This is a Truth I Want More Than an Afterlife, I Swear it to You.

I want to sip boiling hot coffee in my control room while I move some faders to listen to the new guitar tracks being recorded by a band recording their junior album. I want to then congratulate the drummer on nailing everything so perfectly I, for once, don't need to apply any sort of time stretching. I want the guitarists, whom are nationally renowned for their virtuosity, to congratulate my guitar playing on my band's previous record, which, in their words "Was some seriously dope shit, dawg.", and to have them ask me to transcribe it for them to learn when they have down-time on their next tour. I want to have a secret amphetamine addiction that never seems to catch up with me, and I want to have a wife in a band that's actually going to get somewhere, or is at the point where "they're somewhere." I want to bitch about the cold while taking my scarf up to hang up in my studio, to then walk over and pop some water in a tea kettle to boil it for some hot coffee so I can "get my jive going" and feel prepared and ready when the metronome turns on for the band's next session.

I want to wake up in the summer and always feel young and alive. I want to not have to hear "You're getting up there, Sean." jokes. I don't want to have the paralytic fear I have of death anymore. I would laugh at the notion, since it's all fixed by a pill and some synthetic organs. I want to never, ever, ever, ever have writer's block again, or to have to seriously pay for recording gear. I want to be able to look back at myself as a 16-year-old working in a moderately sound-treated room and thank my first employer for giving me a paycheck to fund my passions. I want to be able to reminisce about my last Warped Tour summer as a customer, and my first as a performer.

I want to sleep in a tour bus and wake up feeling disgusting and grungy. I want to then climb off and find a nearby sprinkler, disrobe, and then clean myself at a friction-causing pace. I want to then get dressed again, step back into the bus, and get dressed and have coffee.

I want to wake up late one day and have 15 minutes to build my gear and get on stage to play to a crowd of 6,000 people. I want to panic when I realize I have to re-string, too.

I want to play a guitar solo while standing on 6 people's hands and have 15 video cameras and 4 digital cameras rolling and snapping while I capture the intensity of the moment in a passage so intense it nearly breaks my strings remembering how I wrote it.

I want the summer nights where you're truly apathetic about the world, and you sing loudly, inebriated, at 3AM while tripping up the streets of your town. I want to wake up the next morning to slight frost, an indicator of fall, and I want to feel a little grungy, but be able to break my over-hygienic clean freak ways, and drive out, with my drummer, in my van to a family-run convince store in a moderately "ghetto" portion of town to get some coffee, bagels, and donuts to discuss the next record we're doing with the same people we started the band with. I want to slyly name drop a band, like we do now, but not have my drummer pick-up on it until 5 minutes later when he calls me a "Fucking douche bag." for "Killing his favorite songs." I'll remind him it's Jake, the vocalist, who does that. Not me.

I want screaming to be the new opera. I want sweep picking to die a crawling, agonizing death nailed to a tree in the center of the Boreal Forest. I want touch guitar to be the "next big thing" to guitar players, but be so good at it by then that I'm the new Yngvie Maalmsteen and Mark Warr voluntarily gives me free shit. I thank him and give him a slot in the thank-you portion of my next record. I want to be able to play guitar so fast that I need to be like Skwisgaar and record while sky-diving.

I want to have just enough money to have a decent home with nice furnishings, but not enough that I get bored and waste it. I want to be able to balance work and play perfectly, and have an active, interesting sex life.

I want to live a life that I pick exactly for myself, and not one my dad does.

I want to go to Rutgers and dick around but still get respectable grades. I want a Friday trip to the Grease Trucks to score me a Fat Darrell and a Snapple to chug down while laughing to my keyboardist and bassist. I want to go "My Man." when I'm 30 without seeming creepy. When a brutha gets his dick wet, he deserves the congratulations that only a creepy man outside of Target when you were 15 could come up with.

I want more than I could possibly fit into the database of BlogSpot, but the only thing holding me back is money. If I had money, I could get the better recording equipment I want. I could get the advertising for my band. I could get the few odds and ends I need to professionalize my guitar rig for shows and get some lights set up. I could get a cheap van to get started, and I could pay for some nicer clothes for some business meetings with A&R reps down the road. I would be able to buy my girlfriend a can of Monster before school, like I always promise her but never really have the funds to do.

I hate the current economy because the jobs that 16-year-olds get don't go to them anymore. They go to the union carpenter or the school teacher. If it's 100 dollars a month, it's better than what I get now. If it's 50 dollars a month, it's better than what I get now. If I could get a job that I could consistently work, I'd be good. But like I said, 16-year-olds don't matter as much as the 45-year-old who dropped out.