Have yet to see Clones. Woe is me.

I awoke to a wonderful thing this weekend. Boredom. I had to find things to do to amuse myself. Of course, that always leads to over-thinking... Joy. Brain go away.

I had plans for Friday and Saturday that went up in smoke, due to events beyond my control. Instead I spent extra time playing ClanLord. It gave me a headache, so I went for a nice long drive in my crappy old car. Driving is my escape...my freedom...my exodus from reality...my way to shut up my mind for a while...I crank the radio and whatever song comes up next, I sing along as loudly as possible without hurting myself...bliss.

I am a musician. Not a great musician, but one born with the talent. Where I grew up, the expression used to describe people born with the talent is, 'Gots da music in dem'. I gots the music in me. It's difficult to describe to someone that doesn't. Most people have natural rhythm and can follow a beat. Most people can hear a song and follow the notes in their head. Beyond the normal ability of the general masses, there are people that not only hear what is being sung but know instinctively what is to come in the music. Beyond the melody, harmony and everything obvious, some people know the music at the core of their being, the way it flows, changes, sounds, moves... it all makes sense. Great mathematicians follow the twisting course of logic through a complicated proof and it makes sense, they are born with that; a comparison of sorts. Mathematics flows, so does music. Some people are born with the talent of music, they can read it like a book. I am one of them.

When I hear music, it makes sense to me. The changes, the movements, the pitch, the tempo... all of it. It's a language of its own. Of all the beautiful things in the world, to me, music is the most wonderful. One experience that haunts me is an evening that I heard a local choir (the most famous in our area, and IMHO the undisputed best in the area) perform 'O Holy Night', a christmas traditional. Nothing has topped that. I can still feel the music inside me, when thinking of that experience, and it was close to 15 years ago. Awe. Power. Strength. Balance. Perfection. Too many things to describe the sense it gives me, even to this day.

I knew one of the choir members very well, he was one of my early mentors, one of my early guides in the musical road I walked in my teen years. He's dead and gone now. Killed by a fool, stabbed and left to die alone. But I'm not bitter. I was left with a feeling of incompleteness after he was gone. There were issues before the time he died, but my training with him was not finished. It ended with his death. His memory haunts me when I hear the song as much as that awesome performance does. And I learned to train myself. 'Now I am the master.' It sounds like something out of Star Wars... So long Obi-Wan, so long Yoda, Luke is on his own. /end tangent.

That choir is large, professional and very old. The church choir my mother directs, is extremely talented and has relative fame in our area for being a small group that doesn't get together very often. The talent runs strong within you Luke. Both parents are in the choir. They and two others have been the core for as long as it has existed. They do 'O Holy Night' in such a way that it brings me to tears. I get weak in the knees, it is so done so well. Very different experiences listening to the two. The first group with the many members and strength in each section comes close to perfection in the harmony they create, whereas the smaller church group blows me away with the raw emotion invoked by listening to the song. Both perform it magically, but produce such a different experience. Like listening to Bing Crosby and then someone else do White Christmas. Two very different experiences.

I got the music in me. The flipside of the musical talent is that discord is like being stabbed by a knife. Someone singing off key is worse than being hit by a pickup truck. It sears to the soul. It's like someone writing a fantastic poem, and then erasing every third word... if you read it, it would be just plain wrong. Every gift has its price... when it comes to music, I think the price we pay is that while we hear the good, we hear the bad just as clearly. Perhaps. Some would argue otherwise, but I've had experiences where I thought my spine would snap listening to something that was so wrong that it hurt. But, all in all, the price is well worth paying...

My fatal flaw is that I lack focus. I can't settle myself down into a groove that fits. I sometimes write music, I sometimes play music, but mostly my talent sits doing nothing except humming along to tunes in my head. Is that wrong?

I grew up hearing that I have a talent that I should share with others. I was never good at that. I found it hard to deal with being dropped in the spotlight. I didn't like to be put front-row-center to display my abilities. I hated being compared to others; friends, family, unknown strangers... who the hell are these people and whether they are fantastic or not, why compare them to me?

I didn't like to share my talent. Why? To me, music was my own and I didn't want to share. An escape into my own little world of blissful ambiguity. I'm still like that. Sort of... I think I am getting closer to just going nuts and letting my music escape. It feels closer every day. The urge to share has been strong for some time, but I feel like bursting lately. An odd sensation... so what do I do about it?

I suppose time will tell.