Have you ever tried to not think before? It's pretty damn hard, because you tell yourself "Okay, I'm not going to think right now. I'm not thinking. I'm not thinking..." but technically you are thinking - you're thinking about not thinking, which gets kind of confusing if you think about it.
Thinking can be my worst enemy at times, such as last night. I played a set of Finnegan (my acoustic guitar alter-ego) tunes at Acadia Cafe and it went well, but I almost lost it a few times while I was playing due to you guessed it.. thinking. Once I'm a few minutes into playing guitar, I get lost on my own comfortable little planet and am usually in a safe anti-thought territory. For all you hippies out there, it's very similar to meditation - I space out and forget the rest of the world and just let my fingers do their thang on my guitar, and all of a sudden it's 45 minutes or an hour later and I'm back on dumb old Earth. I'm a genuine 24/7 space cadet by nature which probably is to my advantage in regards to playing music, but at Acadia, for some reason my brain started telling my fingers what they were going to do next when I was in the middle of a song called 77. Uh oh!
"Okay fingers... now index goes here, middle goes here, and pinky goes here.. no, wait, I should really be worried about what I'm playing at this second, not something that is 10 seconds down the road. Um... shite.. where were my fingers going to go again?" It happened one more time during Ampersand. This is how most train wrecks happen onstage (aside from the ones where you're lip syncing and the person at the soundboard starts the wrong song). I mentally crapped my pants and was sweating bullets for about 10 seconds, but thankfully kept playing, the right notes no less, and hopped back into my safe and cozy space-out mode without fucking up. Whew! Close one.
I made it to the end of my set without any other thinking interrupting me, and had a great time. Was great to see Matt, Shannon, and Folkerts take the stage and play their stuff. If anyone who was there is reading this, thanks for coming out! And if you weren't there, you suck (just kidding)
On a likely more entertaining side note: at the show, my homeboy Pete mentioned that he posted a game on his blog and that I would instantly win if I went to check it out and play it. "I like to win!" says I to myself, so I hopped online today to take a gander and almost spit chocolate milk through my nose when I saw it. Play the game here (hopefully that link will work). Hm, does that chump in the middle look remotely familiar? I hope not.
