164 What’s Left?
When men write… when men geeks write, they can barely get a sentence out that doesn’t
have at least one number in it.

See, I’ve already done it… once.

I moved to California ten years ago in a sixteen foot box truck filled with stuff that came
from a house that had been filled with even more stuff. Some was sold, some given away, even some
left on the curb. The rest was stuffed, and I do mean ‘stuffed’ into the sixteen foot box
truck and on to California it went along with two cats a wife and a cutting from an ivy plant
that violated California agriculture laws the moment we crossed from Nevada.

My wife, not the one in the truck, the other one, asked me, not long ago, just how much
of that stuff that was stuffed in the sixteen foot box truck… is left.

As I began to take a mental inventory I realized that precious friggin’ little is… left.

Three bass guitars, two keyboards, my grandmother’s guitar, some old recording gear one
blue chair I’ve had since I was six, an old table, some kitchen odds and ends, perhaps a
T-shirt or three now being used as rags, a pair of NYS license plates I have hanging on
the wall of my studio, some, books, VHS tapes, some photos and a pair of antique cross
country skis I keep partly as sentimental, partly as a joke.

That’s pretty much it.

The TV, the piano, the dressers, the couch, the ‘Dopko’ entertainment center, most of the
CDs and vinyl, that awful mirror-covered wardrobe from the‘70s, The ivy plant—that
wasn’t code by-the-way, it really was just an ivy plant, the car, the chairs, an amp, a bass
cabinet, the wedding album, the wife, bits and chunks of my memory, the cats…

All gone.

They say that the process of the cells in your body dying off and regenerating takes roughly seven
years for the most part with brain cells hanging out the longest. So, in essence, I’m gone
too. Though this doesn’t explain why I still have that mark on my hand from when I
stabbed myself with a pencil in second grade. The figurative symbolism is not lost on me
either, for in many more ways than one, I’m not the same person that showed up in
Hollywood one Thursday night ten years ago.

I was someone who had never lived in a different state or ridden in a stretch limo—or
even a non-stretch limo for that matter, someone who had never been on a movie set or
an off-shore oil rig; someone that had never been face-to-face with Shirley McClain, Jack
Nicholson or, Lord help me, Clair Danes! I had never had long hair; I’d never played
music for a sea of people that I couldn’t see the back row of. I had never been backstage,
under the stage and everywhere else at Radio City Music Hall. I’d never seen a
rattlesnake in the wild, up close! I was pretty sure I’d be a father one day. I was not
someone who was in daily contact with scores of old classmates, old neighbors, and
friends old and new with the simple click of a mouse.

I had still had an uncle and I wasn’t yet one myself.

I was someone who’d never had a car repossessed at three AM, someone who had never
been yelled at by a director or completely humiliated by a celebrity in front of a studio
audience, I was someone who had never had cancer; someone who had never been
divorced and wouldn’t have dreamed he ever would be, even though it would be my
suggestion a little more than a year later.

I had never loved. Not the way I know is possible now.

But now, I have all those things behind me. I have different, decidedly better
furniture, (except for the Dopko) some new instruments and recording gear; different
clothes, though not as many as if Audra had her druthers; different cats.

As I look around me know I can’t help but wonder what will be left in ten years. What
adventures will I have what trials will I have endured. I look down at my hands and not
wonder, but know, though they may look largely the same, in ten years time all these cells I
presently call my hand will be dead and washed away.


We all have lots of stuff and Lord knows I love it as much as the next guy, but I know, over time, all
I really possess is my soul, my beliefs and my stories.

If I don’t share them, they’ll just go away too.

Then all there’ll be left of me is that mark from the pencil stab from second grade.

Ya see that, I couldn’t even end without using 1 more number in the sentence.

=:oJ