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Stand before a mirror and see your reflection. Take a hammer and strike the mirror with just enough force to make it crack. You can still see a version of your reflection. All the same visual information is there for your eyes to interpret. Just not connected and neatly arranged the way you are accustomed to seeing it.

Over the past few years my brain has gradually undergone a similar shattering. I'm receiving all the same sensory information. But my thoughts are now difficult to organize, like looking at a shattered reflection and trying to piece together exactly what it is that I'm looking at.

At age 55, maybe this is just a natural process of losing my edge. Slowing down physically and mentally. But this feels more like playing without a full deck while the cards are constantly being shuffled.

So far the worst side effect is the worry it causes my wife when I have inexplicable memory lapses.

With far more sand in the bottom of my hourglass than there remains in and continually drains from the top, I think constantly of how to make the best of the time I have left to spend with my wife and daughter. What will I leave behind when I'm gone? My own father left behind a legacy of love, music and laughter. That's all I want.

Creativity is the artist's way - the organizing principle - for making sense of his or her thoughts and feelings in a world that defies logic.

All I know is that in recent years I have often felt like a ghost standing outside of myself and watching as I am frantically, deliriously creating, drawing, writing, composing, recording. Wildly chasing every single creative spark down the rabbit hole, synapses firing furiously. I cannot speak to the quality of the work. I was not put here to analyze but to create. I am more prolific now than I have ever been at any other time in my life. The clock is ticking and desperation fuels the fire inside me.