My Massive Musical Success

On Saturday night, the band I am in was just about set-up and ready to play in a bar/restaurant in a relatively affluent New Jersey town. It was a good night. We might have been able to fit three more people into the place if we were lucky -- six, if they had been leprechauns. Lots of people were out to get in an early celebration of St. Paddy's day.

The band at work. 

But a good-sized crowd is not enough. They have to be "into it." And they were. There was a lot of energy. In some ways, we played well. In some ways we did not. Each of us made his mistakes, here and there. I made some doozies. (As a drummer, every mistake I make is a doozy. A guitar player drops a chord or two and it fades into the background. When I make a mistake, the entire crowd turns around to stare at the stupid oaf behind the drum kit.) But we had fun.

On Building Wings

"Stand at the top of the cliff and jump off and build your wings on the way down." Ray Bradbury

I love Ray Bradbury, not just as a writer, but for the guy that he was. To me, he was one of the few people in the world that I deem worthy of the phrase "personal hero." I have made that clear here on this very blog. Also, I love the quotation I have typed above. I really do love it. But it bothers me -- aches a little on the fringe of my mind, the way the sense of a mostly-forgotten, unfulfilled obligation does.

Ray, as you can see if you care to watch the video I have embedded below, was a big proponent of  doing one's own thing -- of choosing one's own direction and sticking to it, no matter what anyone says; of, as you can see, jumping off of the cliff and worrying about the consequences and strategies later. This is very Romantic and very poetic and very Bradbury, but I have to wonder: would he have been giving this advice if the world had not embraced him over the span of his long and illustrious career?

You only really hear the big successes saying things like this, don't you? For the rest of us, it is more complicated than that, really. How many others jumped and then started cobbling their wings together and didn't get the job done before they exploded into a red star-burst on the rocks below.