never slowed down ( I guess that she was distracted the light had been red for a while) and she T-boned me at about 50 mph… She was taken away in an ambulance and I really hope that she is OK.  I am pretty sore, but not dead.  The show must go on anyway, I am playing tonight at the pavilion on Carolina Beach… There will be fire works and much hoopla… Here is a little song that I wrote to commemorate my little brush with that fine line between driving along without a care in the world and the end of it all. It is very rough and unedited so please excuse the sound and quality.

I am new to the world of MacBooks, but I am in it.  I decided to play around with mine today and this is what came out.  iMovie and GarageBand are amazing programs.

The song in the video has been in my head for weeks and sometimes playing it is the only way to get it out.  This song takes me back to my youth.  I can still feel the warm wind through the pick-up truck windows.  The music still sounds thin from the old speakers and worn-out cassette tape.  I’m in the truck with my Dad and we are going wade fishing in the Shenandoah river… The only other things that gives me vivid visceral memories like that are smells.  Songs are a lot like smells.  Smells that you can hear.

I have had a bit of a dry spell for writing songs for the last few weeks.  I have been very busy and haven’t had that much alone time.  For me writing is a private process for the most part, but I was finally left alone for a while the other day and it all came rushing in.  This is kind of a round about way of saying that I have a new song, and not just a new song but one that I really like.

The basic idea that has been rolling around in my head the past few weeks is how people limit themselves, and what thoughts and ideas they use to do that.  I think that fear is our biggest counter-motivator, and it sticks its ugly head up in so many different ways.  One of the biggest hindrances to mankind is rising above this “holding on to fear” mentality that we are programmed with.  It makes sense that we as human beings should feel fear and retain a healthy respect for it.  If you are going to physically survive you need to have knowledge of that which can kill you, and because of that our brains are wired that way just like every other animal.   The problems start to occur when the real lions and tigers and bears ending your life are replaced with concepts of future pain based on current actions or non-actions.  Our brains use the same wiring that tells us to stay away from sharks to tell us to avoid letting our hearts be open to those around us.  Our mind doesn’t differentiate between physical and emotional pain when it tells us to be afraid.  That is to say that we become as emotionally skittish as our ancestors were mortally skittish on the plains in Africa a million years ago.  That fear is what weighs us down and keeps us from reaching our potential (which I believe is limitless).

One of the fears that consumes many of us is our fear of a vengeful God and of the unknown that that God represents.  This new song deals with that a bit.  I was aiming to point out that the weights that we see as holding us down are of our own creation and that we can and must rise above them.  Winston Churchill said “The only thing to fear is fear itself.”  It’s as true today as the day he said it.  When we stop fearing the things that won’t kill us we are freed to live a weightless, constantly expanding existence.  I will post the new song when I get it finalized.