25/52 - (That's a Palindrome)

Dear Internauts,

After last week, I thought maybe we'd go a little more chill and upbeat this time.

I'm playing a show!

Or rather, I will be playing a show if I'm able to sell at least fifteen tickets to the event. SO I need your help. Now, this isn't just some sales pitch for something empty which only helps me. You get to come hear me play a live set as well as four other local artists. Even if there weren't any other acts, it would still be worth it, because you're gonna get to see me playing my heart out with songs from deep down in my gut (even deeper down, way deeper down, than this blog goes). This is the real real. And it's live music. After all, this is what I do, right?

I can write and practice all these songs by myself or record with a few friends, but the proof is in the pudding and the live stage is a giant pudding cup.

The show is a 21+ event at the Thunder Road Music Club in Somerville, MA on July 20th. Doors at 6pm. Show at 7pm.

Tickets are fifteen at the door or you can get them now for only 12.99 (that includes processing fee. Just make sure to select Odist Abettor for the artist so they know what's up.

If you're not available on that night or not in the area, thanks for reading down this far. Hopefully, the more I can do shows like this, the more opportunities I'll be able to travel out farther for concert gigs. Please, if you know anyone in the Mass area who might even in the slightest like to go, let them know about it. I supremely appreciate it.

If you've never heard any of my music, well 1) thanks for reading my weird blog posts anyway, and 2) you can listen to my recorded music here and watch some videos with my music here and even follow my band page here

-------------------
With that out of the way, tell me, how ya doin?

Me, I'm exhausted. Been pretty much just exhausted for a while now. I'm sure some of this is due to lack of sleep from stress, but there's also some good stuff like being about two thirds of the way through the first draft of issue one of my comics story. If anyone out there would like to help me out as a beta reader for critique and insights, feel free to message me or email me or comment or whatever.

Tomorrow I'm meeting with some folks with whom I might be living soon. This will be my third such meeting, wherein the scrutiny of others determines my residency status. It's like the most cautious and dangerous job interview that mostly takes place safely on couches. I just have to be sincere yet charming. Interesting yet balanced. Responsible but not snobby. Frank but not insensitive.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Either way, less than five days till I'm outta here.

About to fall asleep on this keyboard, so...

Thanks for reading,
Odist

24/52 - Politics and Religion (From Your Friend, the Vagabond)

"If I play you a piece of music, that's when you can truly look inside me." 

- Hans Zimmer

Dear Internauts,

Been told I gotta be outta here by the end of the month.

I suppose it's meant to serve as some kinda incentive, but incentive to do what exactly? I would imagine it's to do something I haven't been doing. What haven't I been doing? Well, instead of looking for a job so I can afford to move, I'm now looking for somewhere to move while looking for a job so I can afford to move there.

Of course, the verb "looking" is more than a little skewed.

Let's be real, I can look for and find almost anything these days. That's not the issue. I send you this message on the technological equivalent of a magical bulletin board extending near-infinitely out in every direction. I suppose that in the scope of the infinite, the idea of nearness and far-ness both fade to blankness like a face carved in wood then sanded to obscurity. That is my point about the job market, but it's also my point about identity, politics, and art.

The ability to find a face in the wood is seen as useless to those who define human worth by their ability to rub sandpaper up and down at economically advantageous speeds. To them it's only a matter of getting your hand on the paper and nudging your way into a spot by the timber with a firm handshake and a go-getter attitude.

How many assembly lines does it take to make a worker?

Then again, any philosophy founded on the premise that people have a need to sustain society instead of the other way around is inherently futile as a means to sustain society.

I'm stuck wondering whether I'm ever too political or too personal or too nebulously disconnected in these posts, but that's really a question of whether honest expression is the light, the subject, the reflection, or the shadow of its context.

What is it they say about never bringing up politics and religion in polite company?

Well, I'm not feeling so polite, so let's get political.

I think it's hypocritical and disgusting that we are asked to see the shooting of a member of the government as the somber and tragic victimization of a respectable figure of class while considering our national heroes to be those who continuously and without remorse or recourse kill hundreds of thousands of people who belong to ethnic, national, religious, and/or economic groups against which we are daily propagandized.

Either every act of violence is a tragedy committed against the very heart of our existence OR the specific contents of one's wallet offer the greatest value judgement on the severity of a crime.

People of color are more likely to be shot by police not because they are more likely to be criminals but because they are more likely to be stopped by police due to implicit racial bias. Every single time a person of color is killed by a police officer and the officer is cleared of all charges, it confirms that the legal system parading as shield is actually a knife in the back of liberty. So long as those who are sworn to protect and serve even carry lethal weapons, they stand as a symbol first of death (and obviously at very least of gross misconduct and grosser incompetence).

You wanna talk about some amendment rights which say you can carry death on your hip and support a corporation which runs a huge section of the government via bankroll? At what point does your protection against a tyrannical government require you to actually stand up and do something about it? Because they have all your communications, all your private information, all your transportation, all the biggest toys, and you're wrapped around their finger when it comes to symbols and buzzwords of fear and patriotism. But hey, if you want you can go shoot up a damn ball field. Let's see how much good you do to get your message across when all it does is lead to more empty rhetoric about standing together. Nothing changes in this tyrannical government when schools are razed or millions march. You can't even vote in an election in a country that gets a buzz from the mere whisper of the word democracy, because the electoral college means your vote doesn't mean diddly.

You wanna change something? Let me tell you how it works. You go and stick a gun in someone's face if you think that's the only option and I'll tell you exactly what you'll change.

It was a long, silver revolver like I'd only seen in the movies. So big and polished I was sure it had to be a toy till the barrel made my eyes cross. Everything else in the whole world slipped out of focus except for the roar of his voice and the yellow gleam on that long tube like the sun right before you drive into a midnight black tunnel. Orders like the glare of tanker truck brights smacked my temples as my hands moved to get my wallet, then empty the cash drawer, then lie down on the ground. Don't move or I'll kill you. 

A month later I'd sit with a blood-drenched young woman who'd been beaten to near death by some drunk dates. My head hurts.

Over the next five years I've come to be very well acquainted with the terms Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. While every act of scandalous violence that makes the news is either justified under the law, an act of terrorism, or the result of mental illness, none of those things is ever actually true. We could argue for a long time about the semantics of that, but I only have my experience and biases and look at that so do you.

What I do know for certain is that I had mental illness in my life for at least a decade before anyone put a gun in my face. The biggest cause and trigger for this neurological disorder is a piece of advice I'd received my whole life and have continued to receive from the well meaning but blatantly deluded and unsympathetic.

Any time you see someone in pain or going through hard times and tell them the solution to all their problems is that they've just gotta "have more faith", you're being coldhearted and abusive. It could be a form of gaslighting, or at very least boils down to simply saying, "you're not wishing hard enough." For anyone with as much religious fervor as I fanaticized toward for all my childhood and adolescence the message was clearly, "you're not trying hard enough."

I followed everything I ever was taught would lead me to God's will and whenever I thought I had a hint of the scent of the Christian/moral/right way to go I dove after it, no matter the personal pain or the confusion or any mockery. I would do whatever I was asked by those I looked to for guidance because they were people of God. They were that divine voice in my life, and any task they told me to do I would do. If I made them proud, that meant I made God proud. If I did right by them, that meant I was right in the eyes of the Lord. That meant I was a good person. That meant that I wasn't nearly as broken, lost, and confused as I constantly felt underneath it all.

Now, you may have your own relationship with faith that looks and feels nothing like this. I sure hope if you do it is nothing like this. For me, though, it took way too long for me to realize that I was never gonna be good enough for God. I was, after all never good enough for the mentors, leaders, pastors, adults, and older kids I looked up to. Nothing I did was ever good enough. And nothing I did would ever be good enough...so long as they still needed someone as willing and dedicated as I was for their new ministry. All the hard work and leadership and passion was praised because it meant I worked for them and helped them lead and gave legitimacy to their efforts with my emotional, mental, and physical adoration and obedience. Any time they needed something from me I wasn't willing or able enough to provide, it wasn't just a slight against them—it was a slip down into sin against God.

That's called abuse. That's called brainwashing a child and abusing him for decades. I sure hope that's not your experience, but that was mine.

When my questions and my depression and my inability to live up to an ever climbing, unreachable set of standards all got to be too much, that's when all those mentors and friends and "church family" vanished. Some just cut off all ties. Some first made sure I knew how much they despised me and how much I should despise myself. Some tried to pretend like nothing changed, playing like they could be cool with me and cool with those telling me to go kill myself.

I wanted so much to hold onto the culture and family I'd know my whole life that I stuck around through it all as hard as I could for as long as I could.

About a week and a half after I left the hotel job—still very much in shock, neither sleeping or much leaving the house down in Nashville—I got a call from one such church family member. This was the guy I'd wanted to be since I was a toddler. I looked up to him (i'm now ashamed to say) sometimes even more than I did my own father. He'd noticeably dropped all contact the moment I wasn't in the same state, picking up like he hadn't been screening my calls and emails for the traditional hugs all around the few times a year we'd see eachother. I hadn't heard from him since college, and he was one of the last I expected to call. In some ways, I thought in that moment he was who I needed to hear from the most.

After a brief exchange, he asked me to explain what was going on. I did my best in the haze of crazy I boiled in at the time to do so. Like with my boss when I'd tried to explain how if I hadn't helped the lady would have literally died, I really thought if I was clear enough in my emotions and explanation, this old shepherd of mine would see exactly how his sheep was wounded and know just how to help.

To his credit, I guess, he was consistent. Had this been the me of 6 or 16 then maybe his would have been just the healing rain my dried up psyche needed. Instead, he just said what he always did. He said what he'd said so many times to me, and for the first time in my life, his voice and that script did not ring with the power to which I'd been so accustomed. The love I so needed to hear had vanished from his speech like the flavor in a cheap diet drink though the packaging look so much the same.

"You just gotta have more faith. Be like Job. Or Abraham. Or Paul. Or James. If you just have more faith, then God will get you through this."

There's the rub. If only I had what I didn't. If only I could do what I couldn't. Then the God of everything who could do anything would finally deem me worthy of some time.

I couldn't hear love in his voice. Believe me, I searched for it even harder than I'd searched for some kinda sign of escape from that silver revolver. I could, however, hear the self-congratulatory condescension. He'd just thrown it back up over his shoulder and walked away, winking at me as if to say that's how it's done. Instead of nothing but net it was a wide air-ball. (But being as the ball is imaginary, I guess it was all subjective.)

So there's some politics and some religion.

My politics is that I can't tell you how to live your life, but if I feel up to it, maybe the world might be a better place if you and I worked together on it.

My religion is that it's wack to worship the powerful in a universe so intent on wiping out anyone without an edge. It's the weak who deserve praise. Let's build a temple to the pathetic. We're more forgiving and will understand when resources are diverted for something else. We're used to it.

Don't let this blog fool ya into thinking there aren't those who love me. I was raised in a denomination that officially considers me and anyone else a bit too deviant to be an abomination, but I was also raised by two loving parents who believe in me and only brought me to church because it meant something better for them than it did for me. I hope they know that my disappointment in the institution is not a reflection on them, both of whom I've enormously proud. We don't agree on some things, but that's actually for the best. I love them and they love me, and as I get older I've learned to see that quality beats quantity when it comes to those you keep close.

In that sense I say to anyone who may be worried about the world outside the culture you've known. From someone who often isn't sure—especially at this moment—if there is any kinda future ahead, please know that the possibilities for a new life are always unexpected and the risk is worth the jump. No use wasting your life being anyone else's punching bag or scape goat.

And finally, wherever I end up going in the next few weeks, know that I'm gonna be right here in this third space where we meet. I'll be making music and comics and questions. I'll be "thinking too much" in the words of those who'd rather I just not. I hope that in some way me being so open and obnoxious with my brain rumblings could maybe let you know it's okay to be YOU too.

Thanks for reading,
Odist

23/52 - Easy Street Still Needs a Street Sweeper (Paved with Gold and Tagged in Green)

"Hard knuckles on the second hands of working class watches
Skyscrapers is colossus, the cost of living is preposterous
Stay alive, you play or die, no options
No Batman and Robin
Can't tell between the cops and the robbers
They both partners, they all heartless with no conscience
Back streets stay darkened
Where unbeliever hearts stay hardened
My eagle talons stay sharpened, like city lights stay throbbing
You either make a way or stay sobbin'"

-Mos Def (Respiration by Black Star) 

Dear Internauts,

I've been here long enough to wonder why or at very least long enough to eat some local Chinese take-out. Not much for fate or fortunes, but my latest cookie dropped this bit of vagueness, "A new venture will be a success."

That's right, folks; week twenty-three and I've already resorted to fortune cookies for thematic decision-making.

Did you know that success used to describe any outcome, good or ill? While I could perspire over the linguistic/anthropological reasons for why it may have changed to specify the positive (or y'know just look it up), I'd put my chips on the existential sense of wholeness. A venture often doesn't feel complete unless it's completed in the way we'd wish. We've come to expect happy endings in our media and often in our lives as well.

Nothing ever really ends, though, does it? Or is that just me being optimistic?

Whether or not my success is successful of course depends on my goals and aims. It's possible and in fact likely that what I wish and hope for—no matter how clearly I may delineate its terms—will be perceived as inadequate by those with even a slight variance in values.

Success for me may look like loss to you. Success for you may look trivial or irrelevant to others.

Plus, there's the ambiguity of when exactly to take stock of our lives. Sure, it's easy enough to look back at the lives of the dead and subjectively objectify, but I'd guess that most folks reading this now aren't already dead (at least on the outside). While there's still time to make a move or two, is it really fair or even useful to judge a person's existence as a state of success or failure?

I generally suck at math, but I'd guess the likelihood of the exact outcome I hope for every time I make a choice is bound to be in an extreme minority to the possibilities of anything else happening. That makes me wonder if we place higher value on rare success. The greater the unlikelihood of something awesome happening, the better it feels when it happens. I think this is true often enough to make us miss the times when we can be proud of our more ordinary successes.

What we really mean by SUCCESS is a happily ever after, though, isn't it? This state of future settled bliss where the ordinary would appear extraordinary to our present selves.

For some that's a happy home of familial and material wealth. Not necessarily excessive but with more than enough to pay the bills and provide a safe, comfortable environment for the last forty to fifty years of your own life and at least the first eighteen of your hypothetical kids. More love than debt and enough time for friends and hobbies while still working enough to feel like a productive member of society. 

For others, having a clean well less than two miles away, a chicken in the yard, and a healthy minimum of parasitic worms is the height of luxury.

For me, I'd take somewhere to sleep and enough to eat so long as I can spend my time making art. It's not some kinda ascetic aesthetic I'm after or a holier-than-thou minimalism. Really, it's just a longing not to be messed with. The objects I cherish the most are the things I make and the tools I use to make them. I have nothing against this standard of working hard to have a comfortable house and family and salary and all that, but I've all too often been in a position where my inability to really grasp that desire means I'm seen as useless or lazy.

Yeah, I know I shouldn't care so much about what other people think of me, but other people are kinda terrifying. Unlike in high school when I worried if people didn't like my clothes or my hair or my sense of humor, now I'm mostly just worried that the person in front of me in line is gonna pull out a knife or try to strangle me.

The thing about paranoia is it's a lot like racism—it only takes one act of violence to make an entire group look bad in the eyes of the close-minded.

Success, therefore, isn't just a matter of place and possessions but a state of mind. Wouldn't it be nice to have what I want, to live where I want, to be free to do what I want? Wouldn't it be even nicer to be able to think about myself and the world the way I want?

My success won't look like yours. Nor will yours likely look anything like mine. Our goals are different, after all.

If I get a strike but it's in someone else's lane, I don't get to call it a successful bowl. I can try, though, and—to stretch this metaphor out a few frames—I'd say many of us do. It's like buying a car based on city mileage then taking it off-roading. It's like being an expert in arachnology called in to consult on peach farming because fuzzy.

It's like using the priorities and historical context of one generation to make general statements about what a separate generation should be thinking and doing, based solely on what life was like back when you were that age. Sure, I can relate to some of what Nick Carraway is feeling setting out on his own in a new town with new friends, but even an Old Sport like me might have some trouble using The Great Gatsby to find my way around Long Island.

The sleepless dream a lot while the dreamless sleep so silent.

Who knows where I'll be this time next week or the next, but if I decide it's any of your gosh darn bidness, you can be sure it'll be found right here.

Thanks for reading,
Odist

p.s. - Just heard the newest mix of my new single, Painkiller, to come out this summer. Been a long and windy road, but this is still about the music, ain't it?

22/52 - Personal Responsibility in the Age of Upvotes

"If it's me against me, one of us ain't gonna survive."

-Lupe Fiasco 

Dear Internauts,

Does it count as hypocritical if the double standard is just on two different parts of myself?

This is what wikiquote had to say when I googled "personal responsibility" (because that's the level of research quality you've come to know and expect from this blogger):

Personal responsibility or Individual Responsibility is the idea that human beings choose, instigate, or otherwise cause their own actions. A corollary idea is that because we cause our actions, we can be held morally accountable or legally liable.

Okay, so free will is a thing, right? Or at least if it's not, it doesn't much matter, 'cause I'll act like it is anyway. I choose to believe I have a choice.

When I take responsibility for my actions, the one to whom I'm ultimately responsible is myself. 

Unlike everything I thought would be most different about adulthood, the one thing I didn't expect was how much no one really cares what I do or say or think about anything. Even in this bright new age of share culture, the amount of content I produce is filtered not for quality so much as for the time and attention span of discerning, respectable, and ridiculously attractive folk like yourself, dear reader. There's just so much out here. 

(I don't know about you, but I'm dying of thirst in the midst of floodwaters. I'll take anything from political flame wars to disaster porn to the most spoilerific plot speculation so long as you can compress that chunk of funk into a bite-size ember of empty brain calories.)

While I'd maybe prefer to think of myself as someone who lives up to my ideals, I'm more someone whose ideals stand back and not-so-quietly critique my living. My understanding of Kant is based on vague memories of readings I skimmed and classes I dosed through back in at most recent 2011. Even so, the whole categorical imperative thing made me kinda nauseous back then. Still does. If there are ways in which people should act in all circumstances, even in the most broad and reason-based sense, there's a problem that arises from our individuality. My reasoning is rarely up to the kind of snuff any sensible person might chew, yet I feel an intense sense of obligation that connects my emotions and my favorite catchy tunes of basic morality. 

When I'm not too busy beating myself up or eating my emotions to care, I have this personality-sized tumor of a jones for a hero complex. I carry my perspective about the goings-on in the world in a backpack to take out and shuffle when I hear the headlines on NPR. Instead of crashing into the day senses first, I experience tunnel vision from my own Cask of Amontillado-esque corner of the baggage department. 

And yes, it not only stems but overflows from my religious upbringing. 

I sure as hell hope this isn't the human condition, but my condition (one of many) is a sense that my motivation through ever role I've ever played has been I don't have a choice in the matter. I have to act this way, have to feel this way, have to say this thing or not say anything. It's claustrophobic, but it's also unexpectedly malleable. 

'Cause folks, listen up—the thing about feeling like I "ought" to be a certain kind of person is how often the only aspect of that person I've been 100% sure of was how NOT that person I am. This pursuit of a moral standard based around an avatar of righteousness is necessarily nebulous. The opposing force is presented as legalism so as to give the appearance of compassion.

It's not that hard to seem merciful with the blade when you're the executioner. Plus, sometimes the only difference between symptoms and side-effects can be the price tag. 

I continue to see myself as less of a person when looking through a lens handed to me by those no longer in my life. That's an infection. That's a contagion. That's a complex of inadequacy that has less and less to do with reality the less and less I buy into the moral framework upon which it's built. 

If I am the arbiter of my actions, then I also must be the framer of my motivations. I don't mean must as in should or ought to. I mean that the posturing or gesturing of social behavior is self-destructive. The very act of interaction is self-destructive unless motivation matches up with intention. (Actual action is important, but not as important as intention.) 

In a broad sense this is why laws will never be enough to shape the morals of a society. If the only reason I do or don't do something is from fear of punishment—be that humiliation, incarceration, or damnation—than all it takes is a might of desire and a mite of opportunity to beat that fear down to not-my-problem. If only beating my fear of standing up to someone spouting hate was as easy as beating my fear of reprisal for spouting hate. Either way, though, that's still placing responsibility for my actions on the shoulders of others. 

I like to think that I didn't come into the world owing anyone anything. That is by no means the same as saying I think I got anywhere by my own strength alone. Societal causality exists, despite what you may have heard from those who can actually afford to put their money where their foot is. I know that I have opportunities, privileges, securities, and much MUCH more that I wouldn't have if I'd been born any different. Sacrifices are made to this day by folks who care enough about me to help my clumsy self out of every pitfall. And I'm grateful to those people. And my gratitude goes to those people. 

There is no cosmic karmic scale by which we are constantly found wanting. You can't have an all powerful force that you thank for all the good in your life without having to do something with all the bad. Whatever your personal coping mechanism is, I won't fault you or attack you. That's your business and I'm just glad you found a way to cope. However, whatever we say our moral philosophy is, the day-to-day necessities of life requires us to have a practical responsibility to ourselves. That is to say you don't owe anyone your self-loathing. 

You don't owe anyone your feeling of worthlessness because you don't measure up to someone else's manipulative standard of perfect behavior. 

Yes, this is as much a personal ideological choice to believe in a subjective reality as any kind of faith you'll find. I get that. There are a great many folks who find more validation in believing that a moral compass exists and should be adhered to from outside of the adherent, often without question. If a morality stems from a force of ultimate good, then it too must be good. 

I think history has enough examples of why the individual is still the one who makes the choice of execution when it comes to following whatever code. It's not just a matter of picking and choosing or even academic interpretation. You and I get to decide for ourselves what it means to be good or bad and why that matters to us as individuals unto ourselves and as members of whatever communities we inhabit. Some communities you don't get to choose to be a part of, but you do get to choose how you're a part of them. 

If the individuals in a group don't want that group to function a certain way, continuing to function that way out of loyalty to a code separate from the will of the individuals is not only asinine but also a quick path to the end of that group. Whether it be the electoral college versus the popular vote or some executive federal decision versus that of local governments or the personal moral conviction of one friend/family member versus the traditions/customs of the others. 

Amazing things can be accomplished when we work together, but that "we" includes every single individual. We can change. We can influence and be influenced. We can share and think and be uncertain. That's great! 

Be uncertain. 

But be certain, too. 

And that's enough of me telling you what to do. I just think I've acted enough out of a position of my uncertainty in the face of other people's certainty. When it comes to my life and my standards, though, I have an "at the end of the day" kinda philosophy. 

I'll have to face myself. So what's the point in hating myself?  

Thanks for reading, 

Odist