I was walking through the Charlotte airport on Friday evening, with an hour to kill before my final flight of the day. Saw a young guy quietly playing a non-amplified Ibenez electric guitar, so I sat down next to him and listened for awhile. Man, he had chops. He was playing blues, he was playing classical, he was playing everything. We started to talk about guitars, and music, and life. Turns out he was heading for L.A. on leave from the navy, before reporting to his ship in Japan. This old guitar was a gift from his uncle... just good enough to play, bad enough to have onboard ship. I asked him if there was any resistance to having a guitar on board. "I don't care, I'm not going without it." We parted with a handshake. Nice young man.

If you want to pray for someone, pray for the nice young people, on all sides, who will be going into harm's way. And know that on a ship somewhere, there's a badass version of Texas Flood being played.

Blues