How Long To Sing This Song

Happy 40th Birthday to me.

I'm the first to admit that eclipsing the 40th year of my life is not really a memorable milestone. It's like when Roger Bannister broke the four minute mile...big deal, all he did was run a little bit faster than his predecessors which continually happens to this day. There's much more important milestones in my life that should carry more weight than turning 40. It's all relative right? I chose not to number these milestones because it would take entirely too much cognition to prioritize by importance.

MILESTONE: When it comes to milestones the first one that comes to mind is the birth of child number one. The progression from husband to husband and father is ten-fold-accompanied with all the future responsibility it bears. It impacts everything about your life and forces you to question what were your priorities before parenthood. Once birth occurs there's this enormous amount of responsibility, concern, pride, fear, and joy which engrosses your state of mind. Definitely a major milestone.

MILESTONE: Age 17, soundcheck at Moggs. I can still relive the memory, setting up my new Pearl World Series 7 piece drum set on the stage at Moggs and the sound engineer calls for a soundcheck on the drums. I sit down, hit some half notes on the bass drum and right at that point is where my memory is as clear as can be. The power, the concussion of hitting that bass drum was better than any drug, of that I am sure. From there I played my drums for about 10 to 15 minutes for the engineer to get some good levels and embraced the noise.

It was that memory which taught me later in life the importance of listening to the music. What I mean is that at that age I did not have the maturity to play drums to complement the music-at that age it was complexity multiplied by volume equals good drummer. It took a long time to realize the importance of listening to the song and determining if drums should be merely a support role for the greater good(musical socialism)…the song. Regardless, playing drums in that atmosphere is a memorable aphrodisiac.

MILESTONE: Finding the relationship of a lifetime. There are plenty of people out there who have all the attributes and desire to be with another person yet due to circumstances, they never meet that person or they do and fail to advance their interests. Finding that complement is truly something momentous. I remember going through that sort of introspective evaluation with regards to Laura. I didn’t put it to paper and write down the positives and negatives. It was much more of a progressive, organic process. But really I didn’t need to go through much internal debate on the matter. It was all pretty evident and real to me right from the start that we were going to be together for a long time. Simply put, the fact that I get to experience the rest of my life with Laura by my side is a very definitive milestone.