Among the most pernicious political and social trends of the past four or five years is the widespread gaslighting perpetuated by those with a far-right political agenda. (Yeah, we’re goin’ there.) This trend is presently at its apex with the Derek Chauvin trial.
The political platform is white supremacy. That’s it, that’s the entire platform. The GOP wholesale abandoned any semblance of the political and moral values it portends to espouse, trading it all in for naked power as they followed Trump into a toxic sinkhole of white supremacy.
Yet the whole time, they kept pretending that’s not what they were doing, even as it became more and more and more obvious. The lasting legacy of Trumpism, ironically, will be the mass unmasking of the intense racism in the GOP particularly and in the country as a whole. You know exactly what I’m talking about (even if you try to gaslight me by dodging the issue), but the Chauvin trial shows it all so perfectly. The Right lost its collective shit when Colin Kaepernick quietly took a knee to protest police killing Black people. They knew what he was trying to say, but they lied and made it about “disrespecting the flag.” These are the sort of people who have convinced themselves that this makes sense: Person: Black lives matter! Them: No, allllll lives matter. [pause] Them: ...blue lives matter. But—irony of ironies, I mean the optics are too on-the-nose—Chauvin the cop put his own knee down and executed George Floyd, with impunity, in broad daylight, on video. This trial should take all of five minutes. Because we all know what we saw. We all know what Kaep was trying to say, and we all know what Chauvin was trying to say. We all know who they are and what they’re about. Based on my own interactions with people in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, I am convinced that those who bought into Trumpism early on and stuck with it just have dark spots on their brains now. Each time he drew a new line and dared them to cross it, they had to kill off a part of themselves to justify doing so. After years of this, by the time the 2020 election came around (and it was so clearly just a referendum on hate), I couldn’t get any of those people in my social media circles to agree with me on this: “Just say you’re against white supremacy, misogyny, xenophobia, and bigotry. Let’s start from there.” None of them would. I think it’s because, at that point, they literally couldn’t. ALSO: I have zero patience for the “but but but both sides” people. Just don’t. You know what this is. You know what “both sides” mean. One side is white supremacy. You don’t get to hang out in the middle of that. All of this was on my mind when I wrote this song. Lyrics
Cut the crap, and shut off your gaslight. We’re not confused, we can see in the dark. We know exactly what you mean by your remarks.
We all know what we saw. We all know who you are. We're all impressed by your mental gymnastics. Your flips and spins are tumbling all around the world. The dark spot on your brain grows wider with every line you cross. Until you can't remember what you've lost. We all know what we saw. We all know who you are. They say it's a crime to demand that they value your life. They say it's you who divides, but it's you who puts your body on the line. We all know what we saw. We all know who you are. Come and sit, 'round the warmth of the gaslight. Makes you feel safe, untroubled by the horrors they commit. They go on and on and on, but you say both sides need to quit. Either way you'll be staying out of it. We all know what we saw. We all know who you are. Take a stand by putting your knee down. To protect life or to take one away. Either way we know what you were trying to say. We all know what we saw. We all know who you are. For the music nerds
The first bit that I wrote is the refrain: We all know what we saw. We all know who you are. The second line I wrote is the first line of the song: Cut the crap. Together, that’s pretty much the whole message in a nutshell. The rest of the lyrics qualify and unpack that idea.
Some of the lyrics just kind of tumbled out, which is always nice. I wrote four of the five verses in one or two sittings, if memory serves. The last one I wrote—the middle one—didn’t come for several days. Musically, I wanted that refrain to hearken back to a classic sort of group sing, stompin’, almost call-and-response idea. In my head I heard everyone singing that together. We all know… to kind of reclaim the truth that gaslighters try to take. The chord movement is a straightforward IV-I amen. (Every “amen” you’ve ever sung in church or in a choir boils down to that same IV-I chord movement. “Amen” means “so be it.” Here, it’s musically a way to put a strong stamp on the We all know statement. It leaves no question.) The chord progressions in the verses came quickly. I found the opening two chords for it—F to Am7—right away on the piano, and I liked how it sounded, with the G and A notes on the top of the Am7 chord stack. The rest of the chords organically fell into place from there. I’ve been experimenting with different ways of structuring songs, rather than just relying on the ‘ol verse-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus format. A lot of it has to do with riffing or sketching on some melodic or harmonic idea, and gradually building it out over the course of multiple sections. In this song, the full-length chord progression of the verse is F - Am7 - Bb - C - Dm7 - Bb - Gm7 - Am - Bb - Gm7 - Dm - C - Gm7 - Bb - F. But in the first verse (and last verse), we get a truncated version of that: F - Am7 - Bb - C - Dm7 - Bb - C - Gm7 - Bb - F. So that main verse idea builds on itself. Then, at the end of the second verse, we pivot to something different entirely. I bring back the chords from the long introduction here. The harmonic contrast from the regular verses is important, because I switch from barking at the gaslighters to speaking a word of support to those who have been gaslighted: They say it's a crime to demand that they value your life. They say it's you who divides, but it's you who puts your body on the line. We all know who I’m talking about. And then after that verse (with new chords), I bring back the words of the refrain, but with a different harmonic structure—a stronger, more upbeat IV-V-I progression instead of the IV-I. So back to this idea of sketching and building: By the end of that newly harmonized chorus, we’re more than halfway through the song, and it’s just now that we’ve heard all the musical parts and pieces of it. Not a single intro, verse, or chorus has been exactly the same. But now we’ve established all of it, and so we can play with it for the rest of the piece. For “Gaslight,” I did (almost) a palindromic structure. If you think of the sections not as intros, verses, or choruses, but as musical sections, the structure is basically:
I wrote this on the piano, and it really doesn’t work on the guitar for some reason, so I recorded it on the piano, too. And I put a simple supporting electric bass line underneath to give the low end some juice. I had some bigger ideas for percussion, but I stopped short with what I ended up doing: snaps, claps, and stomps. I wanted it to feel like there were a bunch of people in the room, so I put on my heavy work boots and overdubbed myself snapping, clapping, and stomping at different positions around the mic to create a sense of space. There’s more I think I could/would do in terms of orchestration—like, there’s no solo or lead instrument, and it feels like there should be one, but I don’t hear anything, so I left it out. But what I did here makes sense for now. And also, less is generally more when it comes to orchestrating. As a rule, don’t put in anything that doesn’t need to be there. Maybe I’ll revisit this in another more polished and fleshed-out recording later. But for now, this says what I was trying to say.
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*This story was originally published on April 6, 2021. Here are some things that have happened recently: The weather got warmer. I got my first COVID-19 vaccine. And I quit my job...and maybe my career...and maybe my entire field. All of these feel like spring. Renewal, rebirth, yada yada. And all feel...just a little...perilous. I’m reluctant to celebrate too loudly, because it’s like...can it be true? Is spring here? Really? Fake SpringAll Midwesterners know that Fake Spring precedes Second Winter. Fake Spring is that little window, usually late February or early March, when the single-digit temps give way to days in the 40s, 50s, or 60s. Optimists and idiots think this means spring has sprung. But a week later, Second Winter and its cold fangs bite hard. Some years, it’s just another couple of weeks of cold weather again. Other years, it’s been a full-on resurgence of winter, and we get multiple snowstorms through March and April. Last year, the beginning of the pandemic made most of us forget that spring came early, and was beautiful, and there was no Second Winter. This year...by god, it sure seems as though we’ve dodged it again. We had a grueling stretch of bitter cold and near daily snowfall, but by the end of February, the daffodils were already poking their little green heads out of the dirt. And that was that—spring had sprung. With every day that passes, that one last burst of wintery nastiness is less likely to hit. But even now, just after Easter time, I’m holding my breath. The Prick of LifeThe pandemic is still with us, of course, but...not...for long? A bunch of wizards and billionaires managed to whip out a COVID-19 vaccine in a fraction of the time it usually takes—months, instead of years—and governments and some other wizards have been aggressively distributing vaccine doses to everyone. The Prick of Life! The timeline for when most of us can get our Prick of Life has actually moved up, not back. For the general population, it was “end of May.” Then it was “mid-May.” And now...where I live, at least, it’s going to be open to genpop on April 9. That’s extraordinary. Though some new strains of the virus are causing problems worldwide, most of the news about the vaccines is good. The efficacy is high. Vaxxed people aren’t shedding the virus much, even if they do somehow end up carrying it. Vaxxed people who occasionally do get sick aren’t landing in the hospital. And early tests indicate that at least one of the vaccines (Pfizer) is safe and 100% effective (?!?!) in kids ages 12-15. The CDC now says that fully vaxxed people can pretty much live, laugh, and love with one another like they could in the Beforetimes. Meanwhile, the number of cases in our local schools has continuously dropped since they herded our little darlings back into their seats in January. So it’s...it’s going pretty well, innit? Much better than I thought it would be at this point. And for the first time in a year, I have a little hope that much of our lives can indeed get back to normal. There’s so much I miss. So much we all miss. And once we’re all vaxxed, we can have most of it back. Unless...unless...we get a curveball. Those new strains are scary-looking. And there could be a resurgence in cases as people get a little too comfortable with one another. There is, after all, a year’s worth of partying and get-togethers and travel all pent up, and we still need to employ a dollop of caution. But...I hold my breath and hope. Springtime for SetherMy own personal spring is here. And...well. There’s a lot to unpack. I’ll write a lot more about it by and by—the nature of work, mental health, trauma, personal transformation—but at the moment, here’s the thing:
I quit my job. It was a toxic, degrading, gaslighting, incredibly frustrating environment, within a dying industry, and I could not take it anymore. (Editor’s note: I feel something—shame, maybe—about walking away from a very, very well-paying job while so many people have been laid off and are struggling to scrape together rent. But that’s a thought trap. Forget the money, it was destroying me, and there is no dollar amount you can assign to your life.) Also: There is currently a mass exodus from that employer. As in, a third to half of the company is leaving or has left, all within a few months. And as I’ve met with and consoled and commiserated with most of them, certain similarities emerged in our respective tales of woe, even from people across totally different departments: Burnt out. Tired of being constantly disrespected. Crippling anxiety. Made to feel like they were terrible at their jobs. I had to check on more than one colleague to be sure they were safe. SAFE! Not “if they were okay,” I mean SAFE. And some of them had to do the same for me at one point months ago. Looking back over the years, you’ll find a similar trail of casualties from that company, mainly because of the incompetent and cruel CEO. (Note to self: The past several paragraphs are just me justifying my decision to leave. Hm. Must explore that later.) People keep asking me what I’m going to do next. The answer is I don’t know. Also, I don’t care. I am currently unemployed and plan to stay that way for the foreseeable future. (I am, though, doing some minimal freelance work to bring in some cash flow. We are very, VERY, VERY fortunate that we can comfortably financially afford for me to do this.) But this is about more than just ditching a bad job. Work hasn’t felt good to me in many years. And I realized that I haven’t taken a break since I was a child; I got a paper route when I was 11, and since then I’ve been keeping pretty much full-time hours (or more!), between school and work. I’ve never not had at least some kind of job. Even when I stayed home with our eldest child for a few years, I freelanced and was still working way too much, including on weekends, evenings, and holidays. But this isn’t even about me and how tired I am deep in my bones and brains and soul. It’s about realizing what drove me to work like that for so long and to push myself so hard. And...not doing that anymore. Over the past couple of years, I’ve finally started doing therapy. Multiple modalities. (I highly recommend doing this.) Through that, I’ve learned a lot about who I am, what parts comprise me, and what drives me. And it’s, uh, pretty alarming. Like...you know how some people are “high-functioning” addicts? They’re reasonably successful in school, work, and life, but they’re living on the edge and barely hanging on, dangerously juggling substance abuse and life. That’s how I, and I think many others, live life with poor mental health. You get by, you get by, you get by. You have a big breakdown every few years or so. You pick yourself up and find a way to keep going each time. Then eventually you die, exhausted. That is not any kind of way to exist. And we don’t have to exist that way! I have finally come around to this notion, and am Doing Things About It. It’s difficult and confusing—lots of twists and turns on the ‘ol mental health journey—but well worth the time and effort. My hope is that the first half (maybe one-third) of my life was winter, and that I’m blooming into the spring of my time on this planet. Renewed, reborn, yada yada. Cautious hope. *This story was first published on March 14, 2021 It has been exactly one year since we went into self-quarantine on March 14, 2020. No one knew how long it would last, or how intense it would be. We just knew we had to lock it down and wait. Throughout our quarantine, we kept track of our day to day—what else was there to do? Here’s our family log of our first 60 days in lockdown, with pictures and the occasional audio interview. Excerpts from Day 60: “Two MONTHS! HAHAHAHAHhahahaha…hah…ha. Well. That went by fast. Because ev-er-y-day-is-the-same. Here's to two more months.” [Narrator: It was a lot longer than two more months.] Day 60 was May 15. Our town started opening back up 11 days before, and the COVID-19 case number were beginning a steep climb that only accelerated in the many months since. (Only just recently, with the vaccine rollout, have numbers begun to settle.) For me, worry set in. And malaise. I got distracted by things that weren’t stories about my family dealing with lockdown. Then George Floyd was murdered, and the reverberations took me over. This time period was so incredibly dark—not only was there no end to the pandemic in sight, it was getting worse. Racial strife skyrocketed, and although there was some overdue reckoning going on, the pushback was astonishing even by racist American standards. Trump, and Trumpism, still seemed invulnerable. Like many people, I felt just totally crushed. It was all just too much. No wind in my chest. No strength in my legs, no sparks in my brain. The long months of schooling at home, the constant togetherness with the kids (which is to say, often quantity without quality), wore us all down. My job crumbled out from under me, collapsing into an impossible quagmire that I couldn’t handle anymore. Although the final results of the presidential election spelled the official end of the Trump era, the process of getting there was long, agonizing, and traumatic, and it showed that the nation is still broken in half. But amidst it all, I found this social media post of mine from back on June 1, 2020, and it serves as a shining little example of what most of us have found, and clung to, in the many long months of 2020 and the first few of 2021: These humans are small points of light in the darkness. Camille posed for me in the new kayak. And this is what Essie wore to go kayaking. Small points of light in the darkness, indeed. Perhaps here you see a reflection of your own family’s sparkles from that bizarre time.
We are at a Moment, between the fear and dulled senses and worry and exhaustion of the 2020 pandemic and political season on one end, and glimmers of hope in the darkness on the other—a defeat of Trumpism at the ballot box, the continued momentum of a racial reckoning, and the beginning of the end (maybe) of the pandemic. Take a moment to look back at the dead of winter; see how far we’ve come? Soon, I’ll write about looking forward to a cautious spring.
*This story was originally posted on Feb 13, 2021
Hi, it’s zero degrees outside. It’s mid-February. And Punxsutawny Phil’s stupid shadow recently indicated that we’re in for many more weeks of this than we’d hoped.
It’s the dead of winter, friends. And it’s not just the dead of actual winter; we’re still trapped in this pandemic, with no real end in sight. It’s the proverbial dead of another sort of “winter.” On top of that, people are just...dealing with a lot right now. Maybe you’re in the “dead” of a bad job, or a soured relationship, or maybe you’re just listless and feeling stuck and drained from...well, from everything. So I wrote this: Lyrics
Hope to see you in Kansas City. Maybe when all of this is over. But for now Union Station’s empty like an echo...
Think you'll ever make it to Kansas City? Do you think she'll ever decide? Or in the dead of winter will you die inside? What about all the missing persons? The ones who will never see the thaw. Will we remember who they are? I admit to cabin fever. You bet the walls are closing in. It’s sad when home is not a palace, but a prison. I’m afraid of what we’ll find when the thaw comes in its time. When did your children get so tall? Tell them we miss them, one and all... If you don't make it to Kansas City, and I have to have that drink alone. I'll raise a glass. I'll raise a glass. I'll raise a glass to the dead of winter’s own. I wrote this sort of as if it was a letter to a loved one. In the early verses, I tried to evoke this feeling of wanting to connect and be together, to at least meet up somewhere soon, but...well. Who knows when that will be possible again. And I used the imagery of a place like a Union Station in Kansas City, which is typically busy and bustling and is also a place where travelers meet, but right now is completely empty (or at least, in my imagination it is). I’m calling out how unnerving it is to see these places and spaces devoid of the people who usually give them life. I think it’s because a space that is meant for people, but doesn’t have any people, is dead in a way. The second line is really about those personal “winters”...when we’re in limbo or stuck or drained or hopeless or whatever. The frustration and lack of control. The waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting… One of the things about this pandemic is that we’re losing so many people. They’ve become missing persons. Partly of course it’s COVID-19, which has taken almost half a million lives in the U.S. alone. But we’ve all been hunkering down for nearly an entire year, and in that time, people have died from other things—accidents and old age and other illnesses. And people have moved out of their communities, for normal reasons, but also because of job losses or new opportunities or what have you. And all those people are just...gone. We can’t have going-away parties. We can’t really even have funerals. We’ve lost all the rituals of saying goodbye to people. We don’t notice when they aren’t at school, or church, or community events, or the grocery store, because none of us are at those places anymore. When you lose those rituals and can’t feel the absence of specific people from your normal daily life, you don’t mark their departure. And you don’t remember. When we re-emerge from all this--the proverbial and literal thaw I mention in the song—I’m worried we won’t remember who we’ve lost. My grandmother is one of those people. She died in December, of complications from COVID-19, and although we did a Zoom memorial with our immediate family, it’s just...it’s just not the same. At a real funeral for her, we’d see far-flung cousins and aunts and uncles, and there would be a dinner where we’d laugh a lot and be grateful to see one another despite the circumstances, and there would be a hundred random people I don’t know who would pull me aside and tell me how much she meant to them. People like her hairdresser, or some clerk at a store who saw her every week, or a neighbor from way back, or whoever. That’s how we remember people who have gone. One thing that did not stop during this endless lockdown is the growth of children. Any time people we haven’t seen for too long see our kids, their jaws drop. “Oh my gosh, they got so tall!,” they remark. I’ve felt the same way seeing other people’s kids. It’s sort of a loss, isn’t it? We’re missing out on something there. In schools and communities, we raise our kids together. For almost a year how...we haven’t. The same goes for extended family; how many of us finally get a chance to see nieces and nephews and grandchildren and...God, they got so tall. What else did I miss while that was happening? So. I tried to capture that loss and longing, and that anxious stillness, and the little needles of despair that come with being in the dead of (several types of) winter. But hey, at least you’re not alone in feeling this way, right? Does that bring you a touch of comfort and connection? I hope so. It does for me. For the music nerds
This is one of those songs that began life as a little riff—a simple two-chord progression on the piano. C to Em and back again. Nothing notable or unique. It just kind of rang right in my ears. From there I noodled around to try and find some chordal movement and harmonic structure that complemented the mood I was going for: Am, Am7, B°, back to Am7, land on Dm7. The topmost voice in the right hand climbs up while the left-hand bass walks down step-wise, creating different chord inversions along the way.
Then a pause on that Dm7 (F - A - C in the right hand with big fat octave Ds in the left), and a resolution with a transition as I hit a G in the left hand while walking down scale-wise to get back to where I started. That was the sort of harmonic thesis of the song, and I built on it from there. The tone and mood told me this was going to be morose. It was born as a winter song, and the idea of the dead of winter showed up pretty quickly. Although I wrote most of “The Dead of Winter” on piano, and always intended to use piano as the main instrument when I recorded it, I ended up doing it on the guitar kind of by accident. I wanted to experiment with some vocal ideas, and it was late at night. I can get away with playing guitar in my office without waking everyone up, but not banging on the piano in the living room. So I laid down the guitar track and did a quick scratch vocal track. Then I started playing with more vocal accompaniment—that “hah-hah-hah-hah” stuff, in two- and three-part harmony. Astute listeners will note that the “hah-hah-hah-hah” vocal bits are reminiscent of Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman.” That is because I unabashedly stole the idea directly from that song. I’ve long felt that the “hah-hah-hah-hah” perfectly illustrates the ironic combination of stillness and anxiety that comes with living in the dead of winter. Her voice in “O Superman” is gentle, almost soft, with a calm tone. Yet those pops of air are energetic (try it yourself: hah-hah-hah-hah), and their rapid, unceasing repetition creates this sort of nervous urgency. It’s at once a drone (calming) and an ostinato (agitating). And it’s exactly the effect I wanted for this song. I was happy with how the vocal harmony was working, but with that and the guitar and lead vocal tracks down, the recording was definitely missing something. It needed a lead instrument or voice. I’d had a lick in the back of my head for some time, and I tried it out on an electric guitar. It worked. Sweet. This lead lick always felt wistful to me, almost like it’s an aural nod to the thoughts of this main character in the song. And I really wanted a sound that contrasted with the rest of what I had in there. So I plugged the electric directly into my recording box (I usually record by playing the electric guitar through an amp and recording that with a mic) to get a pure and simple tone from the guitar, and then I slathered it with an obscene amount of reverb. I think the effect works: It almost doesn’t belong in the song, which was kind of the point--it’s off on its own, a sort of descant that’s lost in thought while we feel the jittery hah-hah-hah-hah of the backing vocals. So! A song for winter—this particular winter, and the other winters we’re all currently going through. Hope to see you all in a literal or figurative Kansas City soon. *This story was originally posted on Feb 7, 2021 It’s early on a Sunday morning. Bitter cold. An inch of snow so far, and more coming. I slurp down my first cup of coffee; it’s enough to get me through the task at hand. I’ll use that second cup, waiting for me in the carafe, as my motivation for slogging through the next hour or so of exhausting manual labor. I gear up: Long johns. Double gloves. Boots. A heavy sigh as I open the back door and greet the frigid morning. It’s six degrees, but there’s no Kevin Bacon. At least I have a good podcast to keep me company on this lonely labor. I grab my snow shovel, put the blade on the ground, and go. I hope I have five—maybe 10—minutes until my back is screaming for me to stop. A thousand linear feet of snow to go. ...is what would happen if I didn’t have this BIG-ASS SNOWBLOWER!! WOOOOOO VROOM VROOM!! Make no mistake: I’m still too lightly caffeinated, I’m still geared up against the cold, and Ira Glass’ weird little voice is still ringing in my ears telling me that I’m listening to This American Life, but buddy--instead of that shovel, I’m yanking the pullcord on a hog that’s as big as me. This American life now has a snowblower in it, and it’s roaring to life. I behold the glory of Snowraven, for this is the name we’ve given to this machine.* Yes, “we.” We as in the people of the neighborhood. Because we co-own it. See, this is not the run-of-the-mill story of a tool-happy Midwestern dad getting a shiny new toy to plow his li’l 10-foot driveway. No, this is the story of a community adventure and the solution to a long-time problem that has vexed it. We (as in my family and me) live on a corner lot—a big one, with a lot of sidewalk. It’s right across from the elementary school, which is quite a larger property, with even more sidewalk. And both properties are essentially atop a hill; no matter which of the four directions you approach the school from, you’re going to have to hoof it up a significant incline. And when all of that sidewalk gets piled up with snow, it’s a mess. Worse, a lot of it just doesn’t ever get cleared. Unless a little snow-shovel gnome comes and does it. (Actually, miscellaneous neighbors often will eventually just emerge from their own street and help get the school walks cleared. None of them are actual gnomes, to my knowledge.) The city is supposed to provide this snow removal as a service, but when the white stuff begins to accumulate at all, the crews become completely overwhelmed. Basically, the more snow there is, the less likely you are to get it cleared from your streets and sidewalks. (Whiiiiiich is backwards from the way it should be? Right?) And so, all of the little schoolchildren, and their parents, are always fighting snow and ice during pickup and dropoff. I was seriously considering buying a snowblower last year. But I priced them, and anything good was close to $600, and I just didn’t want to pull the trigger on something that I would use only five or six times a year. But this year, a frustrated community decided enough was enough. When I was out shoveling the most recent snow, my friend JK pulled up in her minivan and rolled down the window. “We need to get you a snowblower so you can get the school walks, too!” she yelled. We chuckled. We exchanged small talk briefly, and then as she drove off, she called out, “I’m serious about the snowblower!” She was. She put the word out on the elementary school parents’ Facebook groups. Who wants to go in on a snowblower? A bunch of families, apparently. Including one of the school’s teachers. A lot of people were excited about the prospect of having all the sidewalks around the school cleared consistently. Some were enamored of the idea of having such a powerful tool available for their own sidewalks and driveways, too. After a day or so of Facebook chatter and collecting donations, JK Venmo’d me $400. I put up some of my own cash, picked out a good machine, and now suddenly there’s a big ‘ol snowblower sitting in my carport. We named it partially after the school mascot--the raven. Hence: Snowraven. We still need to figure out some logistics, though. Who all has access to Snowraven? Can anyone on the list just...swing by and grab it? What is the optimal route? At what point do I hand it off to the next school parent to do their section of the neighborhood, and how does it find its way back to my carport, where it lives? How long will it take to blow a few thousand feet of sidewalk? Will I be able to avoid whooping loudly for joy while I plow? Well. Today was the trial run. And it was glorious. Never mind the fact that it was only an inch of snow. I still don’t want to shovel that nonsense like a caveperson! It took me just a couple of minutes to get the hang of the controls, and off I went. I had mapped out the perfect path. I was thwarted only because someone had already done most of the school sidewalks, leaving the surrounding neighborhood walks to me. No matter. I exited my driveway and turned south, then west to the edge of the school property, then across the street, then east, then...you know what, that part is exciting only to me, forget it. Okay but I’m kind of proud of it, here’s a map: Just kidding. For real, here’s a map: Initial results of the trial run? Superb. Thanks, neighborhood. It’s fun to all be on the same team. I can’t wait to not destroy my back for the next 40 years.
Long live Snowraven! Caw, caw! *OH MY GOD, wait wait wait, should we call it “Snowpiercer”? Just thought of that. Some kids and their parents ruminate on the impending return to in-person school as COVID-19 rages on
*This story was originally posted on Jan 21, 2021
The 2020-2021 school year has been...challenging...for parents, teachers, and students. In our district, the kids were supposed to start the year in person. Then...they didn’t.
So we unexpectedly had virtual school for a few months, and then they actually went back in-person (with a sort-of hybrid thing where for some reason they were home on Wednesdays) for a few weeks, and then the number of COVID-19 cases in the county got too high, so they went back to virtual schooling. And then the holidays came and went. At the start of the new semester, school has been virtual for a couple of weeks, but now we’re going back to in-person school. Sort of. Again, it’s the weird Wednesday hybrid thing. As anyone connected to schools in any way knows, this is incredibly disruptive to families, to learning, etc. I can’t imagine how difficult this has been for teachers who have to keep reinventing the wheel on the fly. (This year, alllll teachers get Teacher of the Year, amiright?) But what’s especially odd about the kids going back--again!--to in-person school is that the number of COVID-19 cases in the county is higher now than it was when they reverted back to virtual school in the first place. Which doesn’t seem particularly safe? The kids are dying to get back to school and see their teachers and friends, and we parents really want them out of the house. But...COVID-19, you know? So...people are having many conflicted Thoughts and Feelings around all of this. To get more perspective, we talked to our kids about how they’re feeling and what they’re thinking about before they go back to school...in person...again.
Note: Essie created all of the music in that podcast episode. Seriously! Here she is concocting her creations.
The “redneck hippie” is a real guy who is awesome.
“Killing Machine” is one of those songs that I finished writing many years ago but just never got around to recording. Now that I finally have, the result is a weird sonic gumbo, at least to me, which matches the odd nature of the lyrics.
When I first wrote it, back in late high school I think, I was fully immersed in learning to play jazz guitar. I wasn’t half bad at comping chords and improvising solos, especially for a kid. But I also never stopped writing songs, so my rock and folk songwriting sensibilities merged with my flowering love of jazz. Around that time, I felt like I had become a good guitar player. Like, objectively good. Not exactly pro-level, but better than most of the adults I knew, and definitely skilled enough to stand out among my peers and get invited (by a friend’s dad, so a little nepotistic) to sit in with a college jazz band during rehearsals. I didn’t feel good about much back then. I hated school, I’d been depressed for years, and I’d long been having friend troubles that…hurt. I’d been lonely and frustrated a lot. And of course there’s all that general adolescent insecurity that piles on top of sensitive kids who are already struggling with mental health and emotional issues. And so, knowing—or at least feeling—that me & my guitar were unimpeachably good, and I felt good when I was playing and writing, was life-giving. That’s what inspired me to write the song, I think. I’ve always loved the metaphor of a guitar as a weapon—a notion I first encountered via that iconic image of Woody Guthrie’s guitar. His flat top acoustic was covered in the words: “This machine kills fascists.” So many of our wounds are self-inflicted, you know? Here’s the story of the worst travel day of my life.My family spent six weeks in Italy. Glorious! Also difficult at times! While my wife Colleen was off teaching for a few days, I took myself, our two kids, my parents, and our nephew on a side trip adventure to Naples (Napoli). This is the true story (no, seriously, 100% true) of one very, very, very long day of misadventures. The first mistakeReally, it all started back when my parents were getting themselves out to Italy to meet us, and in the chaotic parts of all that, we neglected to schedule and book our side trip to Naples, Pompeii, and Campobasso. So there I was, the day I was supposed to take the kids by myself to meet the parents and my nephew in Rome, frantically booking rooms and rental cars and bus tickets.
Those of you who are experienced travelers are screaming at your screen, “You fool! Never plan an ad hoc trip, are you mad?!”, to which I reply, also screaming, “I KNOW THAT *NOW*, PAIN IS HOW YOU LEARN THINGS.” So I book all the things, Colleen prints the bus tickets for me, and we get the kids and me packed and out the door and onto the bus from Siena to Rome. I relax, a little. We did it. Fast forward to the following evening. The parents, the nephew, the kids, and I have done a day in Naples. Naples is like Rome if Rome had a debilitating drug habit and chose to constantly defecate on itself and had no laws governing the roads. But we got around, despite a decent amount of stress on my part as I dragged the crew hither and yon, plotting a course to the various things and trying to keep tired kids happy. Now the kids are in bed, and we are packed and ready for the next day. I set my alarm so I have time to get up, walk to the rental car place, drive the car back to our flat, throw the bags in it for our jaunt to Vesuvio then Pompeii then Campobasso, and clear out of the flat by 11am. I have...a feeling. You know what I mean. But I’ve booked everything already, so I’m good y’know? I mean, right? Adventure Hat is a lot of things. Mainly, it’s an ethos: Just as art is anything in a frame, an adventure is any experience in a frame.
It’s a state of mind. Are you looking for adventure? Did you...bring appropriate head gear? (If the head gear is not especially functional, is it at least gloriously fun? Like this college girl I saw one time in an airport who was clearly on the way to spring break? And was sporting the biggest floppy hat I’ve ever seen, and we all respected her commitment to wearing and/or transporting this giant hat across two flights?) Practically speaking, Adventure Hat is a multimedia storytelling, information, and entertainment outlet—writings, music, photos, videos, podcasts, interviews, drawings, anything. It’s an excuse for me (Seth) to combine alllll the creative content I make into one Thing. What you’ll consume on Adventure Hat is mainly my stuff, but children and/or friends may participate as well. Think of it like a loot crate of media and topics and content. You never really know what you might get when you open a given newsletter email. (Do subscribe, if you would.) But hopefully it will make you happier or more informed or more adventurous than you were before you consumed it. You’ll just have to stay open-minded and curious, ready for anything. And that is what we mean by Adventure Hat. And why it’s important to always wear one. Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update. |
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May 2022
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