No More Think Pieces About COVID

I briefly turn my phone off of “do disturb”
and pretend childhood days spent on another planet where a 60 degree December day was Nothing’s Shocking
Normal

Saint Cloud by Waxahatchee won’t be my COVID album
Joe Biden won’t be our Pandemic President
Warren won’t be my only COVID dog

This will continue, if we did have a shot at shutting it down
We lost it. If we did have a shot at learning great lessons from this,
We punted.

On the night I find out that 800,000 is the American death toll
We start to pick out flights to Florida
I find a babysitter so I can play music on a radio station in the evening on ladies night out

They don’t make think pieces about herpes. They don’t.
They make think pieces about the common cold but you only ever read the first paragraph.
It’s COVID and it’s forever.

The daycare lady tells me she’s nervous about the tornado tonight.
I want to tell her about the candle factory where the boss made them stayed til they died.
I hope I get the email to pick my kids up early.

I hope people know they aren’t testing alarms if they ring them tonight.
In Minnesota they test the weather alarms on the first Wednesday of the month.
It’s December 15. It’s COVID and it’s forever.

My Concept of Longevity is Heavily Skewed

The things I do, I do for a long time. I’ve been in a side project of Heiruspecs for 15 years. I started the band Heiruspecs with Felix in 1997. Ergo, I’ve been in a high school band for 24 years. It throws everything off. Q: “How long have you been with your wife?” A: About 42% as long of a time as I’ve played the song 5ves at concerts.

Minnesota is also a complicated place to deal with longevity. Some people stay in the same jobs here for 20+ years. According to basically everyone I’ve talked to from coastal cities, that’s just unheard of, that isn’t how people build careers there. My thoughts on longevity tonight aren’t so much about how long you should stay in a job. It’s that desire to have a bit of a mission statement for what you’re going to do at a spot that I want to talk about.

When I had just started really grinding hard on Trivia Mafia LLC with Chuck Terhark in 2009/2010, nothing made me feel more like a boss than reading the Corner Office Column in the New York Times. I’d be reading it on my daddy’s subscription (and still do) and thinking about what it will be like when I run a huge ass company. Most of those interviews are just management porn. The column is filled with “answers” like “how do you change the culture? it starts in the fibers, in the very infrastructure that powers the decisions you guide from the C-suite”. The subject of the interview is wearing a tightly tailored suit and gesturing in a way that accentuates their elbows (that’s for the young people), or it’s a head shot and something like a moustache or unfashionable glasses tell us that they are old-school. It’s hilariously useless stuff, even for people at that C-suite level. The column is mainly designed to be read by idiots like I was in 2010.

Nowadays, I am tangentially involved in a company that I think has an excellent culture. I am 50% owner of Trivia Mafia LLC and I can comfortably say that our employees have generally good feelings about how the company is run, feel comfortable bringing up the the things that upset them and anticipate being treated fairly throughout the course of their time at Trivia Mafia. I can’t claim a lot of credit for this continuing to be true, but I can claim some credit for it being true in the first place. Chuck, the other owner, and I have a decade long history of putting being true, fair and considerate ahead of short gains and generally of running a company in a fashion that is smart in the long run. The one full-time employee we have, Brenna Proczko, is really talented and very good at making the principles and attitudes of Trivia Mafia LLC easily exportable to new employees and clients who have less knowledge of what we are all about.

Back to me reading The Corner Office back in the early 2010s. I did come across one interview where the woman criticized the culture of people coming to jobs for a year and a half and then sailing for greener pastures. Specifically she made this explanation that the first year and a half on the job in the grand scheme is the orientation. Where are the bathrooms? Which bathroom do people use for number twos? How do you get reimbursed? What do we do for a holiday party? How do we structure events? In that first year and a half you are getting the answers to those questions. Her pitch was as follows: once you know where everyone shits, stick around for awhile and change some things. Move on after you’ve tried to execute the change that you believe the place deserves. The pitch was that you have a duty to a place, after you learn your way around, do something good for the place. We can all spend a lot of time feeling like we work for our bosses because. . .shit, we do. Our bosses have the biggest say in deciding if we continue to work for whatever place employs us. Writing this column made me realize we have a duty to our institutions that is somewhat independent of our bosses. If you see a lane to make where you work better, stronger, provide a better service et cetera, you have a duty to make that happen, as long as it doesn’t endanger your livelihood.

So what do you do for a place once you know where the bathrooms are? What do you for a place when you feel acclimated, comfortable and ready to rock? I think the main key at that juncture is figuring out your ambition for changing a place. Some gigs, you might have a role where you possess very little without power to change, so you nibble around the corners. At other spots, you can make a big impact with minimal friction. I think this is relatively easy to understand for companies you didn’t start.

This whole logic gets a lot harder to navigate when it is all about a company or a band you started. . .right? What do I want to change about Heiruspecs? What do I want to change about Trivia Mafia? I have real answers to both, but they are muddied by the fact that every mess I want to clean up at those organizations is in some obvious fashion my fault. It’s different with a spot like MPR/APMG. Fresh sets of eyes walk into our orbit at my day-job on a monthly basis. These individuals kick the tires, see where we’re going. They ask questions that weren’t obvious to us, they point out the inefficiencies that seem mandatory to us. But you can’t just kick the tires. Some of the most impressive people I’ve worked with at MPR have left pretty fast. Frankly, they’ve often left for completely logical reasons; great opportunity for them or for a spouse elsewhere. But we can’t just kick the tires to greatness (goddammit that’s my pull quote when I’m wearing the sensible glasses and answering questions in the NYT Corner Office in year 2037). I’ve been at MPR for about seven years in some remotely professional capacity. My ability to change the culture, to bend the arc the way I personally feel it should be is certainly dulled by the fact that I am not remotely in management. There is no one in the business of bending the culture at MPR who have me on their short list to do that bending. But what matters for me is I can see the slow progress. It’s not front page stuff, but I feel MPR has made modest changing in what I think is the right direction and I have been a part of those changes.

Longevity and legacy. With COVID, with your 40s, with kids, your mortality creeps into your thoughts a bit more. I want to be really proud of the work I’ve done on Planet Earth. I also want to be proud of the energy I’ve offered my spouse, my kids, my block, my community. I don’t want to have moved from company to company every year and a half and feel like I never sunk my teeth in and changed a company, turned a page. I feel really great about the music I’ve laid down with Heiruspecs, but I don’t know what is next for me in the musical realm. My life has moved to some extend in slightly constructed half decades of focus:

Ages 20-25 - Heiruspecs
Ages 25-30 - McNally Smith College of Music/Trivia Mafia
Ages 30-35 - Dessa/Trivia Mafia
Ages 35-40 - MPR

It’s oblong, but that’s the arc I’ve got going. I’m trying to figure out how to take that step and see 40-45, 45-50 et cetera actively being about MPR. A longer arc than I’ve offered any project in my life. Q: How long have you been at MPR? A: About 125% as long as I was in Heiruspecs.

How do I stay engaged? How do I stay hungry? How do I stay longetive. That is my new Corner Office word for channeling the spirit of longevity in a society that doesn’t value. Eager to learn, focused on improving my craft, not looking for greener pastures to the detriment of the field I’m in. It’s easy to stagnate, it’s also forgivable to stagnate in the midst of trying to raise kids at the same time. I’m realizing that I need to actively sort out where I’m putting my energy, how I’m pushing myself. What can I bring myself and my energy that will result in more good down the road for everyone and more happiness for me right the f now?

Grateful For Some People I Don’t Know

I have a lot of folks that are directly in my life to be thankful for. But I’ll take care of them on texts, with gifts and with love. I want to give some public love to the people who have helped me get through this year with tremendous lows and only modest highs.

Larry Mizell Jr. from KEXP
I’m a radio DJ, that’s what I do for a living. A couple years ago I realized I wasn’t doing the research I should be to try to get better at my job. When I was making a living as a bass player I studied other bass players and I would’ve done well to study more. I didn’t dig in deeply enough to my craft, instead, I was focused on making my band successful and partying. Fair enough. But I want to make legendary moments happen on the radio. I want to listen and study the folks that are doing elite programming in the spoken voice space (I know that’s clunky, but I study plenty of podcasts when trying to get strong at radio). Larry has the midafternoon spot if you live in Seattle, but in Central time he’s 3-6. In the middle of the summer of 2020 I was knocking out some work and I flipped on KEXP in my pursuit to have some radio on. What I found was a conversational DJ who was still incredibly economical with how long he talked (I think most DJs are one or the other, either conversational or brief). But Larry is both. He’s got tremendous knowledge of music, but frankly, that isn’t that rare. What he has is knowledge and favorites! Though he knows the landscape, I can hear a deeper affinity for Parliament Funkadelic, for MF DOOM, for Thin Lizzy. Does it help that some of these are my favorites as well? Absolutely. But, he’s got favorites that aren’t mine. He gets me excited for house music in a way that I can’t create naturally without him. He keeps track of the birthdays, he makes Thursdays and Fridays more fun than the rest of the week, cause they are.

(Larry’s producer is Charlize. Like most great radio shows, I have no idea where Larry starts and where his team begins, from every indication I get from the outside, the whole crew is on point, delivering great research and awesome music).

Listening to the Afternoon Show lifts me up, it makes me feel like I’m in a room with a bunch of friends picking out records and talking about the goings on of the day. It’s what radio should be, and I’m studying.

It’s hard to know if you’re doing the job well when you’re a DJ on the radio. You can get some feedback from listeners but let’s be honest, the grand majority of us are not contacting radio hosts, whether they are doing a good job or a bad job. The amount of time I’ve been absolutely floored by a DJ and not reached out to them. . .there’s plenty. So realizing how much The Afternoon Show matters to me helps me imagine how maybe what I do on the Current could matter to somebody else. I’m proud of the music I play, the artists I feature, the collaborations I have with Sani, my co-host on the Message, and others. I can imagine what I do having an impact on how good of a Saturday people have, because of how much Larry' and his crew matter to my afternoons.

Political Gabfest from Slate
Every Thursday three friends and influential journalists/journalist adjacent folks get together to talk about a couple big stories of the week and a little bit of bullshitting about lighter news stories. It’s magical because it has the informative qualities of a scripted show, but it also has the human connection qualities that I really only find off of unscripted shows. I have no qualms about saying it’s the best podcast ever. In the final three episodes of a well constructed whodunit I will briefly forget about a show like Political Gabfest, but week after week, I come to this show and get something really rewarding.

The Right Time with Bomani Jones on ESPN
I don’t watch football. I don’t understand basketball but I love it. But I love Bomani Jones. He’s what I think everyone who talks for a living wants. . .when something happens in the world I’m curious what Bomani thinks about it. His angle is always interesting and I might not agree with every take, but I see the path, I get the idea. I also find him to be crazy fast with digesting a moment and predicting how it might look a few months out. He’s got great vision for sports, for music, for the world in general. There’s one particular episode where Dominique Foxworth and Bomani Jones talks about what it takes to do jobs like theirs well and it floored me. Such an inspiring conversation.

Trivia Mafia Thursdays with Chuck and Co on Twitch
Do I own Trivia Mafia? Yup, 50% of it. Do I know Chuck, yup! Am I comfortable telling him how much his weekly trivia night means to me? Nope! That’s why I blog. I’m not super involved in the day to day for Trivia Mafia. I bet if you ask the day to day people they’d say “he’s super not involved”. But here’s the deal, we had to make a big ass pivot for the pandemic. And friends, we did it. We aren’t where we once were, but we are making our way back and we have a new identity as an online trivia company. We’re awesome. People use us for parties et cetera. Our calling card in the digital space is our Thursday night on Twitch. It was handled for more than a year plus by Chuck, the other owner of the company. It is now hosted by a rotating cast, but it’s always magic. Maybe about 200+ viewers, representing more players than that come together and play on their screens. There are inside jokes, there’s alliances, there’s special offerings. Basically, it’s a magical weekly trivia night, online or otherwise. I got together with my wife, neighbor, colleague, old friend and a couple friend of friends and we forged this bond that now lasts into the real world. It gave me something social, something fun and something awesome to get through.

Lowell George Has Me Messed Up

Do you know Lowell George? He was the centerpiece of the first incarnation of the group Little Feat. They are the best Southern rock band to come out of Los Angeles. Lowell George is a great writer and he died in 1979. He died at the Twin Bridges Marriott in Arlington, VA. It was an accidental cocaine overdose. But I was reading about George last night while listening to some Little Feat and it briefly mentioned that in addition to speedballs and tons of alcohol Lowell George gained a bunch of weight at the end of his life weighing 308 pounds.

I weigh more than 308 pounds. I weigh 330 pounds. I don’t do speedballs. But seeing my weight listed in a paragraph that could be labeled as “reasons Lowell George died” had me feeling frustrated. I believe it is fair to mention Lowell George’s weight gain when talking about the deterioration of his health. I understand that Lowell George near his death and I are both morbidly obese. I feel that weight is a valuable part of a metric of health. I think most people agree with that. The fact that it’s become effectively the only metric is frustrating. On top of that, we make other people's weight our business in a way that is unfair. A lot of the bad health decisions that others make don’t show up as visibly as weight. Thus we all feel the freedom to cast judgment in a way that is really unfair.

I deserve love and support even if I was throwing down a whole large pizza in the back of my tour bus before cooking up a speedball (does one cook one of those?). Lowell George deserved love and he probably deserved someone to check in with him, help him get his life on track. That didn’t happen. But, I just don’t think that is a fair description of everyone who is morbidly obese. I hate what I would think about myself if I just walked past me on the bus. I’d think, that dude needs to start exercising, he needs counseling, he needs a supportive partner. The hard part is I’ve got that, I have a fitness regiment, I’ve seen mental health counselors in the recent past and currently do couples counseling. I have a wildly supportive partner. I have the ingredients I need to lead a healthy life. I get more sleep than I used to. I am more comfortable with my feelings. I eat better. I sleep better. I show up better. But I don’t live a thin life. I don’t like a chunky life. I live a morbidly obese life. And I have this monstrous desire to understand every detail of George’s drug abuse, so I can divide my life from his. I didn’t really understand drugs in high school so when Chris Farley died I figured fat people just doubled over and died at some point. I lived in fear and inaction for years. Lowell George, I hope you rest in peace, I hope your soul is good. I’m sorry you died. The path that I’m on is not a straight line to the grave, I am taking care of my body, I am taking time for myself and I am doing it on my terms. I slip, I fail, I have goals I haven’t met, but I love myself and even if we share a scale reading, we are facing different things, and we are facing them differently.

Towards Heiruspecsness

There are joys you only earn through time. Things you can’t hurry through, last pages you can’t skip to.

I’ve been in the band Heiruspecs since fall of 1997 when Chris ‘Felix’ Wilbourn and I stopped just putzing around in our high school music class and started putting together a band. I’m forty years old now and it’s been clear to me since when we second tried to break up in 2006 that this was going to be the most important professional thing I’ll do in my life. By important I mean important. I certainly don’t mean remunerative, it’s possible I’ll make more in a half year working at MPR then I’ll ever have made with Heiruspecs, but that shit truly doesn’t matter. What does matter is that for 24 years, with waning justification, Heiruspecs has been committed to each other and to our community.

Last night we played a show at the Turf Club in St. Paul. The show is called our “Holiday Classic” and it’s the only reliable thing on our live show calendar at this point. We couldn’t do it last year because of the state of the pandemic and so this year it feels particularly special. We had a young rapper named Juice Lord on the bill who Felix and I are both really supportive of. I have no idea how I’ll fair as a tastemaker of any sort, but the first time I heard Juice Lord rap I just immediately felt he had the skills to bring him some level of fame. There’s only so much advice you can dole out as 40 year old musicians with dayjobs who busted their ass to get 269 paid tickets into the Turf Club. Heiruspecs has reached some high levels at time in our careers, but our career isn’t a likely one most young musicians would copy and paste into their own future.

But here’s what I’ll tell you: we’ve earned it. We’ve earned the downsides. At a time in our career where I think the next level was ten really good songs away. . .we couldn’t get into the rehearsal space, we couldn’t walk out with something we were proud of, too much fighting, to many wandering eyes pushing us towards other projects as individuals. At a time in our career where I think another year of grinding very humbly might’ve brought us into a different level of income on the road, we couldn’t get back in the van. We’ve earned the lows. We’ve earned the highs. We made a song that still stands as one of the best of our catalog back in 2008, “We Want a New Flow”. We practically broke up after that rehearsal. I also think we broke the fight into two parts, taking it from our rehearsal space and moving it to Hamline and Thomas, where Muad’dib was working at a coffeeshop. I don’t remember everything we fought about but I remember Peter Leggett, our drummer, saying to Felix - “I’m a utility in this band, that’s all I am”. The larger fight I believe was about inspiration, ratio of created beats to full on songs and more. But I just remember thinking, “wow, we just made an incredible track and we can’t even get out of our own way today.”

I’ve been the leader of the band for the duration of the group. Felix is the front person, it’s not Heiruspecs without Felix, and it’s not Heiruspecs without any of us, but we’d all agree I do a lot of the running of the band. I’ve fucked up enormously. I fired my two best friends from the band in what I thought was the worse way possible, until I fired a keyboard player even more sloppily about three years later. I stumbled through it all. And now we own it in a way I don’t own anything else in my life. My 10,000 hours aren’t as a musician, they’re as a member of Heiruspecs. We step on stage at the Turf Club and I cash in the years I spent listening to music with Peter, the times we just spent in hotels being young men together, finding our way.

Now we’re old. We’re not kind of old, we’re not on the old side. We’re old. We have a fanbase, we have a profile. We know how limited it is but it seems like all of us are dead set upon preserving it, protecting it, advancing it and using it to make this a better scene for the people coming up. It’s important that Heiruspecs isn’t our whole life, it’s important that Heiruspecs is a warts-and-all project, we are relentlessly true to ourselves. That sometimes means we practiced too much and lost the heart of a song, sometimes that means we’ve practiced too little and lost the chart of a song. We struggle through it, but there’s a magic between us that you can’t dilute with time. We earned some sort of chemistry, some sort of 7th member that is the spirit we all poured in to this. When we navigate our next steps with music or business I feel like we are all certain there is a decision that Heiruspecs is supposed to come to, it’s our job as individuals to just carom it pinball style from our points of view and trust that the sum of all these strokes will be towards Heiruspecsness. And that’s our new motto: towards Heiruspecsness.

We Could Treat Police Like Subprime Loan Officers

Too often when the discussion of police abolition comes up one of the first roadblocks is “there are some great cops” or “not all cops are bad”. I sincerely agree with this statement, but I don’t believe that fact should be a dealbreaker for the idea of police abolition. By the way, one of the most helpful resources I found in thinking about police abolition is the MPD150 website, check it out here.

These arguments about “there are some great cops” didn’t come up when our country decided that we needed to get rid of sub-prime loans and thus we needed to get rid of subprime loan officers. We saw that subprime loans were designed to prey on black people in particular and disenfranchised people in general. The country as a whole sadly might have just pinched their nose if subprime loans just kept on handing the financial hardships to black people. But subprime loans started hurting “Main Street” which is often some sort of shorthand for the white middle class. So we promptly said that we couldn’t have that. We didn’t say that the individual loan officers should go to jail en masse, we didn’t say they should never work in loans again. We said “you can’t sell subprime loans anymore, if that’s what you do, stop, we won’t insure those loans”. These subprime loan officers become regular ass loan officers, and some probably started working at other jobs.

Why can’t we say the same to police officers? The history of policing in the United States starts from slave patrols. One of the next big pushes in the “professionalization” of police came from a desire to control immigrant communities. And, according to the CDC, Native Americans are more likely to be killed by police than any other racial or ethnic group. It has been documented for over 100 years that black people are also disproportionately likely to be arrested, prosecuted and found guilty. Police are a locally controlled group with a national problem. I don’t know of an example of an organization with that type of design being reformed. Who reforms it? With whose blessing? Sometimes the Fed comes in and shakes things up. They did that in Ferguson. They are doing it in Minneapolis right now. Will it work? I don’t know. And what does “working” mean? I often feel that police are just the weaponized version of the racism that all Americans carry, black people included. Police are the weaponized version of a distrust a hiring manager has about hiring a black person, that a father has about his child marrying a black person. Police at times seem to me to be armed, embodied versions of this same distrust and fear that so many share.
We got rid of subprime loan officers because it was an affront to the American way. We keep police because they are an insurance policy on the American way. We revere home-ownership. We fear black people.

I spent a lot of time with Heather McGhee’s book “The Sum of Us” last year. I am beyond convinced that America will accept collateral damage to white people in the war to keep black people down. McGhee’s book doesn’t spend much time on why Americans are willing to do this, but I have an idea. If we keep black people down through policies that can be viewed as colorblind then we can believe that there is some moral defense for the centuries where we kept black people down through slavery and Jim Crow. When it becomes clear that there is no grounds for an irrational fear of black people, policing will be different, but also going to get a license will be different, swimming in a pool will be different. Many things will be different because we will be living under a new American paradigm. Keeping black people down has been around longer than the Constitution in this country. When I started writing this entry I thought it would make it easier to get rid of policing based on its links to slavery. It is sinking in that this might be the reason we can never get rid of police. Police are here to keep “us” safe. As long as we walk around with that understanding, police are here to stay. It is almost secondary if they do keep “us” safe. If we agree their purpose is to keep “us” safe, they stay. Once subprime loans stopped being profitable they didn’t do much good for anyone, it wasn’t easy to move on from them, but we knew it was the right thing to do. We were able to get rid of subprime loan officers because we were ready to get rid of subprime loans. We know that when the needs of societies change, people have to find new careers. We aren’t ready to get rid of police officers because we aren’t ready to get rid of the myth they defend. We pretend it’s an abomination when young unarmed people are murdered. We pretend it’s an abomination because to recognize that it’s collateral damage that we don’t endure equally is to reveal how bankrupt we are. These killings aren’t abominations, they’re collateral damage. The collateral damage is focused in certain neighborhoods, on certain bodies. The “safety” is everywhere. So we pinch our nose. We pinch our nose also cause we truly want safety. And we want safety for every family but not bad enough to create it. If the cops provide a safety tangible for our own families, we keep them.

Police may be an imperfect avenue to safety, but there are no viable alternatives and we are in the middle of this stream of violence. We’re never going to change the police if we won’t change more than the police. We gave up on subprime loans, cause we can imagine a world without them. We can’t do the same with policing yet.

Pre Lockdown Tips

Omicron is either going to be a big deal or it won’t be, but let’s not all go buy toilet paper. Here’s a couple things you actually do need in case we move in to some variety of lockdown:

Go Cut Your Hair - do it. Don’t spend this winter looking super shaggy. Dudes over 35, if you haven’t grown a beard yet, there’s a reason. Don’t let this shutdown winter push you into a beard thing that isn’t working for anyone.
Be Charitable and do Mutual Aid - Lockdowns impact different people differently. So does cold weather. All signs point to me and my family staying warm this winter in our home. We have some money to get out to people in a more trying situation. Maybe you do too.
Read Out of Your Bubble - I found in the real shutdown that I just never received news from outside of my self-selected liberal bubble. You don’t have to read every 4,000 word article in the New York Times about the Trump voter who also believes in psychedelics. But, seek out some inputs of information that are the equivalent of the lunch with the across the aisle colleague, something similar to grabbing the WSJ cause it was all that was left en route to your ceramic throne.
Routine ZOOM Hangs - If we get to the “no social” thing and I sincerely hope we don’t, I’ll be scheduling routine, recurring ZOOMs. The more you do ZOOMs the closer they get to human connection. They are still woefully far from human connection, but that regularity helps. So seek that out in your schedule.
Do Things Arounds The House - I got a bunch done in my house during the last lockdown and it really started cooking after I got a list set up and started knocking things off of it.
Listen to the Radio - Obviously you listening to the radio is good for me. I’m a radio host. You listening to the Current is even better. And I love what happens on the Current, I start my mornings with Jill Riley, I bump Mary Lucia on the ride home and my Sundays start with United States of Americana with Bill Deville. I think The Current is pretty great to listen to most any hour of the day. I also swear by Rhythm Revue from WBGO on Saturday mornings out of Newark. I listen to Larry Mizell Jr. on KEXP a couple afternoons a week as well. Radio is great, it gives me room to think that I don’t get from podcasts, but room to connect and engage that I don’t get from streaming or my record collection.
Be Awesome to Your Partner - These lockdowns are hard. I didn’t really understand how hard the first one was on my unemployed, newly given birth wife until after. I knew it wasn’t wonderful, but I didn’t digest how hard until later. Huge mistake. Ask questions, voluntarily take things off your partner’s plate. Don’t assume things are cool.
Know the First Things You’ll Get Back To - A light at the end of the tunnel helps. If we are facing this lockdown what is the first thing you’re going to do when it’s done?
Attend the Heiruspecs Show on December 3rd at Turf Club - The Turf Club requires everyone to be vaxxed or pass that negative test. And our show is going to be great. Buy tickets now, good idea!

Normalize Having Favorites

When you were a kid you had a favorite color and a favorite food. And now it’s like, beneath you, to have a favorite food? Why? Don’t you like food?

I host on the radio on Saturday nights. It’s the highlight of my professional week. I love doing it, I love connecting with the listeners and I love the experience. Listening to music is a joy, doing it with a large audience and discovering music together, it’s one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever gotten to do in my life. Most night it’s requests. That’s very active work. I don’t slow down. The phone rings, I pick out music, I check tweets, I pick out music, I research the music. The whole deal, it’s active. I’ve started to work a little physical exercise into the routine too. It can help slow your brain down to do 25 squats, or do a one minute plank. My guy Scott Blankenship who hosts on “Your Classical” while I’m on “Your The Current” saw me doing exercise and now we run out and do some of these routines together. It brings so much joy to my shift.

Today we got started earlier with our workouts cause I wasn’t doing requests. And I had a moment where I finished my exercise, went and grabbed some smoked salmon, cream cheese and crackers from out of the fridge and put together some little crackers. We’ve got Steely Dan’s “Bodhisatva” blasting out the speakers and I’m spreading world class smoked salmon from Northern Smokehaus onto an elite cracker. Ok, fuck it, that’s my favorite food. It’s a great answer, you see. It’s specific enough to keep a conversation going.*

*God bless you if you’re a grown ass person and your answer is something like “pizza” or you say “I’m a big fan of ice cream”. That’s a kid-ass answer. I want us to have favorites, but you need an answer that has some meat on the bones.

What I want to see from you is an answer that has some specificity but is something you could try anywhere. For instance, if your answer is “the fettucine at this one place in Spain you’ll never go to” I feel like your telling me a story about your favorite dish, not your favorite food. What I want is answer like “If I ever see chicken parmigiana, I get it, it’s my go to” or an answer like “I always like to try chicken wings, I’m into that”. That gives us someplace to go. And folks, I’ve got my favorite food. It’s that Northern Waters Smokehaus smoked salmon on some crackers with cream cheese. Rachel and I have gotten it a bunch of times. I’ve gotten it with my friend Steph from Duluth. It’s a special food experience but it’s built on pretty normal stuff, grab a piece of smoked salmon of any quality and frankly you’re 60% of the way there. So that’s my favorite food. When you eat it you feel like a rustic king, but you can also enjoy the cream cheesy smoothiness of it. You can definitely have a little for a snack. You can fully have it as its own lunch. When you order it, your friends might make nice little yum yum noises from the first bite of their sandwich, but ultimately they’ll see the uniqueness of the cracker/salmon/cream cheese continuum and the specialness of it, the uniqueness of it. And they’ll look at their sandwich with that ping of jealousy: I should’ve ate a story for lunch. And that goddamn smoked fish next to the Saltines is a story, a bona fide story.

Scene reset: Walter and Donald from The Dan delivers peak “guitarmony” out of loud ass speakers, I’m spreading cream cheese on crackers and fielding phone calls from fans of music who are so into the whole thing that they are calling up to suggest particular songs from particular years. This needs to be overstated, this a really cool, amazing indication that radio still has this valence. It is possible that you have forgotten the simple joy of getting your request on the radio. I sure as fuck have not. Being a part of that moment for people, it’s humbles me. It reminds me that there’s a downside to hearing everything all at once. Radio can dole out information, scene backgrounds, insider tips, but it moves linearly. You’re not going to hear the 2 seconds on “who sampled dot com” and then move on to another thing, quickly. They’ll be no random ads and scrolling for your to focus on the rest of the grooves for 6 minutes after you’ve heard the sampled moment. You’ll exist in that Grant Green song for the majority of it’s eight minute length. I love the patience and natural discovery opportunities that come from the radio. The guy I listen to is named Larry Mizell Jr., he’s on KEXP. He takes me on a journey. And friends, this god damn salmon takes me on a journey. I slow down, I remember other times I’ve had, I crisp on the cracker. I feel connected to this experience. I feel connected to Duluth. I feel connected to social food.

And I have a favorite song too. It’s “Coyote” by as done by Joni Mitchell and the Band. I’m gonna go listen to that song. Here’s some favorite categories to sort out for yourself:

Favorite Movie Villain

Favorite Sports Franchise

Favorite Comedy Made Before You Alive

Favorite Music Documentary

Favorite Coffee Shop Order

Favorite Artist to Dance To

Favorite Film Director

good night!

For a Minute We Got it Right at the Place Where We Hide

If you’re driving home from my daughters’ daycare you hit Linwood Park at St. Clair and Victoria after about two minutes of driving. I’ve loved this park since I was in high school. In high school it was the smoke cigarettes watch the sunset park. In college it was the bring girls, get freaky and still smoke cigarettes park. There’s a big field and some sports fields. We started going there with the kids, and my oldest started calling the park “The Place Where We Hide” because there is legit forest in the back of the park that I had never noticed in my cigarette smoking days. And because of where it sits in St. Paul it’s the best place to watch the sunset. My youngest daughter Sadie has learned to appreciate sunsets and Hanukkah all in the same two week period and it’s beautiful. Just yesterday on the ride to swim lessons everything lined up and I had one of those rare perfect moments in my life.
Climbing up St. Clair my daughter says “look at that daddy, that’s the most beautiful blue. Isn’t it the most beautiful blue daddy?”. She was right, the sky was beautiful, with those thick, paintbrush drawn lines of cloud that reach across the sky without taking up much of the real estate. We advance maybe fifty more yards and Sadie exclaims “and look at the orange, look at that orange, it’s amazing!” She was right, it was amazing, that type of orange that looks like it won’t be orange for long. Orange in nature is always temporary and at that moment it was glowing. I was listening to the Current and I had already been marveling at my co-worker Mary Lucia. She’s always a joy to listen to, but you get the feeling like somedays she’s DJing for you and only you. Everything she was playing was hitting me perfectly. At that moment this tune from Gang of Youths came on called “Tend The Garden”. I’m a sucker for a great first line that just arrives as if me and the singer were in the middle of a conversation. They open with this one: “I was young, it was the '60s, you see”. And it’s a one beat pickup plus one measure before the lyric comes in. The song is the least epic song by them that we’ve played on the Current and it’s easily the best. The song’s coming out of the speakers and me and my daughter are admiring the sunset, and for a solid three minutes I’m just smelling the roses cause this moment is perfect.
Ever since my brother got into music I wanted to be a part of the music thing. I’ve wanted it to a be career, to be the center of my life. That’s gone surprisingly well for me. I’ve gotten to play bass all over the country, record records at world class studios. And for me, I had an aspiration to be a part of the story of Minnesota music and I can comfortably say I’ve achieved that. It feels wonderful. But, finding a way to stay being a part of it, while raising a family, while making a living, it’s hard. I will announce the opening and closing of venues on the radio without an honest chance at spending an evening there. I have little children, my wife works full time, I own a trivia company. I want to be a part of the music thing and I know to do my job at the Current well I have to do that. But hearing Gang of Youths and remembering that I interviewed them at the Current reminded me I am a part of this music thing. The Midwest rep for the label was in the studio, he even took the time to call my boss and tell him he thought it was a great interview. So it helped me feel great that I have some tangential relationship to helping Gang of Youths be a part of the story here in Minnesota. They were great to interview, sweet, caring and obviously destined to make great waves. My dog Warren could’ve interviewed them and they’d still be opening for the Foo Fighters and making awesome songs called “Tend the Garden”. But I did the interview. And I’m a part of the music thing. And I’m a dad. And the sun is setting and my daughter knows the sunset looks special at the place where we hide. The song changes, the sun sets, we are five minutes late for the swim lesson, I have to shop for Thanksgiving, the butcher can’t get me beef ribs for Hanukkah cause they’re too busy with Thanksgiving, I’m afraid people will stop having children cause the world is melting and people are plowing through parades and murderers like Kyle Rittenhouse create danger and then “defend” themselves from it. But orange in nature is always temporary and at that moment it was glowing.

I’m Starting to Feel the Pull of this Service

I haven’t read the work of the person who said “the medium is the message”. His name is Marshall Mcluhan and he gets namechecked all the time in NY Times podcasts. I look forward to reading him, but I already really agree with this format. When my most rewarding form of expression was writing songs I metabolized my feelings into thinking how they could be songs. And for quite some time I was drawn to twitter as the easiest and most comfortable way to get my ideas out. When I saw something I thought about sharing it on twitter. And now that this blog is semi cooking, I am finding myself free to think in this format and let me just be honest, it is really freeing. Really freeing. So here’s some free wheeling stuff I’ve been thinking about.

Sandra Bland - I do not believe that Sandra Bland took her own life. I understand all the things about mental health that can lie beneath the surface for every individual. But I have to admit that seeing Sandra' Bland’s bright optimistic “I just got a job” video had me feeling confident in the positive energy she was bringing to planet earth. On top of that, I saw nothing in the operations of the police personnel that made me believe they had a moral code for how to treat a fellow human, particularly a black woman who seemed to know her rights and was willing to be vocal about said rights. I believe there is more to Sandra Bland’s story and I don’t believe suicide has anything to do with it.

Minnesota’s COVID problems - The state I live in is by far the worst state for COVID cases right now. I have no idea why this is happening, but I do understand that Minnesota simply can’t take a sober look at itself and ask the question. Headlines that paint Minnesota in a negative light are the least sticky things we can offer up. It should be front page that this is a dangerous state to live in even if we have reasonably good vaccine rates. It also is not said enough that the clogging of the hospitals is primarily, though not exclusively, created by unvaccinated individuals.

Some of the funkiest music on earth doesn’t require bassists - This hurts me to admit. Organ jazz, which is often delivered with the organist providing the basslines, is absurdly funky and it works without bass players. I’m a bass player, I’m funky and there’s still no getting around these facts.

Fiction - Why can’t I read fiction? Why can’t I watch movies? Why don’t I have the stamina to consume this stuff. It pains me. I fear I’m going to die wondering why I never read Tolstoy, why I never got through all of James Baldwin’s writing, why I have seen only a smattering of movies on purpose. I can’t figure out a way to diligently work towards this. My hope is that viewing movies with my children is going to be the path to this. I don’t know if that will work.

That’s all for now you weirdos.

Why I’m Doing This Blog

Most of us have facebook and instagram accounts, a lot of us have twitter accounts. I started my relationship with social media in a pretty healthy way. I’m 40 years old. So before any social media platform had come along I had made lasting friends, had girlfriends and even gone on tour with a band. I joined friendster first, and loved it. People I knew said nice things about each other. I laughed at jokes and I spent maybe five hours on it a week. A fan of Heiruspecs from Chicago named Jenny Fujitsu told the band we should get into Myspace. I loved Myspace. I kept a blog. I made friends. I got laid off of Myspace. Heiruspecs got “big” on Myspace. It was a good time. Myspace was good for musicians, it gave you an incredible level of freedom to do your thing and push your music.

That same Jenny pushed us all towards Facebook and it was clear to me that it combined the clean design of Friendster, the elitist history of starting in the Ivy League that credentialed it as where the cool people already were and the ambition of Myspace and it was off to the races. I was team Myspace, as mentioned, I had gotten laid off Myspace and was reluctant to leave such a platform. So I came on Facebook with a real clear mandate: I’m on here to get more people to come to my shows. This is where the people are, and I want them to come to my shows. Walking into social media with a clear mandate makes the whole thing pretty logical. That worked for Facebook. My willingness to add “friends” who I considered fans worked for me. I was able to make sure that fans of Heiruspecs might become fans of Dessa (back then we had more fans than her), they might start playing Trivia Mafia. Facebook functioned as a way to take someone who liked one part of the what I offer publicly to connect with the rest. Mission accomplished.

I remember my first night on Facebook: working at a group home in Anoka, invited to the service by my friend Josh Peterson, sitting with my laptop on the other side of the sink to steal the neighbor’s WIFI. I add friends, I create events. I promote my shit. Besides for a couple years of dumb scrolling I didn’t fall in to terrible ruts with Facebook. I knew why I was there, and the products/events/bands I was there to hawk were good enough that people stayed connected with me.

Twitter was different, better and intoxicating. It’s probably mostly cause my brother was really good at twitter. My life in general is just me following wherever my older brother Steve goes. Steve played guitar, so I played bass. Steve liked basketball, so I liked basketball. Steve was good at twitter, so I wanted to be good at twitter. What do I mean he’s good at twitter? My brother is brilliant in long doses but he has a special gift for taking the 25 word joke and making it the three word joke. He has an uncanny ability to drop into someone else’s moment and say the thing everyone was thinking but no one had thought to say. If you are still on that twitter narcotic (and I am!) you should follow him. But twitter was this service I heard about from cool people: my brother, NPR, the woman from DC who got hired at Minnesota Public Radio who said she “connected with new people in new cities on Twitter”. What? Really? Amazing. Twitter was and is a place where cleverness was celebrated and brute promotion was useless. I couldn’t hang and that made me want to hang so bad. Twitter was also great for something that I’ve been all about since I was in fifth grade: asking random ass questions. Suddenly I could ask some question about something dumb and some pseudo-celebrity like A.C. Newman is in my mentions.

Everything I’ve said in this blog has been said by other people, but I need to set up why I’m where I’m at with social media and why I have this blog that at least Andrea Swensson, Chuck Terhark and Bill Caperton read from time to time (hi Andrea, hi Bill, see you tonight Chuck).

I couldn’t be on twitter just to get people to come to my shows. That is, if my desire was to get people to come to my shows, the effective way to do that was to be on twitter about all sorts of other shit, and then jump in authentically and organically with your promotional materials. At the same time I’m realizing this, the trivia company I co-own has to start advertising to keep up attendance at our events. And Facebook is the behemoth in online advertising and somewhere around 2015 we are starting to spend hundreds of dollars (and now probably over 5k a year) on FB advertising. I hate the feeling of typing in the credit card number and giving money to the blueprint-for-all-future-little-shits Mark Zuckerberg, but it’s where the eyeballs are and it owns Instagram where the other eyeballs are.

All of this isn’t enough to make me quit social media. It is still legitimately valuable to my career prospects, to getting people to the things I am promoting. But I’ve fallen for the twitter thing. I’m not there to make money, I’m there to see the responses, I’m there because it’s an incredible place to be. I follow brilliant people who say brilliant things, but I also get to know about the mundanity of their life and I love it. But why am I giving my eyeball dollars to these companies? I love the community, I love the news, but I miss the Wild West of the internet, reloading blogs, laughing about videos, having weird URLs you had to remember just so to share with friends at actual in person parties? I miss those things, but not enough to depart from the zeitgeist. Everyone I’m into is on twitter so there I am.

The whole time this is happening the best things on Earth are happening to me professionally. I used to come to the Current  as a musician and think all my problems in life would be solved if I had a desk here. I thought it was so cool, to be in this physical space that is dedicated to sharing great music with the world. And I’ll tell you, I was right. I have a desk here and I love it. Right now it kind of sucks cause I’m usually the only person sitting in the entire floor, but I still love it. I’m where I wanted to be. I’m doing what I wanted to be doing. Did twitter get my foot in the door at the Current? Hell no. Trivia and being a member of Heiruspecs got my foot in the door. But amassing a following on twitter suddenly seemed like a hurdle that was worthwhile to jump over. In this era you can go check out the stats on the people you admire, and I start to see that they’ve almost all jumped the hurdle of amassing a following on twitter, with some notable exceptions including kick ass music radio jocks in all sorts of markets across the country. But for the most part, it looks like a hurdle the people I admired had jumped over. It reminded me of pre-social media success hurdles.

Time Travel with me to 2003 for this paragraph please: Heiruspecs’ manager was trying to lock down the support of a more elite booking agent at one point, Tom Windish. Tom Windish came to our show at the Abbey in Chicago, dug it and told our manager Vickie, call me when they sell 10,000 records. BTW, not a dickhead statement from Windish, 10,000 records was a doable amount to sell from our infrastructure at that point. Heiruspecs did sell 10,000 records in the end, but by the time we had, we weren’t really in need of an elite booking agent as we couldn’t figure out a way to stay on the road with the money we were making.

Time Travel to 2011 for these next couple paragraphs please: Me and my guy Mike Fotis wanted to do a podcast with APM when Steve Nelson was running the Infinite Guest network. Sat down with Steve and Mike Fotis at Amsterdam Bar and Hall. Nice meeting, love how Steve thinks, but the basic question he asked was as follows, “why start a podcast with two schmos who don’t have 10,000 followers on twitter between ‘em?” I start realizing that twitter is a thermometer check to let you do other cool stuff in life. You get that number far enough up and you don’t have to keep on hawking your value inside the 280 character limit, the doors open up.

All of this thinking still didn’t get me to buy in deep into twitter. It was being on the road with Dessa that sent me towards being oriented towards twitter. Why? Well, first of all, tour is boring. And in the early 2000s when Heiruspecs was on the road we killed time by reading magazines at Borders, listening to records and throwing phone books at each other in hotel rooms. With Dessa, only one of the speakers work in the van so we never get to really listen to music together. Everyone wears headphones and everyone tweets. I still wasn’t personally bought in. Dessa told me, “just tweet twice a day for a month and see if you like it”. I did, and I did. People laughed, people commented, I felt connected. It did all the good things social media was supposed to do.

But, connecting to twitter twice a day and more created an obligation that I carry to this day. I feel the need to see what people are saying about the world and what people are saying about me. I feel compelled to make a comment about any big event happening in the world. Not a statement, not an action, just a comment. I don’t have my brother’s gift to say what everybody’s thinking but nobody’s said. My gifts involve speaking from my heart, being vulnerable in public and crafting ways to get people to attend events and moments I’m a part of or believe in. I am good at asking seemingly stupid questions. They aren’t actually stupid, and we all know that, they just help people think about choices differently than they did before they asked. But I’m trying to fit into this twitter box of success so that Steve Nelson walks to my house with flowers, kisses the ground and says “I was wrong about not giving you a podcast, how many do you want now"?”

But I sat there busting my ass on Facebook creating groups, invites and advertisements hoping first that Heiruspecs would blow up, and then that Trivia Mafia would become a force in the nightlife industry. And I created a non-promotional identity on twitter so that places like the Current and City Pages could see that I had something to bring to the table, not just the amount of followers, but a viewpoint on the world that would fit well with their brands.

Welcome to 2021 again: I’m doing this blog, cause social media has done what I need it to do for me and I don’t think there’s much else it can do. I can’t get laid off of Myspace or any site anymore; I’m in a wonderful monogamous marriage with Rachel. Heiruspecs’ amazing fanbase seems to accept that we will be purely advertorial online. Heiruspecs’ amazing members certainly are not chompin’ at the bit to create some sort of online identity for ourselves beyond “we have shows, we have music, we have videos, please consume”. I have a full-time job at the Current. I have a desk at the Current. I have some modest amount of impact on where the station is heading as a whole, I have a large amount of impact on where the hours of programming I’m doing are heading. I play a role in celebrating and broadcasting Minnesota music. I am beyond humbled by this opportunity. I want to do more, DJ more, do more work in non-music spaces, but I don’t think there are any doors that would be busted wide open for me if I tweeted more.

I listen every week to a podcast called “Political Gabfest”. David Plotz from the show succinctly stated some months ago “social media was a huge experiment and it’s failed”. The words stuck with me, reading Cal Newport’s work has stuck with me. I have goals in life, I have goals for my career, and I think I got a better shot of hitting them if I start relating to social media differently. There are things I want to say about the world, about music, about my friends that I can’t put on to twitter. For many of the hours of my week there are better ways to spend my time than hopping on twitter to join a conversation. I will miss things, I will be misinterpreted, but I believe I have the compass to make sure that across a longer period of time, I’m delivering something better for myself and for the people who care about what I do. I also want my children to see a man who has a good relationship with social media, who handles his involvement with it in such a way that he’s still present with them, present in meetings, present in rehearsals, present at dinner.

It scared me when I realized I was metabolizing my life in twitter. Something bad would happen to me and I’d think about the tweet I could say to have my followers make me feel better. I would view raw injustices happening and I would think about twitter, not about protesting. I thought twitter was all I could do. But, when other organizations would ask me to write something I would take that invitation to think for a longer time in a longer format. I wrote something shortly after Philando Castile was murdered that I’m still proud of. I wrote a commencement address for Slam Academy that I ended up being really proud of. Why do I have to wait for these other organizations to ask me to think? Why do I stay in my twitter box waiting for some company to invite me out to write my thoughts? It’s dumb and frankly, I don’t think tweeting keeps me in good shape to share the longer thoughts I have when I have a larger platform. This blog does.

Also, I want a way to look back at the things I’ve thought in a way that I can digest. I do a very strange IG live video series with my wife on Mondays called Tilapia Mondays. Rachel has archived them on my IG page, so we can watch them later, when we’re older. Right now we are snapshotting our Mondays with a humor and diligence we could never muster if it was on a camcorder. But I can rewatch those, sometimes Rachel does. Years from now we’ll get to see our daughters grow up a week at a time. I’m not doing that with my twitter feed. When I remember how I was doing in 2021 I don’t want to give Mark Zuckerberg my eyeballs. I want to read this blog, I want to read my private journal, I want to listen to the records I made. I want to listen to the programs I did on The Current. I’m not quitting twitter, I still think it is an indispensable way to let people start a journey of connecting with you. But that’s how I’m using it now. You won’t be able to get to know me on social media, and that’s great news for you and me.

How Would Cupcakes Taste without White Supremacy?

I didn’t see the strong backlash to Critical Race Theory coming. But I have a garbage track record. If you told me that a large group of people’s response to signs that say “Black Lives Matter” was to make signs that say “All Lives Matter” I would have laughed in your face. I think what I’ve gotten wrong about a large portion of mainstream America are as follows:

Mainstream America Thinks They Can Curate a Life Where They And Their Children Never Think About Race or Think About it Less and Less - I think Black Lives Matter offends a lot of people because it is a three word statement that firmly states “IT’S NOT FIXED YET”. It blew my mind when I read a piece that argued that the middle age, upper and middle class black hostility towards rap and hip-hop (I’m most aware of the negativity at black radio stations in the 80s and 90s) was because the mere existence of a genre as capital B Black and very outspoken on the ills of urban life was like a loudspeaker announcing “the Civil Rights and Black Power Era didn’t fix it, we are still in this struggle”. This opened my mind, the mere existence of the genre of hip-hop is an indictment of anyone who tried to fly a Mission Accomplished flag across black America in the mid 70s. An honest teaching of race in America would prevent anyone from pretending that the problem of the 21st century isn’t also the color line. And I believe for pretty obvious reasons, if one is convinced they can shelter themselves or their family from the realities of racism, they would! It’s not possible, but there’s a lot of energy being expended to try to create that culture.

Let’s Stop Your Bullet List and Talk About What You Mean By “Fixed” in the paragraph above - Fine. What does it mean to say racism is “fixed”? First, let’s have everybody who actually thinks race has any biological grounding to leave the room. Awesome, those people are dumb and I’m glad they left. If you believe race is a social construct, that means that a large amount of the disparity in wealth, health, lifespan et cetera are caused by society. For generations the money that I’m now spending and saving as a white man has been protected, supported and bolstered by opportunities handed primarily to white men. I believe that “fixed” means counting back those benefits and distributing the fair share to black families. Most of the opportunities to build wealth I’m speaking of have passed over black families since the end of Reconstruction. I also believe that slavery creates a scornful legacy that we WOULD ALL do well to do something to remedy/address. I support reparations for descendants of slaves. I believe that if you do that, many many less young black people would be killed. Less would be killed by police, less would be killed by fellow civilians.

I took a “Racial Equity through Action and Learning” training this summer. It was mandatory for my job at American Public Media. I found it to be really well put together. But, there was a dismal part where the majority of the participants and the leaders voiced their feeling that racism wouldn’t be “solved” in their lifetime. I bit my tongue but I disagreed. I don’t believe the pernicious impact of racism has simply receded in a straight line for this country’s history. We’ve moved backward at many times in history and we’ve moved backward at times in my lifetime. But, progress has been made. Progress has been made (and has recently been lost) towards more comparable levels of wealth for black families compared to white families. But, correcting for redlining, for GI Bill omissions, for illegal hiring practices and paying out reparations could change that wealth trajectory quicker than anything we’ve tried so far.

Fixed to me means household wealth for blacks that is in the same ballpark as whites. I think it’s doable. I think we could get way close before I die and I’m pretty old already! Ok, let’s get back on the bullet points.

Many White People Fear Competing with Black People on Equal Footing - I can’t know this for a fact, obviously. But here’s where I’m coming from. That book “The Sum of Us” from Heather McGhee messed me up in the best way possible. There are tangible ways in which white leadership at local, regional and national levels chose and chooses to go without rather than share with black people. Part of what I extrapolate from this is a fear of brushing shoulders with black people because maybe you’d find out that any inferiority you’ve ascribed to black people just doesn’t track when you actually spend time at a swimming pool, on a job site or any other spot with black people. If white communities segregate access to the best amenities, job opportunities and rapid mass transit lines and leave them most hospitable to white folks, there will be less opportunity for fair competition.

Many White People Believe That Their Success is Dependent Upon Black Failure - Why do many of my white brothers and sisters seem to stick their heads out only to make sure black people are held down? Why will you go out of your way for that? What does it matter to you? The policies you will show up to vote against, the steps you will take to insure that a two tiered society exists. Why? I haven’t ever read a convincing argument as to how that helps out your family or your pocketbook.

Many people lack the imagination for a better America - I believe that the willful drive to ignore racial disparities from so many people in our country comes from a disinclination to imagine a better America. Combined with some of my points above I worry that many people think that a better America in general would be a worse America for them in particular.

—

I think a lot of the people who operate with these views would disavow them, wouldn’t recognize them. But I think at a group level, I see these philosophies in action. I want to talk about the potential invisibility of white supremacy. It’s become part of the language in my world to say something like “white supremacy is the water we swim in, or the air we breath”. It’s often stated as a defense for stating that white supremacy exists in places where you can’t measure it’s impact. My point of departure for a lot of this work was a document written by Tema Okun. It’s a list of characteristics of white supremacy culture. It’s a conversation starter for sure because it lists a lot of characteristics that most readers wouldn’t face value take as part of white supremacy. . .I certainly didn’t.

I didn’t take to this document too well at first: I think of things like perfectionism, quantity over quality as characteristics that are more widespread than just white supremacy culture. I’m all in on ending white supremacy culture. But does that mean I want to end perfectionism? Does that mean we have to end perfectionism? If we believe that white supremacy culture is everywhere can we start saying anything we want is part of white supremacy? There’s no way cupcakes taste this way without white supremacy! I don’t think movies would be so long if it weren’t for white supremacy! We can recognize those statements as humorous, but they are as investigated and supported as the characteristics listed by Tema Okun. But I ask you to read the Okun piece. I got something out of it, I started thinking differently about how we could imagine a world that was calibrated differently. Calibrated without the traumas that racism has given to everyone. You carry trauma from racism. We all do. Maybe that calibration means we don’t celebrate quantity over quality anymore. Shit, maybe the cupcakes will taste different too. I don’t know. But I want to know it. I want to know a world where I don’t pencil in an asterisk next to some of my biggest achievements, a world where I recognize how the road to them would’ve been very different without white privilege. I want to taste a cupcake in a world where a large percentage black people have access to family wealth. I want to watch a movie in a world where we have made an honest effort to right our wrongs.

My First Divorce and Car Accident

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Life Is Lemons, Lemons

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

Don’t Punch Down or Up, Stop Punching

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Makes it Magical

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

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

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

Getting Coverage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over Under NBA

My NBA over under picks:

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

Filing Taxes So Late

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

Rocking on the Radio/Rocking at Home

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

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

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

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