“And it starts, Sometime around midnight, Or at least that's when you lose yourself, For a minute or two”

Sometime Around Midnight – The Airborne Toxic Event

Sometimes I close my eyes, a song plays, and I just start writing. It’s not very often that I actually try and keep up with the feral waves crashing down upon me. But sometimes I do.

Most times it just ends in frustration, as I jump from thought to ephemeral thought … never staying with anything long enough to actually form something worth holding onto. But make no mistake, at all times, in my head, there is something, something simmering, something down there that a song touches.

“Sometimes Around Midnight”

“With or Without You”

“I Might Be Wrong”

“The End of Innocence”

And a few other songs will take me somewhere else.

Or they will so acutely put me in the moment, a place and time I’m trying too hard to dodge, trying so hard to not even think about. For whatever reason the song commands my thoughts to sit up and be heard by my conscientious.

Cigarette dangling from my lip, headphones crammed into my ears, slouched over my deck, a bit untethered from equal measures of the crash of guitars, the bass of the kick drum, flowing bourbon, and my swirling emotions. Mind abuzz and confused with thoughts. The music, my emotions – I can’t make it loud enough.

Not loud enough to hear it … not even loud enough to drown out my own fucking noise. My fingers rise up to bury the ear buds deeper into my tympanic membrane, make the music louder, make the noise stop. My own symphony getting in the way.

My signal to noise ratio is off the charts.

I’ve never had vertigo. Oh sure, I’ve had those moments where I’ve stood up to fast and went dizzy for a moment, but never actually had the prolonged feeling where everything around me was spinning while I stood perfectly still.

Except in my head.

I can’t even begin to explain how often it feels like in my own head everything is twisting, like some sort of particularly evil Nor’easter. And I’m desperately trying to grasp on to anything. Just to feel stable for a second. Hit from all sides -- the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

And then someone has the audacity to say, “Get over it.” “Move on.” “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

And maybe I will, but maybe I won’t. You won’t hear me either way, so it’s of no consequence.

It’s so hard to make sense of anything when everything seems so strange. To calm the storm for just a minute, to be able to make something, anything, make sense for just a second.

And it twirls, and it twirls and it twirls…

‘Cause nothing in the mind is easy, nothing straightforward. Everything in the world seems to follow a crooked road when all you desperately want is -- just for a few steps – the road to be straight.

And the winds whip, the rains fall … you take the best cover you can, and still you end up wet, cold and lonely.

“And then you walk, under the street lights. And you’re too drunk to notice that everyone is staring at you. You don’t care what you look like, the world is falling around you.

“I'll be the man with the broom /If you'll be the dust of the room /And there's only so much you can hide/Before I corner you/Last day of magic/Put the whole ride through/
The eye of the storm/In a single room/My little tornado/My little hurricano”

Last Day of Magic - The Kills

An old cowboy rides off into the sunset. Behind him, his life in all its glory has passed and he’s moving on to that next great adventure.

Making that final walk, the old cowboy thinks of the life he’s lived -- the moments he remembers aren’t measured in long arcs of time, they’re short bursts of intense activity followed by longer periods of normality – little tornados.

I am currently in the midst of my own little tornado, one that I’m sure I’ll remember when I’m finally long in the tooth and short in the breath.

It all started on a Wednesday, a chance email asking me to come to Washington D.C. for some business, on Thursday I was on a plane. I initially baulked at the idea, my weekend already booked but at the encouragement of my beautiful wife (she’s good at pushing me) I went for it.

Early Friday I took care of things in D.C. and flew back home for the five-hour drive to fire academy, academy cut short by yet another commitment. Left academy late Saturday night for a few hours home with the family, up again early Sunday morning to fly to Fort Hood, Texas -- Sunday, Monday, Tuesday in Texas, crammed in a short visit with the San Antonio based parents, home again for a few days.

Friday morning, up and at-em at zero-dark thirty, three-hour drive for a conference up north.

Little tornados, little flourishes of activity that punctuate the grind of our daily existence. Think about all your favorite stories you tell when you’re first making friends with a person. They never involve long, drawn out affairs on the order of a Gore Vidal epic. No, usually they’re one-night blasts you never saw coming or the vacation trip gone wonderfully right or horribly wrong, or the micro-adventure that started out with an innocent “Hey, got a minute?” request. There’s a sign in the local tavern that says something to the effect of – a good friend will bail you out of jail, a best friend will be sitting next to you saying holy cow that was fun! And while I agree with the notion that your best friend would be sitting there next to you, more than that, is the activity that got you there in the first place – little tornado.

I’m not suggesting one should go out and try to get themselves arrested (an interesting idea but one for a later column) but instead that one should be out there creating their own little tornados, making sure that when they pass away, they’ll do so with the broadest of smiles on their face, knowing they lived it to the max.

We all stand at the eye of our own storms and really, it’s up to us to determine what sort of storm our life will be – a tropical depression or a category five, force of nature?

I know I don’t know much -- much escapes me in a blurring woosh but I know this – I’m going to do my levelheaded best to instantiate as many of these little tornadoes as possible in my life all while doing a silly jig with my music blaring the song of the hour.

Have fun, live life to its fullest and enjoy your little tornado!