His watch reads 11:54 pm and Ryan Star, sitting tall, wearing a black hoodie that covers his messy brown hair and a few days growth of a beard, sits in coach of yet another New York to Los Angeles red eye. The emergency lights are flashing as passengers around him are living their greatest fear. Crying and screaming are what he hears as he puts his headphones on to change the sounds to the soothing baritone voice of Leonard Cohen singing, "If It Be Your Will."
He opens a leather bound journal where he writes his words. Pictures of New York City at night, mountains covered in snow, and a young pretty girl fall out. He passes through the pages of some of the songs from the album he has been working on for months and is about to wrap up. He glances at the last entry and the words are ringing in his head, repeating themselves like a mantra, uncertain if it will be possible to see the idea through.
"This could be the year, this could be the moment. You've been waiting your whole life to show the world the cards you're holding."
He puts the tooth-marked airline pen to his paper and starts to write on the last blank page.
"By the time you read this entry, you will know if these are my last words or not. Either way, I am writing as if they are. I have been waiting my whole life for this moment to come. Not the moment up here, thousands of feet above the earth, but this instant where I am on the verge of progress. I have been in training for it a long time. I started at 14 years old, playing weekly at CBGB's with my band of brothers and took the show on the road. I performed in front of millions on an international television show and have recorded countless songs in studios, always trying to get closer to the passion that comes across in a live set in front of warm bodies. All of this--to bring me here and now. Sitting here shaking in the sky, I could say it was all a waste and that I should have done what all of my friends that I grew up with have. I would probably own a house in the suburbs by now and not be an "almost rock and roll cliché." But then of course, I would not be here learning what I am right now.
As I write these words, I realize that I have not been training, I have been living. To think that it was all going to start when I finished the album with a big time producer and a giant record label is bullshit! That is not what music is. It is not what life is. I have heard it a million times, late at night on the self-help infomercials--"start living now." I saw "Fight Club," read "Brave New World," and have always known that we are all high on "soma." Not until now, in my last minute, do I get to really understand it all.
My name is Ryan Star. My whole life I have been getting ready for a moment that might never come. I never slowed down to understand who I really am or what life means to me beyond music and beyond performance. The lyrics I have written since I was a kid have all been trying to tell me what I am just realizing. Life is RIGHT NOW. We are in it already. Make every moment count.
He kisses the journal and holds the pictures to his chest.
The clock reads 11:59.
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