Excerpted from Chapter 18 of Invisible Driving, “The Seductive Call Of All That Is Not Me.” (www.invisibledriving.com) - Amazon.com
            One of the highlights of my career as a jazz listener was a concert in Carnegie Hall. It featured McCoy Tyner and his big band, the outrageous Pharaoh Sanders, and the immortal one himself, Rahsaan Roland Kirk. The hall was hushed as McCoy Tyner, pianist for John Coltrane during the legendary quartet years, took the stage with his large and heavily armed band. Nothing sounds prettier than a room holding hundreds of people with their mouths shut. It reminded me of the Quaker meetings I used to go to every week at school. So many people, alone with their thoughts, together in a room, silent. Great moment. The wooden floors of the old hall creaked like a ship at sea as people settled in their seats. This silence was not the silence of a bus station at 3:00 AM in the morning. This was warm and rich, the audience filled with respect, even awe, and anticipation. You could have heard a lemon drop drop.
            And then, we heard a bomb drop. Tyner’s band burst into an all-stops-out barrage of sound intensity that blew off every hairpiece in the room. From silence to a hurricane of sound, cracking and crashing like madness, so loud that it couldn’t be denied, it didn’t come in through your ears, it came in through your bones. I felt like I was having an orgasm. I was so relieved, so joyful, so happy, I wanted to jump to my feet, thrust my fists into the air and scream “Yes! Thank you!”
            Later, when I was replaying the concert in my mind, I wondered about that moment. Why was it that I craved that level of intensity so much? The longer I thought about it, the harder it became to avoid my best theory. The music was so strong, it obliterated my personality. It was so complete, so overwhelming, that it freed me from myself. I was immersed in only the intoxication of the music. I forgot about me.
            In one way or the other, I’ve been doing that all my life. Running from my personality instead of making the best of it. In the intoxication of romance, I lost myself. Escape into depression, another kind of flight. Escape into isolation, cutting myself off from other people. (And then actually having the nerve to feel sorry for myself because I was alone!) Escape into drugs, alcohol, sex, reading, art. More important, escape into failure. Failure was the ultimate comfort, the ultimate safety. If I was a loser I wouldn’t have to worry about other people because nobody would pay any attention to me.
            Because of my natural gifts, assets, and training, true failure evaded me at first and I occasionally tripped onto success by mistake. But, through a subconscious determination to fail, to kick away life’s pleasures at all cost, I achieved it at last.