Description

SONG TITLE

NOT TODAY SATAN

CATEGORY
Personal Experience / Choices & Consequences

PRIMARY EMOTION
Defiance

ALSO FITS
Discipline / Boundaries / Self-Control / Influence / Personal Strength / Life Lessons

WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT

Sometimes a song starts with something serious.
This one started with something that made me laugh.
When I was incarcerated, I went through a few different roommates. One of them came over from another unit. He was what you might call the muscle. If somebody wanted somebody else dealt with, he was the kind of guy they might turn to.
That sounds pretty rough, and it was.
But here’s the strange part.
He and I got along great.
He took good care of me, and I used to joke around with him all the time. Somewhere in those conversations, he had this saying he would throw at me:
“Not today Satan, not today.”
I got a kick out of it every time.
I don’t know why that particular line stayed with me when so many other things from those years could have disappeared from memory, but it did.
Eventually it became a song.

THE STORY BEHIND THE SONG

There are people you meet in life who don’t fit neatly into one box.
This guy was one of them.
To me, he was my roommate. We laughed. We joked. We got along. He looked out for me.
But there was another side to the environment we were living in.
Being known as the muscle wasn’t exactly an honorary title.
Eventually somebody wanted him to punch somebody out. Instead of doing it, he ratted the guy out. That ended up getting him kicked out of our unit, and eventually I ended up with another roommate.
That’s the simple truth behind where this song began.
But somewhere along the way, “Not today Satan” stopped belonging only to that roommate.
I started hearing something else in it.
Not today.
You’re not getting into my head today.
You’re not controlling my decisions today.
You’re not dragging me into your bullshit today.
You’re not convincing me to become somebody I don’t want to be today.
That changed the direction of the song.

WHY I WROTE THIS SONG

I liked the phrase because it was funny when I first heard it.
I kept it because there was something powerful underneath it.
There are always going to be people, situations and temptations trying to pull you somewhere.
Sometimes the danger is obvious.
Sometimes it comes smiling.
Sometimes it comes from the people around you.
Sometimes it comes from your own habits.
That’s where discipline enters this song.
Wanting a better life doesn’t automatically give you one. Saying you’re going to change doesn’t change anything by itself. Eventually your choices have to back up what you’re saying.
That became much more interesting to me than simply writing a song about Satan.

WHY THIS MATTERS TO ME

I spent enough time around people making good decisions, bad decisions and everything in between to understand how quickly one choice can change where your life goes.
I also understand something else.
A person can be good to you and still be living a life you don’t want for yourself.
Those two things can exist at the same time.
I don’t have to rewrite my memories of my roommate and pretend we didn’t get along. We did.
I also don’t have to pretend everything happening around us was normal just because we were living inside that environment.
That contradiction is part of the story.

WHY THIS SONG FITS MOITA

This is exactly the kind of strange road a MOITA song can travel.
A roommate says something that makes me laugh.
The saying sticks in my head.
Years later it becomes a song.
Then the song starts asking bigger questions about discipline, habits, friendship, influence, boundaries and the direction of a person’s life.
That’s why I believe a song can become much more than a few minutes of music.
Sometimes one sentence carries a hell of a lot more than the person saying it ever intended.

READ THIS FIRST

Don’t take the title too literally.
“Not today Satan” can mean whatever is trying to take you somewhere you know you shouldn’t go.
A bad influence.
A destructive relationship.
A habit.
Manipulation.
Anger.
Temptation.
Or sometimes yourself.
There are days when the person you have to stand up to is staring back at you from the mirror.
Whatever Satan represents to you, the answer in this song is pretty simple.
Not today.

FULL LYRICS

NO TODAY SATAN

I’ll wrap my head around this as fast as I can
The real thing is, I’m as bright as any man
I make my stand not your fan. I’m always in fear of you saying whatever you feel.
You can’t penetrate me my mind is set
I am real
So not today Satan not today
Why is it I’m wasting my breath on you?
All your colluding and practises have no control over me
For crying out loud, what is wrong with you?
Just let it go watch what you say
You can’t penetrate me my mind is set
I am real
So not today Satan not today
So not today Satan not today
Desire alone won’t get you what you want most but discipline will
Your choices create the course and contours of your life.
you’re decisions will determine your destiny
You are more likely to do your habits
if you don’t hate doing your habits
With repetition your new habits will go from being hard to start too being hard to stop
You can’t defeat what you can not define
So you can’t penetrate me my mind is set. I am real
so not today. Satan not today.
Not today, Satan not today
Of everything I’ve cared about and everything I’ve done
To hold myself together, you’ve contributed to what you have done
You’re own reflection in the mirror has ruined you
By a sources, you’ve carried on and has damaged everyone
I am real there’s nothing phoney for about me
I can’t let you in my life and hurt those that I love
I don’t need any gifts or promises from you?
I don’t need your cries or lies anything you advise
Control you’re mood swings and you might realize you’re wrong
So I can’t let you penetrate me . My mind is set. I am real.
So not today Satan not today
not today Satan not today
Desire alone won’t get you what you want most but discipline will
Your choices create the course and contours of your life.
you’re decisions will determine your destiny
You are more likely to do your habits
if you don’t hate doing your habits
With repetition your new habits will go from being hard to start too being hard to stop
You can’t defeat what you can not define
So you can’t penetrate me my mind is set. I am real
so not today. Satan not today.
Not today, Satan not today
Living the right life is almost impossible if you have the wrong friends
The life you are living right now is shaping the life you will be living tomorrow
So you can’t penetrate me my mind is set. I am real
So not today Satan not today
not today Satan not today

 

SECTION ONE
LYRIC JOURNEY
PART 1

“I’ll wrap my head around this as fast as I can”
The song doesn’t waste much time getting comfortable.
That opening sounds like somebody trying to understand what is happening while it is happening.
Then comes:
“The real thing is, I’m as bright as any man”
That’s important because the defence begins with knowing your own worth.
I’m not saying I know everything.
I’m saying don’t mistake me for somebody you can easily manipulate.
“I make my stand not your fan.”
That’s almost confrontational, but there’s also humour in it. I’m drawing the line early.
Then the real backbone appears:
“You can’t penetrate me my mind is set
I am real”
That word penetrate matters throughout this song.
I’m not talking about physically getting through something.
I’m talking about the mind.
You can talk.
You can pressure me.
You can manipulate.
You can make promises.
You can try to influence me.
But somewhere inside myself there has to be a place where I decide who gets in.
Then the phrase that started everything arrives:
“So not today Satan not today”
When my roommate used to say it, I laughed.
Inside this song, I’m using it differently.
Now it’s a refusal.
Whatever you’re bringing toward me, I’m not accepting it today.

PART 2

“Why is it I’m wasting my breath on you?”
I’ve had moments in life where I’ve wondered exactly that.
Why am I still arguing?
Why am I still explaining?
Why am I giving this situation more of my energy?
Sometimes walking away from an argument isn’t losing.
Sometimes continuing the argument is the thing that’s costing you.
“All your colluding and practises have no control over me”
Now the song is moving directly toward influence and control.
That’s followed by a line that sounds almost like something somebody would actually blurt out during an argument:
“For crying out loud, what is wrong with you?”
I like that because it isn’t polished philosophy.
It’s frustration.
Then once again:
“You can’t penetrate me my mind is set
I am real”
The repetition has a purpose.
I’m reminding the other person, but I’m also reminding myself.
That’s something I think people sometimes miss about defiant statements.
We don’t always say them only for the person standing in front of us.
Sometimes we need to hear ourselves say them.

PART 3

Then the song changes.
“Desire alone won’t get you what you want most but discipline will”
Now I’m no longer simply pushing somebody away.
I’m looking inward.
Anybody can want something.
Wanting isn’t particularly difficult.
I can want a better life.
I can want success.
I can want peace.
I can want change.
Eventually I have to do something that supports what I say I want.
“Your choices create the course and contours of your life.”
That’s where responsibility enters.
Not everything that happens to us is our choice. Life doesn’t work that neatly.
But our decisions still matter.
And decisions repeated often enough can become habits.
“With repetition your new habits will go from being hard to start too being hard to stop”
That’s one of the biggest ideas in the song.
At first, change can feel unnatural.
You have to think about it.
You have to force yourself to do it.
Then repetition starts doing some of the work.
That leads into:
“You can’t defeat what you can not define”
If I don’t know what I’m fighting, how am I supposed to fight it?
That’s where the title becomes bigger than the original joke.
You have to know what your Satan is before you can tell it:
Not today.
PART 4
The later verse becomes more personal and more complicated.
“Your own reflection in the mirror has ruined you”
The mirror appears because eventually there are things we cannot keep blaming on everybody else.
Sometimes you have to look at yourself.
The song also draws a harder boundary:
“I can’t let you in my life and hurt those that I love”
Now the decision isn’t only about protecting myself.
Other people can be affected by who I allow into my life.
That changes the responsibility.
“I don’t need any gifts or promises from you”
A gift doesn’t repair everything.
A promise doesn’t automatically restore trust.
Words have to be backed by behaviour.
Then:
“Control you’re mood swings and you might realize you’re wrong”
There is frustration in that line, but underneath it is something simple.
Look at what you’re doing.
Recognize your part in it.
Take responsibility.
And once again I return to the same boundary:
“My mind is set. I am real.”
PART 5
The song eventually brings everything back to the people around us.
“Living the right life is almost impossible if you have the wrong friends”
That line fits the beginning of this story more than I originally realized.
When you’re surrounded by certain behaviour long enough, it can begin to feel normal.
That doesn’t mean everybody around you is evil.
It doesn’t even mean they’re bad people.
It means influence is real.
You still have to decide which parts of the people around you belong in your own life.
“The life you are living right now is shaping the life you will be living tomorrow”
That’s probably the simplest lesson in the entire song.
Tomorrow doesn’t suddenly appear disconnected from today.
We’re building parts of it right now.
Decision by decision.
Habit by habit.
Person by person.
And that’s why the song has to end where it began:
“Not today Satan not today”
I can still hear the humour in that sentence because I remember where I first heard it.
I remember the guy who used to say it.
I remember laughing.
But now it means something different to me.
It means there are things in life that deserve a simple answer.
No long argument.
No negotiation.
No bullshit.
Not today.

SECTION ONE
LYRIC JOURNEY
PART 1
“I’ll wrap my head around this as fast as I can”
That is where I start because sometimes you find yourself dealing with something and you’re trying to understand it while you’re right in the middle of it. You don’t always get time to sit somewhere quietly and figure everything out first. Life puts something in front of you and your mind starts working.
For me, there is also a little attitude in that opening line. I’m listening. I’m thinking. I’m trying to understand what is coming at me. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to accept everything I’m being told.
“The real thing is, I’m as bright as any man”
I’m reminding myself that I’m capable of thinking for myself.
I don’t have to be the smartest person in the room. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying don’t underestimate me and don’t assume that because you say something strongly enough I’m automatically going to believe it.
I’ve spent my life learning in different ways. Some things I learned the easy way. A lot of things I learned the hard way. Either way, I have my own mind and I use it.
“I make my stand not your fan. I’m always in fear of you saying whatever you feel.”
Now the confrontation becomes clearer.
There are people who say whatever comes into their head without thinking about what those words do to somebody else. There are also people who use words deliberately because they’re trying to get a reaction.
Either way, there comes a point where I have to decide how much access I’m going to give those words.
That’s what “I make my stand” means to me.
I’m drawing a line.
“You can’t penetrate me my mind is set”
This becomes one of the most important thoughts in the entire song.
When I use the word penetrate, I’m talking about getting inside my head.
That’s where somebody can do a lot of damage without ever touching you.
A person can keep talking until you start questioning yourself. They can pressure you. They can manipulate you. They can keep repeating something until you begin wondering whether maybe they’re right.
That’s why the mind matters so much here.
There has to be a point where I know what I believe, what I stand for and what I will not allow somebody else to put inside me.
But having my mind set doesn’t mean I believe I’m right about everything.
I’ve been wrong plenty of times.
If somebody teaches me something and I realize I’m wrong, I can change my mind. That’s learning.
What I’m refusing here is manipulation.
There is a difference between somebody helping me see something differently and somebody trying to control the way I think.
“I am real”
Three words.
They don’t need much decoration.
I’m not claiming I’m perfect.
I’m saying what you see is what you’re getting.
I have made mistakes. I’ve had good years and bad years. I’ve made decisions I’m proud of and decisions I would handle differently today.
That’s real life.
Being real isn’t pretending the ugly parts never happened.
It’s being able to look at the whole thing and still say this is me.
“So not today Satan not today”
Now we reach the words that gave the song its name.
The funny thing is that when I first heard those words, none of this deeper meaning was attached to them.
I was incarcerated and I had a roommate who had come over from another unit. He was what you would call the muscle.
Me and him got along great.
He took good care of me and I used to joke with him all the time.
Every once in a while during those conversations he’d come out with:
“Not today Satan not today.”
I got a kick out of it.
That’s the truth about where the title came from.
It wasn’t some great philosophical moment.
It wasn’t me sitting down trying to invent a powerful statement.
It was my roommate saying something that made me laugh.
But the words stayed with me.
And somewhere between hearing them back then and eventually putting them into this song, they changed.
Satan became bigger than one meaning.
It could be somebody trying to manipulate you.
It could be temptation.
It could be anger.
It could be a bad habit.
It could be somebody you know isn’t good for your life.
It could be something inside yourself that keeps pulling you back toward the same mistakes.
That’s when “not today” becomes more than a joke.
It becomes a decision.
“Why is it I’m wasting my breath on you?”
Now I’m getting tired of the conversation.
I think most people have experienced this in one form or another.
You explain yourself.
Then you explain yourself again.
Then somehow you’re explaining the explanation.
Eventually you have to ask yourself what you’re accomplishing.
There are arguments that can actually solve something. Two people can disagree, talk honestly, listen to each other and maybe understand each other better afterward.
Then there are arguments that just go around in circles.
Nobody is listening.
Nobody is learning.
Everybody is waiting for their turn to talk.
At some point you’re not communicating anymore.
You’re just wasting breath.
“All your colluding and practises have no control over me”
This takes the idea one step further.
Now I’m recognizing that whatever is happening isn’t something I want controlling me.
That’s important because control doesn’t always arrive looking like control.
Sometimes it looks like advice.
Sometimes it looks like friendship.
Sometimes it looks like somebody doing you a favour.
Sometimes it comes through pressure.
Sometimes it comes through guilt.
And sometimes you don’t realize how much influence somebody has over you until you finally get some distance from them.
That is why the earlier line about my mind being set matters.
If I don’t know where I stand, somebody else may be more than happy to decide it for me.
“For crying out loud, what is wrong with you?”
There isn’t some hidden meaning behind every sentence I write.
Sometimes you’re simply frustrated.
That’s this line.
I’m basically saying, what the hell are we still doing here?
Why are we still going through this?
“Just let it go watch what you say”
Now I’m asking for two things.
Let it go.
And think before you speak.
Words can disappear from the air almost immediately after they’re spoken, but that doesn’t mean the effect disappears with them.
I’ve said things I probably should have thought about longer before saying them. Most people have.
That’s another reason I don’t want this song to become me pointing a finger at everybody else.
If I’m asking somebody else to watch what they say, I should be willing to ask the same thing of myself.
“You can’t penetrate me my mind is set
I am real”
When these words return, they carry a little more weight than they did the first time.
The first time was a declaration.
Now they’ve been tested.
Somebody has continued pushing.
The argument hasn’t disappeared.
The pressure hasn’t disappeared.
But neither has the boundary.
“So not today Satan not today
So not today Satan not today”
The phrase comes back, and now the joke I originally heard from my roommate has completely entered the meaning of the song.
I still hear the humour in it.
I don’t want to lose that because that’s part of where the song came from.
But now I also hear refusal.
You’re not getting inside my head.
You’re not controlling this decision.
You’re not taking me somewhere I don’t want to go.
Not today.
Then the song is about to make an important turn.
Up to this point, most of the attention has been on the person or influence coming at me.
The next part starts looking at something harder.
My own choices.
My own discipline.
My own habits.
Because eventually I can’t spend my whole life telling everybody else what they’re doing wrong.
At some point I have to look at what I’m doing too.

 

SECTION ONE
LYRIC JOURNEY
PART 2

“Desire alone won’t get you what you want most but discipline will”
This is where the song changes direction.
Up until here, I’ve been talking about somebody trying to get into my head. I’ve been pushing back against outside influence and making it clear that I’m not going to be controlled.
Now I have to turn that same attention toward myself.
It’s easy to say what somebody else is doing wrong.
It’s harder to ask what I’m doing about my own life.
Everybody desires something.
You can desire a better life.
You can desire success.
You can desire peace.
You can desire a better relationship.
You can desire to change something about yourself.
But desire by itself doesn’t do much.
I can sit there wanting something every day for the next ten years and still be sitting in exactly the same place.
At some point, desire needs discipline behind it.
Discipline isn’t always exciting. Most of the time it is doing something when there isn’t anybody around to congratulate you for doing it.
It’s doing it again tomorrow.
That’s where change starts becoming real.
“Your choices create the course and contours of your life.”
I don’t believe every single thing that happens in somebody’s life is the result of their choices.
Life isn’t that simple.
Things happen that we never asked for.
Things happen that we couldn’t have predicted.
Sometimes another person’s decision changes our life.
Sometimes circumstances change everything.
But our choices still matter.
They can change direction.
One decision can lead to another, and that one can lead to another.
After a while you can look back and realize that a decision that seemed small at the time actually changed the road you were travelling.
I know that from my own life.
That’s why I don’t take the word choice lightly.
“you’re decisions will determine your destiny”
This continues the same thought.
I’m not saying that we can control every part of our destiny.
I’m saying our decisions participate in creating it.
There is a difference.
If I repeatedly make decisions that take me in one direction, I shouldn’t be completely surprised when I eventually arrive somewhere in that direction.
Sometimes we don’t see that while we’re making those decisions.
We see it afterward.
Looking backward can make the road appear much clearer than it did while we were walking it.
“You are more likely to do your habits
if you don’t hate doing your habits”
I like this thought because it’s practical.
People sometimes decide they’re going to change everything overnight.
They make the new routine so difficult that they hate it almost immediately.
Then they stop.
If you’re trying to build something into your life, it helps if there is something about it you can actually live with.
That doesn’t mean everything has to be easy.
Some worthwhile things are difficult.
It means there is a difference between challenging yourself and making yourself miserable for no reason.
If you’re trying to build a habit that you want to keep, you have to think beyond the first few days.
Can I actually continue doing this?
“With repetition your new habits will go from being hard to start too being hard to stop”
This is where repetition becomes important.
The beginning can be the hardest part.
The first time you change a routine, you notice it.
The second time, you still notice it.
You keep repeating it and eventually it starts becoming part of what you normally do.
That can work both ways.
Good habits can become easier.
Bad habits can become harder to break.
That’s why I think people have to pay attention to what they’re repeating.
Something doesn’t have to destroy your life overnight to become a problem.
Sometimes it happens slowly.
One decision.
Then another.
Then another.
Eventually you stop thinking about it because it’s just what you do.
That is where this part connects back to the environment I was living in when I first heard the words “not today Satan.”
When you’re around something long enough, you can become accustomed to it.
Things that might have shocked you somewhere else can start becoming another part of the day.
That’s not only true inside incarceration.
It can happen anywhere.
It can happen in relationships.
It can happen with friends.
It can happen at work.
It can happen with money.
It can happen with anger.
It can happen with the way we speak to people.
It can happen with almost anything we repeat long enough.
Getting used to something doesn’t automatically make it good for us.
“You can’t defeat what you can not define”
This is one of the lines I would stop on even if it wasn’t my song.
Because how do you fight something when you don’t even know what you’re fighting?
If I keep saying my life isn’t going the way I want, that is a feeling.
But what exactly isn’t working?
Is it a person?
Is it one of my habits?
Is it the decisions I’m making?
Is it the environment I’m staying in?
Is it fear?
Is it anger?
Is it something I keep avoiding?
Until I can name the problem, I’m swinging at something in the dark.
Defining something doesn’t automatically solve it.
But at least now I know what I’m looking at.
That connects directly to the title again.
If Satan represents whatever is trying to pull me somewhere destructive, I have to know what that is.
Otherwise I’m saying “not today” without even knowing what I’m saying no to.
“So you can’t penetrate me my mind is set. I am real”
When this line returns now, it doesn’t mean exactly what it meant at the beginning.
Earlier I was defending myself against somebody else’s influence.
Now I’ve just spent an entire part of the song talking about discipline, choices and habits.
That changes the meaning.
Having my mind set now carries responsibility with it.
I can’t say nobody else is going to control me and then hand control over to my own destructive habits.
I can’t tell somebody else they aren’t getting into my head while refusing to examine what I’m putting into my own head.
If I’m going to say:
“I am real”
then I have to be real with myself too.
That’s harder.
It’s much easier to recognize somebody else’s bullshit than your own.
“so not today. Satan not today.
Not today, Satan not today”
Now those words have travelled again.
The first time they came from a memory of my roommate.
Then they became resistance against another person’s influence.
Now they can also be directed inward.
Not today to the habit.
Not today to the bad decision.
Not today to repeating something I already know isn’t working.
That doesn’t mean saying those words magically changes anything.
The song itself has already told us what has to come with them.
Discipline.
Choices.
Repetition.
Awareness.
That’s what gives “not today” some weight.
“Of everything I’ve cared about and everything I’ve done
To hold myself together, you’ve contributed to what you have done”
Now the song moves back toward another person.
But I’m not returning to exactly where I started.
I’ve already looked at myself.
I’ve already talked about my choices.
I’ve already talked about responsibility.
That makes it easier to say that somebody else can still contribute to damage without pretending they’re responsible for every part of my life.
Sometimes another person’s behaviour does affect you.
Sometimes you’re doing everything you can to hold yourself together while somebody else keeps adding more weight.
That doesn’t mean you surrender responsibility for yourself.
It means you’re honest about what is happening around you.
“You’re own reflection in the mirror has ruined you”
Now I’m putting the mirror in front of the other person.
Earlier the song forced me to examine myself.
Now I’m asking them to do the same.
Look at yourself.
Not the version you tell everybody you are.
Not the excuses.
Not the promises.
Look at what your actions are actually doing.
The mirror doesn’t argue with you.
It doesn’t tell you what you want to hear.
It just gives you back the person standing in front of it.
And sometimes that’s exactly where the next part of the truth has to begin.

SECTION ONE
LYRIC JOURNEY
PART 3
“By a sources, you’ve carried on and has damaged everyone”
This line continues directly from the mirror.
Whatever has been going on isn’t staying contained between two people anymore.
That’s something we don’t always recognize when we’re caught up in our own problems. We can convince ourselves that what we’re doing is our business and nobody else’s.
But our behaviour can travel.
Anger travels.
Lies travel.
Manipulation travels.
Bad decisions can travel.
The people closest to us can end up carrying something they never created.
That’s where this part of the song becomes less about winning an argument and more about recognizing consequences.
If what you’re doing keeps damaging people around you, eventually you have to stop looking for another explanation and look at the behaviour itself.
“I am real there’s nothing phoney for about me”
I come back to being real again.
I don’t mean flawless.
Those are two completely different things.
If I tried to present myself as somebody who has never made mistakes, anybody who knows anything about my life would know that wasn’t true.
Being real means I don’t need to create a perfect version of myself for this song.
I’ve had victories.
I’ve had failures.
I’ve made good decisions.
I’ve made bad ones.
I’ve had times when I knew exactly where I was going and other times when life went completely sideways.
All of that belongs to the same person.
When I say there is nothing phoney about me, I’m saying I would rather stand behind the truth of who I am than invent somebody easier to admire.
“I can’t let you in my life and hurt those that I love”
This is where the boundary becomes bigger than me.
Before this line, I can decide how much I’m willing to tolerate personally.
But once somebody’s behaviour starts reaching the people I love, the decision changes.
Now my choices can affect people who never agreed to be part of the situation.
That’s something worth thinking about.
We sometimes treat relationships as though they exist between only two people.
They don’t always.
What happens between two people can spread into families, friendships and other relationships.
The damage doesn’t necessarily stop at the original argument.
That’s why there are situations where letting somebody into your life is no longer only about whether you can handle them.
You have to think about who else is standing behind you.
“I don’t need any gifts or promises from you?”
A gift can be nice.
A promise can sound beautiful.
Neither one automatically changes behaviour.
I’ve always believed actions tell you something that words can’t.
Anybody can promise something in the right moment.
The harder part is what happens after the moment passes.
Does anything actually change?
If somebody keeps hurting you, apologizing, promising it won’t happen again and then repeating the same behaviour, eventually the promise starts losing its value.
That doesn’t mean every apology is false.
People can genuinely regret something.
People can change.
I’ve changed things about myself over the years.
But change needs somewhere to show itself.
At some point you should be able to see it in the behaviour.
“I don’t need your cries or lies anything you advise”
This is frustration talking again.
I’m at the point where words aren’t enough.
Crying doesn’t automatically make somebody dishonest, and advice isn’t automatically manipulation.
But inside this particular conversation, trust has already been damaged.
That’s what changes everything.
When trust is strong, words can carry a lot of weight.
When trust has been broken repeatedly, even truthful words can become difficult to believe.
That is one of the unfortunate things about damaging trust.
Eventually somebody can tell the truth and still not be believed because too many earlier lies are standing in the room with them.
“Control you’re mood swings and you might realize you’re wrong”
This line is asking the person to stop reacting long enough to look at what is actually happening.
When emotions are running high, people can say and do things they wouldn’t do when they’re thinking clearly.
I’ve had angry moments myself.
I know what it is like to react first and think later.
That’s exactly why I can’t write this as though I’m standing above somebody else giving them instructions from some perfect position.
I’m not.
The point is recognizing what happens when emotion controls the next decision.
Sometimes the strongest thing you can do is give yourself enough time to see the situation differently.
And sometimes after you settle down, you realize something you didn’t want to admit while you were angry.
You were wrong.
There is nothing easy about saying that.
“So I can’t let you penetrate me. My mind is set. I am real.”
Now the central line returns again, but it has changed.
At the beginning it sounded like defiance.
Now it sounds more like protection.
We’ve travelled through damaged trust, promises, lies, people we love and behaviour that affects more than one person.
So when I say you can’t penetrate me now, I’m not simply trying to sound tough.
I’m protecting a boundary that has a reason for existing.
“My mind is set” doesn’t mean I hate you.
It doesn’t mean I want something bad to happen to you.
It means I’ve reached a decision about what I can allow into my life.
Sometimes people think a boundary has to come with hatred.
It doesn’t.
You can care about somebody and still say no.
You can remember good things about somebody and still recognize that something has become destructive.
You can wish somebody well without giving them unlimited access to your life.
Those things can exist together.
“So not today Satan not today
not today Satan not today”
By now the chorus has travelled a long way from where it began.
The first time I heard those words in real life, I laughed.
The first time they appear in the song, they’re defiant.
Here they’re protective.
That’s why I don’t need to explain the chorus exactly the same way every time it returns.
The words haven’t changed.
The road leading into them has.
And that changes what they carry.
“Desire alone won’t get you what you want most but discipline will”
Now the discipline passage returns.
This time I hear it differently.
The first time it was about building yourself.
Now it follows a section about boundaries and relationships.
That matters because maintaining a boundary can require discipline too.
It’s easy to say you’re finished with something during the worst moment.
It’s harder when time passes.
The anger cools down.
Somebody apologizes.
You remember the good times.
You start questioning yourself.
Maybe it wasn’t that bad.
Maybe this time will be different.
Sometimes it will be different.
People really can change.
But sometimes we’re simply walking back into the same pattern because enough time has passed for us to forget why we left it.
That’s where discipline and judgment have to work together.
“Your choices create the course and contours of your life.
you’re decisions will determine your destiny”
These lines return after we’ve seen what choices can mean inside relationships.
Who you allow close to you is a choice.
Who you trust is a choice.
Whether you give somebody another chance can be a choice.
Whether you walk away can be a choice.
None of those decisions are always easy, and there isn’t one answer that fits every situation.
But they can change the direction of a life.
That’s why I don’t think of destiny here as something already written down somewhere waiting for me.
I’m talking about direction.
The choices I’m making are helping determine where I’m heading.
“You are more likely to do your habits
if you don’t hate doing your habits”
When this returns, I start thinking about relationships as habits too.
Not people as habits.
Patterns.
Some people keep finding themselves in the same argument with different people.
The names change.
The places change.
The years change.
But somehow the pattern looks familiar.
That is worth noticing.
If the same problem keeps following me into different rooms, eventually I have to ask whether part of it walked into the room with me.
That doesn’t mean blaming yourself for everything.
It means being willing to examine repetition wherever it appears.
“With repetition your new habits will go from being hard to start too being hard to stop”
The first time through, this was about building habits.
Now there is another side to it.
Repeated behaviour can become part of a relationship.
One person does something.
The other reacts.
The first person reacts to that reaction.
Everybody knows their part.
Nobody even has to think about it anymore.
The argument almost knows how to run itself.
That’s repetition too.
Breaking that kind of habit can be difficult because you’re not changing one action.
You’re changing a pattern that may have been rehearsed hundreds of times.
“You can’t defeat what you can not define”
And there it is again.
Name the pattern.
What actually keeps happening?
Not what happened this morning.
Not only what somebody said yesterday.
What keeps happening?
Once you can answer that honestly, you finally have something you can examine.
Maybe it can be repaired.
Maybe it can’t.
Maybe both people need to change something.
Maybe the healthiest answer is distance.
But at least you’re no longer fighting something without a name.
“So you can’t penetrate me my mind is set. I am real
so not today. Satan not today.
Not today, Satan not today”
By this point, the chorus has become almost a checkpoint.
We’ve travelled through another part of the song and come back to the same decision.
But we’re not standing in the same place.
The meaning has grown.
At first I was saying no to somebody else’s influence.
Then I was saying no to my own destructive habits.
Now I’m saying no to repeating patterns that can damage me and the people around me.
The words remain simple.
Not today.
But sometimes a simple answer comes only after you’ve finally understood what you’re saying no to.

 

SECTION ONE
LYRIC JOURNEY
PART 4

“Living the right life is almost impossible if you have the wrong friends”
This line brings me right back to where the whole story started.
My roommate.
The environment we were living in.
The people around us.
The choices being made every day.
I don’t mean this line as an excuse for anybody’s behaviour. I can’t spend my life saying I made a bad decision because somebody else was standing beside me.
My decisions belong to me.
But I would be lying if I said the people around us don’t influence us.
They do.
Sometimes that influence is obvious. Somebody directly asks you to do something you know you shouldn’t do.
Other times it happens much more quietly.
You spend enough time around certain behaviour and you start getting used to it.
Something that once looked completely wrong can slowly start looking normal.
Not necessarily right.
Just normal.
There is a difference.
That is one thing an environment can do to a person.
It can move the line without you noticing the line has moved.
That is why I think the people we choose to keep around us matter so much.
A good friend doesn’t have to agree with everything you do.
Actually, sometimes a good friend is the person willing to tell you you’re screwing up.
If everybody around you keeps encouraging your worst decisions, you eventually have to ask yourself why you’re keeping that circle around you.
And there is another side to that question.
What kind of friend am I?
Am I helping the people around me make better decisions?
Or am I the one encouraging them to do something stupid?
Influence goes both ways.
When I think back to my roommate, that’s why I don’t want to turn him into some simple lesson about good people and bad people.
Life isn’t that clean.
He treated me well.
We got along.
He looked out for me.
He also lived inside an environment where being known as the muscle meant something very different.
Both things can be true.
Eventually somebody approached him about punching somebody out.
He didn’t do it.
He ratted the person out and ended up getting kicked out of the unit.
Then life moved on and eventually I had another roommate.
That’s the real story.
I’m not going to rewrite it years later to make it fit neatly into the song.
What stayed with me wasn’t all the politics around the unit.
It was something much simpler.
His saying.
“Not today Satan not today.”
That’s the part that followed me.
“The life you are living right now is shaping the life you will be living tomorrow”
This is where the song reaches the thought I want to leave behind.
Notice I didn’t write that the life you’re living today guarantees the life you’ll have tomorrow.
I wouldn’t believe that.
There are too many things in life we don’t control.
You can do everything right and still get hit with something you never saw coming.
You can make plans and watch them disappear.
You can lose something you worked years to build.
You can also receive an opportunity you never expected.
Life has never promised any of us a straight road.
But today still matters.
What I repeatedly do today can become part of who I am tomorrow.
The habits I’m building matter.
The people I’m surrounding myself with matter.
The way I react when I’m angry matters.
The promises I keep matter.
The promises I break matter.
What I allow into my life matters.
What I refuse matters too.
That doesn’t mean one bad day destroys your future.
It doesn’t mean one good day fixes everything.
It means direction matters.
If I don’t like where I’m going, eventually I have to look at the direction I’m travelling.
Sometimes that means changing something big.
Sometimes it means changing one small thing and repeating that change tomorrow.
That’s where the earlier lines about discipline come back without needing to repeat them again.
Desire starts something.
Discipline keeps it moving.
Choices create direction.
Habits strengthen that direction.
And eventually you’re living somewhere that was built partly from decisions that once seemed very small.
“So you can’t penetrate me my mind is set. I am real”
This is the last time the central thought returns.
By now it has earned a different meaning from the first time we heard it.
At the beginning of the song, it sounded almost like a challenge.
You’re not getting through me.
Now I hear something calmer in it.
I know where I stand.
That doesn’t mean nobody can teach me anything.
It doesn’t mean I’ll never change my mind.
It doesn’t mean I’m always right.
It means I have to be responsible for what I allow to influence me.
There are things I should listen to.
There are people I should learn from.
There are times when somebody tells me I’m wrong and they’re absolutely right.
Being strong enough to change your mind when you’re wrong isn’t weakness.
But neither is refusing to be manipulated.
You have to learn the difference.
That’s part of growing.
“I am real”
The song returns to those three words one last time.
After everything we’ve travelled through, I think they mean more now too.
Being real means I have to own the good and the bad.
I can’t talk about discipline without admitting I’ve lacked it at times.
I can’t talk about choices without admitting I’ve made bad ones.
I can’t talk about wrong friends without examining the kind of friend I’ve been.
I can’t talk about somebody else’s reflection in the mirror without being willing to stand in front of my own.
That’s being real to me.
Not perfection.
Honesty.
“So not today Satan not today
not today Satan not today”
And that’s where the song ends.
Right back at the words that started everything.
I can still picture why those words stayed with me.
A roommate saying something that made me laugh.
At the time, that’s all it needed to be.
I didn’t know I would eventually take those words and build a song around them.
I certainly wasn’t sitting there thinking about habits, discipline, boundaries, influence or the direction of somebody’s life.
All of that came later.
That’s one of the things I love about songwriting.
A moment doesn’t always tell you what it means when you’re living it.
Sometimes it waits.
Years can pass before you understand why something stayed in your head.
For me, “Not today Satan” became one of those things.
The Satan in this song doesn’t have to be the same thing for everybody.
Maybe yours is another person trying to control you.
Maybe it’s a bad relationship.
Maybe it’s anger.
Maybe it’s a habit you’ve been trying to break.
Maybe it’s temptation.
Maybe it’s the people around you.
Maybe it’s something inside yourself that keeps telling you to make the same decision you’ve already regretted ten times.
Whatever it is, there is something I like about the words “not today.”
They don’t ask you to solve the rest of your life before breakfast.
They deal with today.
Maybe tomorrow you’ll have to make the decision again.
Fine.
Tomorrow can wait until tomorrow.
Today you make today’s decision.
And there is still something else underneath all of this that I don’t want the deeper meaning of the song to erase.
The phrase still makes me smile.
I remember the guy who used to say it.
I remember us joking around.
I remember that strange little piece of my life for what it actually was.
Out of all the things that could have followed me from that time, these four words did.
Then I turned them into something of my own.
Not today Satan.
Not today.

 

SECTION TWO
THE STORY
THE GUY BEHIND THE WORDS

One of the strange things about being incarcerated is that you meet people you probably never would have met anywhere else.
You don’t choose everybody around you.
Sometimes you don’t even choose the person sleeping in the same room.
I went through a few roommates, and then this particular guy came over from another unit.
He was known as the muscle.
That’s probably enough description right there.
If somebody wanted somebody punched out, he was the kind of guy they might approach.
But here’s what makes the story interesting.
Me and him got along great.
That’s the part I don’t want to lose by making the story sound darker than it really was between the two of us.
He took good care of me.
I joked with him.
We laughed.
And somewhere in all of that came this sentence I never forgot.
“Not today Satan, not today.”
He would say it to me and I’d get a kick out of it.
I wasn’t sitting there thinking, there’s a song.
I wasn’t analyzing the meaning.
It was just funny.
Sometimes that’s how things stay with me.
A sentence gets lodged somewhere in my head and waits.
THE OTHER SIDE OF HIM
There was obviously another side to the guy.
You don’t get called the muscle because you’re handing out birthday cards.
That was part of the environment we were in.
Eventually somebody approached him about punching somebody else out.
This time he didn’t do it.
He ratted the guy out.
That got him kicked out of our unit, and eventually I ended up with somebody else as a roommate.
I’m deliberately not turning this into a bigger prison story than it needs to be.
The important part isn’t who wanted who punched or all the politics behind it.
The important part for this song is the person I knew and the sentence he left behind.
People are complicated.
Someone can treat you well while living very differently from the way you want to live.
Someone can make you laugh while carrying problems of their own.
Someone can be part of a difficult environment and still leave you with a good memory.
That’s life.
I don’t need to turn him into a hero.
I don’t need to turn him into a villain either.
He was my roommate.
We got along.
He made me laugh.
And he gave me one hell of a song title without ever knowing it.
WHEN THE JOKE BECAME SOMETHING ELSE
The funny thing about “Not today Satan” is how easily those four words can grow.
At first, I connected them to him.
Then I started connecting them to life.
Satan in this song doesn’t have to walk around with horns and a pitchfork.
It can be anything trying to take control of you.
Sometimes it’s another person.
Sometimes it’s anger.
Sometimes it’s temptation.
Sometimes it’s a habit you know is hurting you.
Sometimes it’s somebody offering you something you shouldn’t accept.
Sometimes it’s the crowd around you.
And sometimes the thing screwing up your life is you.
That’s where the song really changed for me.
It stopped being about one guy saying something funny and became a question:
What are you allowing into your head?
THE PEOPLE AROUND YOU
The last part of the song says:
“Living the right life is almost impossible if you have the wrong friends”
I don’t think that means you blame your friends for every bad decision you’ve ever made.
Your decisions are still yours.
But let’s not pretend the people around us don’t matter.
They do.
Spend enough time around certain behaviour and eventually it can stop looking unusual.
That’s true inside prison.
It’s true outside prison.
It’s true when you’re young.
It’s true when you’re old.
The people around you can encourage the best parts of you or constantly invite the worst parts of you to come out.
Eventually you still have to make the decision.
That’s why I followed it with:
“The life you are living right now is shaping the life you will be living tomorrow”
I believe there’s a lot packed into that sentence.
Not because everything about tomorrow is under our control.
It isn’t.
Life can knock you sideways without asking permission.
But what we repeatedly choose today can absolutely become part of what we’re dealing with tomorrow.
DISCIPLINE OVER DESIRE
The middle of this song almost becomes a conversation with myself.
“Desire alone won’t get you what you want most but discipline will”
Everybody desires something.
A better life.
More money.
Better relationships.
Success.
Peace.
Freedom.
Health.
Happiness.
Whatever it happens to be.
But wanting something and building toward it are completely different things.
That’s why habits became part of this song.
A good habit can be difficult when you begin it.
A bad habit can be incredibly easy to begin and incredibly difficult to stop.
Either way, repetition has power.
That is why the line:
“You can’t defeat what you can not define”
belongs here.
Before you change something, you have to be willing to identify it.
What exactly keeps pulling you backward?
Who keeps getting into your head?
What behaviour keeps repeating?
What are you doing that you already know isn’t working?
Maybe that’s another meaning of Satan in this song.
You can’t keep telling something “not today” if you’re unwilling to admit what that something is.
THE MIRROR
Later in the song I bring in the mirror.
That wasn’t accidental.
It’s easy to look around and identify everybody else’s problems.
That guy is the problem.
That woman is the problem.
My friends are the problem.
My circumstances are the problem.
Sometimes they genuinely are part of it.
But eventually there’s a mirror.
That’s the uncomfortable part.
What am I contributing?
What am I allowing?
What am I repeating?
What do I need to change?
I don’t believe personal responsibility means pretending everything that happens to us is our fault.
It means being honest about the part that actually belongs to us.
That’s a much harder conversation.
But it’s also the one that can change something.
NOT TODAY
I still think about how simply this song began.
Two guys sharing a room in jail.
Joking around.
One of them keeps saying:
“Not today Satan, not today.”
The other one keeps laughing.
That’s it.
No great songwriting ceremony.
No grand plan.
Just a sentence.
But that’s one of the reasons I love writing songs.
You never know which moment is going to stay.
Years later, four funny words can turn into something about discipline, boundaries, friendship, influence, habits, responsibility and protecting the people you love.
And somewhere underneath all of those bigger ideas, I can still remember where it came from.
My old roommate.
The muscle.
The guy who made me laugh.
Not today Satan.
Not today.

 

SECTION THREE
LYRIC EXPLORATION
WHERE THE SONG REALLY CHANGES

At first, NOT TODAY SATAN sounds like I’m talking directly to somebody.
There is frustration in it.
There is defiance.
There is somebody trying to get through to me and me refusing to let that happen.
“You can’t penetrate me my mind is set
I am real”
That thought keeps returning because it is the wall running through the entire song.
But the interesting part is that the wall isn’t made of concrete.
It’s mental.
I spent enough time around concrete walls while incarcerated.
This song is about another kind.
The kind you build inside yourself when you finally decide what you will and won’t allow to control you.
WHAT DOES “SATAN” MEAN HERE?
The title can easily make somebody assume this is simply a religious song.
I don’t see it that narrowly.
The word works because everybody understands what it represents: something trying to pull you toward a place you don’t want to go.
For one person, that could be temptation.
For somebody else, addiction.
For somebody else, anger.
A destructive relationship.
A bad crowd.
A decision they already know they’ll regret.
Or their own behaviour.
That’s why I like the title.
You can bring your own Satan to the song.
And you can decide whether today is the day you finally tell it no.
“I AM REAL”
Those three words appear throughout the song.
“I am real.”
They’re simple, but they’re important to me.
Being real doesn’t mean being perfect.
I certainly wouldn’t make that claim.
It means knowing who you are well enough that somebody else can’t constantly redefine you.
That’s harder than it sounds.
People will tell you what you should think.
What you should believe.
Who you should trust.
Who you should hate.
What you should do.
Sometimes they’ll even tell you who you are.
At some point you have to decide for yourself.
That’s where:
“My mind is set”
comes from.
It isn’t saying I’ll never change my mind about anything.
That would be foolish.
If somebody shows me I’m wrong, I should be able to learn.
What I’m talking about is having a core that isn’t available for somebody else to manipulate.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN STRENGTH AND STUBBORNNESS
There is another side to having your mind set.
You can be strong.
You can also be stubborn.
Those aren’t always the same thing.
If “my mind is set” means nobody can manipulate me, that’s strength.
If it means nobody can ever teach me anything, that’s a problem.
That’s why I think the lines about discipline and habits matter so much.
The song isn’t saying:
Everybody else needs to change and I’m fine.
It eventually turns the question around.
What am I doing?
What habits am I building?
What decisions am I repeating?
Where is my life actually going?
That’s a much more useful question.
DESIRE IS EASY
“Desire alone won’t get you what you want most but discipline will”
There’s a reason I repeat this passage.
Desire feels good.
Discipline doesn’t always feel good.
It’s easy to imagine what you want your life to become.
Doing the boring part over and over again is different.
That is where:
“With repetition your new habits will go from being hard to start too being hard to stop”
enters the song.
Repetition can work for you.
It can also work against you.
Do something destructive repeatedly and it can become part of your normal life.
Do something constructive repeatedly and eventually that can become normal too.
The frightening part is that we don’t always notice the moment something becomes normal.
THE ENVIRONMENT AROUND US
That’s one place where my incarceration experience connects naturally to the song.
When you’re living inside an environment long enough, you adjust to it.
Things that would have seemed strange somewhere else become part of another day.
People adapt.
That’s a human strength, but it can also become dangerous if adapting means accepting things you shouldn’t accept.
The same thing happens outside prison.
A person doesn’t need bars around them to become trapped inside an environment.
It can happen in a group of friends.
A workplace.
A relationship.
A family.
A lifestyle.
Even online.
If everybody around you is doing something, eventually it can start looking normal simply because you see it all the time.
That doesn’t automatically make it right for you.
“You can’t defeat what you can not define”
First identify it.
Then decide what you’re going to do about it.
THE WRONG FRIENDS
“Living the right life is almost impossible if you have the wrong friends”
I deliberately don’t want to turn that line into an excuse.
I’ve made my own decisions in life.
I own them.
But influence matters.
There are people who can walk into your life and make you want to become better.
There are others who can slowly convince you that your worst behaviour isn’t really a problem.
Sometimes they don’t even have to convince you.
They just make it easier.
That is why choosing who gets close to you matters.
It isn’t about judging everybody else.
It’s about understanding what happens to you when you’re around them.
Do I become better around this person?
Do I become worse?
Do I constantly have to repair damage afterward?
Do I like who I am when I’m with them?
Those questions can tell you quite a bit.
THE PEOPLE YOU LOVE
One line takes the song beyond protecting myself:
“I can’t let you in my life and hurt those that I love”
That changes the stakes.
Our choices rarely affect only us.
Who we bring into our lives can affect families.
Friends.
Children.
Partners.
People who had nothing to do with the original decision.
Sometimes setting a boundary isn’t about punishing somebody.
It’s about protecting something else.
That can be difficult because people can come with promises.
Apologies.
Gifts.
Tears.
Reasons.
And sometimes those things are sincere.
But sincerity doesn’t automatically erase consequences.
Eventually behaviour has to mean something too.
THE REFLECTION IN THE MIRROR
“You’re own reflection in the mirror has ruined you”
The mirror is probably one of the harshest images in the song because there is nowhere to hide from it.
I can blame everybody else all day.
Eventually I still have to live with myself.
That applies to the person I’m addressing.
It also applies to me.
That’s why I don’t want this song interpreted as me standing above everybody else handing out life lessons.
I’ve made mistakes.
I’ve made decisions I would handle differently today.
I’ve learned things late.
That’s part of being human.
The important question isn’t whether you’ve ever screwed up.
The question is what you do after you recognize it.
TOMORROW STARTS EARLIER THAN WE THINK
“The life you are living right now is shaping the life you will be living tomorrow”
I don’t mean that as some magical guarantee that good decisions automatically create a perfect life.
They don’t.
Bad things happen to good people.
Circumstances change.
Life can throw something at you that you never saw coming.
But tomorrow isn’t completely disconnected from today either.
What you practise today can become what you automatically do tomorrow.
The people you surround yourself with today can influence who you’re becoming.
The boundaries you refuse to establish today may become problems you have to deal with later.
And the discipline you begin building today may eventually become the thing that carries you through something difficult.
That is why the song keeps returning to the same statement.
“My mind is set.
I am real.”
THE FOUR WORDS THAT SURVIVED
The funny thing is that none of this was going through my head when my roommate first said those words.
I just thought they were funny.
“Not today Satan, not today.”
That was the beginning.
Life gave the sentence the rest of its meaning.
Maybe that’s why the title still makes me smile.
I can hear both versions at once.
I hear my old roommate joking around.
And I hear what the words eventually became for me.
A boundary.
A warning.
A reminder.
A little bit of humour.
And sometimes exactly the answer you need when something is trying to drag you somewhere you don’t want to go.
Not today.

 

SECTION FOUR
REFLECTION
WHAT FOUR WORDS CAN BECOME

When I think about this song now, what gets me is how little control we sometimes have over which moments stay with us.
I spent almost three years incarcerated.
There are obviously much bigger memories from that period of my life than somebody looking at me and saying:
“Not today Satan, not today.”
But that one stayed.
Maybe because it made me laugh.
Maybe because of the guy who said it.
Maybe because somewhere underneath the joke there was already a truth I hadn’t attached to it yet.
Whatever the reason, four words followed me out of that place and eventually became something completely different.
THE PERSON AND THE LESSON
I don’t look back at my roommate and pretend he was something he wasn’t.
He had his life.
I had mine.
We were two people sharing the same space for a period of time under circumstances neither of us would have chosen as an ideal place to live.
But we got along.
He looked out for me.
We joked.
He made me laugh.
That memory can exist without me approving of everything else that was happening around us.
I think we sometimes make people too simple.
Good guy.
Bad guy.
Right.
Wrong.
Real people don’t always fit comfortably into those boxes.
Someone can have qualities you genuinely like and still make choices you don’t want to follow.
You can care about somebody and still understand that their road isn’t your road.
Maybe growing older teaches you that.
You don’t have to hate somebody to know you shouldn’t follow them.
NOT EVERY BATTLE NEEDS TO BE FOUGHT
One thing I take from this song today is that strength isn’t always about fighting.
Sometimes strength is refusing to participate.
Not today.
That’s it.
You don’t always need a twenty-minute argument.
You don’t have to prove yourself to everybody.
You don’t have to answer every insult.
You don’t have to accept every invitation.
You don’t have to let everybody into your life.
You don’t even have to win every argument.
Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is recognize where something is heading and decide:
I’m not going there.
That may not look dramatic.
It may actually be one of the strongest decisions you make.
THE HARDEST PERSON TO SAY NO TO
It’s easy to read this song and imagine Satan as somebody else.
That’s convenient.
It’s that person.
That friend.
That relationship.
That asshole.
They’re the problem.
Sometimes that’s true.
But sometimes Satan knows your name because he’s looking back at you from the mirror.
That’s the part I don’t want to leave out.
There have been times in my own life when the person I needed to control wasn’t somebody standing across from me.
It was me.
My reaction.
My anger.
My decision.
My next move.
My willingness to keep doing something even when I already knew where it was taking me.
That’s when “not today” becomes harder.
Because now there is nobody else to blame.
DISCIPLINE ISN’T VERY EXCITING
People like talking about motivation.
Discipline isn’t nearly as glamorous.
Motivation can disappear by lunchtime.
Discipline is what asks you to do something again tomorrow.
Then again.
Then again.
That’s why habits became such a large part of this song.
A life doesn’t usually change because somebody made one beautiful speech about changing.
It changes when enough small decisions begin moving in another direction.
I think that applies whether you’re trying to build something, repair something, leave something behind, learn something new or simply stop repeating the same mistake.
You don’t have to fix your entire life today.
Sometimes you just have to win today.
Tomorrow can have its turn when it gets here.
WHO GETS CLOSE TO YOU?
The line about wrong friends is probably worth carrying beyond the song.
Not because everyone around you has to be perfect.
That would leave all of us pretty lonely.
The better question might be:
Who am I becoming around the people closest to me?
Do they bring out something good in me?
Do I bring something good into their lives?
Can we tell each other when we’re wrong?
Or are we constantly encouraging each other to make the same stupid decisions?
Those questions matter.
The people around us don’t write our destiny for us.
But they can certainly influence the direction we’re walking.
And we’re influencing them too.
That responsibility works both ways.
WHAT I HOPE YOU CARRY FROM THIS SONG
I don’t expect everybody to hear NOT TODAY SATAN the way I do.
Maybe for you it’s spiritual.
Maybe it’s about addiction.
Maybe it’s about somebody toxic in your life.
Maybe it’s about anger.
Maybe it’s about changing a habit.
Maybe you just like the phrase.
That’s fine too.
The song started with laughter.
There’s nothing wrong with leaving some laughter inside it.
But if I hope anything stays with you, it’s this:
You are allowed to draw a line.
You are allowed to reconsider who influences you.
You are allowed to recognize something destructive before it becomes normal.
You are allowed to admit when you’re the one who needs to change.
And you don’t have to wait until your entire life is figured out before you start.
Sometimes four words are enough.
Not today Satan.
Not today.
THANK YOU
If you’ve stayed with me from a prison roommate and a running joke all the way through discipline, habits, friendship, boundaries and the person staring back from the mirror, thank you.
That’s exactly why I built MOITA the way I did.
The song may only last a few minutes.
The story behind it can travel much farther.
This one certainly did.
It started in a place where I never expected to find anything worth carrying forward.
Yet somehow I walked away with four words, a memory, a laugh and eventually a song.
Life is strange that way.
Sometimes you don’t recognize what a moment gave you until years later.

MOITA
WHERE EVERY SONG TELLS A STORY
EVERY STORY TEACHES SOMETHING

SECTION FIVE
MOITA DOCUMENTARY & LEARNING CENTRE
WHEN A PHRASE BECOMES SOMETHING BIGGER

NOT TODAY SATAN began with a phrase I heard from a roommate while I was incarcerated.
But by the time I wrote the song, those words had travelled a long way from where they started.
That’s what I want to explore here.
Not the roommate again.
Not the prison story again.
We’ve already told that story.
This is about the bigger questions the song leaves behind.
Why are the people around us so important?
How do repeated choices become habits?
Why can something harmful eventually start feeling normal?
Why are boundaries sometimes so difficult to establish?
And what does it really mean to have discipline?
Those questions aren’t limited to incarceration.
They’re part of everyday life.
THE PEOPLE AROUND US MATTER
We like to think we’re completely independent.
I make my own decisions.
You make yours.
Simple.
Except human beings don’t live in isolation.
We’re constantly watching one another.
Listening.
Learning.
Comparing.
Adapting.
Sometimes somebody influences us deliberately.
Other times they don’t have to say anything.
Their behaviour becomes part of the environment around us.
That’s one reason the line:
“Living the right life is almost impossible if you have the wrong friends”
deserves more thought than simply blaming your friends.
The better question isn’t whether your friends control you.
They don’t.
The question is whether the environment around you makes certain choices easier or harder.
If everybody around you treats destructive behaviour as normal, resisting it may require more effort.
If the people around you encourage responsibility, learning, creativity or discipline, those things can become easier to maintain too.
Influence doesn’t remove personal responsibility.
It helps explain the environment in which we’re making our decisions.
WHEN SOMETHING BECOMES NORMAL
Human beings are remarkably good at adapting.
That ability helps us survive difficult situations.
But adaptation has another side.
We can become accustomed to things.
A person can enter an environment and initially think:
This is crazy.
Then enough time passes.
They see the same behaviour again.
Then again.
Then again.
Eventually the reaction can change.
What once seemed shocking can start feeling ordinary.
That doesn’t mean the behaviour became better.
It means the person’s reference point may have changed.
This idea matters far beyond prison.
Think about workplaces.
Relationships.
Friend groups.
Online communities.
Families.
Schools.
Any environment we spend enough time inside can influence what begins to feel normal.
That’s why occasionally stepping back and questioning our surroundings can be valuable.
Is this actually healthy?
Or have I simply become used to it?
HABITS DON’T BEGIN AS HABITS
The song says:
“With repetition your new habits will go from being hard to start too being hard to stop”
A habit doesn’t arrive fully formed.
It develops through repetition.
At first, a new behaviour may require deliberate thought.
You remember to do it.
You make yourself do it.
You repeat it.
Over time, familiar behaviours can require less conscious effort.
That’s useful when the behaviour helps us.
It becomes a problem when the repeated behaviour is taking us somewhere we don’t want to go.
This is why changing a habit can involve more than simply saying:
I’m stopping.
It can help to understand what happens before the behaviour.
Where are you?
Who are you with?
What are you feeling?
What usually triggers the next step?
What reward are you getting from it?
Once you begin recognizing the pattern, you’re no longer fighting something completely invisible.
That connects directly to another line in the song:
“You can’t defeat what you can not define”
Before changing a pattern, it helps to understand what the pattern actually is.
DESIRE AND DISCIPLINE
“Desire alone won’t get you what you want most but discipline will”
Wanting something can start the journey.
Discipline helps continue it.
The difficult part is that discipline usually doesn’t look impressive.
It’s repetition.
Showing up.
Practising.
Stopping yourself.
Starting again after slipping.
Doing something when you’d rather not.
Choosing the longer benefit over the immediate reward.
There is also an important difference between discipline and punishment.
Discipline doesn’t have to mean making yourself miserable.
A routine you’re able to repeat is often more useful than an extreme change you abandon almost immediately.
That connects with another interesting thought in the song:
“You are more likely to do your habits
if you don’t hate doing your habits”
That might sound obvious.
But sometimes obvious things are worth saying.
If you’re trying to build something into your life, making it realistic enough to continue matters.
THE POWER OF A SMALL DECISION
“The life you are living right now is shaping the life you will be living tomorrow”
That doesn’t mean every outcome in life is under our control.
It isn’t.
Illness happens.
Accidents happen.
People lose jobs.
Relationships end.
Families experience tragedy.
Opportunities disappear.
Unexpected opportunities appear too.
Life contains chance and circumstances we never chose.
Personal responsibility shouldn’t become an excuse for pretending otherwise.
But there is still a part of tomorrow being built today.
One decision doesn’t necessarily transform a life.
Repeated decisions can.
One workout won’t make somebody physically fit.
One guitar lesson won’t make somebody a musician.
One day of saving money won’t create financial security.
One honest conversation won’t repair every damaged relationship.
But repeated actions can begin changing direction.
That is where discipline becomes more important than one burst of motivation.
BOUNDARIES ARE NOT ALWAYS PUNISHMENT
“I can’t let you in my life and hurt those that I love”
That line introduces another important subject.
Boundaries.
A boundary isn’t automatically an attack against another person.
Sometimes it’s simply a decision about what you will participate in.
What behaviour you will accept.
What you’re willing to give.
What you’re unwilling to sacrifice.
Who gets access to certain parts of your life.
Healthy boundaries can protect relationships rather than destroy them.
They can also protect other people affected by our choices.
And boundaries don’t always require hatred.
That’s something I think matters.
You can care about somebody and still decide that a particular behaviour cannot continue around you.
You can remember good things about somebody while recognizing the damage caused by other things.
Human relationships are rarely as simple as completely good or completely bad.
THE MIRROR TEST
The easiest version of NOT TODAY SATAN is:
You’re the problem.
Stay away from me.
The harder version is:
What if I’m contributing to the problem?
That is where the mirror becomes important.
Self-reflection isn’t the same as blaming yourself for everything.
It means examining the part you actually control.
What did I do?
How did I react?
What am I repeating?
What could I have handled differently?
What can I do now?
Those questions are uncomfortable because they remove the easiest answer:
Everybody else needs to change.
Sometimes they do.
But sometimes I do too.
And sometimes both things are true at the same time.
YOU CAN CHANGE YOUR MIND
There is another side to:
“My mind is set”
I don’t want anybody reading this song to think strength means refusing to reconsider anything.
There is nothing weak about discovering better information and changing your mind.
There is nothing weak about admitting:
I was wrong.
There is nothing weak about realizing that something you believed ten years ago doesn’t make sense to you anymore.
A strong mind isn’t necessarily a closed mind.
For me, “my mind is set” in this song means something different.
My boundaries are mine.
My decisions are mine.
You don’t get to manipulate me into becoming somebody I don’t want to become.
But I still want to learn.
I still want to question myself.
I still want to grow.
Otherwise discipline can turn into stubbornness, and stubbornness can become another prison of its own.
NOT TODAY DOESN’T HAVE TO MEAN FOREVER
There is something else I like about the title.
It doesn’t say:
Never again for the rest of my life.
It says:
Not today.
That’s manageable.
Anybody who has tried to change something difficult knows how overwhelming forever can sound.
Sometimes today is enough.
Make the better decision today.
Keep the boundary today.
Do the work today.
Don’t make the call today.
Walk away from the argument today.
Start the new habit today.
Tomorrow you’ll get another decision.
Maybe that’s why those four words stayed with me.
They started as a joke.
But there is actually something practical hiding inside them.
Not today.
CONTINUE EXPLORING
If the ideas behind NOT TODAY SATAN interest you, there are several subjects worth exploring further.
Look into the psychology of habit formation and how repetition, cues and rewards can influence behaviour.
Explore research on social influence and how groups can affect individual choices without necessarily removing individual responsibility.
Learn about healthy personal boundaries and the difference between boundaries, control and punishment.
You can also explore the idea of self-reflection: how people examine their own decisions without turning responsibility into endless self-blame.
The point isn’t to find one book, one expert or one perfect answer.
It’s to understand yourself a little better.
Ask yourself:
What am I repeatedly doing?
Who is influencing me?
Who am I influencing?
What have I started accepting simply because I’ve been around it long enough?
What boundary have I been afraid to establish?
And what is one decision I could make differently today?
You don’t have to answer every question at once.
Maybe start with one.
After all, this entire song started with four words.
Not today Satan.
Not today.

MOITA