I was never much for taking advice, although I think that in a great many instances it would have helped. I wanted to experience everything, even at the risk of making big mistakes. I wanted to explore the interior of peoples minds, to understand why they did what they did, and I wanted to find this out for myself, I decided to be a psychology major. I wanted to embrace all of life, the beauty and the ugly, to sit with cowards and warriors and listen to them all. I never aspired to be right, or govern my life by theory, imperiously pointing at others with the finger of righteousness.

Just happy, as happy as when I succumb to the spell of sleep counting the sheep of oblivion in my head.

I love struggle, and my wounds are the proud insignia from encounters into which I have flung myself fully, with no holding back. And this life, lived in the moment without reservation, has be packed with some glittering success and bleak misfortune.

I've looked for a place where I could say "Ah, this is it, yes, I'll settle here. It is here that I'll stay" I've yet to reach that place. The ever elusive "there". Holding regrets for roads not taken and rocks left unturned and unskipped down the river of life.

I had a dream in a time when I was trying to kick the lingering effects of drug abuse. I would do ok for a month or so, but then I would start to use again. It was hard to deal the last blow to my habit... I knew that dream was telling me that all my life I had taken on my problems by force, trying to change my lifewith force and through confrontation. But now it was time to try a different way, a deeper and more peaceful way of love, and trust, and surrender. I was changed by that dream, but finding no outlet for my rage, I spent years in a drug-hase, endless lost days of drug-taking, crazy partying. In our drug-out blitzes, all things straight and good were branded by my friends and me as hypocrisy, to us, the worst of sins. We created our own distorted code that reversed the order of the universe. We believed that our suffering gave us that license.

In that drug world, night and day were one, loud music was always blaring, the phones were always ringing (which is one of the reasons why I don't have a phone), there was always food cooking, and people "being", drugging, fucking and speaking at each other in wild soliloquies. Doing whatever was necessary to keep body and soul together.

We could not live with our failures and our doubts. So we turned up the music, turned on the booze drugs and the sex with whomever and whatever was willing and able. Deceiving ourselves that in doing, we were creating another and better world. But it was a world that lacked all meaning. You must have meaning to live, and meaning comes only from long and honest struggle of the soul.

So here I am, simply standing next to you in your thoughts, side by side, sharing with you some things that have inspired me to dance and forget myself in song. For all that, I still stumble like a fool, trying to make sense of my life.

I have been an addict to booze and drugs; ( everyone is looking for someone to love, I loved them and they loved me) and the love/hate of life. But the party doesn't last forever.

I have given myself a lot of bad advice, but things are getting better. I dont hurt myself as much as I used to. My life is a musical score, and each dawn I wake to play my trumpet notes to the new day, a new page turned. I step out among the trees like a child who has wandered far from his parents, into a forest. I don't understand why certain leaves are turning gray. I want to be with that tree and follow it to a place it knows, to the source of life, where one can count the sheep and be what he dreams.

Love and Bottoms up.