My First Divorce and Car Accident

At the time I thought it was a coin toss whose fault the accident was.

Eleanor Shoreman was driving. She was my best friend Betsy’s neighbor growing up. Her family was vaguely eccentric for a non-eccentric Williamstown, Massachusetts family. I think the dad had a British accent. The mom was a caterer for Williams College and for herself. The mom took better care of her skin and jogged longer than most of her age mates. They had an additional greenhouse type thing on their small property, not a shed, not a garage, just a space. But that was eccentric.

Eleanor was dating my friend Conor. He had dated my friend Betsy. Maybe he was just dating everyone on Moorland Avenue before he moved up Cole Avenue. The summer of 1997, I’m preparing to go into my junior year of high school but I have a level of freedom that would make most college sophomores jealous. I don’t have a license, a learner’s permit, a car, but I also don’t have parental supervision. And Eleanor is doing most of the driving that summer. The hand me down ride is a Chevy Malibu that looks nothing like a modern Chevy Malibu. We are on Route 7 by Lake Pontosuc, soon to past Dunkin’ Donuts when Eleanor hits another car. The front of her car is completely shoved in. All I can see in the windshield after the accident is the brown hood of the car pushed all the way up. Besides for my dad hitting a parked car late into the night on a ride home from Fenway Park, I have never been in a car accident.

Even then I experienced the whole aftermath fondly. Me, Conor and Eleanor. We have no idea how to comport ourselves post accident\. Eleanor’s face is bright red, she is crying. Conor is not comforting her. Conor is making small talk with me and laughing. There are no cell phones quite yet. The police make everything easy on Eleanor: she is young, she is white, perhaps they can guess that she has a greenhouse looking thing from the address on her driver’s license.

I’m 1400 miles away from my mom and dad. They are in Minnesota, where I live. I am back in Massachusetts, where I once lived, for the summer. I’m sleeping in a house my parents haven’t sold yet, playing in a blues band every Tuesday night for $200 total at a club that, according to their promotions, is “the only straight bar in Provincetown”. We are playing in Western Mass. on the weekends. The spending money is from these blues gigs, the house, the Toyota Previa we drive in, it’s all bankrolled by my family. My brother is four and a half years older than me and he is the closest thing I have to an authority figure. He’s responsible in a junior in college way. I don’t call my mom, dad, brother to tell them about the accident. Why? On whose phone? With what phone card? Everybody’s fine. Somebody picks Eleanor, Conor and I up, we skip the movie we were gonna go see and the night proceeds quasi-normally.

At that time, heading into my junior year of high school in St. Paul, I had already been through my first divorce. Sitting in front of the Alumni House of Macalester College in St. Paul in the spring before we moved to St. Paul my mom pulled the rental car over and said “I propose a divorce”. We were at each other’s throats. I wanted to stay in Massachusetts. I had a girlfriend named Karissa, she was a junior. She was no-joke-sexually-ambitious and she loved me. She wrote all her yearbook notes diagonally. She drove me to Northampton to go recording shopping and she convinced me I liked Tori Amos. I was in heaven. And then my dad got a job in Minnesota. Not any job, he got the job as the President of Macalester. It was futile to be mad at my dad about it, when would he find the time to respond? He was wrapping up affairs at his job at Williams College and directing all his home energy towards talking about blues music and new movies. I saw my dad behind a set of papers for much of my childhood. In elementary school Dad would take me to breakfast before school on Tuesdays. He’d read the New York Times while I tried to find things interesting enough to get him to fold the paper and look at me. I think it’s why I’m great at asking questions now. Probably no prouder moment than seeing that Science Tuesday crumple down and see his moustache turn up and have him ask “explain that, what do you mean?” But there was no paper to crumple here, Dad had one leg at Macalester, one leg at Williams College and at home he was just letting his nuts hang.

But I could be mad at Mom. She was there, she listened and she fought back. I hated her. I blamed her for moving our family to Minnesota. Granted, my dad landed the job, but my mom had told him she wanted out of Massachusetts after she got fired from teaching job at the Elementary school. I thought I hated her for all of that and all of that alone. But I hated her for the way she treated me when I was a little boy. The way she treated me when me gaining weight at age five confused her, and the way she treated me as the weight just kept on coming. The way she treated me when she couldn’t get back into the teaching world cause there were no jobs when her kids were finally in school. The way she told me she’d feed me paper towels to help me lose weight. The way she called me dumb shit more than she called me Sean. But I thought there was a rule, no matter how much you hated your parents they couldn’t hate you back.

On the day of the divorce we were driving around the Twin Cities looking at different high schools I might go to when we move out here. We skipped Cretin-Derham Hall cause there’s a note in the guidebook that says “good page boys won’t have hair growing past their ears”. So we are in the car, fighting, without an agenda, with some gap of time before my Dad came back from his meetings and we had to make a half-hearted attempt to appear like we were fine. We are yelling at each other and she pulls over to this quiet lane on Summit where no cars are whirring by. She says “I propose a divorce. You don’t like me. And I don’t like you. And we are a family. We can get through these next couple years before you go to college apart. We’ll share a home, but we’ll stay out of each other’s way”. A truce between completely unequal partners, astronomically unequal partners.

It made so much sense at the time. I didn’t like her and I learned that day that she didn’t like me. It wasn’t an uneasy peace. It was just a peace. She said what I thought she couldn’t even feel. And it exposed this rawness of the world that changed me from that day forward. There are actually no laws, no rules, and no conventions against hating your kids. There are no rules against telling your ninth grader you want a divorce. It’s shit. It’s forgivable shit, but shit nonetheless. But my Mom never asked for forgiveness. She’s dead, but I have no idea if she even remembered that day for the twelve or so more years she would live. I made her a card for Mother’s Day once when we were in a better place telling her I was thankful for how far we had come from that time, and she cried. But we never talked about it. That day I learned that there aren’t rules, there aren’t things you can count on.

Back to the car accident: I’m a divorced rising junior in high school making small talk with Conor while he ignores his girlfriend and I’ve never felt freer. I was a musician, high school was a technicality. I was on my own, my mom and dad were a technicality. There were no apps to look for a new mom. There was just me getting home somehow to our old empty house in Williamstown and telling Steve “I got in my first car accident today”. He asked a couple questions, made sure I was okay, we played a game of Road Rash on the Sega Genesis and we went to bed. Two brothers with a more different set of parents than I think he’ll ever realize.

When Life Is Lemons, Lemons

Sometimes life bears down on you from every direction. I have learned that my natural cries for help at times like this are not very fruitful. They generally involve fishing for enthusiasm from support from people I don’t know on social media. Sometimes when life is hard, the best bet is to let it be hard. Before social media I faced difficulty largely by looking internally and to people who loved me. When a bad thing happened I didn’t immediately metabolize it by thinking I could share it on my network. And I need to go back to that. Pain, disappointment, they are all a part of life and none of that pain will be resolved in a meaningful way by seeing how many likes it gets or how many “you’ll get there bud” messages you want. It flicks the little light in your heart, that little alert feeling. I didn’t even have a word for it, but a feeling in your shoulders and the top of your head when you have new notifications. I need to hurt without that feeling, I need to grieve without that feeling. I am already pretty good at smiling, laughing and loving without that feeling. But pain is something different. And accepting the way through pain as largely solitary is something I want to get back to. Is it a strange half-measure to say that but write about it on my squarespace not my ms word journal? Absolutely. It’s a half measure because I am trying to make sure that this page documents much of my spectrum with the slightest bit of compression. I’ll keep the low lows and the high highs to myself. But I want to publish a more complete version of who I am than I am comfortable doing on social media sites. So here I am. These lemons are delicious, I’m gonna go eat them alone.

Don’t Punch Down or Up, Stop Punching

After a night with friends on Friday night I sat down and watched all of the new Chappelle special “The Closer” on Netflix. The next day I listened and re-listened to a number of podcasts featuring the linguist John McWhorter. These two individuals are worlds apart in many ways but I’m writing about my reflections on both because there are some small through lines between the biggest points they are both arguing in the public stage. Briefly: Dave Chapelle is widely mentioned in the conversation of greatest stand-up comedian of all time and frequently forgotten as someone who built his career on misogynistic and racially insensitive skits on the Chappelle Show*. I loved the Chappelle Show, I hear the jokes differently now, but I do still enjoy watching the show. Throughout his last couple Netflix specials, Chappelle has been making more jokes at the expense of the trans community. In the past couple specials these statements have generally been an aside, not the centerpiece of the special. After watching “The Closer” I’m comfortable saying that the thrust of it is to establish some fraudulent differences in the freedom to denigrate, critique, scapegoat and kill black people relative to the freedom to denigrate, critique and scapegoat trans-people. This shit is not laugh out loud comedy, but Chappelle has made specials in the past that weren’t laugh out loud funny that I still thought were excellent. Chappelle’s thesis, which I don’t buy wholesale, doesn’t do enough to establish the fact that there are plenty of black trans people, who stand in a confusing relationship to Chappelle’s relatively cut and dry judgements.

Do these differences actually exist? Is saying something disparaging about a trans person or about transexuals as a group a third rail in public discourse in a way that saying something disparaging about a black person or a black people as a group not? One of Chappelle’s big tent poles is establishing that DaBaby killed a black man in a Walmart and the world didn’t blink, DaBaby’s cache didn’t really drop, but DaBaby rushed to backpedal when he spoke on stage at Rolling Loud saying negative things about gay and trans people. Based on my media consumption, Chappelle is right, I had to google DaBaby killing this black man (the charges have been dropped) but I was very familiar with DaBaby’s statement on stage at Rolling Loud. That stayed in the zeitgeist, but the killing did not.

An aside: I believe the Netflix employees are 100% in the right to walk-out and demand the Chappelle show to be removed. Whether they prevail or not, they cash a check from this organization and if they don’t like what’s coming out, they have every right to leverage their power to try to change that. Jaclyn Moore, a writer and showrunner on “Dear White People” said she wouldn’t work with Netflix. In the interview I saw she also went out of her way to say that Chapelle should be free to say whatever he wants, but she didn’t want to be a part of a company that put out the content. I find no issue with her doing that, and I find no issue with people critiquing her for doing it.

Chapelle has a point: what issues do we and don’t we make third rail issues. I think about this a lot in reference to Israel and Judaism. Many people in our world (but particularly in the US and Western Europe) like to equate a critique of Israel with Anti-Semitism. People get fired and forced into huge apologies for critiques that I think they have every right to make. Why can’t you critique Israel? They are a country. You can critique countries. But if you want to critique Israel you have to be ready to lose your job over it. I don’t think those are the right stakes. I don’t think the answer is creating more and more third rail issues that can’t be discussed. But making certain things third rails is a way that many of our workplaces, homes and public gathering spaces have become more inclusive, more inviting. Fifty years ago, ten years ago, five years ago— there were comments, actions, innuendo and disposition that I believe made the world a worse place. Creating these third rails improved things, but over enforcement of them, expansion of them, yes I think they could make things worse. These conclusions seem destined to be forever gray. There will never be clear lines that stay solid. Chappelle seems to be pointing out that it’s a lot riskier to walk on the third rail in regards to the trans community than to kill a black man. That’s not punching down in my opinion, it’s not comedy, but it’s within the realm of what Chapelle has presented in the past as a celebrated media personality.

But during the whole special Chapelle does all these ticky-tacky side jokes that are dismissive, unimaginative and truly tasteless. He checks every box, misgendering someone on purpose, tossing in tons of letters after LGBTQ+ to minimize this identifier. It’s shitty material. I didn’t laugh. I didn’t need to suppress laughter, it’s cold and it’s pathetic. And I think ticky-tacky side jokes like that about the black community would get you roasted. ROASTED. Chappelle, you have a point, you have a point that’s worth exploring. And you’ve crossed out the punchlines in previous specials when you had something to get across, why do you have to keep on throwing in this hateful, non-insightful shit?

And that’s where John McWhorter comes in. Briefly: McWhorter is on the short list of thinkers who get called up to provide a counter-narrative to the anti-racism positions of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. There’s plenty more to his work than that, but it is that work that is making the rounds right now. McWhorter is black and he speaks with more care than I often see in this space about the welfare of black people. A lot of anti-racist material is marketed, discussed and consumed by a white audience. I consider that in some ways a positive example of white people having an appetite to understand racism in a way that many of us don’t naturally gain an understanding of from our everyday actions. But McWhorter seems asks whether some of the cut and dry metrics that Kendi proposes for moving forward towards an anti-racist society will have negative impacts on the very populations it aims to support. GREAT JOHN. I enjoyed your points and I took a lot from it. Namely, I’ve always felt profoundly more upset about a police officer killing a black person than a civilian of any race killing a black person. I think some of that is reasonable, civilians don’t receive their income from my tax dollars. Civilians don’t kill people and have me pick up the cost of civil lawsuits. Civilians don’t kill people wearing a uniform emblazoned with municipal and county authority. I feel I have more control over the police than I do over civilians, so their misdeeds not only worry me more, they feel more changeable. But, if as a whole country we direct all of our ire, concern and protest against police killing black men are we doing a disservice to the black men and women who are killed by civilians or who will be killed by civilians in the coming years if nothing is done? I believe we can do both, but I do feel recalibrated by John McWhorter. But I wish McWhorter would stop making ticky-tacky little takedowns of writers and thinkers like Kendi and DiAngelo. I don’t expect McWhorter to be funny, it’s not in his job description but when he says things like “now I don’t have X for a middle name” he seems to just be attacking a person for fun, for kicks. But it’s also racialized right. He’s cutting down Kendi for having a tangibly righteous middle name. Come on John, it’s his middle name, keep rolling and keeping arguing for real. And why should you keep arguing? You’ve got a vital point against some of Kendi’s most fundamental arguments, why water them down with that BS? If you think it’s because it’s funny, you need a bigger circle.

McWhorter and Chapelle both seem to be establishing that there are new groups ascending to power and they both question their authority and their methods. For Chapelle he feels that influencers within America have prevailed in creating a protected class for trans people in media spaces in record time relative to black people. For McWhorter he feels that the new wave of anti-racist thinkers has created a singular view about race in America and it has become predominate not because it is right but because people fear speaking out against it. At their best both of these thinkers could be speaking truth to power. But by engaging in potshots and dehumanizing minimizations I fear they are watering down the validity of their most defensible points.

*This is not an out and out indictment of The Chappelle Show. I enjoyed that show when it was released, it formed a lot of my understanding of comedy and of Dave Chappelle. But I believe that it’s important to remember that Chappelle has pushed out controversial content in the past.

What Makes it Magical

I think about breathing magic into my work almost daily. At my favorite moments in life I’ve taken in something magical from a spot that could be mundane. The grand majority of my working life has been dedicated towards music and we’ve all had a moment where a drive between point A and point B becomes a thesis statement in your life because of how J. Mascis played guitar, or how Bernard Purdie hit a fill or because of what Aretha Franklin sang.

With my job as a radio host I have the opportunity to share those magic moments with the audience. I can’t be there for them, I haven’t had that many a magic moment with someone reading underwriting about a new brewery opening in Minneapolis. But, the mundane glue that holds together a moment where a song sneaks up on you is an absolutely essential part of the magic. There’s little magic in a replay of a homerun. Just like in the movie Beautiful Girls when Michael Rappaport’s character tells Dillon’s that you can’t tape “Rich Man, Poor Man”, you gotta watch it with the commercials like everybody else.

Packaging the magic. Packaging the magic on bass. Packaging the magic on the radio. Packaging the magic with trivia. It’s not a science, it’s not easy and it is simple.

Getting Coverage

ARE YOU PLANNING ON RELEASING MUSIC AND HOPING TO GET COVERAGE, TRACTION AND ATTENTION? Here are some specific tips.

Make music that spreads far.
If you share your tune with ten people who you trust to actually listen to it and ten days later it’s got under 30 views/listens, you’ve likely created something you’re pleased with, but it doesn’t spread far. You’ve made a song that doesn’t drive listeners to share with their spouse, their co-worker, their neighbor. If your sound doesn’t spread at that small organic level of uptake there is little that a media organization will be able to help you with. If your music doesn’t make at least a modest spread when you share with a decent size cross section of people it’s time to go back to the drawing board; it’s not time to write a press release.

Make your story easy to tell.
Read/listen through the articles, interviews, reviews that prompted you to take that next step and listen to the artist. What did you read/see/hear that made you want to take that next step. Was it a photo? Was it a story? Was it a quote? Was it a description? Review your own media offerings (your press release, your press kit, your social media presence, your photography) and see where you are coming up short. You will come off false if you carbon copy your heroes. But look at the fundamentals, was their story specific or universal? Was their photo strange in regards to background, attire or more. When you’ve had an artist you’ve shared with your friends, what did you tell them before you pressed play? What would you hope someone would say about your work? Now say that in your materials.

Take interest in the publications you hope to be covered in.
I understand that there are artists who don’t listen/read/review the media they are covered in. I never got there as an artist. I believe that being aware of a host, editor, music director’s personal preferences, idiosyncrasies and favorites can help you pitch your music. Your interest in coverage is likely a career oriented view. There is nothing wrong with that, that’s how it should be. But getting there will involve becoming personally aware and connected with the spots you are angling on for coverage. This knowledge will save you time, you’ll know who to pitch what to. Be strategic in what you pursue. There is an ecosystem to this. There are likely 10,000+ aspiring artists pursuing the ears of the most elite writers/hosts/bloggers in the music space. Look for the outlets with the emptier inboxes, the more animated ears and with pre-existing coverage on new artists.

Trap, don’t hunt.
Stole this one from Dessa. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. And don’t yell at that basket if they don’t cover what you’ve shared. Make your way by finding a number of outlets that might have interest. When one comes back with nothing, you still have other irons in the fire. Don’t let your publicity plan to bang really hard on one inbox of one major media voice and hope that they will for sure listen. Diversify your pursuits, treat each with a sober awareness that they won’t all turn into great coverage for your next project.

Maintain a good email list and don’t act like that’s all that matters.
Keep track of who should be receiving your information. . .if someone’s new position suggests they don’t need to receive music press releases anymore, cut em off of the distribution list. Keep this all up, do some of the housekeeping directly with them i.e., “I see you leveled up to being a food editor, loved your most recent piece and farm to table. . .do you still want my press releases coming to your inbox?” Your email list helps for rare blanket announcements. . .your coverage will come from more pointed pitches.

Be Easy to Write/Talk About
This is different to me than “make your story easy to tell”. If someone needs a radio edit, send that de-shitted track over fast. If someone needs a photo in a different size, fix that up and check the attachment before you send it. If you can control your schedule such that you can be available on relatively short notice. . .do that. Get a nice chain of command going if possible with your full group so that you can say yes or no quickly to opportunities (and try to say yes when it is a fit for you).

Be Easy to be a Fan Of
When someone digs one of your songs, make sure that they can find more of your songs, invites to your shows, videos and a well curated social media presence. If I dig your song, go hunting for you and the most recent posts/announcements are from 2020 I’m going to figure you’ve cooled off of the music thing, taken your talents to Miami et cetera. Make sure that when your potential fans want to go deeper, they have a place to go.

Find Places You and Few Others Fit
Be imaginative about where your take off could start. It could start from a sports magazine, from a cooking blog, from an article in one of those magazines in airplanes. Imagine why you might be a fit there and pitch (that doesn’t mean boiler plate press releases).

Make Your Shows Something People Won’t Forget
The likely way you’ll first see any kind of money in the music game is from a live show. If you can fill shows long after you’ve stopped begging your best friends to come, most of the other things on this list are immaterial. Develop a live show that can be enjoyed without knowing your music beforehand. Develop a live show that might get people 50% of where they need to be to feel like they had a good night out. You aren’t going to hit right away with a solid 45 minutes. But video tape yourself performing at home or your space: are you entertained, are you distracted, are you bored, are you engaged visually?

Do It All Over Again
Don’t believe that an absence of coverage, of interest of fans is a nail in the coffin. It’s an invitation back to the drawing board. And if you don’t like sitting at the drawing board you aren’t necessarily built for this anyway. Going back and creating something else, and tweaking your musical work and your promotional efforts should be a welcome invite to a lifelong creative, if it feels like a step backwards you don’t have your priorities placed in the proper order.

Over Under NBA

My NBA over under picks:

Nets = 56.5 - Under
Bucks - 53.5 - Over
Lakers - 52.5 - Over
Jazz 52.5 - Under
Suns 50.5 - Over
76ers - 50.5 - Under
Heat - 48.5 - Under
Warriors - 48.5 - Under
Mavericks - 47.5 - Over
Nuggets - 47.5 - Over
Hawks - 47.5 - Over
Celtics - 46.5 - Under
Trailblazers - 45.5 - Under
Clippers - 44.5 - Under
Bulls 43.5 - Over
Pacers 43.5 - Under
Knicks - 42.5 - Over
Grizzlies - 41.5 - Under
Pelicans - 38.5 - Over
Hornets - 38.5 - Under
Raptors - 36.5 - Over
Kings - 35.5 - Under
Timberwolves 35.5 - Over
Wizards - 34.5 - Under
Spurs - 29.5 - Over
Cavaliers - 26.5 - Under
Rockets - 26.5 - Over
Pistons - 25.5 - Over
Thunder - 23.5 - Over
Magic - 22.5 - Over

Filing Taxes So Late

I filed for an extension on my taxes in 2020 cause everything was so stressful and difficult to navigate in the summer, making plans for Trivia Mafia, dealing with a young kid, being on the radio, all of it. And now I’m taking a ten minute break from my frantic document finding and hunting. Even after all this work, we will still work with a tax preparer to help us actually file. Why? Well, all the businesses, Trivia Mafia LLC and even a sleepy one like Heiruspecs. . .they are a lot to navigate. Also I just need to be 100% transparent here, child care is outrageously expensive and bakes in inequities from day one. Child care is an essential service, the saints who do it deserve to be paid more, I also don’t think the owners of these spots are lining their pockets in the best of times, nor in the worst of times. But, because my family has means we are paying the equivalent of in-state tuition (it’s inexact since one kid wasn’t in daycare til July of 2020, but the full bill for 2020 is 20k. 20k. There’s some logic to daycare being expensive. It’s hours intensive, you want quality trained professionals doing it, there are tremendous amounts of licensure expenses that go with doing it. But, can we not recognize that of all the places where the financial station of your parents shouldn’t have a bearing on your upbringing this is number one? Give all the children clean classrooms, delicious food, awesome projects, time outside, engaged parents. It’s not happening. And by the time the kids are five, my daughter has a different level of nutrition, of reading comprehension, of so many things than a kindergartner who has been getting catch as catch can child care through informal networks and supports. Quality daycare shouldn’t just be something for the wealthy. Also, it seems to me that most daycares feel very little mandate (and perhaps a lack of finances) to do anything progressive with making their services available on a sliding scale or to otherwise support their care going to a greater cross section of the community they serve. I know there are things on the table that will help make some of the changes permanent in regards to caring for young children and I sincerely hope they do.

Rocking on the Radio/Rocking at Home

Man I’m having a nice ass day. Ran a bags tournament in the front yard this morning. I don’t care for bags too much but I sure care for hanging out with friends and laughing. The older kids on the block are starting to take care of the younger kids and I love that. I told a nine year old to “shove it” on his birthday and I feel great about it.

Now I’m spending a couple hours pitching with Bill DeVille and Mac Wilson on the Current. Got the audio cranked and I’m listening to Aurora singing her tune in the Current’s studio, one of my favorite goosebumping in-studios.

Damn. And tonight a bunch of the people on the block myself included are trying out different chilis. I’m going with a white chicken chili and I’m all in. Plus there’s a new neighbor named Tyler who described his chili as thin and soupy and I am curious if he’s just downplaying it to step back in and deliver serious flavor. But if it’s legit thin and soupy what exactly are you doing.

Working Saturday nights for now about five years it is just such a gift when I get the night off. So I’m going to chill and enjoy my night. Now Mac is playing that tune “California” by Phantom Planet and I’m turning it up even louder. What a treat.

Who Does She Hope To Be?

Today I’m putting on “Who Does She Hope to Be” by Sonny Sharrock. This is music I grew up with cause of my brother’s influence. This to me is ultimate Record Store music. It comes on and you have to know everything about it. The song is mysterious, it’s collaborative and it doesn’t work like many jazz songs. The melody is short and it comes in frequently. It’s more like a bookend than a melody. It’s all legends on here with the leader perhaps being the least well-known. But Sonny is no joke and I hope you can enjoy this song.

I had a moment of pure simple joy last night climbing into bed. I ran trivia at the 331 Club and like so many Sundays in the last fifteen years that I’ve been doing that gig, I was ho-hum about doing it until I got there. But upon arrival I ran into a couple of friends and I put a funk playlist that I enjoy on to the speakers. The energy felt good and trivia was good. We are trying out the new app for Trivia Mafia and it is going well. It has been a tremendous uphill to get it going good and I give credit to Chuck Terhark from Trivia Mafia and the team from Code of the North for their work. After I ran trivia I spent a seemingly unimportant 5 minutes talking to a couple friends outside the bar. That included Benjamin from the 331 (bartender who also likes jazz, here’s one of his playlists). Mainly I talked to a woman whose name I don’t know who plays on a good team from 331 and I found out used to work at Gigi’s Cafe and now works at Pat’s Tap. She said she might make me a lb of the tuna salad from Gigi’s just as a gift which warmed my heart. She had a really warm energy about her (I know that sounds hippy dippy but I do mean it). She told me stop by Pat’s Tap and it had me realizing it’s been maybe a year plus since I’ve just gone into a bar to go into a bar, not to run trivia or do something else. The idea sounds incredibly intriguing to me. On the way home I listened to the podcast Ezra Klein did with the dude who will most likely be the next mayor of NYC, Eric Adams. He mainly talked about how becoming vegan helped him put his diabetes into remission cause he’s got a book on the topic. But he also talked about how to meet and fix problems at their root as opposed to just addressing the symptoms. By most accounts Eric Adams gathered a cross-section of NYC to support him at a time when a former cop who is firmly centrist on many points of view might not have locked the nomination. I enjoyed it.

The pure moment of joy was after getting home, doing my small set of night exercises, making the coffee for today and doing the littlest bit of cleaning. I climbed into bed and before I did my reading I thought about laying next to my spectacular wife, being about 15 feet from two daughters and being exactly 1/8 of an inch away from my punk ass dog Warren. I live in a home with the people I love, I do things I enjoy for work and magical things happen where I get to connect with heroes and interview them. I’ve gotten to interview Chuck D, Stone Gossard, Naughty by Nature, Michael Bland. I slept well last night and woke up with a good spirit.

Give this Sonny Sharrock album a try and see if it puts you in a good place too.

The Late Night Hype

My last hour on the air on Saturday nights I stop taking requests and customarily I spend my time listening to great music very loudly and mindlessly scanning twitter. I like loud music, I don’t really like scanning mindlessly on twitter. Saturday is the best time to be on twitter. People talk about the sports they like, the events they are at. People make funny observations. But I scan it, hungry for some zeitgeist I don’t always get. Maybe I’m looking for the perfect song to play on the radio. Maybe I’m looking for something magical about the night.

But running some thoughts on here might bring a different feel. God I love a good Saturday. Today I woke up a touch more hungover than I expected. Why? I drank Scotch and stayed up with my awesome neighbors. I also connected with my friends Rachel and John. We talked about the minor struggles in my life, the major struggles in hers and the difficulty of feeling like you are on solid ground in 2021. That wrapped up and I went across to my neighbors for last call. Found out my neighbor across the street’s grandfather is 100 years old. HE WAS IN WORLD WAR II. He was a veterinarian for Patton’s bulldog and a bunch of the pigeons they were using to send messages. Yes, that means he is a vet vet. But on top of that, the man has been around for so long. I was born in 1981, I was born into the arrogant post-history view of baby boomers. My dad told me Reagan was garbage but his influence wouldn’t last. He told me we’d run out of fossil fuels in my lifetime and he told me racism was slowly but methodically and consistently becoming less of a force in America. But, maybe somebody born in 1920 would’ve been told some variety of all of that pre the Depression, and then the world cuts open, Hitler and the Nazis walk in and we have one of the ugliest wars in history. Does a little boy or girl born in 1921 actually have something in common with 1981? Was it “morning in America” in both of those years? Remember when we acted like we were coming into the Roaring 20s? Remember July? Remember before DELTA? Not really, the memories just slip away. We are living somewhere new, we have to do something new. Do you know more Americans have died of COVID19 than died in World War II? Do you know that more people have died in this pandemic than in 1918? Do you know people keep dying everyday? Do you know a lot of them wouldn’t die if they took a vaccine? This shit is no joke. We are in the shit. We will be in the shit. I know a handful of people who point out we were meant to be born into this time, to do what needs to be done for these times. I am trying to feel called to a higher action, to step up and do more cause the world is worse. You try to find it and it slips away in the busy run of the days. I have two kids, I work two jobs, I play in a band that is still active. These are all fake excuses. I feel called to work to make my city better, to make my state better. My god there is room for improvement. It’s carving out that time not in huge unimaginable chunks, but find it in a free hour and more. Make it happen.

I was going to talk about how great today was. But I got sidetracked. The Current (me DJing tonight) is playing the song “Galacticana” by Strand of Oaks.

There’s something about this writer. Timothy Showalter. He makes a perfect song every two years. He’s been doing it for ten years. He’s not real famous, he’s not selling out big ass theaters, but he is making music that punches you in the heart and the people who need to hear it get to hear it. He’s the dream. Music is the dream.

Playing records for you on Saturdays is the dream. Here’s why the Saturday was good. I wake up, Rachel lets me sleep for maybe a short 10 minutes after the kids want breakfast. This is after probably twenty plus minutes of them being up but not demanding to go downstairs. This is kind. Rachel doesn’t know it, but I feel pretty tired. I make breakfast every morning for the family, but on Saturdays I make pancakes. Cottage cheese supported pancakes for the rest of the family and some paleo cakes for me based on advice from my nutritionist (I don’t do paleo in general, she just pointed out that regular pancakes is a hard way for me to start a Saturday). I made the pancakes, we ate. Rachel let me sneak in a shower which is such a hangover diminisher for me. We walked to Mattocks Park. This is my happy place when it comes to kids. I see my kids play and laugh and walk around. We ran into a neighbor I don’t know too well named Tyler. Nice. Just a great start to a morning. We got home and we had to eat early cause Sadie and I had a swimming appointment (dear future reader of this blog, for some amount of time after COVID19 became endemic you had to make appointments at swimming pools).

I warmed up pizza from the night before. (My neighbors and I determined the best thin crust pizza in 55105, it’s Italian Pie Shoppe first, Davanni’s second, Carbone’s third and Skinner’s fourth). We had leftovers of Skinner’s so I warmed that up for lunch. BTW, Skinner’s came in last, pizza is still amazing. Especially the next day. Simple lunch. Took Sadie swimming. Four and half year olds are magical. Sadie has some logic, her meltdowns have some cohesion to them and they are rarer. What they have been replaced with is just this joyous curiosity that explodes out of her mouth, her eyes, her arms. She is just wrapping herself around the world. It’s breathtaking. So at the pool she is discovering how independent she can be in the pool with a swim noodle. And the hour just goes by. AN HOUR. WITH A KID! It feels like ten minutes. She just swims around the pool, talks to bigger kids, laughs, grabs a ball, throws it, swims more. Climbs out, jumps in. And the whole time I am just glowing. My daughter is swimming. I love swimming. I loved swim team. I have no idea where she will land but this hour is magic. It’s not a lesson, it’s not practice. It’s me and my daughter in a pool. God damn it. Then we jump into the shower and Sadie can get so clean that she won’t have to take a bath tonight. She likes to use “daddy shampoo” and then she’ll ask for “Y soap”. This is all so magical to me.

I try to go get an Oil Change with Sadie in the back of the car and the good people at Valvoline told me my oil was fine. I tipped $5 for their trouble and headed back home. I made a big ass restaurant style Caesar salad. And there is nothing redeeming or “salady” about a Caesar salad with croutons, parmesan cheese and dressing, but friends, I bought the perfect kind of croutons. My god, what a treat. Caesar down, we decide to go visit Ida, the new baby our friends Anna and Amy just had. I’ve known and loved Anna in one way or another for 24 years of my forty years on this Earth. This is her first child and to see her and her wife Amy smiling, feeding and interacting with this little bundle of joy. It’s too much. We are in that part of life where friends are raising children, bringing new spirits into our Earth. My kids want to play on a hammock that is guaranteed to throw them off at the slightest alteration of their position. So Rachel and I take turns catching up with Amy, Anna and their new baby. I can’t hold this baby, I can’t hug Amy, I can’t hug Anna. I think of it as just part of the territory, but it’s just terrible. It’s so sad, there’s a distance this disease demands of us, a distance we aren’t designed to maintain. I want to hold that baby. I also skipped out on holding babies for so much of my life. We don’t expect young men without their own children to hold babies. Why? It’s magical, it’s special, and the only way you learn is doing it. I’m holding every baby the universe will let me for the rest of my years on this rotating rock.

Somewhere into this hang I realize that I have forgotten that my best friend Martin is holding a small get together and he kind of started it early so that I could be there for it before I had to go into work. I forget about these things cause I’ve changed my relationship with Facebook and with social media. I don’t know about it. And I don’t read all the texts between me and my friends. The pros: I’m present with my kids, I sleep better, I’m a better husband. The cons: shit that is important to my community sometimes blows right past me. Change plans and we order thai food instead of cook it. We get it together and end of grabbing Coconut Thai on Grand Avenue. I make off with my pad thai and egg rolls and head to Martin’s house. It’s just him and his wife at the party and it’s beautiful. We just sit and talk. It’s actually what you want out of a party. Friends show up as I leave to go to my shift at the Current.

The Current is wonderful on Saturdays. It’s a stressful time to be a part of this radio station but on Saturday I connect with magic. The classical jocks are running around making sure their stuff is lined up for their shifts. Mac is sitting in darkness playing jams on the Current and I prepare to go live on The Current’s FB page. Tonight we’re gonna rock out and play rock songs. The Current is largely a rock station, I enjoy some rock but ultimately, I don’t gravitate towards straight ahead rock. Alt country rock? Great. Fancy yacht rock rock? I’m in. Rock that has a ton of blues to it? Bring it on. But just straight up rocking, I usually like to have an ambassador to bring me into that, my brother or somebody. So it’s a really fun area to take requests in. I know the hits, I know the jams, but it’s like rediscovering them cause I don’t go back to this style all that often. So the shift has been a joy. I had a big printer problem up at the top of the shift but after that, smooth ass sailing. Beautiful, turn up the speakers and hear songs from The Walkmen, The Velvet Underground, Muse, Leon Bridges, Heart, Chastity Brown. It’s heaven. You don’t understand the speakers they put into studios. I think these speakers cost maybe $15,000. Could be so wrong about that. It could be more. But listen, they sound like a recording studio, I am basically in a recording studio. Musicians, you know how your shit sounds in the studio? That’s how I get to listen to all this music. And on Saturdays I get calls from kiddos who want to hear a song on the radio, lonely friends who want their shift to move just a little bit faster, people who want a little more community than Spotify can give them but maybe a little less community than being at a gathering will give them. We do this magic thing together and we’ve done it every Saturday. We didn’t miss one during COVID19, we don’t pre-tape, we can’t pre-tape. The show is the hours, the particular night, the moment. You can’t plan a Saturday night, why would you want to. And now I’m about six minutes past my shift and I feel this magic thing leaving my body. It feels like when you walk out of a movie where you forgot about yourself, it’s like waking up from a nap where someone stole your brain and gave it back just a little different. There are DJs who don’t realize how magical this thing can be, how special it can be. These DJs might even be better than me, in many ways, but when I get on this station and do this you can tell I know it’s magical and you can tell I know it doesn’t have shit to do with me. It has everything to do with the amplifiers, drumkits, voices, turntables and emotions that comes out of these $15,000 speakers but more importantly head into headphones all over the world, into coffee shops, into cars, into homes, into card games, into awkward first dates, into snack shopping at a grocery store. Today a couple times I popped out of my studio and coordinated a little bit of exercise with Scott Blankenship at classical. We did a plank. We did 20 squats, we did 20 jumping jacks. It was cool. Today was magical, tonight was magical. Life is good, the world is not ruined. We are all here for a reason, we can all play our part in helping the world out of this pandemic, out of this incessant racism, out of climate change. We are on a ruinous path. We are not ruined. And it’s not just the next generations responsibility. I counted on the forty year old to get shit right when I was a little kid. They didn’t do it. That doesn’t mean we have to do the same. Nobody expects us to do the same anymore. There’s space to change.

New Thoughts

For a long time there was a clear pull (particularly in Minnesota) towards media coverage and attention going towards white artists performing music that was started by and more associated with black artists in general. I believe there may be a bit of a switch happening where now black artists who are performing music more associated with white artists are getting the media attention. I HAVE TWO VERY IMPORTANT NOTES ABOUT THIS:

When it comes to American music, black people made it. You might hear country music now and think about white people, and some of the vanguard contributors of almost every genre are white, but the building blocks artists and the most elite and most successful performers and writers of American music in all genres are predominately black people.
Secondly, I don’t aspire to be in the business of telling anyone what their music sounds like racially. I don’t listen to a black rapper and say “you sound white on that verse”, I don’t listen to a white singer and say “you sound black on that chorus”. It’s a stupid way to listen to music and a really strange way to compliment or insult someone’s artistry. So what I am bringing up is that I am hearing black artists use sounds, compositional styles et cetera that are frequently more associated with white artists. Is the foundation of these sounds still rooted firmly in black music? Yes. Is the reason these sounds are more often associated with white artists related to an unwillingness to give black artists full access to the highway and instead encourage them to stay in “their” lane? Yes.

I have been struggling with staying focused and one of the reasons I’m here and not on twitter is because today I am winning. I have been getting more sleep, I have been trying to do something to mark the end of the working day so as to feel disinterested in checking the computer again. I have a bunch of work waiting for me, but this demarcation is helping me come into the mornings with better spirit.

This weekend was magical. My dad and his wife came into town to watch my kid’s starting Thursday afternoon. It took about 100 emails to sort out all the details, share all the routines, the insurance cards, the whole nine. But it was worth it to take a couple days away from my girls. Sadie is 4 and a half, Naomi is 1 and a half. They’re great but shit if they don’t take everything out of my soul on a daily basis. So, to spend Thursday evening eating an expensive shrimp cocktail in a shirt that didn’t have stains on it felt pretty marvelous. Got to see Honeybutter and King Pari at the Entry for King Pari’s EP release show. That was so fun. Ran into a lot of great friends, was completely blown away by King Pari and the band they had assembled. It was amazing.

Got to hit my favorite YMCA on Friday morning (if you haven’t been to the downtown MPLS YMCA find a way to do it, it’s such a treat). I also got to play pool in the lobby of Rachel’s fancy ass work building and it was fun. I would like to play more pool. Dear universe, make that happen and start adding back pool tables to my favorite bars. Friday night I saw Martin Devaney’s new band at the White Squirrel, was a treat, would recommend.

I spent Saturday morning alone. PARENTS OF AMERICA: when is the last time you spent some time legit alone. I mean alone. I sat and read in a courtyard. I took a super long shower. I walked around downtown. ALONE! It is so necessary. I spent the rest of the weekend with two of my best friends, Martin and Kevin up at a cabin in Princeton. Two nights at a cabin is not enough to get all the way cabinned up, but I got to sit around and listen to great records, take a nature walk through a county park and eat some great food. I was thankful to get to relax and take it all in.

I have to work on finishing the Heiruspecs record. I’m hitting some block where I don’t want to do the last five things I need to do to finish the record and it’s stupid. But even writing this is reminding me it is stupid and I know I can grind and get through it. The record is really good, I’m excited to share it with the world.

Year Long Goals

It’s goal setting time at MPR and I just completed my work goals with my supervisor on Friday. I don’t love everything about the process of making goals (who does), but it does have me thinking about setting goals in my personal life as well. So here’s some goals for MCPHERSON.CLUB FY 69!

I COMFORTABLY PUT SHIT ON MY WALLS
I’ve hung probably 15 photos total in my life on walls. I’m scared shitless that I will hang them badly. I have some of my basses on wall stands downstairs in the basement, one looks fine, one is falling off and I only put the back up P-Bass on that one cause a) it’s not a great instrument and b) it can 100% sustain a fall. I want hooks on my walls, I want shelves, I want all of that. And it is so intimidating. While I started going over my personal goals it was while our superstar neighbor was helping put up shelves in our house cause Rachel had hit her limit for figuring it out. That’s where I am. We have two stud finders, I still struggle. I watch some youtube videos but I never do it enough times in a row to get that mastery. My solution? Practice a bunch out in the garage cause I need all sorts of hooks out there and I don’t think anyone cares if I put a bunch of marks on the walls in my garage.

I GO TO BED BEFORE 11PM UNLESS I’M WORKING OR AM WITH FRIENDS
Sleep is one of the missing ingredients to my overall health. But I struggle to not “crashturbate” as my friend Cahak describes it. You finish your day and you spend about 1 hour to 1.5 hours thumbing through your phone or your computer checking on things. And it’s not good leisure time. I’m not diving into an exciting article, I’m not watching a great program. I’m reading the first two paragraphs of a bunch of articles and looking at peers who are more successful than me. I’m updating the Star Tribune and mindlessly looking to see if someone has said something to me on twitter. My solution? When I complete the work I do that theoretically generates money (this does include writing trivia, playing bass, writing on bass et cetera) I say goodbye to my computer Cal Newport style. (I enjoy the book Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport).

I PLAY BASKETBALL COMPETITIVELY IN ST. PAUL
I used to play basketball every Wednesday in Northeast Minneapolis and I felt a burn, release and camaraderie that I don’t get from other sporting events. I connected with old friends, made a couple new friends and generally just had a bunch of fun running my ass off and getting schooled by better players who were still supportive of my work. Getting to Minneapolis weekly is just not happening on Wednesday nights. Period. It’s too hard to pull off timeline wise. My solution? I’m looking at JCC, Mac-Groveland, The Y and finding something that works for me.

OUR HOUSE IS CLEANER
I had the worst fight of my life with my dad over how clean my house except he doesn’t know it because we are adults so about 98% of it was just me talking to myself. The reason it’s a fight in my head is because the little shit other people say gets right under my skin and finds my very deep anguish about this. I grew up in a messy house. I gained a lot of good practices while living with roommates but nothing spectacular. I’ve had oases of clean but the default has been clutter. The hard part is the organization. Cleaning is much more doable. Rachel and I are making progress but it is a very hard thing to add to your identity. I’ve gotten comfortable with my living situation, but of course not all the way comfortable cause I can feel tension rising over this. Happy there’s been progress, there’s a lot more waiting for me. My solution? I do one thing a weekend that leaves a visible impact on some area of the house. Garage, bedroom, sport porch. I’ve been knocking these things out. The house is slowly less of a mess. I keep going and it starts to really be a different place.

Everyone Back in the Office Day!

It’s not lost on me that today was supposed to be the day that offices were supposed to be full again all over the United States. The Tuesday after Labor Day! We can start hugging again! Let’s go take in a concert, when do work happy hours start again. Instead my work morning starts with me walking into a studio at MPR that is supposed to be empty to do trivia on the Current’s show. Jade (our midday host and music director) is in there working hard thinking that it’s a Monday cause we all know today feels like the most Monday ass Monday in the world even though it is Tuesday. So, she throws on her mask and makes way for me to do trivia and all I can think is. . .it’s still fucking like this? We are still wearing masks, we are still broadcasting from different studios, people still aren’t going in to their offices.

Now here’s a silver lining friends. Maybe right now we are making the right decision by prioritizing schools. It’s more important that schools are open than offices. Hard stop period that’s it no question. So, if we are to choose one, we choose schools. How nervous am I that over 50% of Minnesota schools will be back on distance learning by October 1? I am really nervous. I think that ultimately a lot of individual classrooms will shut down, a lot of people will get sick, but I do think that school will prevail.

If we describe “here” as a place where so many Americans have founded fears of public health and of the medical industry. And if we describe “here” as a place where many Americans consume information that is crafted to radicalize them and to push them away from better choices I want to tell you a little bit of why I think we got here and a lot more about how to get to a better place.

Short run answers for increasing vaccination numbers are hard to come by. My first advice: don’t identify people who haven’t gotten the vaccine as idiots. There are idiots who have gotten the vaccine, and idiots who haven’t. But there are people who primarily make reasonable choices and in my opinion have made the unreasonable choice of forgoing a vaccine that will help their health and the community’s health. My biggest take on vaccine encouragement: if you swing some amount of institutional power. . .push it towards vaccine requirements. I co-own a trivia company, we just added a vaccine mandate. If you run a business, a theater, a community organization. . .if you have an institutional lever to pull to encourage vaccination. . .do it. If you have the plausible opportunity to support people who see obstacles to getting the vaccine and help them get over those do it. If you don’t have that institutional power. . .kill everyone with kindness. Thank people for getting the vaccine, support people who get the vaccine. Don’t dance on the grave of anti-vacc folks who are leaving their family to put together the pieces. Do I find it jarring or somehow poetic when one of these people dies? Perhaps some portion of me does, but a much larger portion thinks about the tremendous load a family will have to bear without a dad, a mom et cetera. I lead with that.

Long run, if our health system was more transparent our vaccine numbers would be better. There’s a lot of people who have a distrust, healthy or otherwise, of the government. Most of those folks still get driver’s licenses, still seek permits for rebuilding projects. Public health needs to be an unimpeachable good that receives wide latitude and high levels of support. It can’t be hollowed out financially, it can’t be rudely paternal towards people. There is also ground to recover. I am tired of folks footnoting on the Tuskegee experiments when discussing vaccine hesitancy. All that footnote does is treat medical racism like a historical relic which is criminally undereducated. Medical inequities and racism can be found yesterday, today and tomorrow. And I see some of the same “thin blue line” nonsense happening in the medical sector as I do in public safety. Call out bad actors, call out bad behaviors, call out bad outcomes. As a chorus of public health officials sound the alarm about the shortcomings of the system that chorus can push us to a different place. But if medical professionals are asking “treat us like an unimpeachably good service and respect us flat out with no regard for our track record” we’re screwed. We’re screwed because I believe it creates a disconnect and a disbelief that no one is willing to brook. And I ultimately believe that it is the institute’s responsibility to share it’s shortcomings, to address those shortcomings and to change the conversation. I don’t believe we can just demand it of individuals who can’t speak as a chorus. But I believe that if some statistically insignificant group of health professionals continued to routinely talk about this, some tides could change.

There’s a moment now where we need the public to trust the health care industry. We can only fix that with persuasion and persistence. There’s a moment coming in the future where we’ll need the public to trust the health care industry. We can do that by acknowledging shortcomings, addressing fears, righting wrongs and bringing a new level of discourse to how we talk about public health.

I Went to a Famous Fat Camp

Bloomberg just published a big article about the end of one of the titans of the weight loss summer camp world, Camp Shane.

I went to Camp Shane for three summers. After 6th, after 7th and after 8th. You lose a lot of weight, you get attention from girls for the first time, you starve, you come home. You field compliments, you start to eat like a normal person, you field questions, you gain the weight back and you go back for another summer. When I think about the destructive information I put into my body and my skin across those summers of binge and purge I shudder.

I always valued the experience from a social point of view. I ended up feeling a level of confidence that I believe has suited me well for the rest of my life. I learned how to make friends, I learned how to make girl friends and girlfriends for the first time really since early elementary school too. I had my first kiss there, a girl named Nikki who told me I was horrible at kissing and made me practice on her neck. I still have a couple pictures of my time from Camp Shane and to me I look happy. I’m losing weight, I’m getting to second base, I’m discovering new music.

This article doesn’t really change my memories of the camp, I am not shocked that horrible things happened there, I’m not shocked the family tore each other apart, avarice combined with money can do that. But it is one of those moments where everything I thought about Camp Shane is thrown a bit more into question. Is what I learned about romantic relationships from going to Camp Shane right? Are the friends I still wonder about maybe secretive about having gone to a fat camp? Are most of them still fat?

A lot of parents forced their kids to go to fat camp. Not mine. My parents didn’t force much of anything on me. That was sometimes good, sometimes bad. But it was my idea, looking in the back of the New York Times magazine and seeing a kid pulling at a drawstring with a foot long gap between his current size and what his pants could hold.

You can’t really write without a thesis but here I am, I loved fat camp, I have so many great memories, I lived more dangerously, more socially and more youthfully than I ever did at home. I felt something magical all the time in those summers. And I loved spending weeks not being singled out for being fat. If a girl liked me or she didn’t, cool, but the dealbreaker wasn’t my size. If my team lost or won at basketball, cool, but the dealbreaker wasn’t my size. That’s really how the world should be. But also in reading this article it’s clear that the world shouldn’t be like Camp Shane.

Live From Trader Joe’s

You’re loading your two bags of Trader Joe’s into the back of your Ford Taurus and just getting started with getting your youngest daughter (1.5 years) into the backseat of your car. A nice grandma age lady pushing a grocery looking lady comes up near your car (but not weird near). She is giving off that Grandma energy too. Talks to my daughter Naomi with that voice and says “are we sleepy? did we help daddy with the shopping*?”. I smile and make that noise that says “I have no problem with anything you’ve done but I have no interest in continuing this interaction you’ve started beyond that noise you just heard”. She walks away, puts “the shopping” in her sensible Mitsubishi. She is out of my mind but before I am already in my car I just hear her quietly say “oh fuck me” while looking at her cell phone.

*The term “the shopping” is also very Grandma vernac.

Can’t Handle this Part

When the pandemic was no one’s fault, I could handle it. Shit happens. Shit that kills hundreds of thousands of people happens.
When the handling of the pandemic was the Federal Government’s fault with a heavy load landing on Trump I could handle it. I considered that White House’s management skills to be an aberration. Now it was an aberration that killed grandpas and grandmas all across the country, but an aberration all the same.
Now it’s our fault. Now it’s the fault of my friend who says he’s waiting to get the vaccine because he wants to make sure we won’t turn into zombies lol. My friend’s zombie fear has me crying in the car worrying about my daughter’s health. My other friend’s need to do his own research before getting the shot has my wife whispering to me this morning “she (our daughter) is scared about wearing the mask at school, we have to tell her it’s okay, we have to act like it’s a fun thing”. I have very few friends who haven’t gotten the vaccine. But they have lots of company. Millions of people across the country, with real fear, with real distrust, with real schedules, with an inability to prepare for a bad response to the vaccine. I don’t know how to change these fears. I have people in my life who will try a pill they’re handed at a party who are nervous to take the vaccine. So this one is our fault. This one is the fault of our friends, our neighbors, our partners.

I can’t forgive us. We could be relaxing right now, we could be working on new problems. We could be picking out new outfits for our kids for school without finding matching masks. But we can’t. Instead we are staying up, sweating bullets, thinking about our relatives, our babies, our selves. I can’t forgive us for this. This pandemic will define this decade, this pandemic will define my adulthood, it will define my kids childhood. And it didn’t have to. Straight up, it didn’t have to.

It Shouldn’t Be This Hard. It is this Hard. What is Should?

Something started to bother me last night while I was DJing on the Current. Somebody random on twitter shared a photo of the Capitol Building under siege and pointed out that that event was exactly six months ago. We are asking so much of ourselves, and I am asking so much of myself, to just keep on grinding and meeting or exceeding or work requirements, our health requirements, our societal requirements. It seems like an especially important time to exceed expectations, we are in a period of upheaval where our country can come out better or worse, but has zero shot at coming out the same. But I find myself paralyzed towards any action I deem valuable.

I had the chance to interview I-Self Devine for the Current some weeks ago and he said he was so excited to be living through these times. It boggled my mind. But having known I-Self for about 20 years now, he’s been preparing for moments when revolutionaries, forward thinkers, change makers were needed. And they’ve always been needed, but their need is so obvious now, so tangible now. And I’ve had the exact opposite feeling about the past year. . .I am just an honest mouthpiece for how fraudulent our country is but I have no guts to change anything. I am an armchair thinker talking about it, but actual change? Hard pass. Too stressful. Too afraid of being wrong. Too afraid of being killed. Too afraid of being fired.

But that’s not who I thought I was. I did college in two chunks and my second half was probably close to 40% African-American Studies courses to make that part of my individualized degree. I soaked the content up like the adult college student that I was and I saw myself in the shoes of a lot of the activists in those pages. I remember looking at the young blond man holding his teeth into his bloody mouth with the cuff of his suit next to John Lewis. I thought, if this opportunity to speak bruises to power was available in my day, I’d be drying the blood up with my suit. But it’s come, and I’m not. I’m donating money, I’m speaking more courageously than expected for someone who DJs on a major station in a major market, I’m going to protests twice a year. But I’m not bloody. I’m not Heather Heyer, I’m not Deona Knadjek.

But I’m not in my own work in a way that in some sense in my mind would excuse my absence from this opportunity to change the world. I’m distracted at work. I can’t stay focused on the foods I was successfully eating everyday during lockdown. I can’t find my way to practicing bass or exercising after I put my kids to bed. I just deflate, I just clean the kitchen, I read three pages of a book and go to bed. I have so many things I want to do for Purple Current and the Current and I can’t. I can’t bring myself to do them cause I can’t find the hours, or I can’t find the motivation, or I know the support to do them isn’t there.

I float between these worlds of believing that the world is changing and that I can’t be a part of it because I’m raising my kids. I hate it. I hate feeling it and I can’t figure out how to forgive myself for any of it. My wife said she has a new understanding and a better understanding for fat people after living with me and loving me. I wish I had the same from living with myself. I am relentlessly disappointed in me, in what I choose to do and not to do. And that makes me addicted to the external praise, which is why I have worked so hard to excel in fields like music and radio that dole out praise profusely if you do good work. And I am now facing a time at work where I am getting a different sense of my self worth, financially, creatively and frankly holistically. And it is shattering me. It is shattering me to know what they really think of me. And how do you make sure you think of yourself the right way. . .when in fact you never have thought of yourself the right way. So now your self confidence declines further, and now of course it’s harder to not have two cups of cowboy caviar while Scott Van Pelt talks to Mark Jackson. And of course it’s harder to not get the big at Potbelly’s. And you got a job that you always thought was cool, you sit at a desk you always thought it would be cool to sit at. . .and it is cool. But your stepmom doesn’t think it’s cool, and that can stay in your brain way longer than your neighbor saying you have the coolest jobs in the world. Ultimately you are out of phase, you are torn and you just wonder if anyone else is thinking “100 people died of heat stroke in. . . . . . .OREGON, in OREGON” , , ,there are headlines everyday that I think would be the biggest news story of 1995 or of 1925, but they last three days we move on. There are body parts being distributed slowly across parks in Northeast Minneapolis. It’s now bigger news if police aren’t wearing cameras when they shoot and kill a young black man but the verdicts are largely the same, camera or no. We are in a churn of nightmares on a rapidly heating planet and it’s hard to just keep on making plans with friends and deciding who to interview on the radio.

I Want a Different Relationship With Work

I’m listening to the latest Ezra Klein podcast right now. The interview is with James Suzman and it involves a deep look at why in an era of such surplus we work so much. I also want to be clear that this surplus does not mean that everyone has what they need. It does mean that our problems are related much more to distribution than to scarcity.
I grew up with a dad who was a work-for-someone-else-a-holic. He wasn’t a busy body around the house always tinkering with something and had to keep on doing projects. But if there was work he could do for his employer (Williams College) or his academic reputation (Economics) that came first. Travel, reviewing papers, meeting with students. My brother and I spent a lot of our weekends playing in a weird cement tunnel about 200 feet from Fernald House while my dad worked away on whatever Economics professors work away on. You ask my dad what the most important thing to him in life is and he’ll say his kids. No pause, no stumble. And I think that’s true. He’s a great dad and a great grandfather. But I’m finding that especially in the grandparent department, the love from men, although earnest, is dull and hard to observe. A grandmother loves children—she can attend to those children, converse with the children, engage with the children, deescalate during a mood with the children. The grandfathers in my life, you love them, they love your kids, but their love primarily involves wanting them around and then continuing to attend to their phones, their papers, their devices, their grown up children. (I’m thinking that my experience is not 100% unique, but I recognize there are huge exceptions to this rule).

I can already feel myself slipping the same way into an abstract love for family and things not work. I’m sure my wife can too. You grade me on a curve I’m more involved with the care of my children than my father was with his. But that’s a hell of a curve. My wife doesn’t make a secret to me or to anyone who will listen that she feels like a single parent much of the time. I have a job that I work on weekends, I own a company that operates exclusively on nights and weekends. All I need to do is find a tunnel near MPR for Sadie and Naomi to play in and I’ve completed the cycle. I live in a world where I feel hesitant to ask to hold somebody else’s baby in a way that I don’t see from my women neighbors. I also think almost immediately about turning anything I love into a money making venture. To some extent that is why this missive right here is on a blog as opposed to a massive, annoying facebook post. That means that if I play ping pong I think about hosting a ping pong night at a bar. If I enjoy basketball I think about producing a podcast with people who actually know about the sport to talk. This might seem like complete dumb pointless ambition, but basically my career has been monetizing what I love, I play bass in a hip-hop band, I talk on the radio, I own a trivia company. But we don’t monetize our kids for the most part, and that’s a wonderful thing. I turn my eye at the blogs that feel like they do monetize their kids existence. But if it’s not monetized I look away, I schedule over it, I hold it a lower priority.

But there’s a status quo upheaval in process right now and I want to be a part of it. COVID taught me a different relationship with work. The presidency of Trump taught me a different relationship government. The unearthing of police murders being covered up taught me a different relationship with white supremacy and the professionalization of white supremacy. I use the word taught there because I don’t believe I’ve learned it, digested it and know it. I know my previous relationship with work was wrong. I know my Dad’s was wrong. I know the government is corrupt and faulty to a degree I wasn’t ready to confront. Every stone unturned in the history of policing in this country makes the official story about a death like Sandra Bland’s completely unbelievable. I am reading The New Jim Crow right now and it is pushing my brain to confront a level of opportunistic weaponization of white supremacy in my lifetime that I had not faced before. After reading the lengthy foreword I read about 2/3 of the first chapter, tried to fall asleep and when my youngest started screaming at the top of her lungs in my sleep I imagined that her body was discovering the trauma it carried. It’s the only pain I can imagine eliciting the howls I heard. I think spending your life throwing yourself into the work at the cost of changing your relationship with family, with government, with white supremacy. . .it’s not a defensible position. This is not a time to pinch your nose and take the paycheck. This is not a time to wave off family engagements in order to be fully present at work. This is not a time to hope that someone else is thinking about how to end white supremacy. I want to recalibrate what is essential to me in life, I want to find a more ambitious path for how I live my life. Work is so central to my life that I feel like it starts there, I want a different relationship with work.

Locking Up Our Own by James Forman Jr.

I recently finished the book “Locking Up Our Own” by James Forman Jr. The book is a deep dive into Washington D.C. and it’s relation with police, lawyers and jails. I love the book because it was so patient to walk back far enough in history to give a real consideration to a time when many black leaders were completely on board with mandatory sentencing and with a large swath of policies that aren’t supported by many leaders period, and certainly aren’t heard often from black leaders. I like the point that you can’t really understand America’s response to the crack epidemic without understanding the heroin epidemic. Being born in ‘81 my reference has always been crack into opioids with little knowledge or focus on what came before. I was also blown away to understand how significant black newspapers were in the framing of the questions of decriminalization, mandatory minimums and more during the 1970s. I know that journalism has been on the ropes for years in our country, I’m glad that the two black owned newspapers from Minnesota are going strong (Insight News and the Spokesmen-Recorder). Getting to see comic depiction of D.C.’s crime issues as well as read from editorials was a really helpful tool in being transported back in to the 1970s and the 1980s.

In reading this book I am reminded how much I believed in the “War on Drugs” and how much I believed in “Just Say No”. I wonder if my parents knew it was bullshit. My parents were former weed smoking Chicago hippies but they had moved out to rural Massachusetts and my parents instilled all sorts of scare language that was really unproductive in helping me understand the United States. I remember drive through the South Side of Chicago with my mom and she told us that if she said “duck” we were all compelled to immediately duck our head down from gunfire. I understand the principle to protect your children. I also understand the danger of stray gunshots, this year we’ve lost multiple children to stray gun shots. I don’t think that duck command was helping anyone. My dad drove me to Walker-West Jazz Academy on Selby when I was in high school in St. Paul. He said “no matter how close we lived to this neighborhood, I would want to drive you cause this doesn’t feel safe”. I grew up knowing that if we saw a lot of black faces in a neighborhood we weren’t safe. This is a stupid way to live life, it’s also a stupid thing to teach rural kids. My cousins who grew up in Milwaukee were endowed with some modicum of street smarts that involved things as simple as knowing how to take mass transit alone, but also a sense of when it was time to come in to the house cause the energy was getting bad around the block. I think those kids maybe could’ve gotten some nuanced lessons from their family about how to ensure your safety and how to be aware of your surrounding. My parents came from Milwaukee and Chicago. But they were raising boys out in Williamstown, MA. I wasn’t getting smarts that helped me carry myself, I was just getting this knee jerk vibe of “you will fucking die if you go into this neighborhood”. I got the same thing on TV screens at home, pictures of downtown Troy, stories of crack dealers stopping in Pittsfield between Toronto and New York. The Just Say No campaign, neighborhoods being torn apart by turf wars. This book gave me a lot of context both for how the reaction to crack had everything to do with increase of violence related to heroin in the 1970s. You can see justifications from Eric Holder when he was the Attorney for D.C. about indiscriminate searches of cars in poor neighborhoods to shake out guns, drugs and more. But you see this willingness in the policy to inconvenience that average driver on a thoroughfare for the dim possibility of shaking out something significant from a search. It’s demoralizing and it’s a willingness to criminalize black life in total because it is unfairly matched up with criminality. It’s the policy that was the de facto lesson of my travels into black neighborhoods in my youth. And this auto-criminalization of a neighborhood limits opportunity, limits growth and in many ways self-prophesizes the neighborhood slipping. It was all bullshit. It was even Band-Aids on a severe injury. It was Band-Aids on the wrong arm, it was Band-Aids on the wrong person. This book lines up a lot of the foundational views that created the climate ripe for the War on Drugs in one of the cities most impacted by said war. I strongly recommend this book.

Today

Today has been a special day. The thing I’ve done the longest in my life besides for be alive is play music with Heiruspecs. I started the band with Felix when I was in 11th grade. I’m forty years old. We won best High School Band in the City Pages in the Year 2000. We’ve been doing the shit we do for a long time. I think Heiruspecs is incredibly good at what we do. We are a creative live hip-hop band that embraces all the magic that having a live band permits us to bring in to the genre. We are students of hip-hop, we are students of live music and we bring it together. From my completely biased point of view I think we are some of the best to ever do it in Minnesota. I’ve witnessed bands that blow us out of the water, I’ve been humbled seeing especially what some of the younger generation of players and writers can do, but I’m very proud of what we bring to the music world.

And I didn’t realize how much having that joy of creation, of collaboration, of camaraderie stripped from my life for a year and a half has been debilitating. I didn’t get to run songs, to use bass effects, to argue about how to end a song. One of the things most core to my existence was effectively tossed on ice for a year and a half.

This morning as the members of Heiruspecs filed in and we started talking about what we wanted to get done today. . .I felt so good, I felt so alive. I didn’t realize how important this is to me. I didn’t realize how much this matters to me.

I also got to take my kids on the bus today. Many people have to take the bus as their way to get to work, to recreation, to everything. Most of them had to keep on grinding during the thick of the pandemic to keep their life up. I take the bus as a form of recreation on Saturdays cause my daughter Sadie and I love it. Sadie is four, it is still my dream that she’ll be a bus driver. She seems so fascinated by it all. This was Naomi, my one year old, maiden voyage on the bus. She enjoyed it and honestly running to Music Go Round to pick up a check for some gear a sold, the Trivia Mafia Office for an unexpected bathroom break, Korte’s for some groceries and J&S for an iced coffee. It felt so good. Pop on the bus, pop off. Wait by the bus stop. Make small talk about the fire station across the street. Answer random questions. The bus means you spend time at unexpected intersections. New territory for a four year old means moments of discovery.

I didn’t realize how much I love that intimacy of the bus trip. My wife doesn’t go on the bus trips with us. It’s a thing for me and my kids. And we meet people, we laugh, we stop at random spots, we explore strange little corners of the city I would never take half a glance at if I wasn’t with my kids.

Today was great. Music is a gift. Children are a gift. They are both demanding, challenging and fatiguing gifts, but today I remembered they are a gift.