Death Interrupted - Part One

It's late January 2009. I've just done a week of recording. I'm in a weakened state and short of breath. . .more than usual, just going out of the studio, to my truck and back. My lungs are feeling as though they're the size of two small cherries. Heart seems to be working too hard, squeezing instead of pumping.

I'm thinking perhaps I just need to walk more because I have been so inactive over these last five months, but no; it's something else besides lack of exercise. Something unexpected. Something deadly.

Tonight I'm attempting some spirited vocals on a song I wrote about a twisted marriage: You Use To Be On MySide (Now You're On My Back) or On My Back for short. By the way, aspects of that marriage are revealed in my article: The Gifts of Forgiveness. There is a surprising prologue coming up for that as well.

After the session, I drive from Norcross to downtown Atlanta, deciding to stop at my favorite diner in all the world, The Majestic Diner on Ponce de Leon Avenue. I order chili cheese fries and coffee.
Though I love the Majestic, especially for its Hebrew National sausages and a couple of folks who work there.

This version of chili cheese fries is not quite as good as the ones I had in LA in 1980, when perhaps no one else in the world made this delicious, greasy, heart-clogging combination except some folks at street kiosk on Crenshaw Blvd just down from Baldwin Hills. Yummy.

As I sit in the diner here, some 28 years later, memories of street thugs playing three-card molly in front of the popular streetery prance across my dreamsphere. An abject dizziness intrudes. What's wrong with me?

I am finishing up the coffee, before paying up and going on home while I assay a lump growing under my chin, noting a feeling tantamount to eating something not good for me. With my finger in the fabled Dyke, I'm holding back a state of severe negative stress that has been building ever since I left Paris in July of 2008. There was not a lot of work waiting for me upon my return to the States.

I was told there were three gigs in Paris. There was only one, but oh what a gig it was. I've never had people rush the stage to shake my hand. That was the best experience I've ever had in my 45 years of show business.

But even so, while I'm wowing them with some hot blues on the stage of The New Morning, abnormal white blood cells going about their business of deceiving various organs within my body, to gain entrance and invite infections. but I'm not feeling any ill effects. I feel quite good actually.

It's not like me to have anxiety for a companion. I'm a naturally happy kind of person. I brood as artists must, but I am usually rather anxiety free. I practice meditation, akin to self-hypnosis (they are close cousins) to quell a lot of stealthy neuroplasticity or anything I identify as bordering on compulsions or impulses I don't accept. I am not a 'meat puppet' controlled by an unruly DNA or a runaway brain. I am in touch with me and my ways, for now.

My normal disposition reminds me of a little deer who comes to my girlfriend's backyard, two hours north of Nelson, BC, with her family to graze. After a few chews, 'Bambi' suddenly jumps about with glee, just because she can. When she does that, I wonder what's in her mind. Dear reader, if you want to see her, please go to You Tube, search: maestroza, then look for Backyard Zoo.

Nevertheless, I share the spirit of that little spotted fawn but poor-musician me, I haven't worked steadily since August and here I am coming into the week of my birthday, February 2nd, knowing the ground hog has bottomed out and won't be healthy enough to come out to see her shadow anyway. The shock of my life awaits in all the shadows of my days heretofore.

Continued in "Death Interrupted" part II