Month: May 2024

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I was born to parents who had recently become members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and that was how I was raised.

When I was a kid, 15 years old, I was convinced that Jehovah’s Witnesses knew The Truth about life, the universe, and everything.  I was sure that they had it all figured out and that the end of the world was rapidly approaching, so I got baptized.

When I was 30, I discovered that this was not, in fact, the case.  They Watchtower Society was just a human religion with no more claim to “truth” than any other and much of what they claimed to be True was provably False.  Well, darn.

In normal life, in typical situations, a person learns new things, discovers that something they thought was one way is actually another, and they can change their views and it’s not, like, the end of the world.  Not so with the Jehovah’s Witnesses.  As it turns out, they don’t let you just leave without pretty much demolishing your entire life.  Everybody you ever knew and loved who happens to be a Witness is lost to you, forever, and it sucks.

Because of this particular facet of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, because of the way they demonize, shun, ostracize, criticize, and dehumanize former members, there is a large community of former members who are, to put it mildly, fucking angry.  People go to therapy, they do self harm, they rant online, they picket Watchtower conventions.  In short, they do the very human and rational things that anybody would do when they are mistreated, falsely accused, judged and condemned without cause, and given no voice.  These people engage in activism against the Watchtower and in support of other former members.

I respect this community.  It is a community that is mostly fueled by righteous indignation over a major injustice.  I feel that, but I have always struggled with finding the balance for myself between that righteous indignation, my own mental health, and actually acting in a way that might somehow help alleviate some of the harm that Witnesses cause with the abuse they perpetrate on former members.

If you are vocal, strident, or direct, you will be accused of “hating your former brothers”.  They will say you are angry and bitter, that you are mentally diseased, when all you really are is outraged and hurt because you’ve been lied to and abused and they will cross the street if they so much as see you on the other side.  On the other hand, if you are quiet and swallow your objections down, they will still shun you but may occasionally reach out with an invitation to start attending their meetings again or something like that.  Every former JW that I know has had to decide for themselves just how vocal, how direct, they personally want to be, where their personal lines are.

I have learned that I am vocal but I am not an activist.  I have participated in activism when asked to and I believe the activists are on the side of justice, but I am not one of them.  In my down time I try to avoid “EXJW” content.  I am not interested in the videos, podcasts, books, or websites that obsess over the Watchtower Society and the Jehovah’s Witnesses.  I don’t enjoy rehashing old traumas.  When I do participate, I try very hard to represent a perspective of moving on, living a post-Witness life that is healthy, and finding balance.  I’d rather talk about pretty much anything than the Jehovah’s Witnesses.  I don’t want to give them any more of my too short time on this earth.

When a major part of your identity is your opposition to someone or something, you are still in a relationship with that thing and I don’t want to be in any sort of relationship with the Watchtower Society anymore.  Not with them, not against them, I just want to live my life.

However, since I opened myself up to a documentary film being made about a big part of my life, music, and past with the Witnesses I’ve participated in interviews and podcasts and conversations with various people in the EXJW world.  It isn’t the first time I have done this sort of thing.  When I first left the Witnesses I did a few interviews on podcasts and cable access TV shows and it was similar.  I considered writing a proper book, getting into free-thought and humanist activism, but I decided that it wasn’t for me.  Activism feels wrong for me.  That’s not who I am.  So, I did my appearances and then I declined additional invites and stopped because at the end of the day I would rather be an artist than an activist.  The problem with mixing the two, in my opinion, is that when art becomes too topical for me it becomes boring and predictable.  My problem with political or religious music isn’t the message, it’s the dullness of only writing songs about a single topic.  Snore.

Now I feel that I have to make this “how much to flirt with activism” decision again.  The activist community of former Witnesses are interested in the movie and I’m happy they are.  That’s great.  However, I sincerely hope the film’s exposure is not limited strictly to that community and I would love it if everybody saw the movie, even if they’ve never met a Jehovah’s Witness.  The movie is NOT targeted specifically at Jehovah’s Witnesses, current or former.  You don’t need to have gone to space to enjoy a documentary about the moon landing and you don’t need to know or care about the Jehovah’s Witnesses to enjoy Witness Underground.  Do you like music?  Do you have human feelings about things?  Congratulations, you are the target audience for Witness Underground.

That said, the XJW activists have been the ones who naturally want to talk about the film and the temptation has been there to get into that activism and I’ve felt really uncomfortable about it.  It seems like that same decision point I felt back in 2006.  Do I further engage in activism or do I step back?

I’ve decided, I’m once again stepping back.  I have to.  For my sanity, my health, my happiness.  As I said, at heart, I’m not an activist.  I’m glad they exist, I’m a fellow traveler, but I’m not going to picket or post or argue or debate or engage in the Watchtower topic on a regular basis if I can help it.

I believe the best thing for me is to focus on being a normal person.  I do not self identify as an “apostate”, or an “XJW”, just as a “human”.  A non-theistic Buddhist, if you press me further on the topic of religion but I wish you wouldn’t, thanks.  When I take on those identities I feel uncomfortable and unhappy.  I’m just a guy who likes computers and cars and dogs and fishing and making music and eating spicy food.  I want to spend time doing normal things and being happy and I don’t want to talk about the Watchtower Society or write about it or think about it or read about it or watch videos about it or listen to podcasts about it.  I lived happily like this for many years and I will do so again from here on out.  Make music.  Drive around in old stupid cool cars.  Take pictures with obsolete cameras.  Catch bass.  Be a dork.

So, you won’t be seeing me doing much more Witness chat from here on out, k?  It’s a part of my life, I’m not ashamed of it and I’m not going to avoid talking about it now and then, but I’m not a religious activist and I don’t want to become one.

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Another day, another rant.

I recently added an M2-powered iPad Pro to my life to go along with the M1 MacBook Pro and I have thoughts.

First thoughts…. Apple went ahead and revamped the iPad lineup shortly after I acquired my M2 iPad with the amazing new M4 processor. One might think that I would be disappointed to have missed the upgrade but the truth is that I am very happy with the one I have even if it’s not equipped with all the new fancy stuff because a) this one was a HELLUVA lot cheaper and b) there is almost no point to having an iPad with that much horsepower because there are so few apps that can even take advantage of it because iPadOS is garbage.

I already have to wonder when or if I will be able to really put the M2 to any serious use. It seems a damn shame that the faster of my two daily drivers is the iPad, not the Mac.

I could try to use the iPad for “serious” work, except, well, that’s pretty much impossible. Audio production? The apps and plugins I have used for years are all available on Mac OS but iPadOS? Nope. Ditto with video editing and production. I would LOVE to use Topaz Video AI on the M2 instead of the M1 but it’s not available for iPadOS. What about photography? Software development? Any serious productivity based work? No, no, no.

The iPad is not a serious computing platform because iPadOS is not a serious operating system. The iPad is an incredibly powerful piece of hardware that, when paired with a Magic Keyboard, is essentially the most capable laptop I own in terms of horsepower, but you simply cannot do real work with one unless you can accept tons of compromises and limited versions of software.

I’ve owned iPads for as long as there have been iPads. I have always enjoyed them for reading comic books, I love the iPad version of Garageband for doing quick demos and playing around with musical ideas, I love drawing on the iPad, it’s a great casual email and web surfing machine, but when I want to get anything legitimate done, I put the iPad away and I reach for a real computer. The iPad is a device, the Mac is a computer. The difference is the software. I am far from the first person to make this observation (Not an iPad Pro Review: Why iPadOS Still Doesn’t Get the Basics Right)
but I’ll tell you, it’s a serious missed opportunity. An M4 powered machine with a touch screen and actual serious professional applications (sorry Apple, but your Final Cut and Logic options only highlight the problem by being alone in their categories…) would be amazing.

As it is, I am sitting here feeling like the potential of even my M2 iPad is 99 percent wasted because I can’t find anything more challenging to do with it than I could with the old iPad that it replaced. Comics and ebooks reader, light productivity and journaling, a few cool virtual instrument apps, nothing serious. Nothing I can use do actually accomplish much of anything.

Also, the operating system itself is incredibly half-baked in so many ways. File management and multi-tasking are stuck in the stone age, there is no window management worth mentioning (the split screen thing doesn’t even work for a lot of apps)…. I would argue that iPadOS, from a purely user-friendliness perspective, is not only worse than MacOS, it’s worse than Windows, it’s worse than most Linux distros, it’s worse than Android. It’s my least favorite operating system, the one that annoys me the most often, the one that limits what I can do with my computer more than any other. My phone runs Android and I don’t love it but I ask very little of it, it’s a smartphone, I don’t like smartphones much and as long as I can use it as a casual camera, GPS, and phone, I don’t much care about the OS. Mac, Windows, and the various Linux desktops all have mature and capable and well understood ways of getting just about anything done that a user might desire. Only iPadOS, the bastard offspring of MacOS and iOS that can’t decide what the hell it’s supposed to be, only iPadOS goes out of it’s way to frustrate me, limit me, and neuter the potential of the very device it is designed to run on.

The iPad could and should be the touchable Mac. It should and could be the best touchscreen-centric personal computer in the world instead of just being an App Store limited, disposable, hamstrung, awkward “device”. It has all the power, but thanks to iPadOS, the worst operating system currently on the market, most of the power doesn’t matter a bit.