Month: September 2022

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A photo of a black dog smiling in the sunshine

In 2014 I decided to start working on a new solo album with the working title The wolf is at the door / let’s invite him inside / it’s getting cold out there.  I thought I would probably complete the record in 2015 or 2016 because, unlike previous records such as Blood and Scotch/Valentine (2012) or Louder, Longer, Lobster (2007), I was not going to do the record as a one-month project but rather would take as much time as I needed to.  I had no idea that would be 8 years.

There are some pretty good reasons that this album has been a long time in development.  For one thing, I got involved in several other musical projects with other bands.  First I joined Robots From the Future, then Fistful of Datas, and finally my current band, Awkward Bodies.  I also sat in with several other bands.  Secondly, my life went through a number of personal and professional changes that had nothing to do with music.  There was also my involvement in the Witness Underground film. But, through it all, I have been writing and recording music.  A lot of music.  Too much music.

So here I am with an update.  FINALLY.  I am happy to report that the album is now entering the final stage.  There are only a few overdubs left but as of last night the track selection and order has been decided on, the release title and cover image for the album have been decided on, and I have a rough mix of the album and I’m very happy with the result.  My new album has a final shape and I am looking forward to sharing it with the world.  On vinyl.  🙂

More to come!

P. S. – I hope I will be able to complete my next album in a shorter period of time.  I’ll try.  Promise.

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Last night I had another JW dream. They don’t happen all that often these days, but every once and a while I am reminded that I spent the first 30 years of my life in that religion and it is still a part of my make up.

I don’t exactly know why I would happen to have a JW dream now, there has been nothing occuring in the waking world that has made me think about my Witness past, but the subsconscious does what it wants. Perhaps it can’t help but stumble across that theme in it’s nightly wanderings.

In this particular episode I found myself at an assembly of Witnesses that was being held in an elementary school gymnasium. Hardly the sort of place that Witnesses usually meet, but, dreams do their own things. The elementary school was a bit sprawling with hallways and classrooms filled with children’s drawings and tiny desks. I was my current, adult, non-JW self and I had decided to visit the Witness gathering as a peace offering to my father. I was initially standing in the auditorium, suit and tie bound, listening to the program out of politeness, and then I was wandering the halls of the elementary school since I didn’t actually care what the speakers had to say having heard it all a trillion times before.

That was when my dad came up to me to tell me that I needed to get studying for the next meeting and directed me to an after-hours study session going on in one of the classrooms. I didn’t argue and started heading towards the indicated room but when I got in there I realized I was now stuck with a bunch of other Witnesses who thought I was there as a believer not out of politeness. What was worse, they had been a study group that my brother Rhett had been a member of. They were very excited that I would be joining their group because Rhett had been such a great contributor and pillar when he had been alive. I suddenly started to feel like I had made a massive mistake in coming to this place. I had thought I was making some sort of effort to show my dad that I wasn’t hostile to his faith, I just wasn’t a member, but now I was faced with a group of friendly people who were accepting me on the false belief that I was one of them and I could only disappoint them. I started looking for an escape that wouldn’t sound mean or disappoint them too much. I was really upset that there was a Rhett connection because I felt like I was letting down his memory at the same time I was letting these Brothers and Sisters down. Life gives you opportunities enough to feel awkward, it sucks when your brain puts you in an awkward social situation when you aren’t even conscious. Thanks, Obama.

Anyhow, I escaped from the clutches of the Bible study group not by any graceful reply but by excusing myself to the bathroom and looking for an exit. I then woke up.

I am not sure there was any great message in my dream but I am pretty sure that it was pretty far off from what a real intrusion into a Witness event would be like. First off, the wouldn’t allow me in any of their study groups. They wouldn’t speak to me. They wouldn’t even allow me to speak to them. If I tried I would likely be ushered out of the building if I said anything about religion. I could ask where the restroom is. Probably.

I haven’t set foot in a Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses since Rhett’s funeral in 2005. I am pretty sure that if I did go to a meeting some day (I’ve been tempted) I would find it a very alien experience. I was used to black Bibles, but now they are silver. When I went, there were no televisions in the Halls, but now I understand they routinely watch video presentations at the meetings. The schedule of meetings is different, they have removed a couple and retooled others. In my day, we carried around printed magazines, nobody used tablet computers or laptops, but now a lot of them do. Maybe most.

Every time I have a JW dream I wind up spending a little time online refamiliarizing myself with what’s new in the world of Watchtower. Mainly, I think, I’m just hoping to learn some day that they have finally decided to soften their stance towards people like me. I keep hoping that they will get “new light”. Something like this…

‘When it comes to those who once believed in our religion but, after doing their own research, have come to the conclusion that they believe something else and resigned from our fellowship, we should respect that their spiritual journey is their own. While we do well not to debate religious matters with such ones, lest our own faith be tested, these former brothers and sisters should be treated with love and dignity, as we would treat any other neighbor, family member, or friend, in emulation of the example of the great teacher, Jesus Christ. Recall that Jesus dined with even the sinners, the prostitutes, the tax collectors, and did not shun even these. We can never know what is in the heart of another, what may have motivated them to believe differently than we do, but by continuing to demonstrate our Christlike love, we may one day cause them to return to our congregations, winning them over by the fruitage of the spirit. There is no cause to consider them diseased enemies, twisted apostates, or dangerous foes unless they explicitly engage in slander or abuse towards their former brethren. In the case of one who simply follows another path, the course of love for our fellow man should motivate us to treat such a one with the dignity, respect, and love that all Jehovah’s creatures deserve. After all, are we not all imperfect children of Adam and Eve? Truly this new arrangement will bring us blessings, Brothers and Sisters, as we reunite broken families, heal traumas, and perhaps even win over some of those we have lost back to Jehovah’s Organization.’

Something like that. Wasn’t it nice of me to write it for them using their own style of language? I’m a peach.

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I’m sitting in bed with a laptop and a coffee, and a banana and two Tylenol coursing through my veins.  It’s rainy and weird outside.  Perfect day for a COVID vaccine hangover, the fourth I have experienced.

The introduction of the new COVID vaccine that covers the latest variants is something I have been looking forward to for a while now.  I got the original two shots, then the booster last November, then I got COVID itself in the spring, and not I’m boosted again.  I should be pretty darn protected by this point but this is the time of year when I tend to get extremely bad lung illnesses, so, that’s exactly what I want, I want to be insanely protected.

There was probably a point in time when COVID could have been stopped, but that window passed thanks in large part to the truly psychotic and delusional right wing political faction in the United States and their war on reality but also because, as a general rule, humans are bad at assessing risks and taking precautions.  So, millions dead, needlessly, and we all get to live with COVID as a fact of life from now on.  Cool.

My life has changed in many ways since the pandemic and it has never really reverted to pre-pandemic norms.  I am a bit of a shut-in these days.  I probably only venture outside of my homestead one or two times a week on average.  The rest of the time I have an endless list of projects to work on, dogs to entertain, books to read, food to cook, and the like.  I don’t love it, if I’m being honest.  I miss late nights at bars with live music, I miss casually hanging out with friends, I miss Chinese buffets, I miss a lot of stuff.  Sure, I know those things are still options but I fell out of the habit of them.  It feels like a big decision to get dressed up and drive an hour to a thing and do stuff.  I live in the middle of nowhere.  It was so much easier when work made me leave the house five days a week.  I would probably opt for working in my corporate office more often than I do except it’s so far away.  Every time I have to drive there it’s essentially taking two hours out of my day to do nothing but drive in commuter traffic.  Such a waste of time.

I recently read the book The Chaos Machine, by Max Fisher.  That title sounds like some sort of science fiction novel but it’s actually a book about how social media algorithms have turned the world inside out by exploiting our worst human impulses to drive corporate profits.   It is a book that has helped some things click for me that have been bothering me for a while now.  I’ve been trending more and more towards being disaffected with the internet, apps, smartphones, etc. for a few years now, realyl since the rise of social media.  In and of itself, that is not all that unusual.  I think a lot of people feel some sort of vague dis-ease over this trend towards having our attention steered by invisible and inscrutable machine learning algorithms and the corresponding creepiness of having all of our online motions tracked and monitized even as we continue to use these platforms to entertain, educate, and socialize ourselves.  It was something of an a-ha moment for me when I connected my sensitivity towards anything that feels like cult indoctrination with The Algorithms. I had this moment where I realized “oh, right, that’s why I am shying away from the internet, that’s why it all feels so creepy and weird and wrong… it all feels like the Watchtower Society”.

The thing about cults is that they are not about any particular beliefs, not really. One cult believes the earth is flat, another that space aliens are coming on a comet next Tuesday, another that a handful of poorly educated dudes in New York are the divine mouthpiece of the creator of all the universe and He says you need to shun your relatives. These are all the teachings but a cult is not it’s teachings. A cult is in techniques of persuasion that keep you, the individual, from thinking for yourself. A cult is any system of indoctrination that manipulates your beliefs, attention, thoughts, feelings, or actions to serve the ends of the cult leader rather than your own. Cults form around persuasive leaders, persuasive organizations, persuasive causes, or really just about anything where human rational thinking can be short-circuited by thought manipulation techniques.

The social media platforms (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) have developed algorithms that train themselves on tracking and focusing user attention spans into whatever keeps you hooked on the content. These are blind algorithms in the sense that there is no ideology or message, no goal or plan beyond the capturing of eyeballs, the gathering of your attention, your mind, so that they can sell advertising time to companies. Something like YouTube isn’t a cult per se, it’s more like an engine designed to turn just about anything into a cult and, thanks to millions of years of human evolution, our basest instincts and emotions, our most fear driven urges, are the ones that monetize the most effectively. It’s happening all over the world, as social media usage spreads, and the overall feeling for me is as if the entire world is just turning into different flavors of cults. Having spent the first 30 years of my life in cult programming, the modern social-media-centric internet feels skeevy as hell.

I’ve already tuned out to a massive extent. I only get news from the Associated Press. I have all my web browsers set to block tracking. I opt out of cookies on most web sites. I have massively curtailed my time on Facebook. I rarely touch IG or Twitter. I sabotage the algorithms whenever and wherever possible, feeding them false information, declining all interest in all advertising (especially ads that are accurately targeted). I bought an entirely open-source hardware computer running Linux. I do most of my writing, photography, and music using purely analog gear. I try to be online less than an hour a day outside of work. None of this is because of some sort of paranoia. I do not fear that there is a nefarious cabal that is going to attack or hurt me because I like vintage sports cars or the new Flaming Lips album. No, I am just hypersensitive to the idea that somebody else is watching over my shoulder, nudging my behavior, attempting to manipulate my thoughts, feelings, or attention span to their own ends. I don’t care if the “somebody” is actually a faceless set of algorithms and tracking mechanisms strewn across the internet for the purpose of maximizing ad revenue or if the somebody is a religious organization that wants me to go door to door every Saturday morning and skip college, my mind is my own and I’ve had enough of others coopting it, thank you very much.

What really sucks is that I actually love technology. I think it’s awesome to have powerful tools to do cool things. I even think that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are themselves powerful tools that could do great things for humanity. They could solve large problems rather than corrupting societies globally and killing millions of people in order to increase revenue at a handful of Silicon Valley mega-corporations. It pisses me off to no end that more and more of the technology that I have some to rely on in my life has become infected by these social algorithms. I want to opt out, completely and forever, from anything that monitors my purchases or interests, anything that recommends anything I don’t explicitly ask for, and anything that informs any third party about me in any way but the way things are, you can barely make breakfast without your toaster reporting to the internet that you went bagel today instead of english muffin.

Fuck that.

I realize that money makes the world go ’round and that this is the inevitable outcome but man… it’s bad bad bad bad bad. The Chaos Machine fills in a lot of information I did not previously know about just how bad it really is, and really is a read I strongly recommend for everybody who is interested in how the world is actually working today. It doesn’t really offer answers but it gives a lot to think about. Go read it. And then make changes. Sabotage the algorithm. Decline those cookies. Move your media consumption offline. Read paper books. Turn off autoplay wherever you find it. Be intentional about what you put into your eye and ear holes. Don’t let your brain be hijacked by third parties who may or may not have your best interests at heart. It’s an affront to human dignity and an assault on us all.