James Lee Stanley

To continue, I was talking the other day about some of the life lessons that I learned from living in an apartment.

One was handling people’s rage and the other is handling your rage; what your attitude can bring to the table.  They are almost the same thing, but applied slightly differently.

By was of example, I came off the road and had only two days home before I had to drive to San Francisco for a date with Stephen Stills (www.stephenstills.com) at the Fillmore Auditorium on Friday night and Chicago at the Concord Pavillion, a 10,000 seat outdoor shed east of Oakland on Saturday.   So it was a big deal to me and I needed to get a good’s night rest before I took off for that weekend.

I got home late Tuesday night with the intention of sleeping til I woke up on Wednesday, taking care of all the personal business that had accumulated in my absence, and then going to be early Wednesday night and getting one complete night of recharging.

By driving all day Tuesday, I had depleted my core energy, so Tuesday night would make up for that, but Wednesday was the day where I would build up some psychic energy to take care of the weekend.

I would be driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco on Thursday, so I would arrive up north somewhat fried.   Wednesday was my night to recharge before these two high profile gigs.

I went to bed early that night, knowing that I was doing the right thing.   I had been asleep about an hour when the thunder started.  I woke up to find that it wasn’t thunder but my upstairs neighbors who were evidently practicing combat tap dancing on their newly exposed hardwood floors.

In my absence they had taken up the carpets and now my apartment was like the inside of a large drum.   I could even hear what they were saying.   Consequently, I could feel the helpless rage building in my body, which would, of course, make it impossible for me to fall asleep.

I started to get up when I realized it really wasn’t that late and the people upstairs were really not doing anything out of the ordinary given their tap dancing proclivities.

I had lived away from my large family for decades at that time, but still remember clearly living in a home with a lot of people.   For some reason I recalled that and realized that if those were my sisters and parents making those noises, they wouldn’t bother me at all.  

Those noises would just be the normal life noises of people that I love.  

It wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine what my reaction to this noise would be if it were the noises of my loved ones.

So I decided to pretend that was the noise of my sisters and my parents, and believe it or not, I went right to sleep.

So by changing my attitude, I got what I wanted to have happen.  A good night’s sleep; by changing the only thing I could…what was in my head.

The two shows that weekend went spectacularly well and I even have a four camera dvd of my Concord Pavillion show available, ahem, for sale at www.jamesleestanley.com.