Of Blood & Drumsticks

I’ve been playing drums on and off since, I was sixteen years old. I don’t know why I picked the sticks up.  I have no blooming idea why I chose the skins.  I think they chose me.

Twenty-seven years I’ve been jamming the drums.  Although there were a fair amounts of time where I would stray for a bit, but I would always keep coming back the primal instrument.

I’ve been wanting to write a good, solid blog for a while now and just couldn’t rattle my old brain to come up with something worth writing or hell, more importantly, worth your time reading it.  However, after today’s events, I think I may have something.  You will have to be the judge of whether you wasted your time or not.

If you have ever played the drums, or guitar for that matter, you will be all too familiar with the abuse your hands and fingers take once you start playing the instrument on a daily basis.  It hurts and it can hurt like hell. Well for me, and every drummer, (who is self-taught) the damage were blisters and bloody fingers from smacking the drum rims or hitting my own hands like a complete clumsy dolt that I am.

It hurt twenty-seven years ago, and it still hurts today.  Which brings me to my point. 

I’ve played in bands and have had great times as well as rough, “why the hell to I bother” times.  Bands are like a girlfriend and are just as testy and fickle and somehow, some way, you come away feeling like you’ve been screwed; sometimes in a good way, sometimes…. Ah, not so much.

Right now, at this very moment, I bet you are asking; “Uh, Tom, are your getting to your point at anytime with this blog or are you just waxing nostalgic?”  Well, here I am and here is blasted point, dear reader!

I haven’t been in a band in a couple years but still play drums a few days a week. Playing the drums is actually part of my OCD ritual before I put my big bum in chair and start writing.  Hey, we all have our own thing… RIGHT????!!!!

However, I tonight I sat down and pressed play on the CD player and started jamming along some Black Crowes tune and was well off on my way of my cozy ritual.  That was until I felt a shattering pain in my left index finger. You know the one that does the whole snare drum, backbeat thing.  I look down, as Christ Robinson keeps belting out the tune and I see bright red blood spilling out of my now, throbbing index finger.  It spewed its lifeblood onto the white drumhead and it soaked it up like a sponge.

I sat on the drum stool, dropping every possible “F-bomb” I can create. And lord knows, I am pretty damn good at it.  I wiped my bloody finger on my pant leg and kept jamming and my mind became lost in the thought of blood and drumsticks and my whole life over the past forty-three years.

This moment was a realization that no matter how long you let your muse or creativity sit by the way-side or lay dormant,  the passion and need to play/create will emerge and push you past the point of  self-doubt and pain (or bloody fingers) to where you know you are doing what you are MEANT to be doing.  That and, while you might be rusty and feel that you suck,  you must push past the pain and that uncomfortable period when you start something new or even have a bloody-finger set-back with a writing project.

My bloody finger reminded me of how and why I came to play and love the drums.  Now, by some strange celestial co-pilot, I have found my path following that of the intrepid writer.  Its funny how while when I write, my hands or fingers don’t get blooded, but my heart and soul and mind do.  Writing is a rough and violent passion and it demands a lot.  But I can live with that.

For I have found a calling that I could never, would have never dreamed of.

A writer.

My age doesn’t bother me.  Nor does the numerous bloody fingers or emotional moments my life path has chosen for me.

I am a writer, a drummer, and a dreamer.

I am pretty sure that even at forty three, I have plenty of bloody fingers in my future.

…and I can dig that.