Holy crap I love Altin Gün.  Makes me wish I understood Turkish…   Also, I wish I had seen them before Merve Daşdemir left the band…  Anyhow, if you don’t know them already, Anatolian Rock geniuses, Altin Gün.  Enjoy.

I’ve been threatening to relaunch NuclearGopher.com for years.  One rather ridiculous reason I have struggled to make this happen is that I truly and deeply find the modern style of website building to be boring, annoying, and uninspiring.

1. Setup a content management system (probably WordPress but if you’re really unsure of what to do you can use something like Bandzoogle or Wix or Strikingly or something)
2. Install one of the myriad number of available responsive “beautiful” themes and change some colors and logos
3. Start cranking out “content”
4. For every special feature you want (comments, newsletter signup, blah blah blah) install a plugin and probably signup for some cloud based subscription service
5. To get statistics or visitor info add in Google Analytics or use an SEO optimizer service so your site can secretly track visitors and report the data to marketing firms

Congratulations, you now have a website that looks just like every other site on the internet and you are likely going to pay multiple monthly fees to keep it online!

It’s really not that hard.  I’ve built such sites dozens of times.  But…  honestly?  I hate them.  They are not memorable or distinctive, they are intrusive and heavy, and they are BORING AS HELL.

I didn’t want to build a site like that.  Not for my favorite little site of all time.  The thought of doing so was dispiriting.  But what was the alternative in the modern era?  Surely that is what people expect of websites these days?  The entire internet is made up of Every Fucking Bootstrap Site Ever these days, right?

I want a website that is quirky and weird, a site that is memorable, the kind of website that existed during the Old Weird Internet Era.  I have nothing against modern web standards, CSS and HTML5 are so much nicer to work with than the primitive Web 1.0 iterations of those technologies, but I want to make something that meets the following criteria:

1. No tracking or spying on visitors
2. No dependence on Big Tech companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook, X, etc..)
3. A unique flavor that changes over time
4. No dependence on third-party external cloud services

In other words, I want to build a website with modern tools that is indie.  Indie in design, indie in spirit, indie in execution, and uniquely it’s own beast.

In theory this is straightforward.  All you need is:

1. A webserver
2. Web pages and other content
3. Ideas and know how

The problem I was facing as I contemplated this was that the simple, straightforward, “old school” path to building websites is almost non-existent these days and the companies that run traditional web hosting go out of their way to make the creation and administration of such sites challenging.  They want you to buy rather than build and since so few people try to build this sort of website anymore they often provide very little support or guidance to help people do so.

But, moron that I am, I put a stake in the ground a few years back and made a landing page at nucleargopher.com that merely rendered our old logo in the middle of the page and held down the fort while I went and educated myself.

I had MANY false starts.  I thought I might be able to wrangle WordPress into a shape that made me happy but after half a dozen attempts in which I was just sad about the result I ditched that.  I next took a look at a series of “static site generators” which create nicely styled and “plain old HTML” sites without databases and all that and that was closer to what I wanted.  Plain text, full control, host anywhere.  I fell in love with one in particular.  Still, time kept on timing and I was getting no closer to a web site that I would feel good about.  The big issue was still themes.  I just really hate the look of every theme out there and I kept losing patience at learning yet another templating language.  There are just sooooo many of them and none seem to be particularly better or worse than the others.

So I came to a decision.  I decided that I was just gonna party like it’s 1999 and damn the torpedos.  I picked one easily attainable starting point: a landing page that had a music player on it.  And not just any music player but WinAmp (or, to be more accurate, WebAmp, an HTML5 clone of the original WinAmp player).  Two days ago, on April Fools Day, I uploaded the updated NuclearGopher.com landing page with two initial songs on the playlist: the new Awkward Bodies cover of The Lavone’s 1986 song “My Adventure Flowerland” and “Hi-Fi” by HighTV (and some kick butt WinAmp skins if you can figure out how to change them).  You can go there right now and hear some tunes.  It’s the softest of soft launches ever considering that this a website that has essentially been dormant for about 20 years but it was (gasp!) fun.

Today I realized that it would be nice to have a newsletter signup and also the ability to view site traffic statistics.  Again I asked myself how exactly I ought to do those things in 2024 without signing up for anything or doing any tracking nonsense.  It took a few hours of tinkering because my web hosting provider has incomplete and misleading instructions that are years out of date, but I managed to setup the stats thing (still entirely anonymous, just crunching numbers from the server logs) and I am now auditioning an open-source, self-hosted, newsletter signup tool that will allow visitors to opt-in/out of basic updates about new releases, events, and the rest, again without any tracking or Big Tech involvement.  This is how I built websites 25 years ago.  By hand, using open-source, maintaining independent control and respecting visitor privacy.  It’s kind of ugly right now but in a goofy way that I like more than a fancy theme.

I’m really looking forward to adding to the site, putting up new pages, playing around with the look and feel, throwing in easter eggs and silly bits, and actually having a good time and enjoying the process.  It feels like the right way to do it.  So, please, feel free to go listen to a couple of songs and take a look at the embryonic new nucleargopher.com.  I have interesting plans for it and I promise that the changes won’t be measured in decades or even years from here on out.  The internet need not be boring or corporate, dominated by apps, subscriptions, paywalls, and pretentious BS.  It used to be fun.  I hope I can bring a little bit of fun back to it.  It can’t all be as cool as zombo.com but we can try.  And those two songs are pretty sweet…

When I was in high school I took a philosophy course and I have to admit that I didn’t think too highly of it.  We learned about the debates over questions such as “What is truth?”, “What is beauty?” and “Does life have meaning?”

I was pretty sure I knew the answers to all the big philosophical questions and I was pretty sure that anybody who wanted to know the answers could just study the Bible a bit with a member of my religion and they could have those answers too.  That is the thing about belief: it gives you the comfort of feeling that you have answers and can therefore get on with the business of living your life instead of wasting all that time in pointless debating like the philosophers.

I didn’t develop a proper appreciation for these philosophical questions until I learned that the “facts” underpinning my beliefs were not actually facts, i.e. – objectively verifiable statements derived from the observation of reality.  Many of the key “facts” I had built my world view on had been derived from opinions, stories, inventions, speculations, distortions, and partial truths that didn’t stand up to scrutiny.  I gotta tell ya, I developed a healthy appreciation for being skeptical about the things I believe in right fast and I have maintained my commitment to skepticism as a virtue ever since.

People in general are not skeptical enough, it seems.  They believe advertisements, politicians, propaganda, religious cult leaders, and fabricated content they see on the internet.  This has led to a slew of opinion pieces about how we live in a “post-truth era” and that hurts both my heart and my head.  There is no such thing as a post-truth era, there are no such things as alternative facts, there is simply an information landscape that has morphed into something so fearsomely massive that the signal is lost in the noise and the average person is ill-equipped to critically examine the information they consume.  This has resulted in the golden age of misinformation wherein the largest number of people can be manipulated by the largest number of bad actors the world has ever seen.  It is no wonder that so many are falling under the sway of authoritarian politicians, hate groups, and high-control cults (or in the case of MAGA Trump Worship, the trifecta…).

Years ago I read an incredible book called Age of Propaganda by Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson.  I firmly believe this book ought to be required reading in this day and age to help people recognize when they are being manipulated to serve the ends of a third party through propagandist techniques.  Chapter 35 in this book is called “How To Become A Cult Leader” and is not intended as a How To guide any more than the recent Netflix series was, but in using this structure the authors run through the techniques that are used to create cults and, if you become familiar with the techniques, you can identify whether or not a leader or group that you follow might, in fact, be a cult.  This is not the only kind of skeptical thought required in our times, the ability to recognize logical fallacies, spot doctored/false/misleading “facts”, and learn enough science and math to at least understand why certain things are true and others false, those are all important too, but without a free brain to use to evaluate information, a person is hampered.  People who are under the sway of cult thinking do not, by definition, have freedom of thought, so the first step in escaping from the post-truth conceit and developing the ability to live in reality is to recognize if you are being interfered with by these techniques coming from leaders you trust.

Here’s the list.  If you belong to a group that uses the following tried and true manipulation techniques, you might want to ask yourself whether or not they are entirely on the up and up:

1. Create your own social reality.
   Members will continue the bad habit of thinking for themselves if they are not isolated from bad influences, so you start there.  You need to create boundaries between the believers and the non-believers, at least mentally if not physically.  This is fairly easily accomplished by labeling everything that is not from “the group” as being from “the devil”.  Once you do that, you must provide members with a set of beliefs that tell them how to interpret the world so that they come to believe that the cult teachings are the only way the world makes any sense.  Another pro tip: create your own jargon or lingo.  It makes it harder to see the world from a perspective other than the group, it allows members to recognize each other more easily, and when you change how people use language, you change how they think.  Do this right and you will have followers who speak and think according to a set of filters you define, who think of themselves as being “in the group”, and who are intellectually and socially isolated from the larger world.
2. Create an in-group of followers and an out-group of “others” (aka – The Granfalloon Technique).
   The obvious next step is to strengthen the social reality that you have created using language and teachings by explicitly defining an Us and a Them.  If you do this right, two random members of the group should be able to run into each other on a bus in a strange city, strike up a brief conversation, immediately recognize the other as a member of the group, and immediately consider them a “brother” or “sister”, even though they don’t know each other, entirely because of shared membership in the in-group.
3. Create a spiral of escalating commitment to combat cognitive dissonance.
   Getting people to join a group that involves the weakening or loss of connections with existing family and friends is a CHALLENGE.  Most people don’t want to do this.  So, how do you get that to happen?  Start small.  Get people to eat just a metaphorical snack.  Leave them with some of the group’s more appealing teachings or invite them to a social event.  Get them to make some small commitment, agreeing to a followup visit or maybe coming to another group meeting.  Each small commitment, each small step towards the group, creates a sense of investment, a sense that if you don’t follow up with the next step you will be letting somebody else down.  This is a powerful force but can’t be rushed.  Don’t want to spook the newbie.  Once a person has started to get involved in a cult group, they are likely to experience some sort of intervention from friends or family and that is the first test.  Ideally, the newbie feels defensive and tries to justify their involvement because the alternative involves admitting that they might be wrong, and that feels terrible.  If you can get a person to start to decide that they are doing this because it’s really what they want, not because they are being coerced, you’re 90% of the way to a new convert.
4. Establish the credibility and attractiveness of the leader(s).
   It should go without saying that some famous cult leaders are not exactly what one would call “attractive”.  Jim Jones, Kim Jong Un, Donald Trump, Marshall Herff Applewhite, these guys ain’t exactly Ryan Gosling.  But that’s OK.  You want to build a myth, something bigger than reality.  You want tell a story about how the leader or leaders (if you are led by a committee) are chosen, special, the recipients of unique divine direction, God’s chosen mouthpiece, the purveyors of the one Truth, “Only I can fix it”, you get the picture.  It helps if there is some sort of vague event in the past, a heroic backstory, a rags to riches story, something emotionally manipulative.  It’s very important that the leader(s) not be seen as merely people who gathered followers using shady and manipulative techniques.  They are SPECIAL.  Put them on TV, hold them up for admiration, talk about how they are chosen/directed/unique.  If you fail on this point, your whole cult could fizzle but if you get it right, you could get people to do all sorts of terrible things to themselves and others in the name of God or your group.
5. Send members out to spread the message to the “others”.
   This might seem to violate #1.  If you want to isolate people, why would you send them out to preach?  Well, believe it or not, nothing toughens the skin of a believer (and creates a stronger commitment trap) than promoting and defending your beliefs to others.  If it is at all feasible, send your converts out into the world to spread the word, go door to door, hand out flowers at airports, hold rallies and conventions, encounter resistance, repeatedly and intentionally.  If you really want somebody to be willing to allow their child to die for your teachings, if you really want somebody kill themselves and others for your cause, you need this level of commitment.  And, bonus, you might occasionally make a few new converts in the process.  Nice.  Just remember: the new converts are actually made via the commitment trap, not the preaching activity.  The real point of proselytizing is to keep the in-group IN and the out-group OUT via the magic of self-selling.  For examples simply look at every internet flame war ever to see how views almost universally become more entrenched when challenged.
6. Distract members from thinking undesirable thoughts.
   You can’t have your members using their pesky brains to think undesirable thoughts such as “What if Kim Jong Un isn’t really a God?” or “What if Noah’s ark was just a story?” or “What if this group is just a bunch of people telling stories and manipulating other people????”   That would be serious trouble.  It’s the brain you want to control, so, how does one do that?  First off, ban independent thought.  Just outright ban it.  Tell your followers that they can’t be trusted to think for themselves, the leader(s) know better, and if they encounter any information that appears to counter that message it is clearly from the devil and should be rejected out of hand.  Make sure other members of the group will report independent thinking to others as well so if somebody DOES use their brain, they’ll know better than to say so out loud for fear of retribution by the community.  Give people techniques to avoid thinking.  Lots of group meetings with rote memorization of texts, songs, and repetitions of the same teachings are a good idea.  Don’t allow time for thoughts to fester, keep the mind busy with other things.
7. Fixate member’s vision on a phantom.
   We all know that you get a donkey to move using a carrot and a stick.  The potential for losing the social reality, the desire to be associated with the in-group, the commitment trap created by being part of the group, those are all kind of negative incentives for a convert to stay in the group.  The songs and busywork, the meetings and services and rallies and proselytizing activities, that’s all great to suppress independent thoughts, but the final piece of the puzzle is all important.  You need to dangle a carrot out there.  You need to make sure that your followers are constantly reminded of some future glory that always remains tantalizingly just out of reach.  Make America Great Again!  When?  Later.  Just have faith.  Give more of yourself, more of your time, more of your money, more of your resources and the promised land will arrive.  The new earth, the paradise, the glorious future, heaven, or personal riches (in the case of certain business cults) are there, waiting for you, SALVATION, just stay the course.  I mean, of course the carrot is attached to the stick, the stick is held by the leadership, and the carrot moves ahead with the donkey but the donkey isn’t thinking, the donkey doesn’t realize that.

And that’s the list.  Congratulations, you are now equipped to start a religion, a multi-level marketing business, a political movement, or whatever kind of high control group strikes your fancy.

If you are reading this and anything on that list struck uncomfortably close to home about a group you are involved in, listen to that feeling and ask yourself if maybe, just maybe, it’s time to try a little of that thinking for yourself thing.  If you aren’t thinking for yourself I’d maybe find a few moments to ponder:

• Who is doing my thinking for me?
• Why do they want to influence my thinking?  What’s their motive?
• If they are operating in good faith, why do they use manipulative control techniques in their group?
• What can I do to independently validate and verify the information I consume and act upon so I am less prone to misinformation and manipulation?

Everybody needs to develop skills and habits of mind to filter and assess groups, individuals, and information.  Fortunately, once you know some of the things to look for, it can be done.

Today I awoke to learn that the funding goal set to launch “Witness Underground” out into the world was reached, two days ahead of schedule.  Not quite under the wire but not exactly a chip shot either.

I will be honest here, I really dislike crowdfunding as a concept, I think social media is a social toxin, and I did not enjoy the actual process.  I really stressed Scott out with my own stress about the process and I feel bad about that.  The whole thing was well out of my personal comfort zone.  That said, there was one upside to the whole thing and that was the amazing coalescence of a community of supporters, well-wishers, and fellow travelers.

Amazing people, big hearts, incredible talents, I am humbled by the support, the enthusiasm, and the love being shown on the Discord server, on social media, in appreciative emails, on video calls, it’s stunning.

I’m speechless.

Decades ago my brother and I started something that grew into something else.  Eighteen years ago I lost it.  And him.  I tried to make peace with those losses.  I went to therapy.  I started a new life.  I wrote hundreds of thousands of words.  I meditated.  I recorded music.  I cried and screamed and tried to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life and then this movie happened.  These people happened.  Thanks to this movie and the community of people who have responded to it, a future I never allowed myself to dream could be possible.  I keep waking up in shocked disbelief, like this isn’t happening, can’t be happening.  Nobody gets a second chance like this.

Life doesn’t work that way.

And yet, thanks to a whole bunch of incredible, kind, thoughtful, and supportive people, here we are.

Thank you, everybody.  Thank you so incredibly much.  I’m not good at showing my gratitude but I have more of it than I know what to do with.

I may not have been born yet when the late, great, Buddy Miles sang about Them Changes but I like to think I know what he was singing about.  Change is all there is, nothing ever really stays the same, not exactly, even in the most humdrum and repetitive phases of our lives.  Even though this is true and all things are always in flux, it’s very easy as a passenger through linear time to see certain events and choices, times and seasons, as if they are the starts and ends of chapters in a book.  A birth, a death, a move to a new home, a new city, a change in career, the end of a relationship or start of a romance, these are the easy markers, the ones that have dates and names attached.  Most of our lives, however, are lived in the interstices between those big changes.  

That is all as it should be.  Major changes are exhausting and (typically) somewhat rare.  We see them as major because they alter the day to day reality of our lives in some sort of on-going way and if that were happening every day or week or month I don’t know how I’d survive it.  You have to have at least a few days here or there to stop and read a book and eat a sandwich in peace, right?

The last phase/chapter of my life has been a bit of a mixed bag.  As I’ve written here before, I have floundered creatively, struggled to find my mojo, wrestled with a lot of self-doubt and a lack of ambition about the future.  The Trump era and the pandemic were not uniquely hard on me, I know that, but they came at an inopportune time in my life and more than once I found myself on the ropes, psychologically.  But hey, I’m still here, I’m still happening.

And that’s what I want to say today.  I’m still here and I’ve got irons in the fire again and it feels good.

One way to create change when I feel like I am mired down is to make a physical change to the environment.  So, several weeks back, I decided the time had come to create the workspace for the next phase of things.  I emptied out my basement studio, and went at it with a crowbar, popping floor tiles left and right.  Picked out some new paint colors (goodbye white, hello copper and blue), and started intentionally designing the new space.  I wanted the space to be a multi-use space which could be easily configured for home office, VR/gaming, recording sessions, video shoots, or as a home movie theater.  It’s a large space, 400+ square feet, with a small kitchenette area, so it can accommodate a lot of flexibility.  I decided that a hardwood floor would be important (bought cheap at online auction) and also decided that every major piece of furniture in the space needed to be on wheels (I have learned much about casters over the last month) or at least sliders.  

The room is absolutely coming together.  The majority of the hardwood is installed, the walls are painted, the A/V setup is progressing, there is a fantastic new desk/workspace, I’ve got a huge room divider curtain wall, smart lighting, new cabinets in the kitchenette area, it’s turning into quite the setup.  Watched some movies down there last night and it’s absolutely epic.  I have a bit of work ahead of me still, quite a bit, but I’m motivated by the release of the new album, the relaunch of Nuclear Gopher as a label, and a number of related plans I’m not ready to talk about here yet.  The space is taking longer to come together than I had hoped but it is already pretty dang usable and looking great.  Recording sessions will be commencing this month.  

As I’ve been spending evenings and weekends renovating and reconfiguring, divesting myself of old furniture and items that no longer serve any purpose, I’ve begun to feel a bit of my old self.  One of my favorite sayings, usually credited to Alan Kay of Xerox PARC fame, is “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”  I know the kind of future I want to inhabit.  I know that I feel good in the present when I spend time creating changes.  I know that our actions can create our feelings as directly as our feelings can spur us to actions.  Working a plan to change my life into the life I want to be living doesn’t have to involve some dramatic gesture or massive disruption.  It can start by writing some things, installing a floor, drawing some sketches of future ideas, getting a bit dirty and sweaty, digging in, building a wall a brick at a time.  There is no guarantee that my ideas will succeed or that the changes I am working on will bring wealth, joy, and inner satisfaction, but it feels right to be doing something.  I’m instigating a series of changes, moving into a transitional state to some new things, and I am more capable, more intentional, and more mindful about this than I have ever been at any previous stage in my life.  

I often say that “hope” is a four letter word (I am the writer of Pessimist Song, after all), so I’m not going to pin any hopes on this next phase.  Let’s just say instead that I am excited to get on the next ride in the amusement park, see what thrills it has in store for me.  Renovating a room is just a project, but it represents an investment in a future I want to create in which I DO create.  From that perspective, it’s vitally important and every piece of flooring I install takes me one step closer to that reality.  I have a future to invent.

The hardest part about losing my religion wasn’t unlearning the teachings. Doing study and research enough to replace the baseless fantasies I had believed in with reality-based information was intense, sure, but I love learning and I enjoyed the thrill of discovery. Who doesn’t get a kick out of the mental buzz you get when you graduate from the childish simplicity of seeing the sky as a sort blue bowl over your head to understanding how light is being refracted and diffused through the atmosphere to create the illusion?

No, the hard part was losing a sense of meaning and purpose. To be a believer was to belong somewhere and to know, really firmly and truly know, where you fit in, the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. I think I knew that this would be a problem long before I ever lost my faith because I had seen other people who had lost their faith who seemed to struggle with being happy. The sense of belonging to a higher calling, doing something universally important with one’s life, that’s something you can’t just casually replace. In the world of my particular faith tradition, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, it is perhaps one of the more extreme experiences of loss in Western Christian culture. It is possible to leave as I did, because you no longer believe the teachings, and you will experience the complete loss of family, community, and purpose in life and it is also possible to be expelled from the community via disfellowshipping, in which case you experience the complete loss of family and community but if you still believe, and many do, you get to at least retain the idea that you have a higher purpose. You just suffer with feelings of shame and guilt and anxiety until they let you back in.

In either case, the sense of having a direction in life on a daily basis, of knowing where you fit, is disrupted, brutally and violently.

The first three years after my loss of faith were the most transformative. There was a lot of study and learning and writing and change. I grew a beard and started doing meditation and wrote a lot of music and centered my life on the one thing that I knew mattered more than anything, the one true north… my son. Maybe I didn’t know the meaning of life anymore, but I knew that my boy and I were family and that I was responsible for being the best dad to him that I could be. This anchored me in a way that nothing else did. Then I met and married my wife and the three of us became my purpose in life. I may not have been clear on whether or not the universe was intentionally created by an invisible person who wants to talk to me in my head but I was very very crystal clear about the child and the woman who lived in my house, who shared their welfare with my own, and who I loved.

But purpose is a tricky thing. Life changes, times go by, and purpose sometimes changes shape. My son grew up, he moved out of the house, my core purpose in life, my core identity of Dad, was no longer the obvious reason for getting up in the morning, going to work, brushing my teeth, and bringing home the bacon. I found that my interest in creativity waned, which surprised me because it was such a huge part of my self-identity and I had thought that being creative was it’s own purpose in life. I had thought it was my core purpose, but I learned that it was actually something else and that the lose of a sense of purpose had a detrimental effect on my creative output.

When I was one of Jehovah’s Witnesses and making music in The Lavone with my brother Rhett, organizing and promoting various bands and albums via the Nuclear Gopher, building websites and making movies, the activities served at least three purposes. First, I had a personal creative outlet for my thoughts and feelings. Second, I had a sense that my creative/entrepreneurial activities were allowing people I loved to do things that they loved while staying faithful to Jehovah. Third, I found that my Nuclear Gopher activities were a testbed of learning that had the practical benefit of advancing my technical skills and advancing my more mundane (but financially stable) career as a software developer and therefore helped me take care of my kid and myself.

Take the religion and the child-rearing out of the equation and I was left with far less “cosmic purpose”. I didn’t need to run a record label to try to help support random musicians, there were already thousands of those. I was well enough established in my career that I wasn’t going to learn anything earth shattering by building another website, so no purpose there. I honestly couldn’t think of any sort of reason to create anymore, or at the least, when I did create something I could no longer see any particular reason to share it with the world. That was how I came to realize that being a creative person had never actually been my core motivation. A need to be heard, to have my barbaric yawp echo throughout the world, had not been my driving motivation and once it came down to writing to be heard, singing to be heard, or creating art to be seen I found that I just didn’t care.

It wasn’t just that. I didn’t care about, well, anything really. Creativity was just the most (to me) surprising example. After losing my faith, my belief in God, my family, my friends, the record label I had been working on for over half of my life, my wife, all of that, I still had a kid to raise. I had a new wife. I starting making my own music, without Nuclear Gopher and The Lavone. I had a lot of learning to do. That wave of purpose got me through most of a decade but when I became an empty-nester I was confronted again with “WHY?” and I didn’t have an answer.

I am not a career person. I have never wanted to climb a corporate ladder, I don’t talk about work at parties. I have a relatively successful career that has lasted nearly 30 years but the part of me that does my job and the rest of me are barely on speaking terms. I put on a hat and I go to an office (or login to remote things) and I do a thing that I get compensated for but in terms of personal identity? I am not my job, I have no sense of self tied up in my career. I am good at it, but there is no purpose for me in the world of software engineering. That’s just a thing I know how to do that pays better than most of the other things I know how to do.

I am not expecting to become a rich and famous artist or celebrity. Pursuing music, writing, or (another passion) filmmaking as an alternate career to the software one, trying to make myself known as a creator and deriving an income from that, feels like a dream that passed me by a long time ago. I’m pushing 50. I’m balding. I’m not some basement hero, some Nuclear Gopher dreaming of Armageddon and trying to make a dent in the universe before 30, I’m a middle aged guy with a well earned dad bod and a long track record of putting out records and making videos and stuff that (until recently) very few people have paid any goddamn attention to. Tilting at that particular windmill without some additional motivation feels ridiculous, like buying a Ferrari or getting hair plugs.

If I lack cosmic purpose of the religious kind, if I am no longer actively parenting, if I do not realistically expect to “make it” in the creative world, if I am not really interested in corporate or financial pursuits, why put out a new record? Why write this blog post? Why do anything at all? OK, yes, I have people who depend on me; my wife, the people I work with, even my son. I have animals who depend on me too. Four dogs and two cats at current count. If I were suddenly taken away tomorrow, to paraphrase the great Keanu Reeves, the people who love me would miss me. Which is great, I don’t intend to devalue that, being accountable to and spending time with people that matter to you is insanely important but it doesn’t really help me know what I want to actually do with my time. I mean, I can completely stop being creative and still be with loved ones. Most people, it turns out, are fine with just BEING. I’m terrible at it. After the first three decades of my life spent thinking I was part of a cosmic melodrama I just get antsy when I don’t know why any one choice or direction is of more interest than any other. Purpose provides this. Where do I want to expend my efforts, my time, my money? This is the purpose of purpose. Having a purpose clarifies your decision making, gives you a sense of direction for your actions, helps you decide what you want to do next. Living without a purpose feels more aimless, directionless, rudderless, and ultimately a bit pointless.

Ultimately, my struggle to have a sense of purpose in my life has been the central struggle of the last decade for me, the long-haul XJW symptom I have found to be the stickiest, the most persistent. I know, intellectually, that people who were never in a cult also struggle with the ultimate meaninglessness of existence, it is not unique to me or to people like me, but if I had never had the sense that I was part of some universal plan maybe I wouldn’t feel it to be such a loss, such a gaping hole in my heart. In my private journaling I often wrestle with what has happened to me creatively. After all, barring a little 6-song EP that I recorded in a day in 2014 I haven’t fundamentally been able to even make a record since 2012, something I used to do at least once a year. My public facing writing is minimal, my private writing is mostly a lot of navel gazing. My days are packed with activities but very few are social. I wake up, write, do the Wordle and Spelling Bee, start my work day, 9-10 hours later I log off, maybe feed the dogs, help make dinner, run to the store, or take care of some sort of errands. I don’t call, don’t text, don’t go on social media much, don’t see friends, I keep my head down. I feel like I’m waiting for something to change. Waiting for an internal levee to break. Waiting to have a sense of “this is the way” and, in the meantime, I’m just taking care of business.

This, my friends, has been, for me, the true legacy of losing my faith. I have found myself in a state where I don’t believe in ambition, don’t believe in myself, don’t believe in much beyond survival most days. A state where it’s a good day if I just wake up, experience something, and go to sleep. But it’s also a state I am profoundly dissatisfied with. I want my purpose back. I want to have a reason to believe in myself, a reason to do things, a reason to put myself back out there. I’m taking some steps. I’m planning to put myself back out in the world (even if I am not sure exactly why) and I feel that it’s worth sharing these feelings with whoever might read this. I’ve been out of the Witnesses for 19 years. I’ve built a good life for myself. I have everything to be proud of and happy about. I have a wonderful son, a long-lasting marriage, a respectable and stable career, a home, pets who love me, friends, some cool old sports cars, guitars, amazing memories, but it’s still a struggle. I still feel like the point is elusive. Maybe this is just how it is for everybody. I don’t know. I am just going to have to stop waiting to feel purpose and start doing. Maybe I can at least find some satisfaction that way. Time will tell.

Back in September I posted a Long Overdue Album Update! and now here I am with another.

I have made a series of demo mixes of the album and done additional tracking since then, including hiring some session musicians to add some horn and string parts.  I’ve also mocked up some cover art to use for the demo mixes although actual final cover art is still TBD.  As you can see, I’m naming the album Capistrano, which also happens to be the proper name of the Very Good Boy gracing the cover.  His nicknames are Cappy or Cap but his full name is Capistrano and he informs me that this is the first time anybody has ever named an album after him.  Go figure.

As of the most recent demo mix, the album consists of eleven tracks and runs about 40 minutes but there are a few things in flux and it could potentially (re)gain a twelfth track by the time I get it out the door.  I hope to have all the tracking done by next week and then it will be time to get into mixing and then mastering.  I’ve already started laying down songs for the next album.  Nothing makes me more excited to make music than making music.  🙂

I can’t wait to share this with the world.  It’s been a long time coming…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fuck that.

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