Excerpt #1 Songs About Life

It was a beautiful morning.  The sun was battling the snowflakes for air supremacy, with the snow handily winning out.  They were huge flakes, like Christmas snow, except it was January, so the collective grumble I heard from the Sunday shoppers was no surprise.  I loved the winter.  I wanted to run down the street as fast as I could just to feel the cold on my cheeks and the freshness in my lungs.  Snow always made me feel like I was part of something more than just concrete sidewalks and Gap Stores.  I was alive.  There was this huge thing going on in the world that no one could stop or even control.  Mother Nature.

     In Australia people were lying on the beach in bikinis at the same moment a group of school kids were whipping down hills on toboggans over in Thompson Park.  It was crazy.  I might not have believed in organized religion, but I certainly believed in a higher spirit.  Ms. Dennis always taught us that Mother Nature was God's little sister and she was in charge of the circle of life and making the world a beautiful place to be.  God must be very proud of his little sister.  His children though, I think he's probably pretty ashamed of us.  We've messed things up horribly.  We throw garbage everywhere; destroy our drinking water and set forests ablaze because we're too lazy to put out a campfire.  Yet under all those charred remains is a new forest, just waiting to grow.  All it takes is one seed.  One green leaf.  If a forest can regenerate itself, why can't we as human beings?  We just need to find that one little seed, that one sign of life.  Capture it.  Nurture it.  Give it hope.

Excerpt #2 Songs About Life

     Just once I'd like to meet that person who sits in the corner spot of the corner booth in the dark confines of a dingy bar and watches life happen.  This person is always drunk or at least has the appearance that he is one sip away from total and complete lack of recognition of anything human or dead.  Maybe he is dead.  Or maybe he's just in limbo, waiting for the right moment, trying to decide whether or not he really wants to rejoin the living or continue to squander his time in a pit hole of puke.  His name is Bobby.

     Now Bobby's a good citizen.  He gets up every morning and goes to work pulling cable lines for the local conglomerate, earning a decent wage.  He pays his rent, telephone and utility bills all on time and even has a little cash left over to tip the paperboy once and awhile.  Bobby never reads the paper of course.  He stacks them chronologically in a corner of his apartment where they sit, day after day, year after year, gathering dust.  An ever-thickening layer of black soot from a chimney badly in need of a sweep envelops not only the papers, but the entire contents of the room.  Bobby doesn't care; he's never there.  Sure he sleeps a little in that lumpy old cot, which sits in the corner of what used to be the master bedroom, but it's hard to get a good night's sleep when your head is always spinning and your mind is always cluttered.  Poor Bobby.  He is alone, but not that lonely.  He has friends and they are just like him.  In fact, they have a support group which meets every night from 5 o'clock until last call at Wilkens’ on the corner of John and Madison.  Bobby, Frank, Jim, John, Dave, the same regular guys, with the same regular names, all living the same sort of lives.  How do I know all this?  I was walking home late one night as they all departed the bar.  They left arm in arm, singing at the top of their lungs about the glory of their lives.  They were singing songs about life and I needed to find out more, so I became “The Observer”.

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