Category: Life

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For 30 years I’ve made my living in this world, paid my bills and my taxes, raised my kid, almost entirely from the writing of computer software.  It’s a solid skill, always in demand, and I’m good at it.  Both before and throughout that entire professional career I have also had a (far less lucrative but infinitely more satisfying) shadow career as an independent musician, writer, filmmaker and creator.  I have a resume that details the technology career, but not really one that details my career as a creator.  This is that resume.  Kind of…

I was born into a family of musicians and singers and raised with access to instruments and primitive recording technology but never had any formal training with two exceptions: I played french horn in school band for a few months in elementary school and I took a 6-week crash course in guitar when I was 12.  I didn’t consider that music was something that required training if you had an ear, and I had that, so, I figured I could work it out for myself.

Music was not my first creative passion.  The first was visual art.  I liked to draw and paint.  My mom was a singer in a band and my dad painted wildlife watercolors and could draw exceptionally well so I had my pick of parents to emulate and older brother Rhett was already obsessed with music so I wound up glued to my sketchbook.   As I got a little older I decided that even though I was good at drawing and enjoyed it what I really wanted to be was a writer.

By early adolescence I had broadened my interests still further, having taught myself how to write software for the home computers of the era and also having developed a rabid obsession with cars.  The first three years after I bought my first guitar I rarely practiced and was much more interested in the 0-60 times of the Porsche 959 and drawing and designing imaginary cars than I was in music making.  Then puberty hit and some switch in my brain went musical.

Rhett and I had our band, The Lavone, and we had recorded a lot of music, but I was a fairly passive participant until suddenly I wasn’t.  I started having musical ideas and interests and really learning what to do with them around the age of 15.  I upgraded my guitar and got some cool glasses and turned into one of those High School Art Kids.

Visual arts and explorations into videography and photography were of nearly as much interest as the music.  When I was in high school I was always creating one thing or another.  I wrote a few bad novels, created sculptures and jewelry and pottery and learned basic woodworking, made some paintings, all the usual stuff that a teenager does to look for ways to express themselves.  Rhett and I started our little basement record label, Nuclear Gopher, and music became a core part of my identity even as I started doing less writing, less painting, less drawing, etc.

Post high-school I got married and my time for creative work trended downward but my need for it didn’t.  I started coming up with ways to give myself excuses to keep recording albums with The Lavone and creating visual art even as my software engineering career began.  Since the internet was a new phenomenon at the time, that meant building a website for the Nuclear Gopher as well as making music videos and short films.  I can honestly say, however, that my 20’s were a period of creative challenge.  I made some great songs with The Lavone and the Nuclear Gopher turned into it’s own amazing thing, but I found a role for myself as more of a producer, a technician, a documenter, an archivist, and an enabler than as a musician.

As I was approaching 30 I was getting nervous that the life of a creative person was becoming too inaccessible for me.  I had a young child to raise, my other career was time consuming, and I often wondered if I was just deluding myself that I had anything worth creating inside me.  I started to turn my attention more towards filmmaking and writing.  I taught myself digital video editing and the basics of cinematography.  I made some shorts and started planning to make an indie feature film.

But, as John Lennon once sang, life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.  My 30’s started with the general disruption of my entire family, life, and self.  A lost religion, a failed marriage, and estrangement from my family and friends.  I had nothing really to fall back on except music.

I realized that I wanted to, NEEDED to, make music, and I started my solo music career at the grand old age of 30.

At first I had a lot to learn.  Despite spending over half my life in and around bands and recording studios, I had never really engineered or produced my own music.  I could play guitar and sing but I couldn’t drum worth a damn and keyboards were a mystery.  Regardless, I tracked an album that I didn’t share with anybody and then I tracked an EP called The Context in 2004 and then my first proper album, Songs of Be Redoubt, the following year.  I wrote the songs, engineered the tracks, played all the instruments, designed the cover art, mixed and mastered it, the whole thing was a learning process.  By the end of working on Bo Redoubt, I was quite a bit better at the whole solo music making thing but I was still missing some of the polish that would come from playing in a band that had regular practices, live shows, and opportunities to hone my skills.

An opportunity soon arose to do so and I decided to join a band called The Eclectics, a Unitarian Universalist church band that played at Sunday services.  I played the guitar and sang, we played in front of the congregation, and after a year or so I was feeling a lot more confident musically.  In February of 2007 this lead to the formation of my (to date only) post-Lavone band, Trumpet Marine with three other members of The Eclectics.  We tracked an album called Longer, Louder, Lobster and it was arguably the best thing I had ever done up to that point.  I felt like I had arrived, at least a little, enough to try my hand at fronting the band on stage for some gigs.

Trumpet Marine was short lived, however.  Competing commitments caused members to come and go, we were constantly relearning the songs with new people, I just couldn’t hold it together and by early 2009 I gave up the idea.  I had recorded another solo album in the meantime and it was…  OK… but I was not yet a confident musical artist.

The next year or two involved some personal drama and my bandwidth was once again limited to really reach for what I wanted to do musically.  I was almost ready to give up on music but then I wrote a song called “I Sleep With My Hands In Fists” and it rallied me to get up off the mat and come out swinging again.  I had my studio and I was recording and writing, I had also played here and there in another few short lived bands, but it wasn’t clicking.  If I wanted to get things to click I needed to change something.

In early 2012 I struck some creative gold with an album called Blood and Scotch/Valentine, which I tracked in a couple of weeks all on my own.  I even broke out the art supplies and painted the cover, a bright yellow heart amidst a haze of chaos.  I knew I didn’t want to give up after that record.  I just didn’t know exactly what happened next.

I remembered that playing in other bands had helped me develop my skills and increase my passion for music so I decided to try that again.  I joined a local Ween-meets-Devo group called Robots From the Future as their keyboardist despite being pretty bad at keys.  I figured I wouldn’t get better unless I had a good reason to do so.  We played shows and practiced and I did get better.  There was no real pressure because I wasn’t the front man and they weren’t my songs.  I could just focus on playing.  Robots music wasn’t really my best fit, though, so I left the band and started making plans for the album I really wanted to make.  I had a sort of “back to basics” idea where I would record a few short EPs and then get serious about making a record that I would be totally happy with.  I figured that might take me a year or two.  I released the first of the EPs, The Coal Room, on Christmas of 2014.

I also joined another band, a 90’s cover band called Fistful of Datas, but this time on bass guitar and occasional auxiliary keys.  One of the Robots, Keith Lodermeier, was in that band and through that band I also met some other fantastic people, his wife Liz, Cris Arias-Romero, Maya Burroughs, and Mackenzie Lahren.  Another one of the Robots, Reynold Kissling, came on board near the tail end of my tenure with the group.

During the couple of years I played with that band I had a blast, met a lot of people, and improved my skills but that solo album I had committed to sort of went into development hell.  I just didn’t have the time to devote to solo studio work while also living the grown up life of a married career man in his 40’s.  I was having fun but I wasn’t creative.  Somehow the years were slipping by without much progress, even though I kept locking myself in the studio now and then.

I played a solo set at a now defunct space in St. Paul to try out some of my new album material in front of an audience and that led to an invite to join yet another band, Awkward Bodies, as a bass player.  The music of Awkward Bodies was definitely more up my alley than 90’s cover songs so I was really excited to join them and more shows followed.  Things were going pretty good and my spirits were high, I thought I might finally get my new album done, but then John Lennon happened again.

I don’t know what it was, exactly, but the world seemed to go nuts starting in 2016.  An orange sociopath was somehow put in power in my country and I became too obsessed with the fallout.  Social media and podcasts and news feeds and negativity took over my headspace.  My creative output dwindled to nearly nothing, despite having a great studio sitting in my own damn basement.  At least I was playing in Awkward Bodies and enjoying that but musically I was closer than I had ever been to hanging it up.  The world seemed too stupid to want to create within it.  It seemed like every day there was some outrage or insanity and playing cool indie rock was just not enough.  My software career had changed from writing code to running the department so I spent none of my day doing hands-on work, instead getting enmeshed in emails and meetings and exhaustion.

Then something weird happened in 2018.  A filmmaker named Scott Homan contacted me about telling my story for a documentary.  We met.  I told him my story.  I had no expectation that this would lead anywhere bigger than a short on YouTube, if that.  I didn’t know him or how serious and committed he turned out to be.  That event changed my life.

The world descended further into chaos with a global pandemic and my beloved Minneapolis being torn apart in the wake of the George Floyd riots.  Awkward Bodies struggled to hold the band together and keep some sort of momentum.  I continued to struggle to find personal creative traction.  But Scott and his editor, Sian Walmsley, just kept hacking away at making a movie and as it took shape I started to see my creative career differently.  It had not been a success but had also not been a failure.  I had struggled, sure, but so does everybody else who creates.  I was no longer in my 20’s but I had improved at every aspect of making music and art in the meantime.  And, most importantly, I had made a positive difference in the world with Nuclear Gopher and with my writing and my art.  When I saw the movie for the first time I woke up and knew what I needed to do.  I saw a possible future.  Not commercially, but artistically.  And I felt inspired again.

I got serious about finishing my slowly developing album.  I started planning for a new chapter in the Nuclear Gopher story.  I came to the realization that my time spent wandering in the creative wilderness, taking my licks, getting better at my craft, making mistakes, failing at plans, meeting people, playing Spice Girls covers while dressed as a zombie, and just generally living my life had made me stronger and more self-aware.  Sure, I’m older now, oldest I’ve ever been, but I’m not slow, I’m not tired, I’m not out of ideas, and I’m not ready to hang it up, not just yet.

The last couple of years have involved a LOT of work below the waterline.  Renovated my studio for future commercial use, making plans for the new Gopher, several revisions of the album (which is now practically done), and a new attitude towards the work I am doing that has really put me in a good place mentally.

My creative career could be counted in how many albums I’ve contributed to, how many shows I’ve played, how many films and videos I’ve made, etc, but I don’t even know the answers to those questions.  I guess I don’t care or I would keep track.  What I do know is that I’ve been dedicated to a life of making whatever art I can manage for as long as I can remember and for helping others do the same.  That’s my career.  That’s what I want to be remembered for when I die.  If nothing else, I’m leaving behind artifacts that prove I was here and that I did my best.  What else can a person do?

Skills and Experience:

I have demonstrated proficiency with:

  • audio engineering and production (both digital and analog)
  • digital video editing using Final Cut Pro and Davinci Resolve
  • guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, vocals, and other instruments
  • photography (both film and digital)
  • graphic design, painting, drawing
  • website development
  • writing

Salary Requirements:

Happiness.

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I am a notoriously difficult person to get a hold of.  Texts are missed for days or weeks, emails too, my social media appearances are few and far between, if I don’t recognize a phone number I don’t answer the phone.

This is not because I don’t want to talk to people or because I want to make anybody’s life difficult, but rather because the thought of picking up a smartphone for anything, even to approve a multi-factor authentication request, has become repugnant.  I have no positive feelings about the device.  I resent it.  I want to throw it in a river or toss it as high as I can up in the air and watch it smash on my driveway.  It takes an act of grit and determination to remove it from the charger, unlock it, and check it for messages.

I enjoy going to the physical mailbox.  I enjoy socializing in person.  I enjoy PEOPLE.  I even enjoy talking on the phone and hearing the voice of somebody I love.  But the smartphone represents advertising, scammers, invasive tracking, disruptive notifications, and negativity.  No joy is to be found there.  No warmth.  No positive energy.  Just a cold, dead, screen, filled with vapid content dished up by entities intent on taking my money, my time, or both.  Why on earth would I ever want to use it for anything?  I truly hate that thing.  I’d rather pick up a dog turd than a smartphone.

It wasn’t always this way.  I loved the first iPhone I had, (it was a 3G, the second iPhone iteration).  That was a fun device.  Before that I had a proto-smartphone, the Motorola Razr, and I thought it was pretty fun too.  In fact, I was pretty smartphone crazy for the first decade they were available, TBH.  Then, sometime around the beginning of the Trump presidency, the smartphone just came to symbolize all that is wrong with the world for me.  They stopped being fun and started to make me feel terrible every time I touched one.  I don’t know what to do about it.

The smartphone is the thing everybody expects you to have.  People expect you to carry it with you at all times.  I was one of the early adopters.  I get it.  To be a person in the 21st century who avoids social media and doesn’t usually have a smartphone nearby is to basically be a caveman.  But here I am trying to  figure out how it would work if I were to switch to a no-smartphone life.  Landline or feature phone only, use a tablet or something else for MFA login authentication stuff.  The only thing I would miss is GPS but my car has that built in now.

As it stands I sometimes go most of a week without even picking up my smartphone so I feel like it would be doable.

I find it bizarre that a device that I once saw as the greatest innovation ever and quite a lot of fun is now something I want to get rid of forever.

Maybe this is coming from the big stupid big corporate social media internet we have now, which I hate, or maybe it’s just that I’ve been using smartphones (and proto smartphones) for over 20 years so the novelty has well and truly worn off, but I constantly find myself thinking about how nice it would be to simplify the number of ways that people can reach me.  One of the overwhelming things about the modern communications landscape is the sheer number of things that people monitor.  They monitor texts, DMs on multiple platforms, app notifications, phone calls, and email.  It’s a lot to respond to and keep up with and I just don’t want to do that anymore.  I only need one.  I don’t need one device with 47 inboxes, notifications, or messaging apps.  I just need one place to be contacted.  When I was a kid there were two ways to reach me.  You could mail me a letter or you could call my home phone number and if somebody was home to answer you could ask for me and if nobody was around you couldn’t.  In my early 20’s I added email to the mix.  Then PC messaging apps.  Then a cell phone.  Then texts.  The options kept multiplying and I just don’t monitor all of this stuff anymore.  I don’t want to.  Bill Murray has a voice mailbox that people can call to leave him messages about things.  That’s it.  There is no other way to get in touch with Bill Murray.  That’s genius.  I need to figure out something that simple.

And then I need to “accidentally” drop my smartphone in a wood-chipper.  🙂

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I started a new job a while back where, for the first time in many years, I am back to doing full time software engineering work that involves me writing code.  Frankly, I’m enjoying it.  I spent the first twenty years of my career writing code and the last ten leading and building teams of other people who write code.

When it was me doing the coding, my days tended to consist of a lot of private battles with logic and problem solving.  I felt mentally sharp and my brain felt alive with ideas and inspiration.  Then I pivoted to leadership and I enjoyed it quite a bit too but in a very different way.  I moved my attention from the very small details within a system, data and logic, up to the larger role that software development plays in the company and the world at large.  When I thought about my work it was about how to make the team better, how to make the product better, or how to improve the user experience for the customer, not about the algorithms, scalability, or testability of a particular function, method, object, or data structure.  I also focused on how to help other people become better developers, how to improve their interpersonal team dynamics, how to identify and hire great engineering talent, basically everything except the creation of software.  I was very good at that and I built some great teams and together we built some great products.  My technical role wasn’t gone entirely, I still provided high level architectural direction, reviewed and approved code changes, and even occasionally coded up a proof of concept for a new solution.  But, when it came to writing the tens of thousands of lines of code that make up a software product, I was strictly hands off.  I was a conductor, not a musician.

I missed coding sometimes because the two jobs are so radically different.  As a coder I spent my time in a cycle of code/compile/run/deploy/validate/repeat for most of any given day.  Sometimes I didn’t talk to another person for hours at a time.  As head of engineering I spent my time in meetings.  All. The Time.  Meetings with department heads, meetings with the CEO, 1 on 1 meetings with my direct reports, team meetings, scrum process meetings, design sessions.  When I wasn’t in meetings I was replying to emails.  And DMs.  And phone calls.  The job was all about communication and coordination and usually I was being looked to for the answers on any given question because I was The Man when it came to anything technology related.

After five years heading up engineering at the most recent company and also having a challenging period in my personal life outside of work, I decided that I needed a break from corporate life.  A little sabbatical.  I left the company, took a breather, and went shopping for another job.  I did not expect to end up where I am now, coding again.

Let me be clear here, there was initially a bit of “career path” snobbery on my part when this new opportunity came my way.  Hadn’t I outgrown the hands on stuff around the time Obama got elected?  The company I’m now working for is very small, a startup.  The entire company could comfortably fit in my living room.  They already have a very good CTO and don’t need two of them.  What they did need was a very senior and very skilled software engineer with a particular set of skills that just happen to align very well to my specialties.  Still, I said no, two times, when approached about the job.  I hadn’t done full time coding work in a very long time and it felt a little weird to think of going back to “my old job”, the one I had left behind over a decade ago.  But I agreed to meet with them and hear them out and they convinced me that this was, in fact, an amazing opportunity that actually fitted in perfectly with my career plans.  It might even be, dare I say, fun?  I just had to be willing to go back to my roots.

So, I took the job, surprising my wife and myself.  For two months now I have been waking up in the morning, picking up the days dev stories, and reacquainting myself with the world of the software engineer.  It’s oddly peaceful.  My wife has a job that entails a fair number of meetings every day and we both work from home so I often hear her calls taking place in the other room, in fact there is one going on right now, so I am reminded daily of the kind of job I have left behind and also reminded that this is a better fit for me where I am in my life right now.

Life is short and you need to be happy with who you are and how you spend your time.  A career takes up a massive amount of your time.  It’s no wonder that so many people come to identify themselves with their work.  “I’m Bob, I’m a banker.”  “I’m Regina, I’m a dental technician.”  I don’t self-identify with my technical career all that much.  I am unlikely in introduce myself by saying “I’m Ryan, I’m a software engineering leader.”  I’m much more likely to say “I’m Ryan, I’m a musician and writer.” if I am going to relate to a particular profession or career.

Maybe it’s because I have always seen myself as having multiple simultaneous careers?  The career that has made me the most money over the years is my career in software engineering.  The career that has had the most personal impact on my life and left the largest legacy in it’s wake is my career as a musician, recording artist, indie filmmaker, and record label entrepreneur.  The career I have been the least commercially “successful” at but that I find the most fulfilling on a daily basis is my career as a writer.

As I was writing that paragraph I found myself thinking that it’s perhaps the first time I’ve ever put it that way to myself.  I have three careers.  Well shoot.  That’s a lot.  No wonder I’m always so busy.  But it’s true though.  The dictionary defines a career as “an occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person’s life and with opportunities for progress”.  That definition applies to each of those areas of work that I engage in.  They sure aren’t hobbies.  A hobby is “an activity done regularly in one’s leisure time for pleasure”.  I enjoy building model cars, for me that is a hobby.  The same can be said for fishing, reading or playing video games.  These are all hobbies of mine.  Tinkering with old cars.  Woodworking.  Hobbies.  That’s not how I approach my careers.  I may pursue aspects of them in my leisure time for pleasure but on the whole they are a lot more involved than that.

When I look at it that way then the pivot in my technology career away from one kind of work and back to another kind of work (and whether or not that was the right move for that career) doesn’t seem like a particularly big deal.  At the end of the day I’ve only ever had one goal in my technology career and that is money.  I don’t do software engineering because of personal fulfillment, or social impact, or enjoyment, it’s just for the money.  I don’t even actually like money.  I wish I didn’t need money.  I think money is a pain in the ass.  But I live in a capitalist society and money is required so, there you are.  Since I never wanted to climb a corporate ladder and my sense of self-esteem and self-worth has never derived from my technology career or any particular job I have held in that career, the specific role I’m filling isn’t all that important as long as it works for the financial aspect of life, and this does.  In fact, moving back to a non-leadership position in my tech career has already had the effect of improving my mental capacity for my other two careers.  I’m getting creative again.

The time spent in leadership work does not support a creative lifestyle.  It is work where you say so much all day that when the time comes to try to say something in a song or prose you are just empty.  You are tired.  The only thing that comes out is hot air.  I’ve struggled mightily to pursue my creative career paths over the last decade since I made that pivot in the tech career path and became a leader.  I never liked the trade off.  I don’t think the trade off was worth it, in retrospect.  The core skills required to do leadership and the core skills required to do creative work are at odds with one another.  Leadership involves a lack of focus, the ability to flit from one thing to another, a sort of constant shifting from one thing to another.  Your brain gets used to taking in information in short bursts and every day brings a new series of distractions, discussions, and decisions.  Creative work requires focused periods of heads down concentration.  The escape from distractions and interruptions.  Freedom to disappear into a flow state for hours or days at a time.  It’s the polar opposite of being an information and people manager.  To spend 8-12 hours a day being in the “leadership” mindset and then attempt to pivot to a creative flow state on the evenings and weekends is an incredibly difficult trick to pull off and every time I managed to do so I would feel so good but then I would find that work would intrude the next day and before I knew it I would go two or three more months before I found that mental state again.  I was never able to build any sort of creative momentum because every time I found a flow state it I was back at square one.

I’m still recovering from the leadership experience, to be honest.  For the last few months I have been focused on rebuilding a creative lifestyle supported by my tech career along the lines of how it was for the first 10-15 years of my adulthood and it feels really good but I can tell it’s going to take me a while to get back to having creative momentum on projects again.  Regaining the capacity for extended focused work is one of my main missions in life right now.  I want to be able to go down into the studio and create for 6-10 hours without falling asleep or producing empty crap.  I want to be able to actually make progress on larger projects like albums, films, and books.  I need to rebuild my ability to dig in, stay in a flow state, and make things happen.  Writing software is exceptionally helpful in this regard.  It requires that state.  Give me a couple of more months and I’m going to be a new (old) man.

This was definitely the right decision.

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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 have COVID.  It’s something I had managed to avoid up to this point because I have a history of chronic bronchitis and pneumonia as well as asthma.  A killer lung virus was not high on my Christmas list.  The good news is that I managed to avoid a COVID infection for over two years and in that time the medical treatments for COVID have advanced to the point where my case is so far been manageable.  I was quite sick on Friday afternoon and by Sunday I was quite worried about developing severe complications so I did the smart thing and went to the Urgent Care.  The doctor agreed that I needed intervention and prescribed the new anti-viral for COVID, paxlovid.  Since I started taking it I have noticed a trend towards getting better rather than getting worse and I couldn’t be happier.

I’ve missed three days of work so far and I’m really tired and taking a lot of meds but I don’t see an ICU in my future if this holds.  Knock on wood.

Anyhow, one of the side effects of being laid out sick for a few days is that I tend to catch up on media.  Shows and movies I’ve been meaning to watch, books I’ve been meaning to read, games I’ve been meaning to play.  The last few days have been no exception.  I binged all five Dirty Harry movies, watched the second season of Russian Doll, read the final book in the EXCELLENT Noumenon trilogy (Marina J. Lostetter is maybe my new favorite sci-fi author if she can crank out this level of work consistently…  wow) and spent some time playing Beneath a Steel Sky on my new MNT Reform Linux laptop, reacquainting myself with the world of non-corporate computing and open-source in a purer form than I normally use.

What I haven’t done is make additional progress on my new album, but that’s OK.  Awkward Bodies is in the closing stages of recording our new album, which has been a ton of fun.  I still have some bass parts to re-cut and some backing vocals to lay down, but there is an album tracked and getting ready to go out in to the world.  This is very exciting to me as it represents the first album I’ve made in collaboration with a band in more years than I care to mention.  My solo album will be a nice follow on.

I’ve had some time to ponder while laying around for the last few days and one thing I’ve pondered is the fact that I am almost constantly making things, fixing things, restoring things, writing things, but at some point in the last decade or so I stopped aiming to make larger projects out of the smaller things.  On any given day I usually start and complete one or two small projects.  I write a journal entry or repair a piece of technology or build something.  So why, then, am I no longer trying to write novels, develop software applications, make movies, record albums, build businesses, or any of that?

I’ve never lost the creative urge, but I’ve lost the ambition to try to make anything coherent, larger, more meaningful.  I have many theories as to why, and I have written about them in many a journal entry.  I haven’t always even been particularly sure it was actually a problem.  So what if I am no longer trying to do anything big?  It was never really necessary in the first place, if I’m honest with myself.  I just always thought that “making a dent in the universe” had a nice ring to it.

But something else has been going on, something less about big intent and more about small habits and patterns and over the last two years I’ve become more and more aware of those changes as underlying causes.  I can’t, and don’t, blame everything on the culture or technology, but I am a person who has spent most of my adult life living in close symbiosis with technological advances in computers and communications.  It’s my job, and something I’ve been interested in since early childhood.  With each adaptation I have made to technologies (home computers, the internet, mobile phones, smart phones, social media, etc.) I have changed my habits and daily patterns.  I have very much been both master and servant to my devices and their needs.

I have finally learned that my actual thought patterns, my levels and lengths of attention, my capacity to absorb and retain and use information, my sleep cycles and physical fitness, all of these are shaped by my habits and activities throughout the day and those habits and activities are shaped by my relationship to communications technology.  I have also learned that it is possible to intentionally reshape that relationship, to regain control of it, even if my career is based in those very technologies.

I learned a long time ago from Buddhist teachers that it is very difficult to change your mind and from there change your self.  Your mind is the core of your self.  Waiting for a change of mind or thought before making changes to action is a lovely way to stay mired in your thought patterns for all eternity.  The best way to change your mind is to change your practices and behaviors and allow your mind to change in response to the new stimuli.  Ergo, if I want to have more attention span, if I want to regain the capacity for long-form creative work, if I want to redevelop the ability to be present and focused and to be ambitious with my intentions, the first step is to change the behavior patterns and practices that are creating that mental state.

So, that was what I set out to do.  I made a conscious effort to rearrange my relationships to the technologies that have mostly shaped my life for the last 30 years.

I would like to say that I had a clear plan that this was what I was doing, but that would be giving myself too much credit.  I just knew I had some unhealthy patterns that were creating negative mental states and I hoped that altering those patterns would lead to changes of mind.  I wanted to stop being tethered to screens, stop responding to a constant influx of updates, messages, and notifications, stop chasing an endless flow of information, just stop.  I wanted to start to live more like when I am backpacking.  One foot in front of the other, present with the trail, not half-connected to some fake meta-universe.  I decided to change my tech in order to change my patterns so I would change my brain.  I won’t go through everything that happened, everything I tried, but I will summarize by saying that I decided I needed a divorce from the endless feeds of social media, podcasts, and the news.  My smartphone needed to stop living in my pocket.  My computing, whenever I chose to do it, needed to be rigorously controlled, with me totally in control of the experience and nobody else’s agenda pushing into my space.  No ads, tracking, or reselling of myself to data brokers.  And last, but certainly not least, I needed to find and learn how to use disconnected creative tools so I could be creative again without depending on the devices that were disrupting my brain.

Hence, a return to typewriters.  Hence, a return to vintage, pre-internet “retro” computers.  Hence, fountain pens.  Hence, film photography.  But the retro-analog thing wasn’t even really the point. It was more important to my project that I adopt technology that was disconnected than that it was analog.  The goal was to return to focus, disconnection, presence of mind, concentration, not to make a fetish out of old gear.  So, I also adopted two very modern solutions: I acquired a standalone 32-track digital multi-track recorder so I could record music without using a computer and I acquired a computer that is entirely free of proprietary hardware and software and which has nothing on it or about it that I did not choose.

I ordered this computer a couple of years ago.  It was made by some hackers in Germany as a “free as in speech” project that was crowdfunded.  No mega tech corporations involved in making the hardware or the software.  It’s called an MNT Reform and there are only a few hundred of these machines in existence and it took over two years to get it delivered.  It was worth the wait.  It’s a symbol, sure, but as an artist I’ve always honored the power of symbols.  It’s also a tool that makes me feel free when I use it, rather than making me feel as if I’m being guided along by some invisible hand whose motives are beyond me.

I’m kitted out.  I can write, shoot, record, edit and publish without giving over my control or agency.  My communications patterns are radically altered.  I feel healthier than I’ve felt in a decade.  I don’t yet know what I’m going to create, but I can report that the changes in my habits and patterns over this stretch of time have started to create the hoped for changes in my thoughts and feelings.  I may not yet be spending extensive hours in the recording studio, but I have been enjoying spending extensive hours in the darkroom and behind a typewriter or a camera or playing a guitar.  I may not yet have written a novel, but I have found new joy in writing and spending focused time doing it, indeed I’ve developed several new types of writing practice for myself.

For many years, as far back as a decade, I’ve felt unglued, unmoored, as if the world was flying by at a pace that removed all joy or even the opportunity for it, like every day was an endless feed, nothing really mattering for more than a minute or two, nothing could really stick.  Everything was one little dopamine hit after another and nothing really made a dent.  I wondered if that was just a side effect of aging or my career or other events in my life, but the fever really took hold and broke through the Trump presidency and the pandemic and the overall insanity of world events during the last few years.  I came to realize that, yes, the world is an endless feed of events happening and, no, nothing inherently matters for more than a moment or two, if you always move on to the next thing.  And there is always going to be a next thing.  You cannot ever catch up, you cannot ever win, you cannot ever make it change.  You can, however, change your relationship to it.  You can stop being addicted to it.  You can detach from the streams and services and corporations and media outlets and technologies that thrive on your attachment to them.  You can choose to live fully in the life you have on a daily basis rather than vicariously through the ambient intimacy and perpetual thirst trap of the modern digital culture.  Sure, it might be an over-correction to replace your 5g smartphone with a quill pen you hand carved from a found turkey feather, but maybe it’s not.  Maybe it’s exactly what you ought to do.  At least for a while.  Give your brain a chance to catch up, slow down, chill out, and reconfigure.

At least, that’s how it’s looking to me.  Look at that, I just wrote over 1900 words.  It’s working.

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The first time I ever encountered a conspiracy theorist I was 16 years old and out in the door to door ministry with some fellow teenage Jehovah’s Witnesses. It was mid-summer, a really hot one, and I was paired up with Bobby Norbohm. We went to a door and knocked and a little old man answered the door. He was short, slim, rosy skin tone, a halo of white hair, and oddly enthusiastic about our visit. He invited us in to his air conditioned living room and offered us beverages. Witnesses face a lot of rejection in the door-to-door game, quite a lot, so a cool room on a hot day with a friendly face is rather welcome. Also, Bobby’s green 1970-something GM Behemoth didn’t have air conditioning, you just had to roll the windows down and sweat all over the pleather.

I got no hint of threat, no sense of anything inappropriate, he just seemed like somebody who wanted to talk, and so I plowed into my presentation of the magazines or books or whatever it was I was presenting that day. I can’t recall but that’s mainly because of what happened next. He brushed aside everything I was trying to sell him to hit me with a counter-offer. He wanted to tell us the score. He took out a well used and clearly loved Bible and started countering my scriptures with scriptures of his own and in mere minutes we were deep into dueling interpretations of the book of Daniel. Now, I don’t know that I can adequately describe how spectacularly unsettling it was to have a householder who was a) even more Biblically literate than I was and b) equipped with an equally intricate net of theology. Witnesses treat the Bible like it’s a giant puzzle that explains itself through tens of thousands of cross-references between the different pieces and they have the only key to correctly understanding it. Rarely if ever do they encounter other people out in the wild who have the same basic approach but reach different conclusions. I was at a loss and so was Bobby, but the visit hadn’t yet gotten supremely weird. It was just uncomfortable to feel, for the first time I could remember, like there was a chance the householder actually knew the Bible better than I did. How could I preach to a person like that?

As it turned out, that was just the warm up. The little man was vigorously surfing scripture upon scripture to illuminate his interpretation of a prophecy about the tribes of Israel, connecting current events and the world situation to his scriptures as I struggled to find the scriptures in my own Bible fast enough to keep pace when he suddenly started talking about Maitreya. Who or what was Maitreya? Good question. Apparently, Maitreya was/is a guru/teacher/leader who has taken over the United Nations and all the major world governments, presenting himself as a benevolent and wise entity, but who is actually (surprise!) Satan. According to our host, Maitreya appears and disappears at will at gatherings of the rich and powerful, and they do whatever he asks them to do. Maitreya is charismatic. Maitreya is devious. He’s the devil and you cannot take his picture, for some reason.

I asked why, if all of this is true, I have never heard the name Maitreya in my life. Also, much of his supporting material for these claims involved the Illuminati and Freemasons and “history” I had never heard of. I asked him how he could possibly know all of this when it wasn’t in history books or the library or encyclopedias. This was the late 1980’s and the internet wasn’t a thing outside of universities and government agencies. He said that the real truth was never published because the government controls the libraries, the television, the radio, the newspapers, but he knew the truth because he had connected, via computer, to other people who knew the truth. He even had a picture of Maitreya printed out that he could show us.

That was his first major slip up. He said he had a photo of the devil who he just said could not be photographed and seemed not to notice the inherent contradiction. What was going on here?

I had never before heard the term “conspiracy theorist”. The X-Files wouldn’t make it’s debut for about another 4 years. I didn’t even have a term in my vocabulary for a person like this. I was creeped out and kinda fascinated and he just kept spinning more weirdness. Pretty soon there were alien lizard people and god knows what else involved in the alternate universe he was describing. Bobby and I started giving each other nervous glances and seeking a graceful escape. This man was as deep down the alternate reality conspiracy rabbit hole as anybody I’ve since met and he was apparently doing this, erm… research(?) entirely via pre-internet dial-up bulletin board systems.

By the time Bobby and I did manage to extricate ourselves and return to our sweltering, partially melted, compatriots, my eyes had been opened not to the lizard people, Maitreya, the lost tribes of Israel or the Illuminati but rather, to the idea that there were people who were trading and consuming underground “knowledge”. Off the books, unauthorized, unofficial. Claims and theories and speculations, oh my. Had the story ended there it would have been sufficiently strange to my teenage brain but there is a slightly disconcerting coda. A couple of days after that visit with the old man, a book appeared on the doorstep of our house. It was just sitting on the front step, no note, no explanation. It was a book about everything the guy had been talking about, his entire spiel of weirdness, all the conspiracy kook stuff, in a paperback, sitting on my goddamn front step.

To this day I have no idea how he found out where I lived but he obviously did. I was so freaked out by the book that I destroyed it. Tore it to pieces, threw it away. I thought about burning it.

A few years later there was the X-Files and the internet and I started to become more and more aware of the world of conspiracy theories. The JFK assassination, the moon landing, subliminal Disney porn, the secret leaders of the world, Area 51, etc, etc, etc. We all did, as a society. We collectively became acquainted with and absorbed the fact that there are people who believe all this alternate history and alternate reality stuff and, collectively, we considered it to be great entertainment and mostly harmless but I have never forgotten the passion in that man’s voice, the fervor of a true believer preaching The Truth About Everything, and he would know, because he had the photos. Did I want to see them?

I write all of this because here we are, 30+ years later, and instead of a rare, fascinating, troubled soul tilting at windmills from his dial-up modem, connecting with the handful of people like him who Know It’s All A Lie, we have a president and millions of people in the country who believe some set or subset or parallel to the same wildly fantastic nonsense that man believed. They don’t have to work for it, don’t have to plumb the depths of BBS systems and trace teenage Jehovah’s Witnesses to their homes, they just have to take their phones out of their pockets, open a social media app, and pretty soon QAnon shoots straight into their eyeballs from the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. I can barely fathom how weird it is, that in my lifetime, the entire concept of objective reality, trusted news sources (Walter Kronkite! Dan Rather!), and a shared understanding of the world has come under such threat, such assault, that I think back to Maitreya Man as the earliest canary in the coal mine of modern life.

Maitreya Man is probably no longer with us, he would likely be pushing 100 by now, but the way he thought, the ways he conducting “research”, the fascinating combination of high intelligence with an out-of-control pattern recognition function in his brain that caused him to see connections literally everywhere, the paranoia and delusion that must have fed him, and the fledgling underground community of which he was a part, this stuff became a business model and a poison that has penetrated into every nook and cranny of our society. Technology has enabled and accelerated it and allowed all the various conspiracy theories to mutate, adapt, flourish, grow, and draw eyeballs and mindshare. The Left-leaning fringe is prone to this type of “thinking”, and generally always have been, but the heart of the Right, the absolute MAGA core of one of the two major political parties in this country, has completely embraced the insanity, which is frankly even more surprising. I mean, the conservatives of the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, these were not the people who believed in alien lizard people, these were the salt of the earth types, they vaccinated their livestock and their kids, they were proud that America beat the Russkies to the moon and in the Cold War, they didn’t go in for any of that crazy talk, and now they can’t even agree the earth is round and a shocking percentage of them believe Hollywood actors drink baby blood or something batshit insane like that.

How on earth did the most normal of normal people get turned into raving Maitreya Men and Maitreya Women?

Sure, the answers are there. Alex Jones, Fox News, Trump, Facebook, blah blah blah, they are clearly being exposed to more outlets of disinformation that is divorced from reality than they are chemtrails, but my god, what can be done about it? Anything? Are we just all doomed to live in a world now in which a huge number of people aren’t really sure whether or not reality is… reality? Where evidence against the things they say is either ignored or converted into evidence for what they say? Because let’s be honest here, none of this would be happening if there wasn’t money being made on peddling disinformation, conspiracy, and crackpot bullshit. As long as a market exists there will be sellers. The only possible solution is to reduce the number of people who are vulnerable to falling for this stuff. Every insane conspiracy theory has a website somewhere debunking all of it’s claims. Sometimes I read these things just for fun, keep an eye on the state of the state and all that. The theory sites have certain things in common. They tend to make grandiose statements without evidence, they usually make a lot of claims that all fail, on their own merits, to stand up to critical scrutiny but together are considered “a pattern”, they commit logical fallacies, they contradict their own logic, etc. The debunking sites usually take on the “evidence” with actual evidence, point by point, and demolish the theory and it makes no difference whatsoever. The Sandy Hook Massacre was a False Flag. NASA never landed on the moon. Fluoride is for mind control. Hillary Clinton is a lizard person. Michelle Obama is a man. On and on and on, evidence be damned.

The debunking approach, satisfying as it may be, doesn’t work for the simple reason that believers never visit debunking sites. If they are directed to them by a loved one, they may grudgingly look at the site for two seconds but they immediately reject the debunker as somebody who doesn’t get it or a tool of the masterminds behind the conspiracy. Of course the Freemasons have a website demonstrating that the moon landing was real! That site is part of the wool being pulled over your eyes sheeple!

So, if we can’t debunk our way out of this, what do we do? How do we get through to somebody who is in the grip of an induced delusion/psychosis, in the sway of a maniac cult leader like Donald Trump who is retweeting QAnon lunacy? This is no longer one isolated old man in a basement, this is tens of millions of citizens of this country. This is terrifying. What can possibly be done? I am sad to say, I offer no solutions, no hope. I have never won an argument with a conspiracy theorist, never seen a case where they turn around and come back to consensus reality. I’ve never heard of anything that works to right this wrong when it occurs in a human mind. I’d love a glimmer of hope, if you have any to offer. Please.

Failing that, can I please just suggest, humbly, that we all do our best to make critical thought respected and valued again and look for ways to fight this collective mental virus? We can’t be a functioning society if 30-40% of us believe an alien cabal of lizard people is eating babies and one of them is George Soros and he faked the death of Hugo Chavez as part of a plot to steal the 2020 election by reprogramming all the voting machines so that nobody will uncover the secret that NASA faked the space program by building cellular towers that caused coronavirus and the earth is actually flat and somehow the LGBTQ+ are in on it too but I’m not sure why or how yet but also Starbucks coffee cups hate Christians. Or something. This is not sustainable and it’s not something we can argue and debunk away.

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I keep seeing advertisements online for lite/small/basic/dumb phones.  These are usually promising to break the user away from the mind-numbing addiction to the doomscroll and allow them to once again see the world around them.  I am guessing that none of these products actually have much of a likelihood of succeeding in the marketplace because, at the end of the day, they are the electronic equivalent of a healthy diet and we all want pizza.

But I get the appeal.  I have gone to great lengths to simplify and cut back and escape the ultra-intrusive and soul-crushing miasma that is the modern internet, social media, news, hell even the gas pumps have Maria Menounos talking your ear off whenever you just want to fill ‘er up.  The world is loud.  Everybody everywhere wants a piece of everyone else, everybody wants to be viral and sticky and every available niche is being filled by noise.  It’s awful.  No wonder we tell ourselves that a simpler phone will save the day.  Seems like such an easy solution, but that’s an illusion. The phone isn’t the problem.  The phone is a delivery device for the poison of our modern culture, sure, the smart phone is to psychological poison as the cigarette is to carcinogens, but the real problem is the fascination with and addiction to the gazillion small hits of dopamine we get from ingesting the latest stupid headline, the latest trivial status update, the latest tweet, the latest Tik Tok video, the latest, the latest, the endless content ocean.

I put it to you that the mindless consumption of endless hours of low value content and ephemeral news (always mostly bad) has never, in the history of humanity, been a healthy activity.  It was a little harder to do, back in the day, I’ll give you that, but only just.  You know what the Fox News MAGA Boomers have in common with their Zoomer grand-kids?  The former keep a television on during all waking hours, feeding themselves an endless stream of targeted information chosen by an editorial staff in the service of advertisers and the latter stare at a phone during all waking hours, feeding themselves an endless stream of targeted information chosen by an algorithm in the service of advertisers.  The Venn diagram is a circle.  Only the content differs.  The narrowcast, tailored, corporatized “social” web and app ecosystem is no more diverse, empowering, educational, or conducive to free thought than the old broadcast radio and television it has superseded.  At least there were three major networks broadcasting television to our parents generation and, you know, PBS, but for us it’s one bubble, crafted by tracking cookies, collaborative filters, and virality that create an echo chamber at the personal level that gives Fox News programming a run for it’s money in it’s extreme lack of variety.

Reality has been so curated for us, our ideas and desires and personal situations, our friendships and family connections have been productized, monetized, and exploited so heavily, that we find ourselves in an almost absurd predicament as a society.  We technically have more access to all of the information in the world than any population in mankind’s history and yet on a daily basis we have to make such a violent and intentional effort to encounter it that it might as well not be there.  We are the least informed consumers, the least enlightened populace, and the most radically misinformed bunch of sad sacks that the modern post-enlightenment world has ever seen.

Of course, this is all in the service of scratching the itch of boredom.  We work at our jobs all day and we crave something interesting and corporations are really really incredibly good at giving us diversions.  Allegedly we want to know what’s happening in the world, connect with our friends, laugh at something silly, but really, it’s just that we are bored and don’t know what to do with that novel feeling in a world so filled with stimulation.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that we don’t even have a chance to get legitimately bored.  We simply find ourselves lacking a diversion, which is not the same thing.  We have forgotten how to just exist to such a level that we equate being alive with boredom.  We get an idle minute and we have to decide to be unconscious (sleepy time!) or to seek out something diverting.  Diversion wins.  We happily step into the most convenient available trap.  The Phone.  The TV.  Potayto.  Potahto.  So, you see, this isn’t a new problem and a simpler phone isn’t much of a solution.  What we need to do is learn to do nothing and have it be enough.  Allow inaction to occur.  Don’t call it boredom.  And don’t seek a diversion.  Here are some exercises you can try.

Exercise: Turn off all electronics.  Put them in a totally separate room.  Make a meal.  Eat it and give it your full attention.  Don’t shovel it in your mouth while scrolling Twitter.  Taste it.

Exercise: Switch out some piece of media consumption that you currently use a device for with it’s “obsolete” equivalent.  For example, you like your e-reader?  Read a print book for a change.  You love Spotify?  Dig out those old tapes or records or CDs from the closet and play one.  Experience the difference between streaming “media” into your bubble and the physical act of interacting with a physical piece of media.  Read a paper newspaper.

Exercise: Remember back to things you used to do to entertain yourself before you had a smartphone that you don’t do anymore.  Do that for a day.  See how it feels.

Exercise: Schedule times to be online for a week but otherwise, be offline by default.  Throughout human history, as recently as 10 years ago, most people were not carrying a phone around with them 24/7 and could not be pinged, messaged, rung up, or tweeted at and somehow, somehow, these brave ancestors survived.  Imagine a world in which your time was respected, in which nobody expected you to be waiting by the phone 24/7, nobody panicked if you went a day or two between texts, how much pressure would that take off your shoulders?  How much relief would you feel?

Exercise: Find a news outlet that is honest, reliable, and without partisan bent and (if you must consume current events) make that your first stop of the day.  Before you encounter memes, spin, or your own bubble, try to be aware of a neutral reporting of facts, sans opinions.  Then, for bonus points, form your own opinions.

Exercise: Track the trackers.  Add an extension to your browser that alerts you to how many organizations track your every move online and block them.  Observe changes in your online experience.  Opt for media interactions that don’t track you and, even more to the point, don’t monetize your activity.  Buy products, not access, copies, not subscriptions.  Companies don’t track you if you aren’t being monetized.  When is the last time you actually owned a copy of a new album rather than just streaming it?

Look, I get it, we aren’t ever getting rid of this technology.  You’re not going to live this way all the time.  These are exercises intended to make you think about the choices you’re making on a daily basis.  Practices to gain some perspective.  Things you can try doing to make yourself more aware of the ways you are being catered to, manipulated, handled, exploited, and sold.  We aren’t going back to the “good old days”.  There aren’t any.  We are, however, going to wind up in Idiocracy if enough of us don’t get out of the bubbles and into reality.  So, you know, stop reading this.  I’m not tracking you or monetizing your eyeballs but still, get offline.  Paint something.  Play that xylophone you got at the yard sale.  Read a physical book.  Sit quietly in a room and listen to your environment.  This whole online thing is a fiction and you know it.  Shoo.

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I had a bit of an epiphany last night.  I don’t know if it’s particularly profound, but I feel like my eyes were opened to a few truths that I have long known and simply forgotten to apply in my life.

First thing.  I have been a music person my entire life.  I have listened to music, thought in music, sang to myself in the car, in the shower, written my own songs, recorded music, performed music, learned instruments, collected music, obsessed over music.  I know people who maybe own two or three CDs and casually listen to Spotify, you know, normal people.   In contrast, I have literally thousands of albums in numerous formats: vinyl records, shellac 78s, CDs, cassettes, reel to reel tapes, digital files, you name it.  OK, I don’t have any 8-track carts, gotta draw the line somewhere, but I do actually own a functional hand-cranked Columbia Grafonola record player. 

I’ve personally been involved with and worked on the recording of at least 40 recorded albums or singles as either a performer, engineer, producer, or sometimes all of the above.  I have a recording studio in my basement.  I own dozens of musical instruments.  Guitars, basses, drum kits, keyboards, horns, accordions, slide whistles.  Hell, there is a documentary being made in which my musical endeavors and life’s work feature prominently. 

I say all of this to highlight the fact that you would be hard-pressed to find a person who’s life is more obviously centered around music, which makes it all the more strange to me that I’ve been so out of touch, emotionally and professionally, with music for the last few years. 

I have played in several bands and participated in the documentary, but I haven’t released a new album of original music since a minor acoustic EP that I recorded in a day back in December 2014.  I used to wonder if something was wrong with me if I didn’t release an album a year, at least, and I’m now coming up on six years with nothing to show for it except for the memories of some gigs played, a handful of unfinished projects and a few one-off songs or videos.  I have written and recorded things but I just haven’t been able to get into any sort of rhythm (pun intended) with my musical life.  I think that’s because I haven’t HAD a musical life.  Instead, I have been knee deep in the Miasma and it’s killed my sense of joy, wonder, and creativity.  At the same time, as a listener, I have allowed music to become a background wallpaper to my daily life instead of truly engaging with, appreciating it, eating, sleeping, and breathing it as I used to do.

The Miasma is a term I recently acquired from the book Fall; or, Dodge in Hell by author Neal Stephenson.  It is the catch-all term for the cultural wasteland of insanity, trolling, confirmation bias, misinformation, distortion, propaganda, bad blood, viral marketing, and lowest common denominator garbage that the modern internet has descended into.  Everything about the public discourse, the endless doomscrolling, the sheer end of the world nihilism of late stage capitalism, authoritarianism, stupidity, violence, and (bonus!) a global pandemic, it’s all so disheartening, so maddening, that turning on a television, reading a newspaper, looking at a social media feed, or visiting nearly any part of the internet for any reason is guaranteed to make whatever mood I am in worse.  Good moods become bad moods, bad moods become dire.

Instead of using music or meditation or poetry or art or any of the other tools at my disposal to counter the effects of the Miasma, I have fallen into an engagement trap based on the fact that, at one point, I used to love the internet.  I did.  I believed in it.  I thought it was a net-positive for humanity.  In the world before the web, communities were more physically isolated, knowledge harder to access, there was much more terra incognita.  The promise of the web and the connected digital society as laid out by luminaries like Ted Nelson, Vannevar Bush, Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Kay, and even Steve Jobs was so appealing.  It was almost like a second Enlightenment Age dawning.  All the worlds knowledge available, all the communications barriers broken.  How could this be anything other than an Objectively Good Thing?

Well, as it turns out, every silver lining has a cloud.  As it turns out, people were not historically hostile and tribal merely because of limited communications technology or limited access to information.  People are hostile and tribal because they have been made that way through billions of years of natural selection.  They require almost no incentive whatsoever to pick sides and develop animosity towards each other.  Kurt Vonnegut nailed it with his granfalloon concept.  Thanks to this programming, hyper-connecting all the people was always going to mean that the people who thrive on rancor, discord, and negativity would have louder voices and more power to shape our culture than they did before.  Capitalism, which naturally goes where the market leads, would naturally find ways to monetize and stoke this hostility and division in order to make money.  Religions and political parties would do the same, feeding the flames to advance power and agendas.  These are not new forces in human society, they existed as far back as written history records and likely much further back.  It turns out that the previous limits imposed by geography, technology, and access to information were also holding some of our tribalism and collective insanity in check by channeling it into narrow and somewhat isolated outlets.  That is no longer possible.  Thanks to the democratizing power of the internet, we now have all of the foibles and ridiculousness of our species running amok, unfettered, unchecked by any force, Enlightenment 2: Electric Boogaloo has given way to Idiocracy 2: Boogaloo Now Means Race War.

But wait a minute, I hear you saying, wasn’t this post about music?  Yeah, yeah, I’m getting there, it’s my blog, I wanna take a while to get to my point, that’s my prerogative.  Keep your shirt on.

OK, so, the Miasma was probably inevitable, in retrospect, but I didn’t anticipate it.  I believed, perhaps too strongly, in the positive and empowering aspects of the always on, hyper-connected, society.  I thought it would lead me to more creativity (more ability to share what you create is good, right?), more human connection (all my old friends are here, that’s gotta be good, right?), and all the old hassles of primitive technologies would be rendered obsolete by the wireless, simple, one device to rule them all vision of the smartphone as digital camera, digital music player, GPS, movie player, social life, VR headset, internet information appliance, dessert topping, floor wax, etc.   I was an early adopter.  I was a proponent.  I was a fan. 

I was wrong.

The all-in-one device is a marvel of convenience, but it makes focused attention on any one single thing of value extremely challenging.  Always being connected is great for knowing where to find a gas station while driving in an unknown area or for settling a bet about a piece of trivia with a friend, but it creates a constant psychological drag on the real world experience of every day life because you often feel compelled to use it just because it’s there and you’re bored for 5 whole consecutive seconds.  A globally connected platform for delivering creative work to audiences is theoretically empowering for artists, but since everybody throws everything out there, nothing feels special or unique or lasting, almost everything feels ephemeral, transitive, meaningless, like a night at an open-mic where the entire audience is on-stage at once, talking at the same time. 

In the Miasma, all of these things that hypothetically could have been enriching, empowering, and inspiring have mostly turned to shit.  Devalued, corrupted, monetized, destroyed, and we as a society have been lessened to the extent where Donald Fucking Trump actually became President of the United States.  Think about that.  As far back as the 80’s that would have been the punchline to a joke about America failing as a country and IT.  ACTUALLY.  HAPPENED.

I can chart my decline in creative interest and output on a graph (yes, I’ve actually done this on paper) and it directly correlates to the rise of the post-Facebook/post-iPhone Miasma version of the internet.  My flagging interest in saying anything whatsoever to the world at large, my increasing disinterest in my OWN MUSICAL WORK, my general sense of despondency about anything, or anyone, anywhere, truly mattering at all, my ever deeper struggles with the blank page or blank tape, it all correlates perfectly to the amount of time I have spent online since the New Enlightenment turned into the Miasma. 

The question is, what is a boy to do?

The internet I fell in love with is gone, for good.  The world I grew up in is radically changed.  No use looking backwards, it is what it is. I can limit my online time, work on my mindfulness, and swear a lot, but it I can’t undo what’s been done.  This is where my job is.  This is where my friends are.  This is how the music and tech industries function.  If I want to work in technology and/or be a creative, I can’t pretend the cultural landscape is what it was 12 years ago. 

I think the answer, ironically(?), is hinted at in trends I am beginning to encounter in the habits of the generation being raised with hyper-connectivity and social networking since childhood.  They are not enamored of apps and smartthings, they don’t think they’re especially cool or interesting, and they don’t inherently think the digital stuff is better or worse than what came before it.  It’s all just tech.  This is why a lot of people these days are, apparently, rediscovering mixtapes made with actual cassettes.  I did not foresee cassettes coming back, but they are.  Why?  Making mix tapes with your own voice and choices of songs was fun when I was a kid and it’s still fun now.  Who cares that you can listen to the same songs on your phone on Spotify?  That doesn’t feel unique like a tape does.  Another example, my niece became obsessed with typewriters at age 12 despite having a smartphone and tablet.  People who didn’t experience the migration from analog to digital to networked are not inherently biased against the old tools and can even appreciate their quirks and limits but mostly they appreciate the physicality, the reality, of analog. 

The Miasma is an endless stream of mostly negative messages masquerading as news, relationships, and information which is tailored to hook you, personally, and to shape your world and your view of it.  Unconnected technology only puts out what you put into it, there is no agenda, no secret influencers.  Maybe the way to get creative again is, in part, to only use tools and technologies that don’t try to influence my behaviors. 

And while I do think that’s a part of it, the real insight I had is that the flip side of the Miasma is how it makes you, me, everybody who participates, into both influenced and influencer.  We are all trying to culturally signify our alignments, beliefs, and affiliations.  We are all posting selfies and liking posts and crafting a semi-public persona as a type of performance art.  This is not an environment that fosters or encourages actual creativity.  In fact, it’s an active impediment because it creates the illusion of creativity.

Taking a photograph and applying some funny filter to it or cobbling together a meme is an act of creation, sure, but it’s more craft than art.  It’s more like making a hand-print turkey painting than it is like writing a confessional poem.  These types of minor creative output are mostly imitative or derivative, and the primary value is amusing other people.  These are all performance, but not all art is performance.

I recently read something written by Jeff Buckley in the liner notes to the posthumously released collection of material he was working on at the time of his death “Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk”.  He wrote the following about his songwriting:

There is also music I’ll make that will never-ever-ever be for sale. This is my music alone, this is my true home; from which all things are born and from which all my life will spring untainted and unworried, fully of my own body.

And this is something I have known for a very long time but I have let myself forget, the simple basic fact that you need to create first and foremost for your ears alone, for your heart alone, for your soul alone, if you want to have a home to share with others.  You can’t make that kind of art with the thoughts, feelings, opinions, or judgments of other people in mind.  You can’t be wondering if they will like you or what you have to say.  It’s not about them.  It’s the opposite of performance.  It’s self-exploration.  The more my life has become about the performances and manipulations of the Miasma, the more I’ve come to critically judge my own work and the less free I have felt to just play, explore, experiment, and enjoy the process of making music that nobody will ever hear.  I’ve been laboring under the false feeling that if I make music that I don’t think is “releasable” then I shouldn’t have bothered to make it.  When I was in high school sitting cross-legged on my bed with a four-track recorder recording ambient soundscapes about Tony Bennett or swarms of bees I wasn’t worrying about anybody hearing me or caring what I was doing…  I was having fun.

Fun.  Yes, fucking FUN.  Where is fun in 2020?  Where is joy in 2020?  Where is there joy to be found in the endless doomscroll of the Miasma or the viral marketing hellscape or the endless disgusting behavior of the bigots and fundamentalists or the constant manipulation of influencers and trends and memes and the barrage of messages and notifications and micro and macro time sinks of modern life?  I’ll tell you where it is.  Nowhere.  Missing in action.

And there, ladies and gentlemen, there is the key in all of this navel gazing.  Without fun, without joy, even the joy of painful catharsis (and yes, there is joy to be found in working through painful emotions, just think of the joy of relief when you remove a really bad splinter), what are you sharing?  What have you got other than an empty “look at me”? 

I’ve let the Miasma train me.  I’ve let it get me focused on publishing, producing, consuming and being consumed, constantly trying to drink a bottomless pool dry, and neglecting the square one of unplugging, playing, doing things just because they are interesting, making music for nobody else to hear, remembering that the bad news will still be there whether you look at it or not but that your soul won’t be if you won’t look after it.  When was the last time I just put on a record and listened to it without also being online?  When the last time I picked up a guitar and just made something up with no plan?  When was the last time I turned away from all screens, tablet, television, phone or e-reader, and just lived in the world of the actual senses? 

I am not sure.  I know that my entire life was spent in real space up to a point, and then it started digitizing, and it eventually wound up twisted around this shared online fiction we now call a culture, but the answer is not about “going back”, it’s not about “disconnecting”, it’s about remembering that the Miasma cannot provide meaning, it cannot provide true joy, but music can, real life can, and if I want to find that again, I need only remember how to play, how to write for myself and myself alone, and then to make a conscious decision to stop participating in the endless performance.

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I have been eligible to vote in American elections since the early 90’s but the first time I actually voted was in 2004.  I hadn’t previously voted because I was a member of a religion which specifically prohibited voting.  Weird, I know.  As soon as I was no longer a member of that group, I got excited about the opportunity to vote and that year I supported John Kerry in his failed bid to unseat incumbent president (and Rove/Cheney ventriloquist’s dummy) W.  It was an extremely disappointing experience that left me profoundly disturbed.  I found it very hard to understand why anybody who was even marginally conscious about anything happening in the country could ever vote for a man with the apparent IQ of a sea cucumber, but clearly I misunderestimated my fellow citizens.  It wouldn’t be the last time.

People, it turns out, are gullible, easily manipulated, unreliable, and generally bad at critical thinking.  Also, for the most part, poor judges of character.  I suppose I kinda knew this before 2004, but I was working pretty darn hard to avoid thinking about it.  I was aware that politics were a thing and people were passionate about them but I had also been taught that none of it mattered, it was all equally corrupt and bad, and the whole “political system of things” was doomed to destruction anyhow so I didn’t think I needed to worry my pretty little head about it.  And so I didn’t.

Once I started to realize that politics is simply our name for “how the human species makes group decisions instead of just killing each other” I began to realize that I was at the mercy of the collective bad decision making, poor critical thinking skills, and gullibility of my neighbors and there was no Jesus on horse with a flaming sword a-comin’ to save the day.  That was terrifying and I would like to report that it has gotten less so, but that would be a lie.  It is not less terrifying and people do not instill me with any more confidence today than they did before.  Probably less since 2016.

But here we all are and 2020 is here and the POTUS is a mob boss, the Russians and Republicans are strategic allies, every Democratic candidate on the table has a fatal flaw, and every left-leaning person I know is fighting with every other left-leaning person so we’re probably gonna get twelve more years of He Who Shall Not Be Named after he just goes ahead and declares himself president for life and suspends elections and since I am powerless to change these things, I need to figure out how to live with them and, ideally, not enter into a crippling depression.

The simplest option, perhaps the only one that really rises to the level of a solution, is just to tune out.  Go back to how I grew up.  Focus on music, family, personal development, art, and the rest, just show up to vote my conscience but, otherwise, simply ignore all the bad stuff that’s happening.  Don’t follow the news, don’t obsess over the soap opera, keep a distance.

This is much harder to do in my current life than it was when I was growing up.  I grew up in the pre-internet era when news was a paper delivered once a day which I mostly ignored, despite delivering it around the neighborhood.  I read the comics and skimmed the TV listings for movies or shows I might want to record, but beyond that I was pretty much unaware of and uninterested in the world outside my neighborhood.  No social media, no cable news, no office filled with co-workers with opinions.  It was simple.  Now, if I want to see what’s going on my friends lives, I dip into social media and pretty soon I’m seeing political posts and I’m having opinions and the bubble is gone.  I work in an office on a computer all day, the internet is always happening, and I can choose not to look but it takes a lot more self-control.  It’s easy to avoid things that you have to out of your way to see, it’s hard to avoid things that pop up on your screen or arrive in your inbox.

I’m not sure, either, that I would like to return to the ignorance is bliss stage of my life.  I wasn’t just uninformed, I was MIS-informed.  Because I wasn’t aware of actual events actually happening in the world around me, I was able to be fed a bunch of untrue information that formed the basis of the worldview promulgated by my religion and this kept me from thinking for myself for a very long time.  Long story short, I was insulated and thus slow in developing my critical thinking skills about the world even as I developed my intellectual capacities in other areas like music and computer programming.  Once you are out of a bubble, you can’t go back in.  The nature of bubbles is that they pop and then they no longer exist.

At the risk of over-simplifying then, I see three options.  Go back to being Bubble Boy, lose my damn mind over every new outrage, or, option three, balance.

Here are my fledgling rules for finding balance in a world of political insanity:

1. Don’t over-consume.  Read the news once or twice a week to stay informed on major events, but avoid binging, avoid politics talk shows, podcasts, cable news, blogs, and the obsessive 24/7 coverage.

2. Don’t fuel negative feelings, find positive things to do.  When exposed to the latest Trump outrage or Republican violation of law, morality, the constitution, and basic human decency, you can either fume and stew or put something good into the world instead.  Finish an unfinished project, write a song, listen to a new record, watch a classic film you’ve been meaning to watch, read a novel.  The world doesn’t get better without good things happening, do something positive in response to a negative.  If you let bad people and events paralyze you, the end result is less good in the world.

3. Participate, but moderately.  Vote when you get to vote.  Be informed enough to make good decisions.  Maybe even volunteer to do some canvasing, but also refrain from activities that only serve yourself.  Fighting with people online isn’t going to make any change happen.  Neither is checking out completely and staying home.  Participate in the democracy like it matters but don’t think your passion can change the world or allow yourself to become so disenchanted that the bastards win.

Informed, meaningful, participation plus just enough news intake, and a commitment to contributing my time and energy to positive things as a way to fight against the negative ones are really the three guidelines I’m going to try to stick to.  Feel free to remind me I said this next time I find myself ranting or obsessing.  I’ll appreciate the reminder even if I say, “I know but….”

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What a stressful year 2015 has been.

On the plus side, I joined a fun band and played a bunch of shows and good times were had.  I moved to a new house with 20 acres of land, a heated workshop, and a barn that I will be perfect to convert into a studio.  Work was insanely stressful, but we built a system, and we launched it, and now a major global hotel chain is running on our software 24/7.  That has it’s own type of satisfaction at the end of the day but I’d be lying if I said I would do it all again.  Too much personal time missed, too little work/life balance.

On the negative side, my oldest friendship ended and I don’t know why.  I got a text message saying we weren’t friends anymore and that was that.  All efforts on my part to find out what upset him or caused that to happen have been ignored.  I doubt I’ll ever understand that one.  People are so strange.  Life is short.  Why anybody would do that to anyone is beyond me.  

But I’m feeling healthy, sleeping well, and I feel like I passed through some sort of life transition this year and the future feels unfamiliar and new, which I like.  There is still one more “heavy lifting” task ahead of me from this Year of Heavy Lifting, which is to finish renovating and selling my old house.  It should be ready to list in January of next year.  We are patching and painting and cleaning and replacing old flooring and putting in new light fixtures and things like that.  I built a small deck in the back.  It’s amazing how many things you always mean to get around to but don’t until you are going to sell.  Between unpacking into the new house and working on the old one I feel like I’m pretty much constantly busy.

Busy is good.  As long as it has a purpose.  And I feel more of a sense of purpose now than I have felt several years.  I am looking forward to finishing the album I’ve been working on in dribs and drabs for a year and a half.  I’m looking forward to outfitting my new studio.   I’m looking forward to playing more live music with my band and solo.  I’m looking forward to gardening and hiking and working at my new 20 acre homestead.  I have a tractor.  I used it to clear the driveway of show this week.  How cool is that?   

I haven’t seen the new Star Wars movie yet.  I thought about going to a late showing last night after spending the rest of the evening working on the old house, but the floor I was installing took too long and I ran out of time to make the last one before 1:00 AM.  I wasn’t about to go that late.  

Since moving into what my workmates call “The Compound”, life has been quite different.  We haven’t even been there two months and the following have already transpired:

– a night of tractor repair featuring an alcohol-influenced 2:00 AM snow blowing test run

– the finding of the decaying bodies of two dead red-tail hawks

– the construction of a 1000 foot long fence

– The canine killing of a shrew, a mouse, and a pocket gopher

– four sightings of the two barn cats

– turkeys, deer, woodpeckers, rabbits, etc, just walking around like they own the place

– learning just how incredibly annoying satellite Internet service is (it’s truly terrible, HughesNet is a joke but it’s basically the only option that has any bandwidth to speak of)

It’s a lifestyle change…  Here’s how it happened.

For a few years now, we’ve been talking about moving but never able to agree on what a move might involve.  I like live music (playing it and going to shows), working in downtown Minneapolis and taking public transit to work instead of driving a car.  So, suburban/urban locations are my preference.  We bought a house in Apple Valley, which is where I grew up, and I have always liked the fact that despite having no particular charms of it’s own, it’s relatively convenient to get just about anywhere I want to go.  It’s safe, schools are good, it’s clean, nothing to complain about.  There is even a big 2000 acre park where I can hike and kayak.  Esther, on the other hand, doesn’t much care for suburbs.  If she is going to live somewhere with a high concentration of people (and she has, namely, Brooklyn NY), she wants interesting restaurants and shops and inspiring surroundings.  There is nothing particularly inspiring about Apple Valley with it’s Ruby Tuesday, Applebees, Target, and the like.  Sure, there’s one good Thai restaurant, but otherwise I agree with her critique.  I also enjoy inspiring surroundings, but, well…  There’s a trade off.  Picturesque surroundings are all well and good, but they are usually found in inconvenient locations.  Convenient locations are fine but the surroundings are rarely picturesque.  And since dogs became a big part of our lives, she has been clamoring for more space for them.  Something like 5 acres.  With some woods.  Near water would be nice.  It seemed unlikely we would find a place to move that would satisfy both of us and, honestly, this was the topic of many a heated conversation.  

I laid down my criteria for what I wanted and she laid down hers and there wasn’t a ton of overlap, but if there was a property that fit both of our lists, I decided I would consider it.  One thing I insisted on was something I have wanted my entire adult life: a separate building to use as a recording studio.  I wasn’t all that terribly in love with the idea of moving but if I could actually stay close to the Twin Cities and get a recording studio in the process, well, I decided I could try to be open-minded and maybe something would pop up that I would feel was worth all the hassle.  I mean, Esther and the dogs would benefit, I would benefit, what more could you ask for?  Tt seemed like we were asking a lot but still, we set up some Zillow searches and alerts and started trawling through listings.  And more listings.  And more listings.

 “Here’s one with 5 acres…  But it’s all grass, no trees”

 “This one has 34 acres, but it’s an hour drive to work”

“6 acres with a stream!  Good location!  But the house is practically falling down”

“This one is perfect!  But it’s WAYYYY too expensive.”

On and on and on.  We eventually got a realtor and got pre-approved for a mortgage in case we actually found something.  We dragged the poor woman all over Minnesota to see properties as far apart as Big Lake and Nininger and still, no dice.  On the one hand, the number of near misses we were finding assured me that the goal was attainable but on the other hand, I was pretty skeptical that it would be attained without accepting some sort of major compromise.  Something on the list had to give.  Less land or further out or worse house or something.  But then I clicked a listing on Zillow and saw “The Compound”.  20-acres.  Multiple out-buildings, including a heated shop and a beautiful barn that would make a perfect studio.  Geothermal heating and cooling.  In our price range.  Nearby transit station with express bus downtown.  Only 10 miles farther away from my office than our current house.  Trees.  Beautiful lot.  Seclusion.  Quiet.  Two suburbs nearby with all the usual suspects (Chinese buffet, Menards, Goodwill, book stores, Carbones pizza, Cub Foods).  Clearly there must be something wrong with it.  I was skeptical enough that I didn’t even invite our realtor to set up a showing until I drove out there first to scout it out.  I couldn’t believe what I saw and I sat in my car in front of the property thinking, “Wow.  This is it.  This is seriously it.  Whoa.”

The rest, as they say, is history.  We officially visited the following day.  Our realtor lost her mind over how amazing it was.  We followed suit.  An offer was immediately made.  Full price.  No haggling when you find exactly what you want for less than it’s worth.  It was accepted.  No drama.  A closing date was set.  We signed, we moved in, and every day since has been a discovery.  We keep saying things like “I had no idea I wanted this.” and “This is so great.” and “Can you believe this is happening?”  The dogs love it.  They run and run, and chase things, and come in the house dirty, and they get tire themselves out and they sleep.  The cats now spend time in the same rooms as the dogs.  There is peace.  To stand outside on a clear night is a miracle.  The sky has more stars than I ever remember seeing.  It’s so quiet you can hear an owl hooting miles away.  The house has twice as much living space, we have barely begun to properly leverage it.  We had to buy walkie talkies just to keep in touch with each other.  

And I got my studio.

Initially it may seem like a “barn” isn’t a great idea for a studio.  I think barn and I think of a drafty, dusty, old building for animals to live in.  But this barn is different.  It’s wired up, electrified, lighted, wrapped and sided.  There are two stories inside plus a loft area that just need some insulation, drywall, and some sort of heat source to become a year-round workspace.  Plus it’s good looking.  And there are two doorways on the upper level that are just begging to open out onto a couple of decks.  I’m reading up on studio construction techniques now…  Mwahahahahahahaha….