First Words

  I'm just kicking this out there to peg the page down, to mark my territory, as it were.  I hope to spend a little time in here, and maybe it'll give me some direction...

  

  I used the title This Artists Soul, as an homage to Andrea J. Dillon, possibly the most interesting woman I ever met, and certainly the most talented artist ever to come out of Austin, TX. In our time together, she recognized that, while I might not have had the training, or the personal muse to drive me, I did have an artist's soul and an artist's eye, based on observations she had made on the way I viewed things, visualized things.   

  Andie died from complications from gall bladder blockage of some sort that turned into a raging  case of cancer getting loose inside her body and just decimating that person, a creative genius and a spark in her own right, and an intense and sometimes troubled young woman. But she was never dull! And meeting her the night she walked into the nightclub I worked in, in Dallas, to hear Gil Scott-Heron, was sheer and utter divine intervention, people.

 I will thank God to my dying day that I called California on the night she left, and got to speak some meager words to her comatose ear, thanks to her mother's help. If it hadn't been so, I just know I would have lived out my days with a wretched feeling of having been cheated of speaking to her, of being able to say what I wanted her to hear to her still-active, still listening ear.

 Because yes, I am a big one for regrets, and as much as I hate it, I can't go a day without feeling the pangs of regret over one thing or another. 

More on that later, though ...