The clock struck three in the somber night as the four of us journeyed towards our grand performance. In music, the space between the beats is important. Life, too, unfolds in these spaces.

The incessant snowfall painted a thick veil of white upon the perilous black ice of the mountain highway. Our windshield wipers battled valiantly, their efforts hardly enough to reveal the treacherous path that lay ahead or the abyss of the valley beside. Shrouded by dense fog, in the bitter cold, we pressed on.

Then, in an instant, a booming thud resounded through the night air. Jerome, the valiant helmsman of our carriage, grappled with the wheel as it bucked and fishtailed violently along the icy road. In the back seat, I quickly accepted the fate that seemed imminent, a fate of being reduced to nothing but a mangled mess upon the desolate highway. Next to me, Keefer raised his arms and opened his mouth in dramatic slow motion.

But, onward we pressed, albeit amidst chaos.

“By the stars, thou hast done well, my friend!” I extolled Jerome for his admirable navigation.

“I aimed for the smallest of them,” he replied earnestly. “Three creatures there were, but alas, they appeared before I could discern their presence.”

“Aye, indeed,” added Thud Pumpkin. “Fortunate it was a deer and not a towering moose, for with their long limbs, they could thrust through the very windshield.”

Nonetheless, a hundred leagues still lay between us and the next village, and our headlights had relinquished their radiance to darkness. We found ourselves bereft of warmth, frequently halting in the middle of the highway to replenish the radiator now adorned with six antler holes, spewing the lifeblood of antifreeze. With steady perseverance, we inched closer to the next haven, repairing the beleaguered radiator upon our arrival. The culmination of our efforts allowed us to grace the stage precisely as the hour struck for the grand performance.

The evening greeted us with a throng that stretched for blocks, and the elixir of tequila flowed generously, akin to the flowing streams of Dionysian revelry. From the stage, we beheld the fervent punk maidens, their spirits alight with vivacious dance. As the night unfolded, Keefer and I ventured into the chamber of reflection, where a pair of shoes betrayed their presence beneath a cubicle. Curiosity beguiled Keefer, compelling him to peer over the cubicle, revealing a familiar fan. His unbuttoned sleeve, rolled past his elbow, bore witness to a needle embedded below a small tattoo of a heart with chains.

“Dude, dost it prove effective for thee?” Keefer inquired.

He seemed unaware of Keefer’s intrusion, but Keefer persisted, “Pray tell, does it avail thee, my friend?”

In that moment, I felt a gentle tap upon my shoulder. A fervent punk maiden appeared before me.

“Would you not desire to embrace me passionately?” she questioned with fervor.

“What might you offer in return?” I inquired with a measure of nonchalance.

“I knew it,” she exclaimed in excitement.

With that, we departed from the jubilant assembly and made our way back to the sanctuary of the hotel. The curtains had fallen upon the grand spectacle, and now it was time to embrace the space between the beats.

Even though shooting up cop cars while armed with two hot chicks and some paint-ball guns is terrific fun, we decided to quit while we were ahead, go to the mountain, and finish the Jack Daniel’s.

There, in the dizziness of the early morning, I started to climb down the dark mountain side. I hoped the girls would follow me so I could ask them important questions like why their shoes didn’t match their hair. But then it happened. I lost my rapport with gravity and tumbled a hundred and fifty feet down the mountain. Luckily, I landed on top of a lonely tree.

It was on this lonely tree where I began to reflect on my life, a life devoted entirely to music. I won’t claim it’s a noble pursuit. My biggest mistake was trying to create music simply for the sake of art. I now see that music and art don’t always mix, and I’ve checked my idealism at the door, along with my soul.

I’ve always valued individuality, and as a kid, strived to express it through music. Recently though, I’ve come to the conclusion that individuality can be a detriment to musicians. Why try to create something unique when it takes much less effort, and the rewards are potentially so much greater, to copy something that people already accept?

I often become frustrated when I get on stage and hear, “He’s cute.”

“But I wish he’d smile more.”

“What’s with the hair?”

“That’s all right,” I tell myself. “One day, there will be a beautiful princess who will understand. She will be the one.”

But if there’s one thing I learned during my recent conversations with God, affectionately known as Eddie Van Halen, it’s that I’ve been dreaming, and there’s precious little space reserved in the world for dreamers.

On the lonely tree, I thought about a girl I used to know. She was the most beautiful girl I ever saw. Not that I’d ever tell her that. She knows, they all know. I imagine it must disappoint women when they first realize how simple men really are.

Sometimes I wonder what’s so special about being human. Like monkeys, we watch and mimic all the other monkeys we see on TV. If I were in charge of the world and wanted to control the monkeys, I’d show plenty of examples on TV for them to follow. I’d reward psychotic behavior of all kinds. I’d feed the monkeys drugs, then lock them up for getting high. I’d encourage the monkeys to fight over such stupid things as the color of their fur. And if I was feeling particularly ambitious, I’d start a religion and say, “I know you’re only a monkey, but pretend you’re not. If you just sacrifice all your monkeying around in this life, in the next one you’ll have a hundred monkey-whores feeding you grapes.”

Then, just when the monkeys were about to give up their hopes and dreams and their faith in the greatness of monkeykind, I’d fake a Mars landing.

Paranoid monkeys have a fancy word for this, and it’s the paranoid monkeys who know what’s really going on. They call it imprinting. They say the head monkeys use imprinting to encourage certain types of behavior in lower-class monkeys, like musicians. If the whole idea of imprinting doesn’t disturb you, it might not have dawned on you yet.

Distracted, I heard a concerned voice call from the top of the mountain. “Are you all right?”

“I don’t know yet,” I answered as I checked for broken bones. My right knee appeared to take the worst of it, but my ego also took a bruise.

“Good thing you’re so cute, because you’re dumb as shit.”

As I climbed down the lonely tree, I came to realize why Eddie Van Halen invented Jack Daniel’s. I took a deep breath and embarked on my journey back to the top of the mountain, but this time I was especially careful because just like art and music, gravity and Jack Daniel’s don’t mix.