Mean Maybe

I'm going to record some songs I've been working on the past year or so with my brother over the holiday break in Sacramento. So far, I've just been sending him bedroom recordings of me on acoustic guitar and singing - usually quite out of tune. But I'm excited to get something recorded again after a very long hiatus. Sometimes when I'm working on one of my own tunes (rudimentary though they may be), I stumble upon some other tune I really like.

I really like this song "Mean Maybe" by this fantastic band Yellowbirds. So I recorded a dumb little bedroom recording of it. I think you can hear my cat howling in the background of just about everything I've ever tried to record. Goddamn thing.

I Should Have Shouted

There have been times I should have shouted, but could not. Did not. Did nothing instead. Did nothing but feel suddenly hot as my blood boiled and my heart rate tripled. But that's not really doing anything. Maybe on some metaphysical level, the biological reactions I've experienced on my insides could fit the mold of some sort of reaction. But blood pumping through my dumb, dead veins all day isn't exactly voluntary. Doesn't make me brave. Or maybe it does. But no one will ever see it, or know, or deign to stretch to guess that sitting around doing nothing is actually doing SOMEthing.

I can feel when it happens; when I want to scream and when I want to scare someone. Or when I feel like some cerebral injustice is about to unfold and some fucking common sense ought to be distilled from all the half-truths and conspiracies and shortcuts to thinking that are all-but bound to stem from a panicked mass of souls, each of them afraid of dying. Of growing old. Of being alone forever. I can see it in the eyes of some of my closest confidantes when the veil of their skepticism is lifted, and everything's a grimace, and how could anyone in the world have a sense of fairness and just thought amidst this big pop culture tornado blowin' through the Bowerys, and the Bays, and the Burnsides.

Follied be they for whom extant virtues have been absorbed through mediums they can never understand. Fortunate (and rare) be they for whom sense doesn't need to be common to be just. And fair. And a life lived in the moons of neverending cosmos invisible to eyes a million years from now be wished upon to those for whom the rigors of honesty with themselves, with others, and with unencumbered pride and humility for the understanding of it all is relegated to some fantasy realm. That the fantasy is often much more appealing than the small efforts and rewards bequeathed by leading a virtuous life is the wellspring of every evil in the world.

It is to these last referenced that my silent protests, my seething inner diatribes, my distrust in humanity as a whole, is most steadily focused upon.

So, there have been times I should have shouted, but did not. For some reason figured I could not. That to rock the boat meant to chase the tornado. Meant to acknowledge that I play a role, if only as opponent, in a web of systematic insanity. With paper trails. With photo IDs and retina scanners, and workplace safety standards and lunch hours and no time for naps or outrage or questioning of anything of any real cultural significance. McKenna's maxim "Culture is not your friend" is perhaps the best synopsis, or the most succinct. Had he pointed out, in turn, that the parameters instilled into those whose entire intellectual apparatus has been hinged upon impossibly unreal expectations, has been imbued by unfair standards of role, has been smeared before even their birth by thousands of years of hate, fear of death, disgust of peace, I believe that McKenna's relatively small contributions (although terribly influential to many facets of rational thought, and to a more dramatic extent, influential to the scores of brain cells mystified by extraterrestrial research, or drugs, or humanity and fear) may have hit home harder outside of the underground world of ethnobotany and the hippie-youth drug scene who desperately want to believe that we're descendant of apes who mistakenly ate psylocybic mushrooms growing on ancient cow manure.

Then again, maybe not. Maybe nobody would have thought any different anyway. Despite the evidence. Despite the inimitable truths burning holes right into their eyes and ears. And that is what is worth screaming for. That the proof in the pudding must pale its hue to that most lethal drug: Distraction. For with the barricade of ignorance, willful or otherwise (but especially willful, which, frankly, all ignorance is), distraction's etymological kissing cousin, destruction - at least of the brain, or of any other wholly humanistic trait that separates us from wild dogs - is all but a foregone conclusion.

Live in the wild and live your truths, and be who you are. If your wild is the cultural wastelands of the valleys and the strip malls and the ridiculous facades of faux-historic corporate conglomerates, stay there. If your truths are morsels culled from television programs run by corporate-sponsored networks, or billboards, or flash-in-the-pan, hypnotic, repetitive, bland and unoriginal pop music, save them for yourself (see also: save yourself from them). And if you question, for even a second, ever, that who you are is a force detrimental to the advancement of society, or a hurdle in the thoroughfare toward peace, or a chigger in the doe hair of mother nature's vast, uncompromising-yet-delicate hide, CHANGE.