I wake; it's 4:32am.

I toss as my mind turns over the previous days events. I sit up, I lie back down. I put my iPod headphones on and listen to yet another episode of "My Favorite Husband", Lucille Ball's original radio sitcom. How many times has this incredibly funny human being kept me company or made me laugh when everyone else in my world was fast a sleep?

Eventually I nod off thinking about all the wonderfully supportive comments that so many of my new friends on MySpace sent to me yesterday. I wake again at 5:23am, this time ruminating about what I have embarked on with these websites. For years I have had the luxury of staying out the spotlight, privately creating my songs without having the world looking on. Now, suddenly, people are looking on. It's a little unnerving. Hell, it's a lot unnerving.

What was I trying to do, and if I could have foreseen my actual musical career in advance, would I even have started down this path? Sometimes I doubt it; but my desire to sing and make records was overwhelmingly powerful when I was young, I simple couldn't imagine myself doing anything else. I was hopelessly in love with popular music and wanted to be a part of it. I loved everything to do with making recordings, from singing into a studio microphone to mixing a new track on a multi-channel mixing board.

There was a problem though...there always is in every dream. Eventually you wake up.

The idea of getting on a tour bus or an airplane and going from town to town performing the same songs night after night made me want to run for my life. It still does. Also, I was painfully shy and always wanted to stay sequestered away in my studio...and that's exactly what I did for as long as I could, until my father became ill and passed away, and my cozy little hermitage came to a swift and sudden end.

I finally throw in the towel around 6:35am and decided that, for better or worse, I am awake, and not necessarily in the spiritual sense but awake nonetheless. I walk down the hall to the kitchen and put on pot of President's Choice, Dark Roast. This will fix everything I think. And it does.

And so a new day begins...