Shinedown - What A Shame (lyrics)

Sketches

I've been sketching lately. Which is something I've always done on and off throughout my life. I start drawing, then I keep it up everyday for a few weeks, then I'll just stop.
This time I started because I got a new sketch pad, and I couldn't wait to brake it in, there's just something about a new pad of paper that gets my creative juices flowing. Whether it be lined paper and I'm inspired to write a story, or sketch paper and I want to draw.
I don't get that way when I see a blank page on my Microsoft Office Word, or on my lap top paint program. I have to already be inspired or motivated before I even open up a window on my computer.

Washing the Dogs

Every time it’s the same old story:
A brother or two and I go out, armed with the bottle of shampoo and sensitive doggy skin spray. Every time my younger brother grabs the collar of Tippy and drags her into the sunlight. If the other brother is present he is in charge of the water, if not, I am. The water is turned on and the little dog trembles in the uttermost terror as the cold water works its way through the layers of fur and accumulated grease and dirt that is the reason behind our mission.
Around the point that the shampoo is applied I run in to get the towels that I always forget to bring with me. Running back outside we rinse of the dog that does not look unlike a wet rat.
After allowing the ashamed animal to have the pleasure of shaking off the water and drenching my unfortunate brothers, (I refuse to be near the dogs when they shake) we dry off the little mutant that slowly begins to resemble a dog. She begins to wag her tail with pleasure, as we towel her off. My dog isn’t any better. Wouldn’t you think they would have understood that in order to have the wonderful doggy bliss of a getting toweled down we have to get them wet first? Doesn’t watering them give them the wonder feeling of getting cooled off on a warm summer’s day?
Yet the next time we go out to wash the dogs, my brothers have to chase them down and drag them into place.

Washing The Windows

I was outside washing the windows, and my dog was looking at me forlornly, the way he usually does when he can see me and I'm not petting him. Then it slowly dawned on me as he continued to stare at me like I was betraying him, that the motions that I made with my hands across the glass as I rubbed it dry, were remarkably similar to the hand motions that involve petting a dog.

"Oh Merlin," I said shaking my head, "you're making me feel bad for washing the windows...You dog."

He sighed dejectedly and walked away.

A Villiage Girl and a Captain Walk Together

As the small village girl led the tired military captain to the town Inn she commented that he didn’t seem like a captain.
“Don’t get me wrong,” the simple country girl said, “I hear you fight well and all, for one so young. But your voice is too soft to give commands and be taken seriously. In fact, everything about you is all wrong to be a man of war. You have a goodness about you that doesn’t belong on a battlefield.”
“I do what I have to,” he replied shortly, and then his voice softened as he looked at the girl. “I know my job is to kill, and take life; so that’s what I do. I’ve learned to be good as what I have to do.” He paused, “Sometimes you just need to do what you’re told to, even if you don’t like id….even if you don’t agree with it….” The soldiers mind wondered for a moment.
“Amazing isn’t it, life?” the captain said, “We think it’s so precious that some of us are willing to compromise our own morals and beliefs just to keep on living…
“But when all is said and done, once everything that can be compromised has been; when everything has been taken away or changed; and yourself compromised and changed, is it worth it? Is it even a life that we lead anymore?” He glanced down at the girl traveling beside him. Innocent and pure, her eyes wide and full of pity for the captain, but did she really understand what he spoke of? He prayed she didn’t and that she never would.
Since his soul was now forfeit, he then and there swore to make is his duty to ensure that she and others like this girl, would never have to make the choices he had made what seem like an eternity ago, or to know the pain and loss he had gone through just to understand that you don’t always make your own life; you can’t always choose your own future. So when you do have a chance to make your own choices, you need to choose the path that is good for your soul.
It is better to go against country, family, and friends than to go against your own conscious; because it is you who lives with your choices, it is you who has to sleep with yourself at night; and no matter whom you are, or where you are, or what you did, everyone dies alone. It will just be you and your choices that walk down that tunnel towards the light of the next life.
Just as the captain decided to pay the village girl who showed him the way, enough gold to feed her family through the winter time, before walking into the Inn and eating a dinner of bread and cheese and sleeping in the cheapest room that the Inn keeper had open.