I've decided to begin a "captain's log."
This way, if something horrific ever happens, there will be a trace of me floating around this world wide web.
I love to write, so this whole "day 1, day 2" thing should come as second nature.
There should be a beginning. I know, I know, this is the beginning, but I want there to be a definite start.
I think I'll start with the exposition of my life. That way, you (the reader) and I (the tragic hero) will have been properly introduced.
I'm from the country. I loved to play in the dirt; it was my favorite thing when i was little. I don't mean making mud pies or burying toys. I would strip down to nothing and sit in the finest, most powdery, spot I could find, and do my best to become a part of dirt I so enjoyed. Hours were spent sifting it through my fingers; clouding it up around me as if it were a magic dust. I transgressed rather effortlessly from dirt to song.
My earliest memory of music plays out like most- I was in church. It was the little stone church down the road from our house. My mother would take me down there so the eldery people, great aunts and uncles could gush over me. They would stand me up on a stool and I would sing "this little light of mine" while Mrs. Stroud, an ancient christian woman, played the piano.
Where my memory starts to differ from most is in the fact that I don't just remember singing that song. I remember the way everyone reacted, and the admiration that crept up from the pews. It bit me; not the holy spirit, but the energy of it all. I didn't know what it was at the time, but I would learn, over time, that, if the song was right-if I was doing my part, I could control the emotions of an entire room.
So the evolution of me continued. I spent most of my days, as a kid, outside. I spent countless hours trying to will myself to fly, making up potions, and building forts in the woods. All the while singing to myself and the the hills around our little farm. I would pretend that all the trees choking the hillsides were my audience, and the hillsides my stadium. I would echo up and over the sea of leaves and they would throw my songs back at me. It was a lovely marriage. At one point I misunderstood the physics of sound waves and I took their definition quite literally. I assumed that if I could hear a plane flying by, then surely whomever was riding in them would hear me singing back. For some reason I was sure Reba McEntire was aboard any one of those passing airplanes. Whenever I heard one coming I would stop whatever I was doing and run to the nearest corner post along the barbed wire fence, scramble to the top, and sing. Boy did I sing. I was certain that if she only heard a note or two she would DEMAND the pilot land her plane in the field beside my house. She never did.
Time after time, stage after stage, I grew up singing to whomever would listen. And still I sing... because they're still listening.
