I remember getting stung by a bee a in late August of 2001.  I was wearing sandals and walking in grass and somehow it got between my sandal and foot and got me on the right heel–one second I was walking on top of the world and the next I was howling in pain and on the ground trying to remove the stinger.  I remember thinking that it had been months, maybe even years at that point since I had felt any real pain.  I also remember thinking that that was somehow unnatural and thankful that the pain had finally come–better to feel it than know it’s out there and due.

I was staying up all night, every night, reading the Koran and Kerouac’s Some of the Dharma then and had some vague notion that I had to have both finished and have achieved some sort of Bo Tree-enlightenment before I started work in September or else it would be too late.  I read The Bible too–the New Testament–and I was still living at home and my dad would walk by my room on the way to the bathroom and make sounds of disgust when he saw my light was still on at 3 a.m..  One night I was reading the Gospel of Luke and he actually opened my door in a half-asleep stagger and snarled, “What the hell is the matter with you, being awake at 3 a.m.??  What the hell are you doing?? Go to sleep goddamnit!!”  Jesus seemed to get along with his Dad pretty well, but he did have some cross words for Mom every now and then, so I figured he would have been able to relate at least.  I kept reading and turned the other cheek to the glares he shot at me when I got out of bed at 2 p.m. the next day.

I had just gotten a new guitar that month too–my 1969 Mahogany Guild D-25, which I still have.  I bought it off of Brian Molnar for $400.  I think it hurt him terribly to let it go, but I needed it and he didn’t and that’s the way things should work, I think.  I was playing it in these funky open tunings with dropped down strings that just rang through the mahogany with the sound of the smell of autumn as it begins to work it’s way out of the dry, late August earth–it sounded like the smell of a change coming on–dark, dry and rich.  I had been  listening to David Gray’s Lost Songs over and over again and somehow knew that he smelled the same thing.

I wrote “If I Wake Up” which ended up on What’s Your Sign?during that period.  (Click and scroll to the bottom to hear me today, playing it solo, how I wrote it, on that dark, dry and rich Guild D-25.) In my head back then, David Gray was singing it and I was just trying to harmonize.  Now I know better.

I had also been dating this girl for about 4 months then–there is something in our DNA that makes that the time in a relationship to, as Ray Wylie Hubbard so eloquently puts it, “fish or cut bait.”  We saw each other everyday.  When she came home from work she smelled like ginger spice and wore black polo shirts.  We spent all our money eating out and swam in my parent’s pool at night and watched movies in their furnished basement room.  We walked by the tracks and sat by the river in the gorge–it was the land of milk and honey and we were, like everybody else I knew, drunk on its sweetness.