Don't Blame Bonnie Raitt

There is an urban myth floating around that Bonnie Raitt killed Lowell George.

Actually I do not know how prevalent this story is. Somewhere in my life the story got into my head. I did not make it up. It could have very well been the stoned imaginings of any number of music loving close friends of mine. We had many fascinating conversations after we discovered the wonders of marijuana, whose consumption we pushed as far as it could be pushed.

Lowell George was the founding father of Little Feat. If I have to explain who Bonnie Raitt is, please log out immediately.

George was a heavy drug user, a booze lover, junk food junkie and general wild man. He was renowned as a unique slide guitar player and compared in that category to Duane Allman, which is high praise. For both of them.

The story goes that Raitt convinced him to give up the booze and drugs and he died shortly afterward. Apparently from the state of shock his body was thrown into.

Truthfully he died on the road touring behind his one and only solo album after Little Feat had broken up. He weighed 300 pounds or more at the time as a result of his excesses. Officially he died of a massive heart attack suspected to have been brought on by drug abuse. He was 34.

But the Bonnnie Raitt story is so much cooler.

The reason I bring it up is that I have reduced whiskey consumption by 90%. Carol, no doubt, is chagrined to know that despite all her valiant efforts over the years, it was the fear of high blood pressure and the obvious correlation between alcohol consumption and said affliction, that brought me around.

I don't regret it. I don't miss it. But I am amused to wonder what my body is thinking right now. I have been drinking excessively since the age of fifteen. Almost exclusively beer for a very long time. I don't remember when I started experimenting with whiskey but I do know that my body took to it magnificently.

It has been my drink of choice for decades, my friend, my soother, my confidante.

My internal organs must be craning their necks inside of me wondering where the hell whiskey river went. Looking for the next deluge. Delighting in their (hopefully) return to normal functioning.

Chaos and creation inside my guts. I stole that term from McCartney. It's a song and the name of a relatively recent album. Not the guts part, the chaos part.

I have resumed exercising. I have contacted a friend of ours who is a psychologist who will soon provide for me a reference for a friend of his that is a psychologist. I am fighting the pinched nerve thing with a full on commitment to Chiro man. I am applying for jobs like a manic job seeker. I am writing more and trying to branch out into fiction which is where I believe my immediate financial future lies. I am reading and studying. Cramming my brain with nutritious information.

Hope all this good stuff doesn't kill me.

My mind being what it is, I have had the thought that I am sixty years old. How long will all of this take? What if the only outcome of all this is for me to die in peace. Probably not a bad thing to die with a tranquil mind. Sounds peaceful.

That would be ironic if that is all that I accomplish, because I am shooting for and capable of much bigger things.

I prefer to believe I am creating a wave of change that will allow me to wrestle some satisfaction out of  my existence on planet earth. All of my angst over the course of my life has been centered around the searing self knowledge that I am underachieving and that I am largely to blame for that.

Not circumstances, not anybody else. Me.

Not a lot of happiness in January 2014. Lots of pain, little sleep. But, hopefully, I am laying the foundation for the supreme transition.

Hopefully a very solid foundation upon which I can eventually stand and raise my fist to the sky, victorious.

I might have a dollop of whiskey to celebrate on that moment.