Interruptions

Interruptions (Demo)

This has been one hell of a couple weeks. We got hit with tornadoes, right in my neighborhood. Sucking the shingles right off of houses and planting them three counties over kinda for-realz tornadoes. Then we spent nearly an entire week without power, and watched one of our neighbor's houses burn to the ground from a lightning strike.

While all this was going on, we had two deaths on Kelly's side of the family. Kelly will be traveling to Florida for one of the funerals tomorrow. It's been, in a lot of ways an incredibly surreal and somber week. In other ways, though it has been nothing short of magical.

Last Wednesday, the day of the tornadoes was absolutely exhausting as wave after wave of storms came through. It was like a roller coaster of fear, culminating in that house fire I mentioned (everyone got out ok, thankfully), but it was one of the saddest things I'd ever seen.

Around a little before midnight all the fire trucks had finally gone and the power was out in the entire region. The weather had moved on, leaving a crystal clear sky in the chilly air.  It was absolutely, completely and utterly still. With the lights out in the entire city, the sky lit up like a celestial fireworks show. It was simply breathtaking ... such peaceful beauty after a day of unrelenting terror, all our digital umbilicals cut at once; all of us simultaneously disconnected from the matrix.

That was the other beautiful thing about the experience. It was like the entire neighborhood went on a camping trip together. I've lived here 4 years, and I didn't even know my neighbors until last week. With no distractions, we all crawled out of our respective caves and ... talked to one another. Children played in the streets instead of lapping up whatever half-assed treacle the Disney Channel is selling this week.

We had BBQs. Every night in fact and every breakfast and lunch, because with no power, you have an imperative to cook anything and everything you have on hand before it goes bad. On the first night it was just us and one neighbor, but it grew every successive night. We had over 30 people in our driveway and more food than a Southern Baptist pot-luck, the last night of the power outage.


Another less happy amazing moment was when I drove through Harvest this morning on my way to my one-year checkup at Vanderbilt. It's only 4 miles here (exactly) to what can only be described as a complete disaster zone. It looks like a bomb was detonated over there.

So anyhow ... this song is called "Interruptions". I wrote it last year, recovering from a major surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from my pancreas (a mighty scary time in it's own right). It was exactly a year ago, I came home from that operation in Nashville. What a year it's been ... cancer to natural disasters ... but all through it some truly amazing experiences.

Regarding the song ... I suck at drums. Just try to ignore them.