#BrainDump

Ok. It’s been about a week. The long and the short of it? I don’t really feel anything. What does that mean exactly? I have no idea. I thought for sure I’d have a mental breakdown by now. I even shuffled around my calendar to allow time for it to happen. Maybe a decade plus of dealing with my many particular idiosyncrasies (addictions and disorders) have finally landed me in that constant zen-like state I so desperately craved. Or maybe I’m in serious denial. Or maybe this is a perfectly acceptable way to feel: Not feeling. I don’t know.

I used to joke with Josh all the time that I could take or leave the band. I was very “whatever” about it. Perhaps the word is: Flippant. It would enrage him. Makes sense seeing as he was the guy who did literally all of the behind the scenes work for the band, in addition to being one hell of a writer. If I remember correctly (and don’t believe a word of anything I try to recall from memory) this mentality continued through at least the first two MCS records, if not the third. Somewhere around 2010 I finally started to refer to myself as a Musician on those entrance and exit cards while traveling abroad, instead of: “Failed Filmmaker.”

I love writing songs. Even more than that I love telling stories. Even more than that I love having an idea, discovering where it starts and ends, and then figuring out how to string it all together. Often times the story shifts on you and refuses to go where you want it to. That’s when you really have to get creative. But it all takes time. Time alone. Alone in a room. A place of your design. Alone with your thoughts and anti-thoughts. Alone in silence and song. It’s almost meditative for me. I listen to the same parts of the demo over and over and over… And I just throw shit at the wall until something sticks (figuratively). But I love this time alone, being frustrated and unable to figure it out… Until eventually I do.

Apologies if this is fragmented. My mind feels fragmented. I feel at any given minute I might explode into a million little pieces. But I know that’s not going to happen. I think it is just me being aware of my anxieties and acknowledging them and then quickly moving on.

What is the point of this? I am not absolutely certain. But I think it starts with me vomiting out all my current thoughts and not-thoughts for any of you who dig reading the thoughts or not-thoughts of someone like me. I’m trying to get better at spontaneity and imperfection. So I’m not going to rewrite this. I’m just going to let it all spill out.

Performing on stage has never been a fully enjoyable experience for me. I’m too in my head to enjoy it like most people claim to. I never seem to have enough of a voice to sing the way I wish I could, and I cannot seem to remember guitar parts or words to my own songs if I go more than a week without playing them. I’m constantly shifting the way I do things while I’m doing them, based on what just happened or didn’t just happen on the last verse, chorus, song, etc… I really wish I could just play and sing without having to do crazy math equations in my head, and just look into the audience and make connections with people in the moment. But instead I am made up of equal parts fear and anxiety, masquerading as someone who is 100% chill and appears to have it totally together.

As I reread everything I’ve just written, I think to myself, “this guys sucks.” I don’t mean to come off as an ungrateful prick who is complaining about getting to play music for nearly 15 years FOR A LIVING. I mean just the opposite of that. And I’ll try to get to it now.

It’s no secret I don’t have the greatest image of myself (I mean, jesus, just listen to the words of any of our songs.) And I have no idea why that is. My parents were wonderful. I had a great childhood. High school both sucked and didn’t suck, but for the most part I have NOTHING to complain about. Yet, somehow I felt broken. And for a while that really messed me up. I thought there was something wrong with me and it sort of fed into this cycle of self-defeating behavior. Alcohol seemed to work for a while. It worked through the writing of the first album for sure. I continued to struggle with both alcohol and myself for two to three more records.

Eventually I accepted EVERYTHING sometime around 2011. Things were very dark though. I was obsessed with death and felt like I wasn’t in my body. That probably sounds weird. What I mean is, I felt as though I were floating through life, almost watching my life through my eyes as though it were someone else’s, like a film or something. Also, it felt like the colors of the world were brighter and each breath I took contained more oxygen than normal. It’s hard to explain… And now I kind of wished I hadn’t tried to. I sound like a lunatic.

It wasn’t until we started writing and recording Panic Stations that I finally found I could revisit old feelings and scenes from my life without being too affected by them. I had been working at this thing (Sobriety, Living in the moment, Self-love, Not being an asshole, etc…) for years and it was finally paying off. I had become an almost complete person. Hell, ten years ago I was playing a show in Scotland and messed up and started crying on stage. CRYING. In the middle of the set. The last few years I started screwing up left and right and was able to finally shake it off and start over (mentally) from whatever moment the screw up occurred.

I know this kind of contradicts something I wrote a few paragraphs back, but it doesn’t. Trust me. I’m about to get to the good stuff. And perhaps the point of all this.

I am most comfortable when I am alone, or with my family; my wife, my kid, my siblings, my parents, or one or two friends at a time MAXIMUM. Taken out of that, I find it hard to be completely authentic. I get too worried, anxious, nervous, fearful, etc… I know that I can play guitar. I know that I can sing. I know that I can hold a conversation. I just wish I were better at all of the above than I actually am. And that’s its own sad kind of constant.

A few years ago I started paying attention to the internet. Twitter, Facebook, emails, etc… I started reading and responding to messages form people who dug the music I was making. It was LIFE CHANGING. Aside from finally being able to communicate with others and hear their stories (post shows I would always be silent in order to preserve the voice I was constantly losing), I was actually learning a lot about myself through their interpretations of my music. Does that make any sense?

It had never occurred to me that I might be bipolar or have panic attacks. I thought several days literally laying on the floor unable to move after several days of incredible creative outbursts was just normal. Or that it was a fear of heights that caused my heart to palpitate and my hands to sweat before every flight, and that several glasses of scotch was the only cure.

I have not been diagnosed with anything by any doctors, and by the time I started reading these messages I had already worked through most of my issues by sheer force of will. Which either means I am a fucking superhero, or my problems were not that big to begin with. Or perhaps, and more likely, things fell somewhere between these two extremes.

More than anything, the last few years have been full of wonderful correspondences with incredible humans all over the world. I’ve read stories about the fucked up things that have happened to you, listened to your bands, declined your wedding invites, recorded awkward messages for your sisters and brothers, given terrible advice, given not-so-terrible advice, advised you not to listen to just one person’s advice (which in itself is one wicked conundrum), but most of all I’ve healed a part of me I forgot was broken.

Being alone all the time is great, but it is important to come up for air every now and again. And I’m not advocating that you need to go outside and run around. Hell no. The sun is for suckers. I’m just saying that it’s good for the soul to just listen to people. Let them tell you about themselves. Let them ask you questions. Let yourself respond to them as honestly as you can in the moment. Be there for a complete stranger.

You’ll have no idea how much our conversations have meant to me over the years. I hope that they don’t stop coming. I apologize for the drought in responses in both actual mail and electronic mail. I aim to start responding to all later this week. You see, I was anticipating a mental breakdown…

Which brings me back to Doe. A deer? A female deer.

The truth is, I’ve been bursting into tears spontaneously out of nowhere. No reason. And no feelings attached to it that I’m aware of. I’ll be mowing the lawn or seal-coating the driveway or emptying out the dishwasher and suddenly I’ll just start crying. IT’S FUCKING WEIRD. I’m comfortable enough with myself to just let it happen, but I am bummed that I don’t have any feelings associated with it. Any psychiatrists out there? Just kidding (but not really).

Did I mention I somehow graduated from high school without ever having learned how to write a proper paper? Can I file this post under poetry? Or claim artistic license or shenanigans? How exactly does shenanigans work? (Rhetorical).

My best attempt at psychoanalysis is this:

I’ve created unattainable goals for myself as a performer and a human which, without fail, I always fall short of. This allows me to focus on my shortcomings (and how to overcome them) rather than dealing with having any real feelings about things, one way or the other.

Maybe now the non-feeling feelings are all coming up. After a lifetime of muscling my way through things, now not having things to muscle through, I’m left to deal with the feelings I’ve refused to have to begin with.

Or maybe it’s more simple than that.

Maybe I’m strangely mourning the loss of identity. For what feels like my entire life I’ve been identified one way, as “that guy with the hair who…” And now that’s gone and I need to find a new identity. But it’s not really gone. And I don’t care to find a new identity. I’m totally fine being known as “that guy with the hair who…”

But things are different now. And the weight of that is everywhere.

In summation, I just want to thank you for digging the tunes that we made, and for coming out to shows, and for sharing your stories with me. Despite all of my overthinkingness, I have had an incredible ride. You have helped define me as a human on planet earth and I will be forever grateful for that.

Hopefully I will see you again someday, further down the river, and we can exchange tales of this and that, and learn a little something new about ourselves in the process.

Much love.

-Justin.

current mood: that picture of Rami Malek holding two pens at an autograph signing and looking overwhelmed. you know the one i mean

This Lady is a Loud, Angry Idiot

I first became aware of this piss-angry Tomi Lahren person after a piss-angry video of hers about Colin Kaepernick went piss-angry viral. Apparently she’s a 24-year-old conservative from a military family in South Dakota. And her obviously-parroted ‘get off my lawn’ rants about black people have kind of made her the cutie-pie Millennial darling of the growing white bereavement movement sweeping the non-woke corners of the country. She’s like a newer, shinier (and completely humorless) version of Ann Coulter, without all the Ivy League education or life experiences. 

So let’s go through this video and take a look at some of her finer points.

1. Tomi’s first item of business is that she supports Kaepernick’s First Amendment rights and adds, “Go for it, bud.”

By the way, Tomi really likes saying ‘bud’. It’s like her only real attempt at humor because we know it’s supposed to be taken as sarcastic and avuncular. Anyway, I thought it would have been great if the video ended right there. Just, “Go for it, bud,” and then CREDITS. Because that’s how it should have ended. Actually someone should edit a version where they cut out the rest of this shit and just have a shouty blonde lady wholeheartedly agreeing with Kaepernick’s right to a peaceful protest.     

2. I’m not counting the “black America, white America, brown America or purple America, for that matter” as an attempt at a joke. That line is so moth-eaten and lame that it makes my balls hurt. I’ll give Tomi the benefit of the doubt that she writes this stuff on her own, but if I was told a 78-year-old man in rural Iowa (or North Dakota) writes them, it would make a whole lot more sense. Especially if he’s mad he can’t get boners anymore.

3. Next, she shouts, “There are patriots of every race that have fought and died for this country and we honor the flag and sing the anthem as a reminder.”  

That struck me as particularly odd because A) his protest has nothing to do with the military and B) the flag and the national anthem probably have a giant range of interpretations, depending on who you ask. That was the basis of the whole Confederate flag bullshit last summer, wasn’t it? It’s Southern pride, not a battle flag for a traitorous new nation hell bent on preserving the enslavement of an entire race of people! Southern pride, I tells ya!  

Declaring, definitively, that the pregame ceremonies are all done for our soldiers is some military-grade rhetoric that wasn’t forced down my throat in school or at home when I was growing up. That would mean the anthem is only for the 0.4% of the population in current active military duty. Or I guess zero percent of the country, since we’re singing a song to dead people. That doesn’t make any sense to me.   

When I saw the medal ceremonies in this year’s Olympics, for example, I didn’t think about dead soldiers once. When I watch sporting events featuring the Canadian national anthem, I don’t think about dead Canadians either. I just assumed both of those songs were general statements of national pride and identity. That sort of thing can evoke thoughts about the military, if that’s something near and dear to you. Or if you just generally can’t grasp the abstract concept of patriotism. But if the military is that important in your life (like, say being from a military family in South Dakota), you probably don’t really need a reminder.         

4. Here’s when she tells Colin Kaepernick that if the country disgusts him so much that he should leave. Oh, man. This Tomi is so hip! Maybe she found a book of old ‘silent majority’ zingers from the Nixon Administration?

Anyway, I’m guessing nobody is telling Tomi that if she doesn’t like Kaepernick she should leave the country. But yeah, he could leave. He’s got the money. Or he could engage in a little civil disobedience until the situation in the country he’s protesting makes significant improvements. That shouldn’t be too hard for anybody to understand. Unless, of course, you viewed the person peacefully protesting as some sort of “other” and think the country would be better off without that person or people who look like them in your version of the country.

5. “Is our country perfect? No. But what have you done to make it better? What’s your contribution?”

Uh, providing entertainment and escapism to millions of people while playing the most popular sport in America? Starting a national conversation and raising awareness about the severe racial inequality in our criminal justice system?    

Or what that rhetorical? Anyway, here’s where Tomi really turns on the charm.

6. Next she basically accuses Kaepernick of encouraging black kids to “parade around with a chip on their shoulder like they’re a victim.”

Since my head isn’t completely buried in whitewashed sand, I can assume that if a person of color has a grudge against authorities or feels like a victim because of their race, it has a lot more to do with their own life experiences than it does with 49ers quarterback, Colin Kaepernick. In other words, I don’t think he’s telling most black kids something they don’t already know.    

7. “How dare you sit there and blame white people for the problems of minority communities. After all, aren’t you half white? Didn’t two white parents adopt you after yours weren’t willing to raise you? For a racist and horrible country filled with racist and horrible white people, that’s really something, isn’t it?”

See? How dare you, Colin! That’s something 24-year-olds say, right? How dare you! Systemic racism doesn’t exist. Tomi knows two anecdotal facts about your upbringing that disprove hundreds of years of state-sponsored discrimination, intimidation, segregation and mass incarceration. Would you have had kindly white parents to save you from your one lazy black parent if any racism existed, Colin? I don’t think so. And I, for one, think it’s about time someone stood up for these oppressed white people. After all, their feelings are the important ones! 

8. “Maybe you should also decline the paycheck from the white owner of your team.”      

You know who really needs defending? People with a hundred million dollars! That’s who. That’s EXACTLY who! Their feelings matter the most.  

9. “And Colin, who’s getting away with murder? I’d like to see some evidence to back that up. Because that’s a pretty strong claim.” 

Oh, fuck you! I’m done playing. You know who. How do you even know who Colin Kaepernick is if you don’t know the other news items he’s referring to? He’s talking about the lack of accountability for police officers who kill unarmed black men around the country. All of the acquittals. The Blue Wall of Silence. All the falsified police reports disproved with video evidence. You know exactly what the fuck he means, Tomi. Both of my parents are white too and I know what he means.

And, you know what? It IS a strong claim. That’s kinda his whole point. It’s also a strong claim that happens to be true. Which means the country IS oppressing black people. So where are we now, Tomi?

10. I don’t even want to quote her on this one, but then she brings up the black unemployment rate, the black homicide rate, the black dropout rate and the black communities on food stamps. And then blames the black President and the black Attorney General. And tops it off with, “When will those in black communities take a step back and take some responsi-damn-bility for the problems of black communities? Because it seems to me blaming white people for all of your problems might make you the racist.”

Holy fucking shit. This is mind-bendingly illogical. Black people, being a minority in a country with a white majority, are impoverished and poorly-educated criminals, but until they come to the realization that it’s their own fault for being impoverished and poorly-educated criminals, they’re being racist against the saintly white majority? Do you really not see the flagrant idiocy in what you’re saying, Tomi? Denying racism exists by reducing a minority race to an inferior status and then claiming majority superiority as well as majority oppression at the same time? Bud???   

I’d try to further unpack her failed attempt at racism judo but she might be better off just reading about the history of our country first. It’s pretty clear she’s completely unaware of a lot of things that have happened. She has NO idea about what’s currently happening. So here’s an article that Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote for The Atlantic that you might not enjoy. It’s pretty inconvenient to your sheltered and privileged worldview, but it has things in it like facts and research that would educate you on something you’re so passionately wrong about. We’ll call it a good start. Forward the link to your dad too, or whoever you got the phrase ‘responsi-damn-bility’ from. Maybe it’s that 78-year-old man who writes this shit and whose peener no longer works. I don’t know. But I bet he used to call his erections ‘Purple America’.       

What I do know is that Colin Kaepernick is protesting something very real. It’s very real now and it’s been very real throughout the history of the country. If you’ve been force-fed dogmatic obedience to the country and/or military and its racial status-quo, especially coming from a community where the trials and tribulations of minorities aren’t anything more than a distant agitation, somewhere out there in urban America, I don’t necessarily expect you to understand.

But it’s impossible to turn on the TV and not notice the sheer numbers of black men shot and killed by police officers, who then avoid any repercussions for their actions. And yet that topic was completely avoided in order to delegitimize the arguments of black people, in general, and claim reverse racism instead. But in doing so, you completely tripped on your own proverbial dick and made the exact opposite points that you probably intended to make. Because the truth is not your friend, here, Tomi. And your conservative distractions (the military worship, the racial scapegoating and victim-blaming) have made you completely ill-equipped to understand basic truths about the real world. But at least you’re white, so there’s a social safety net to insure you won’t fall too far after you lose your little cutie-pie looks.

“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” That’s something I’ve heard a lot of people say lately to help explain why a lot of white people are so offended by the thought of uppity negros no longer wanting to get shot by authorities. When you’re 24, I don’t know what you’re accustomed to, other than the stupidity of youth and the wrongheaded opinions of adults. But part of the beauty of this country is that, although our past is, by and large, fucking horrific, generation after generation of ambitious or iconoclastic young people in America have attempted progress by improving upon what came before them. Being a 24-year-old conservative is one thing. Parroting the bigoted beliefs of the fact-free distraction machines that came before you is quite another. Colin Kaepernick is the true patriot, or at least the true American, in this equation. On the other hand, Polly is a cracker. Sorry, bud.