I know it's been a while now, but almost weekly it seems I stop and contemplate if a world without Joe Strummer is a world worth living in.
I've also wondered today at the marvel of how it is we all end being who we are. A happenstance chemical reaction that bursts into countless cells and molecules. The smallest parts of ourselves instruct us on who we are and what we look like and try to pass on the knowledge of the last few million years. Suddenly thrust into a bizarre world we fight against what was inane within us as we struggle to make it all coincide with the hammering pressures of a world designed to wear us down. These outside pressures bend and shape us until we resemble less that first bunch of unique cells and more the others around us. But the uniqueness is there all the while. Some ebrace it, some lose it, some deny it, some exorcise it.
So it is I sit here with the wisdom of the ages and the stupidity of the present racing through my body never sure which is which.
It is ever been that struggle for myself. To allow the blacksmith of society to hammer me into the right mold with the promise of all the best things it offers if only I should bend to it's will. Or to stake my own more modest path and be able at the end of the day to look at my actions with a twinkle of pride.
Shall it forever be the latter.
But how fortunate for me that among those outside influences the likes of Joe Strummer etched his scratchy voice into my cranium.
And so it is that his songs, to me, are the very coronation of freedom and individuality in my soul.
I tend to lose sight of this but when I stop and look it's not so hard to see this influence clearly evident in ways small and big in my life.
Among which, I truly and perhaps naively, still believe that no matter what it is that if you wish to pursue, and no matter how many people tell you that you can't, if you stick to your guns and dig in you can accomplish anything.
I'll always be the 15 year old skinny kid with a guitar around his neck spending hours in a garage banging away on bar chords and thinking he can write the perfect song.
And there ain't nothing wrong with that.
Thanks Joe.