jitters

i'm usually not nervous about performing. probably because, in my mind, that's not what i'm doing. i'm just playing guitar and singing. i have clothes on. hopefully nice ones. but, as an old friend's t-shirt once read, 'wart you see is wart you get' (it had a frog on it).

there are the thoughts that zoom in like starfighters that you will commit a mistake, forget a line, blow a chord, but once you're resolved to the task at hand, you just forge ahead. and usually, within a moment or so, you're back where you're supposed to be; inside the song, feeling the music come through you, not really from you.

the antenna is used as a common metaphor for how music is created. as is the fishing pole. but the only real acknowledgement that music is occurring that i know of, is when the person performing or the people listening, for even just a fraction of time, disappear. and in that mysterious black hole, we are lost in the sound that came through all of us. and then someone coughs, or a chair squeaks and we're hauled back in by the gravity of life.

but just for a moment, we escape.

and that's really nothing to be nervous about.