thoughtful mind.

I'm listening to a Damien Jurado song..."Lord do me a favor, it's wrong but I ask you...take my brother's life."

It's got me thinking...well I should say maybe, that I had a dream last night in which I felt so securely embraced, and that feeling has been haunting me all day...just wanting to find it again.

My dad's brother died in umm...2001, January, during the recording of my album, "life worth living". Wayne, my uncle, gave me my first guitar, which I played for 1 song on the album, and the whole project was kind of dedicated to him. In the year before his death, my dad's mom, and his brother-in-law had also died...it was a couple years of intense grieving for my family, for my dad. I never really felt all that much about it...
It was really hard to watch my dad grieving, and I felt a lot of regret about the lack of relationship I'd had with my uncles and my grandma, but I don't know that I felt a whole lot of grief myself. I made a pact with myself, I guess, at that point, to keep in touch more with my family. I speak so highly of my mom's dad...my heart swells with pride and love when I think of him, but I don't think he or my step-grandma know that...very few people in my family, I think, really understand how much they mean to me.

My uncle Wayne struggled with a lot of things in his life, which I won't speak specifically about here because they're private things, not for public consumption in this manner...
I have a friend who struggles with a lot of the same things, and he um...this friend, I'm not sure that he knows that I know exactly what it is that he is facing. I wish he knew, because it's very similar to what my uncle struggled with. (It isn't criminal or anything, just an illness with a stigma...again, a private thing). But everytime I see him...for days afterward, I just want to be near him, to talk to him...but we're both busy, and currently we live in different provinces, so it's not really a possibility.

He's just one more person who I really care about, and I hope he knows. And knows that I...see this thing, but also don't see it at all. It isn't everything he is.

Stirring up emotions...ah, life.

"Jackie, come save me, the doctors, they'll kill me!
no they're here to help you straighten out your mind."