Right now I’m trying to become the Dexter Peterson that almost had his head blown off in France. I’m not a military guy, even though everyone in my family has enlisted in some form or another. One of my best friends from high school is still flying C-130′s over the desert and a local friend has been to Iraq a couple of times so far.

Yet here I am, a lifelong musician trying to write 20 pages about life in World War II. Given the nature of the story, it actually makes a bit of sense. Dexter gets no training and no shakedown before jumping into the next life, so he’s as clueless as I am. Every so often- while making a cup of coffee or taking out the trash or something -I’ll stop and think to myself, “what would happen if I turned around and suddenly found myself in a machine gun battle?”

I wonder if regular musicians writing love songs ever have to do this kind of abstract thinking. Shit, how many alt rock albums actually require library research and references?

In the back of my mind I can see crowded theaters and conventions where people waited in line in the cold to see me in concert… Yet I know that I won’t get to that point until I can place myself behind a filthy hedge row somewhere in France, ducking bullets and running like mad for a farm house a few miles away. If you need me, hit me on the radio and make it snappy- I may need to blow something up relatively soon.

Osprey by Marc Schulman

A significant portion of you are familiar with this little dichotomy. I’ve been featured at a few Furry conventions over the years and my popularity among the animal-savvy seems to be growing. The fact that some of my Second Life fans still haven’t seen me in person as a human makes for a unique image to uphold. There are a lot of people, however, who just want to hear the music.

For the “normal” people out there, I’m just your average piano rocker trying to eke out a living in the music business. I can’t exactly hide my fascination with the Pandion Haliaetus, but fortunately most of you don’t seem to be weirded out by it. I’m not the guy with the ears and tail at the shopping mall, nor am I anything you’ve read about in Vanity Fair or seen on TV. If you’d like to compare me to those freak shows, I will happily find the choicest representatives of your hobbies or religions and write about them for you.

No, I’ve just had the usual fascination with animals and, in particular, Osprey. When I was younger (up to and including last week) I spoke to an imaginary friend- a 6-foot tall humanoid osprey. I even wrote a musical incorporating a friend of his as my senior project in college. I spent over a decade writing a 400-page novel about the world my avian friend comes from… I’m hoping that someday I can share it with you, but it needs some serious revisions that I just can’t focus on right now.

When you consider that anthropomorphism has played a major role in everything from religions to sporting events for thousands of years, it should surprise no one that some of us feel drawn to an animal that represents something we admire or covet. If you think this is odd, you haven’t taken a look at your favorite sports teams recently- chances are good they’re represented by an animal. So is your local gas station. Jesus Christ was called both a lion and a lamb, depending on the verse. We name our attack helicopters and fighter jets after birds of prey and Indian tribes. For that matter, those Indian tribes believe in spirits personified by the animals from their surrounding territory.

It honestly makes me sad when I encounter people who don’t entertain these kinds of concepts. If all you’ve thought about are things you’ve seen in this world, you are living in a very limited space. You’re trapped in a studio apartment with no windows- you may be content with your surroundings and your life, but I believe you suffer from an imaginative agoraphobia. Once you’ve seen what’s outside the walls of normality, you might wonder how you existed before.

Do I write songs about birds? Not a whole lot. I’ve written about cows more often than I’ve written about birds, to be honest. I write about what I experience, and I haven’t experienced birdness yet. The bird thing is more of a constant fascination- something that I feel drawn to in a way that I just can’t quantify. I wish I could be a bird, that’s for certain, but until I disappear in a cloud of feathers I want my fans to understand one of my long-term fixations. It’s a fun world to immerse myself in from time to time, and it affects my daily life in tiny ways I’m not aware of.

What are you drawn to? What’s the little non-sequitir that exists in your daily life, making things a bit more interesting? How are you using that?

Update: I love hearing from all of my friends who already get this stuff, but if you’re a “normal” person and are a bit shy about commenting, please respond to this anyway!