Are you (short) changing the world?

This guy's name is Ted Kirkpatrick, and he inspires me. In fact, applying a filter to the word inspiration and searching my brain's archives I can honestly say that he was the first person to ever inspire me.

I was eleven or twelve when a friend of mine bought a brand new cassette tape and played it for me in his little Ford Ranger. My friend played the first track and started headbanging. Until that moment I had been raised on country and Christian contemporary music, but when Ted crashed in on that first track, 'Bearing Gruesome Cargo', it flipped a switch. I didn't head bang along with my friend. I just sat there, listening through that song, absorbing it, and feeling for the first time, inspired. The song ended and I asked my friend who the band was, then I begged my mom to take me to the local Christian book store (the only place you could buy christian music at the time) and bought the tape.

My family went on vacation that year to Callaway Gardens. I brought along my tape, my walkman, extra batteries, and lost myself in that album for the entire trip. That was the great thing about cassettes, if you made it to the end of side two you were rewarded with the first track the next time you flipped the tape. Oh, analog, you beautiful rusty beast. It was there, in that awkward pre-teen angsty hormonal stage that I learned to dissect and appreciate music.

By the time we returned from that trip I had a new favorite band, favorite song, and aspirations of learning to play the drums.

My dad had a country band at the time, and a band room above the barn that we built out of an old frame house that was to be torn down. We literally cut down a frame house with chainsaws, then raised it up on stilts, and rebuilt it.

His drummer, who's name was also Ted, was amazing. He left his 1970 something chrome shelled Slingerland kit set up there in that music room. Big mistake.

Ted liked to play with BIG sticks, and my skinny little frame had to learn with those sticks, so I did. I also had to replace the heads three times within two years and apologize a lot when he came over to find that I had beaten them dead. I had a lot of learning to do, but there I was, a kid, inspired by someone, to do something, and doing it. I played those drums for 3 or 4 hours every single day until I could play through the entire Vanishing Lessons album, which was a pretty heady order for a beginner, and continued playing to this day almost 20 years later.

Ted Kirkpatrick has had an immeasurably profound impact on my life through his art form, but here's the thing; if Ted had decided to answer telephones at an insurance company for the rest of his life instead of pursuing a music career I would not have a story to tell today. Maybe I wouldn't have developed a passion for music, or writing for that matter, and you wouldn't be reading this post. Maybe someone else would have inspired me, but I doubt it would have been the same story. See, Ted's passion for music led to the release of that album which led to my buddy playing it for me, which led to the beginning of this post. If Ted wouldn't have been there, with his convictions on full display through his lyrics I would be a different person.

Okay, enough about Ted, I didn't mean to devote that much time to him, but trust me, I could go on.

Here's my question to you: Are you cheating the world by not exercising your passion?

Think about it. The back story above is a big part of the belief system I carry, the convictions I live by, how my character was developed, my hobbies, my thoughts on relationships, etc., and none of that would have been ingrained in me on that trip if it weren't for that album.

So, having said that, if you are not exercising your passion, it stands to reason that you are also not changing the world around you. Every kid needs a hero, and every adult needs a mentor, so why with all of our knowledge and understanding are there still people lacking both?

This post is not meant to be "inspirational", I don't believe that a blog post can be that. I would like to think that in reading it you feel challenged to do something you gave up on, or just put more effort into what your doing, to be someone worth remembering, worth writing about.

All that said, one my passions is writing, so I am writing. Do with that what you will.

-Austin

P.S. I promise to get back to the funny stuff, but I do my best to keep my writing in sync with the ebb and flow of my life and my thoughts. Anything else would be dishonest.