3/12/03
"SIMPLE MAN"
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Do you ever just put a song on repeat and listen to it over and over again? I do that fairly frequently when a particular song is just perfectly fitting my mood that I don't want to screw it up with a mix. And there's one that I put on repeat more often than others. In fact it's been on repeat now for about 20 minutes. It's Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Simple Man."

It's one of those songs that just makes you sit back and blow all the air out of your lungs and just BE. And it's not so much because of the lyrics, though I do like the lyrics, but the music itself is just so... It makes me think of just sitting on my friend Jesse's back porch in Maine. He had a little windchime hanging from a rafter which in the summer caught the wind just enough to tinkle but not annoying. And I can remember sitting out there one evening before we were all getting ready to head out somewhere. i had probably had a beer or two and was maybe smoking a cigarette at the time. He has a lot of land behind his house even by maine standards. And I was just looking out at the hills and forest a quarter mile away or so, listening to the windchimes and feeling the gentle summer breeze as it blew in the early evening. The sky had just started to turn from blue so that it was a pale pinkish color. Not the deep orange of sunset, but not bright blue afternoon.

We listened to a lot of classic rock back in those days. (I say that like it was half a lifetime ago... though it might as well be for as much as me and Jesse keep in touch these days.) And Lynyrd Skynyrd was a big one on our playlists. It was the country and those southern rock groups resonated with those hickish areas. Hearing "Simple Man" and other ones like "Tuesday's Gone" just make me drift back to that time when I was caught between my old life and my life yet to come. I knew that there were decisions to be made in a couple of years, but for the time being, I didn't need to worry about any of them. The only decisions we were making were, whose car are we taking tonight? Whose house is the party at tonight? Which of our of age friends was going to buy us beer. It really was a simpler time. Sometimes I ache for that so bad again. It's that part of me that cannot believe that i actually got married, that I actually pay rent and own a car. That I have a job where I'm not just getting somebody's coffee. Suddenly my actions and decisions have much more of an impact than whether or not I wake up with a hangover.

Listening to this song also makes me kinda wish that I had a joint right now.