I need to get this down quickly, before these emotions get washed away, which invariably happens over time.

Onnie achieved liftoff at exactly 4:03pm Pacific Time, August 19th, in the year of our Lord 2026. And while I write this through tears, I’m also consumed with the question of what exactly happens at that moment between life and death?

His passing was supremely calm. I plied him with treats, held him close, he seemed quite happy and content. Maggie and Rosie hovered nearby, but not too close to cause concern, the cats did also, trying to look as if they didn’t care too much, but it was clear they did. Everybody knew what was up, as did he. But he faced it with aplomb. Fortitude. Steadfastness. The happy warrior.

My wee pup had lived 16 years, 9 months and 19 days on our fair planet; if counting dog years, he was about 140, so massive kudos for that. He was a complicated guy - cheerful, unfailingly happy to see any of us, but also quite pensive and introspective at times. He had a lot going on under the hood that we were never privy to. I don’t think anyone was. He’ll carry those thoughts to the great beyond.

But the moment he left his body, I knew it. I was cradling him, telling him what a phenomenal being he was, when that subtle shift occurred. He was there. And then he wasn’t.

In that fraction of a second, between life and death, he moved. Out. His body no longer contained him, but he was still very much present. Lighter. A quiet ah-ha! I felt it immediately. My tears were no longer about his pending departure, they became my grief at having to finally say goodbye. There is a stark difference between pre-grief, when you’re leading up to the moment, and your mind goes into overdrive trying to figure out another way to keep him alive, to the grief that hits you just after the shift, when you realize there is nothing on heaven or earth that can now change things. They are two quite different states of being.

However…

He is not lost. It makes little difference to me whether that soul was housed in a human’s body, or any creature. He doesn’t have a soul - he is a soul. I loved, and love him with all my heart, and that will never dim.

Fair thee well, Onnie. You comported yourself with extraordinary strength, patience, good humor and grace all your life.

Would that we all could say the same.

I hear the sound of something tearing, a slight rip in the fabric of the world, when someone I love has to exit this corporeal existence. That sound is my heart relinquishing some of its mass, pulled away by the being who’s leaving this world.

I give it gladly, hoping it’ll help remind the one leaving how very much I love him. That all the adventures, mishaps, remarkable and unremarkable moments we shared are safely stored in that bit of psychic tissue, my parting gift. I carry a mirror of those moments in the heart I have left, and I’d like to think that binds us forever.

I’ve given away more than a few bits over the years, but there’s enough left for those who still remain. And when I go, those bits will be scattered among the ones I’ve held so dear for so long. That, I believe, is immortality. “and you give yourself away…”

My dog, Onnie (Onyx Maximus) is scheduled to be euthanized next week. It’s taken me nearly a year to make this decision, and when I finally did send the email to the kind women who run a service for just this sort of thing, I collapsed in spasms of tears. I am the executioner. I am the knife. A kind knife, but deadly nonetheless.

No amount of justification soothes my soul that the time has come, that he’s probably in pain, that I don’t want to leave things until he collapses in a mass of anguished cries, that I pick up poop in the house on a daily basis, that I haven’t actually had a full night’s sleep in over a year, tending and comforting him many times every night. He has dreams. Nightmares, I think.

People who think non-human species don’t deserve the same level of love and care will point their noses skyward at my reactions. He’s not a person, they’ll say. It’s - IT’S! - just a dog. You have no idea how incandescent that makes me. No creature is an it or a just.

Onnie has been at my side for over 16 years, since he was 10 weeks old. I found him on a Craigslist ad, and in the picture of him, slung over someone’s shoulder, he looked like a tiny old man, with wall eyes and a silly little grin. He’s been loving, infuriating, funny, willful, sneaky, pensive, massively destructive - consuming an entire Canon T2 camera body, crunching it into such tiny pieces that it exited at various times without harming him, eating rocks that (thankfully!) also passed, and ripping out (with his buddy Sean, an over-excited Irish Setter pup) the entire wiring harness of our cargo van, and eating all the knobs and control surfaces in the van in less than two hours. A Guinness record, I’m sure.

He’s also never been mean or growly, and greets me every single time our eyes meet with joy and this astonishing outpouring of pure love. Why do we humans even deserve this? It humbles me, that another being could feel this level of unvarnished adoration for… me.

He’ll leave behind Maggie and Rosie, Great Pyrenees sisters who love and admire him, as well as four cats, Phoenix, ZuZu, Juno and Luna. Yes, I know, too many critters. All I can say in my defense is they are now my family, the cats keep the local exploding ground squirrel population in check, and the loving pack we’ve formed keeps depression at bay.

I love all of them, but I confess (quietly) that I will miss the trouble those two engaged in. Maggie and Rosie are wonderful, dear, loving girls, but they behave. I don’t exactly know how to deal with that.

It isn’t going to be the same around here. I’ll catch a glimpse of him out of the corner of my eye, whenever he decides to make his presence known, usually right around dinner :) And then, over time, he’ll slowly pull away, as he heads out on his personal odyssey.

But he’ll have my little piece with him, tucked safely within that beautiful soul. Bon voyage, baby boy. I will miss you.

This morning I read a wonderful piece by Eric Spitznagel on the more dubious relics of the punk era, and his trek with his son to inhale the highlights of those times. It’s worth a read.

I had just one brush with CBGB’s during a transitory time in my life at 22, when I was bemoaning a stalled career in classical ballet, wondering what lay ahead. A friend in NYC, where I lived at the time, suggested I make my way to that storied venue to get a taste of that life.

Nothing, nothing prepared me for what lay inside when I walked through those doors. Sadly, I didn’t witness Blondie or the Ramones, or any other band that would eventually rocket into the zeitgeist. I don’t even remember who the band was, probably because the volume level, pungent odor of those around me writhing, shaking and yelling all succeeded in wiping my mind clean. I was no longer thinking - I was feeling.

It was heady. Real. Sweaty, stinky, unpredictably raw human emotion. Could I have easily slipped into that life, then and there? I doubt it, because in my mind I’d not yet made the transition out of the prim, rigid, militaristic lifestyle of a ballet dancer into one who spent her time rebelling against what she perceived as stale or wrong.

But it planted a seed that spent the next couple of years germinating, while I went to Colorado to dance in the last dance company I’d ever work with. Clandestine thoughts brewed, but the trajectory was unclear. How the hell did people fall into this new line of work?

I’d been reared and taught the classical way - ballet, piano. I had no idea what being in a band meant. I knew no popular songs, either to sing, which I’d never really tried, or on the piano. I owned no equipment, and it definitely looked like keyboards were a peripheral instrument during those days. Being left handed and extremely dyslexic, learning guitar was right out. I had no connections. I sure as hell didn’t have the look.

Had I stayed in NYC, I might’ve eventually understood the mechanics of how that world operated. As it turned out, after Colorado, I moved to LA with my then-new and eventually-divorced husband. LA had a completely different rhythm - much more polished, with a whiff of corporate even at that stage. In LA it was about making money, less about rebelling. And I grew very confused.

One could be rebellious in the LA music scene, but only to a point, because bands also had to cultivate a certain amount of gloss. This was during the rise of the hair bands - the Marshall Shags and Jimmie Hi-watts who paraded all over town in increasingly gaudy gear and hair that outcompeted B-52 hairdos in altitude. Gloss vs. rebellion - those two aspects seemed diametrically opposed to one another. It was calculated, sanctioned rebellion meant to titillate - not true revolt. Displaying tendencies to not play nicely with the agents, labels and venues in the corporate world got you ostracized. There were a few who found ways to thread that needle, but then, they were very gifted, in both talent and subterfuge.

I have never forgotten how I felt, standing 6 feet from the stage at CBGB’s, with my hair almost being ripped off my scalp by the volume and intensity of the music. It woke me up out of a deep slumber I’d been in from birth.

Turns out I wasn’t meant for the classical path, and that ratty, smelly dive at 315 Bowery in the East Village exposed the wild, explosive underbelly of humanity for me. I did see the bathrooms, and I did not use them. Even at that point, I knew enough microbiology to know that was a leap toward extinction.

It takes an enormous amount of energy to craft something new and somewhat disturbing, in the way that seeing what you think might be a UFO on the horizon feels like. It upsets your internal status quo as your mind kicks into hyperdrive trying to come up with an explanation that’ll make it fit into your framework.

I don’t think people can handle that kind of shock to the system on a regular basis, but that doesn’t lessen its power. We’re creatures of habit, and most of us tend to fall into patterns that over time become a kind of cage. The bars get thicker and stronger and for many there comes a time when it’s impossible to break out.

Next week I’m heading back to NYC to be in a showcase. It won’t exactly be closing the loop, because CBGB’s is gone, and this venue will be a more tightly controlled environment. But the city has an in-your-face attitude where the arts are concerned, and I like that. You know where you stand. I love living in California, but it’s far tamer, softer, than the East Coast, and double-speak is its own language. Though I’ve lived out here since 1982, deep down I’m still an East coaster.

Whether I pick up my toothbrush tomorrow using my non-dominant hand, walk through a door backwards, decide to learn a new language or go to a club to hear music way outside my comfort zone, disrupting the mental quilt so lovingly and unconsciously stitched over a lifetime is now a requirement.

Otherwise I’m not really living. I’m on autopilot. And that isn’t life, it’s just existence.

In my Long, Dark Teatime of the Soul (thank you, Douglas Addams - best book title ever), when I find myself sandwiched between the non-important daily grindings that leech the life out of most of us, and those special seconds when all becomes clarity itself, ping-ponging between these two states becomes a bit worrying.

As in - does this dichotomy eventually lead to madness?

As I’ve written about before, a part of me winces when I write that, because I don’t know how long others will virtually hold my hand - there, there... before eventually exiting the room.

I don’t know what I’m doing. Ok, yes, in a structural, procedural kind of way, I pay my bills, brush my teeth, keep an eye on the well pump, and generally do all the things that adults do. And that part of me, the logical, grounded individual I’ve spent SO much time crafting lo these multiple decades, is fairly sound.

The me who doesn’t know what she’d doing is the artist. Again, having said this before (don’t leave!), I am very, very shy about saying I am. That.

And I just realized why. Growing up, I never saw artists who self identified. They were always identified by others. To come out and state I was an artist seemed exceptionally narcissistic. And I probably did encounter self-id’d artists, but I don’t remember ever hearing one say so out loud.

I’d always thought I was a brave SOB, or more accurately, a brave B, but come to find out nay, not so! I am afeared of what I most want. I long to inhabit the space of an artist 24/7, unencumbered by the opinions of others. At least the mental space of an artist, even if I have to do other, mostly technical things to keep the lights on. Legions of other people do this quite successfully. I actually have no problem keeping both alive in my head.

The question is, can I pull what the artist in me wants to do into real, concrete, this-is-now daylight? I keep moving forward, building, creating, and yet, when I have work to show, I hesitate.

I know part of that is the perfectionista in me, that nosy, OCD, stuck-up, pissy little part that says no bit, no molecule, will leave these shores until every last pixel or frequency is exactly where intended. It is control taken to extraordinary lengths, and it’s not healthy.

That part may have come from many years spent looking into a mirror as a professional ballet dancer. Civilians might think doing that would breed an unparalleled sense of self-aggrandizement, but it is the exact opposite. Dancers almost always see only the things they need to improve on. For most it’s an unflinching look at what’s wrong, not what works.

And I have to admit, beyond a certain basic level of competence, doing it that way (endlessly thrashing a work till it’s been ground to a fine powder) won’t let the art be art*. A work subjected to purposeful construction, meticulously crafted, tested, retested, starved for oxygen, quarantined for a bit to make sure it’s not carrying anything, and then…

I have started and stopped this project multiple times, reverting strategically to 1) let’s remix this, to 2) I don’t have any content to put out, to 3) I don’t WANT to create content for momentary consumption, to 4) would anyone actually want to see/listen to this anyway? to 5) what on earth am I, a 69 year old widow, doing?

What am I doing? Beats me. I’m living life, unknowable thing that it is. These days contain a certain strain of inquietude. In the back of my mind the mantra “I don’t have a hell of a lot of time left” tickles my synapses, punctured in the most amazing ways by creative bursts that remind me of me. Of who I am. If not for those moments, life would seem quite,

quite,

quite

boring.

I’m fairly certain I should’ve figured most of this stuff out years ago, but being the late potato that I am (namesake of my publishing co! Funny if not sad that its moniker might be emblematic of its inability to publish), I feel behind.

And I may just be behind for the remainder. Somewhere in the deep recesses of my brain I somehow think someone’s keeping score. Measuring success, tallying the progress of each to everyone else. Where did I learn this?

It has taken me nearly three years to realize that I do not require permission from anyone to do literally anything I want**. I’m astounded that I have to - voce forte - remind myself that I don’t need to check with anyone re plans. And before anyone thinks my husband was a dictatorial jerk, he was not. My family is not. My friends are not. But somewhere along the way, I learned to check myself, wait. Men don’t do this, but many women do.

So, there’re twin forces at work here; they collide with and reinforce each other. The perfectionism plus the hesitancy, what an effective barrier they build when a person is trying to birth an idea into the world.

In an instance like that, probably the only thing to do is scale the cliff and jump off. I keep saying I’m going to do that, and I have, sort of. I may never figure out what I’m doing until after the fact. I think that’s the way of most of us.

* Architecture can get away with this because no one wants buildings that fall down, and gravity doesn’t care one whit whether it’s beautiful or not.

**Except, OBVIOUSLY, illegal things, or anything that would hurt someone else.

Sounds like Armageddon for anybody’s GI, but the thought of that meal still triggers a Pavlovian response in me. Nothing could dim the enthusiasm or energy of an 8 year old child unbound by school or other obligations on a Saturday morning.

Now that I’m trending toward being a vegetarian, I could have the beanies without the weenies (Vienna sausages made of parts I’d rather not think about), but damn, they were good.

I would levitate around 5:30, just in time for the TV to switch from the static image of the solemn Indian test pattern to the farm report, which, because of its sheer boredom factor, I found fascinating. These guys with the stage presence of day-old bread would drone on about soil conditions, what to plant when, the price of such and such crop (LOTS of talk about tobacco, unfortunately).

Before enjoying such scintillating entertainment, I would quietly raid the kitchen, and put together my favorite meal of all time - Beanie Weenies in a pop-top can, dill pickles, marshmallows I would squish together to form a block or twist into little animal shapes, and a coke.

What followed was at least three solid hours of cartoons. My favorites were Bullwinkle and Rocky, Clyde “base for base, ball for ball - baseball” Crashcup, Fractured Fairytales and Dudley Do-Right of the Northwest Mounties. And the Jetsons. I remember in later years when new cartoons appeared, it seemed like the animators had suddenly become lazy because only the characters’ jaws moved, and I totally lost interest. Or I grew out of cartoons.

After dragging my drying eyeballs away from the screen, I’d pack another small feast and head down the hill two miles though thick woods to my favorite little creek, where I’d play with freshwater crawdads, mud puppies and salamanders. I learned not to bring them home because they never fared well.

That spot was my haven, where I spent many weekend mornings alone, exploring the surrounding area, discovering critters, plants, a few fossils, and a remarkable yellow fungus that, having grown tired of where it was, grew filopodia (akin to feet) on its underside, and very slowly walked away. It was a fantastic place to grow up, and it makes me sad that many kids are no longer afforded alone time in Nature. Sure, I got poison ivy, insect bites, scrapes and cuts, but I learned self-reliance and was happy being alone.

There was only one thing that could keep me out of the woods, and that was a rabid animal. On occasion, we’d hear of rabid foxes or squirrels (I did encounter a few of those who seemed unnaturally friendly/insane, and knew to steer well clear). Some months I wasn’t allowed down there at all, and time became a boring slog toward the inevitable - school. God, when would that ever END?

Farther down the slope was a limestone outcropping we called Lookout Limestone. My recollection of it was as a towering monolith jutting out of the hill, but when I was around 30 I went back for a visit. I could’ve found it blindfolded - so many days I spent in those woods.

It was minuscule, barely three feet off the ground. The “cave“ below it went into the hill maybe six feet, but when I was small it’d seemed gaping, foreboding. We’d all heard stories (true ones), of people getting lost in caves permanently, so we peered in cautiously and then backed out, afraid it would somehow swallow us just for looking.

But by the age of 10 I’d begun to outgrow the woods, and turned my attention to other things. The last six years that we lived there, I don’t think I went down there once. I’d entered the world of human society, preferring people company to the wonders of the natural world. If I could go back, I’d give my 10 year old self a stern lecture on the necessity of continuing that conversation with the woods.

But isn’t it interesting how things come back around? I now live in the country again, in a very different kind of woods, but still, around things not of our making. I have reintroduced myself to nature and apologized, and she has welcomed me back. I can spend long hours alone with her, but I no longer pack that lunch.

Humans do need each other - we’re gregarious animals after all. But this jamming tightly into mega cities is unnatural and harmful, not only to us, but to everything else. We don’t seem to be able to limit ourselves or our impact on the planet.

Someday the planet may do that for us. In the meantime, I’m trying hard to curb my consumption of resources, and to live a thoughtful, non-harmful life. It’s not easy, since we’ve designed so many systems to which we’ve become utterly dependent. I’m guilty of using them too.

I think about those halcyon days as a child, when I was paying more attention, was less bothered, and allowed the natural world to speak to me and be heard. I am determined to rebuild that skill.

Kindness. Purposeful action. Weaning ourselves off of destructive practices. These things require paying attention, and I’ll admit, the world is such a clusterfuck right now that there doesn’t seem to be any room in our heads to rewire ourselves for less harmful behaviors.

But we have to try, because as someone sage said, “there is no try, only do”.

It’s a given that without motion, life doesn’t exist. We all quiver with atomic movement, which translates up the scale to molecules banging into one another, jiggling cell membranes and their inner contents.

I like to think that thoughts are like that, expanding and contracting depending on other thoughts they encounter. If the analogy holds, then the internal paradigms we all cling to can also be jilted by opposing paradigms. And that can yield life-shattering, earth-busting outcomes.

I used to think that the only immovable object in the universe was a person’s opinion. Evidence of this is borne out in the MAGA mentality - despite plain, visible and irrefutable evidence, MAGA clings desperately to what they think is true, because to eschew that paradigm risks crumbling the architecture upon which they have built their ID, their personality, their reason for being.

This morning I stumbled upon a fantastic explanation of a four step process to engage with someone of a radically different persuasion. And the key to this is not that you’re trying to change the other person’s mind, but that you are letting them know that you have actually heard them.

Can this be done with MAGA? I believe so, but it’ll take the right circumstances and a large amount of intestinal fortitude. So, why do it?

Because it’s possible that by truly listening to someone (1), giving them the time to express themselves, then (2) relay those thoughts back to them in your own words, asking them if you understood them correctly, it will cause them to (3) expound on those thoughts, which might uncover the actual reasons for why they feel that way, leading them to (4) feel more comfortable that they’ve actually been heard, and thus (BONUS!) be more receptive to YOUR views.

In the spectrum of MAGA followers, there are truly those beyond repair, but also others worth helping out of this pit.

For now, I understand why so many of us would say hell no - I’m one of them, so fundamentally pissed off by what’s been happening that I can’t stomach the idea of sitting down with anyone holding Trumpian views. But there will come a time when we’ll have to begin a new dialogue, and that’s going to take time, patience and the desire to knit our communities back together again.

And yeah, the question comes up: why the hell do WE have to do this? Why can’t MAGA meet us halfway? Some might, but honestly, entrenched ideas create concrete people. You have to chip away slowly to free the person inside. It’s all amygdalar thinking right now, they’re stuck in fight or flight.

I wish I could locate an article I read several years ago about a former racist skinhead (is racist skinhead a redundant phrase?) who’d done time, finding out the hard way that hate ultimately does one no good, and having an epiphany - to engage with another racist over a period of several years, gaining his trust, and eventually introducing him to a good friend of his who was Black.

As this man, who’d harbored such hatred toward other races came to know this friend, his outlook began to change. His hatred was a symptom of what lay inside - fear. By slow degrees, he came to see that all people are individuals, not a herd.

I fully understand if the mere idea of starting a conversation triggers people who’re deep in the throes of hatred regarding what’s happening to our country right now. I am also extremely angry, and often have thoughts of lashing out. We all do, if we’re being honest.

But look at the No Kings and the other protests - they are emblematic of the right way to approach these problems. Non-violent but millions-strong, individuals standing up to oppression collectively, showing ourselves and the world that we do not have to lose our humanity to fight this pox. We are a thinking, rational people, and we are displaying that in spades. I am so, so proud of us.

We will win this war for the soul of America, not by destroying our neighbors, but by showing those who can change that there will eventually be a place at the table. There’s always been a percentage of any given population on the planet who cannot or don’t want to think independently. And there’re some people who were born evil. Stephen Miller comes to mind, that guy is irrevocably damaged. When the tide turns, most will shift sides simply because they need someone to follow, not caring who, if their needs are met. The truly bad apples will roll back into the shadows to wait for another opportunity to destroy. Because that’s what they are built for.

And those little apples need to be identified and watched perpetually.

Civilization is like housework, never done. Safeguarding a society is an ongoing process, and whenever we become complacent (it can never happen HERE!) the door is blown off its hinges, and the malcontents slither in. Functioning vibrant societies operate in an osmotic environment, open enough to absorb new ideas, grow, learn and share, but ever vigilant to the possibility that something or someone toxic might slip in.

We will not survive if half of us hate the other half. None of us can turn the other cheek in this moment, but there’s going to come a time when we’ll have to sit down and really, really listen. And they’ll have to return the favor. It won’t be nice or pretty or fun. The wound is deep, society’s bones have been shattered, and it’s going to take years to heal.

Not now. But soon, we’ll need to cultivate forgiveness.

If we don’t, the self-inflicted wounds they carry will fester and this phenomenon will rise again.

Another long spell between posts, very sorry. Life intervened…

Eons ago, now blown to dust by time, I had a band in LA. Like many other young humans of that era, I chased the brass ring from one end of town to the other. I felt engulfed by fire, hyper-aware of every passing moment, caught up in a dream whose realization looked possible but in reality was probably never meant to be.

I was chasing the wrong dream. It was never supposed to be about following trends, emulating others’ efforts or fitting in. I knew several others musicians who somehow seemed to understand this innately, and off they marched to their own singular drummer. I envied them but had no idea what made them this way. Whether they succeeded or not, they had their own compass heading and could not be swayed, cajoled or bludgeoned into altering it. I hope the ones who didn’t grab that ring feel some sense of accomplishment at having had such unwavering directional drive.

Sometimes I think that just experiencing that kind of maniacal fever is more important than actually achieving its aim. It shows you how hard you’re willing to push, and that can be really useful later, when the next dream requiring insane drive comes along. Because for most of us, the first go around doesn’t work.

Not that I capitulated, but with my dream, I swayed. I didn’t know my own compass heading, and so tried to find it through experimentation, trying on other peoples’ ideas. I confess that I was and still am a late potato, a term my mother used to describe me as one who matured more slowly than most. It’s what I’ve named my publishing company. I was incredibly naïve, and in a strange way, I still am.

Like thinking that television news broadcasts are a public service, which I thought was the case until my husband Doug, who’d worked in film and television, educated me on the fact that they’re the networks’ cash cows because they’re easy and cheap to produce and rake in loads of money through advertising. I still am a little shocked by that. Bear that in mind the next time you watch one. This is not being done entirely for your edification.

I still am a tad wide-eyed, however it’s curated. I prefer this to cynicism, because being jaded occludes the observation and enjoyment of many amazing things in life. I had to make a stark decision in my late thirties, when I had temporarily turned into a hard-core cynic following a disastrous marriage and my escape from music, to pivot to once again being an open book, letting both very good and occasionally strange things into my world.

wrote about Hunter S. Thompson finding his artistic compass in a recent post -

If you’re looking for a turning point, this is it. Thompson now had the recipe, and it involved three conceptual breakthroughs:

1. The story behind the story is the real story.

2. The writer is now the hero of each episode.

3. All this gets written in the style of a personal communication to the reader of the real, dirty inside stuff—straight, with no holds barred.

To me, this was the meat - #2 makes me slightly uncomfortable, but I get it. I can’t say I’ll always be the hero, but hopefully a decent storyteller. #1 and #3 are true whether you’re discussing writing, music, art of any form. Artistic expression is the unpeeling of one’s innermost thoughts, the really uncomfortable ones that make you sigh, laugh, cry, explode.

This is what we’re all trying to get to, isn’t it? The gem at the heart of every experience that transforms it from a plebian exercise into something that rips your beating heart out of your chest, then hands it back to you, miraculously healed and wiser.

When I first met my future husband and partner in all things, upon being led to him like a lamb to slaughter by none other than his ex-wife (unbeknownst to me at the time), I told him immediately that I was not remotely interested in getting into a relationship because I was starting a two year art school program and wanted to focus my entire attention on that. Not men. Not music. Men had always diluted whatever else I was trying to accomplish, and I wanted no more of that. Not being interested in women meant a life of celibacy, which seemed preferable to being relentlessly subjugated by the men I had become involved with up to that point.

Imagine my surprise when I first encountered Mr. Douglas Huff. He scared the shit out of me that first meeting because he actually listened to what I was saying, not pretending to listen. Sensing his casual, polite yet piercingly focused attention, drilling into my psyche with those baby blues that held such a wealth of kindness and intelligence, I realized I would need to up my game considerably. Gone was the mindless patter that usually accompanies initial meetings - this man wanted to understand what made me tick in depth. I kept expecting the inevitable pause and switch to another subject, or a brief but polite acknowledgement that the interview was winding down, but instead we spoke for nearly three hours, about what he wanted to accomplish in life, the things I wanted to do, the inevitable tech talk two geeks get into, but also science, art, life, the state of the world. Things outside most first conversations. We quickly hit bedrock and found a rich, evergreen vein of shared interests.

I bid him goodbye that evening, but he did ask for my number :) I had never met a man who wanted to know more about me for no other reason than to actually understand my thoughts. Not just as a babe. Do all women feel this way? To be astonished, delighted and a little fearful at stumbling across someone who’s truly paying attention?

It’s possible that most women have not felt listened to for the majority of their lives. And I love men! I think many of them are cool, interesting people and I value them a great deal, so please, no harsh words, I’m simply relaying what I’ve experienced personally.

Doug drew me into a world filled with that rarest of delights - a partnership on a completely egalitarian plane, consisting of shared enthusiasm in both the arts and sciences and anything else we happened upon, complete and utter confidence in each other to summon the mental firepower in solving any problem, steadfast unshakable trust in each other’s agency. Love. Unwavering boundless love. All soaking in a delightful bath of humor for the more ridiculous aspects of life.

The nearly thirty years we spent together were, no question, the very happiest I have ever been, even though most of it didn’t include music. When we began to write again after a quarter century away from it, there was an explosion of sound, we were writing in ways neither of us had ever done. And that makes his absence that much harder to endure. How can a person pick up the shards of what life they have left after their beloved’s death and glue them into a new shape that’ll withstand the coming years? I am experiencing the bitter winds of aloneness now, it’s a harsh, cold reality. I would not wish this on anyone.

Music is saving me. I have known most of my life that I’m a purpose-built machine of sorts - I must have a goal, and a very difficult one at that, to feel like my life has meaning. I’ve wished so many times over the years that I could be the sort of person content to live, love and not be pestered, because, yes, it is a pestering a body endures when the need to create is so strong that it crushes other calmer, easier ways of living. I would like to be rid of that drive, but it’s not ready to let go of me.

Last week I went to a dear friend’s wedding, and on the day, something kept nagging me - what was it? When I got back to my room late that night, the realization hit me like a mac truck. It would’ve been our twenty fifth wedding anniversary, had he lived. I’ve been through some difficult moments in my life, but this one was among the worst. All the pain, anguish, longing and grief came rushing in, and I mourned him alone.

And then something happened. I realized I had come to a pivot point in my life and had to make a decision right then, not the following day. Was I going to continue down the path of pain or take a new path?

I can’t say that I feel continuously buoyed by this decision. I still have moments where I fall back into sadness, but it’s pretty clear the choice has been made, and I’m moving forward, wherever that leads.

I recently came across this video clip of David White quoting from Dante’s Divine Comedy, and it perfectly encapsulates exactly how I feel right now.

He continues - “How do you know you’re on your path? Because it disappears, that’s how you know. How do you know that you’re really doing something radical? Because you can’t see where you’re going, that’s how you know. Everything you have leant on for your identity has gone. And so you’re going to enter the black, contemplative splendors of self-doubt, at the same time as you’re setting out on this radical new path.”

This is me! I have a dream, but I really don’t know how to get there. The way is invisible but I feel my way forward. I’ll bet this describes everyone who’s ever stretched to uncomfortable lengths to create something new. I lie awake at night wondering how the hell I’m going to do this, so I’m glad to hear it spoken about this way, because it stops me from searching for formulas, how-to’s, SMEs and primers on how to walk this path. I tend to dig, dredge, DRILL for data on the best ways forward concerning anything I do, a result of having been steeping in the scientific method for most of my life. I obsess on finding and comparing information. But I’ve wound up at a brick wall that’s hard to scale. The time for data acquisition is at an end - now to look inward and figure it out.

I just have to do it. I have to make it up whole cloth. Launch a band, release an EP, djin up interest for it, both on the sync side and also out there in the wild. Repeat. The rules that governed the music business thirty years ago no longer exist. We are in the badlands, with no set route and no compass save what’s inside each of us. Which is good. But seriously scary.

Maybe there’s a gene, or some genes that were meant for another purpose, but whose byproduct enabled humans to weave magic out of nothingness. We imagine, and cannot help it. We build, mostly good, some really bad, yet the products of that imagination are all around us.

I keep this podcast at the ready whenever I need to snap myself out of overthinking; it’s a compilation by Guy Raz of his favorite moments interviewing people like Sting, Elizabeth Gilbert, Dr. Charles Lamb, Sir Ken Robinson and Dame Gillian Lynne on their sources of creativity. Dr. Lamb stands out because he doesn’t think this source might also exist outside of us, and I tend to disagree with that.

But what he found IS interesting - in people who appear to be turning on creativity’s faucet, their brains are doing two things - the prefrontal cortex powers down, allowing other areas of the brain associated with the creative impulse to ramp up. It’s this ability to stop filtering what you’re doing. I’ve always had a big problem with that, but I’m learning how to just let go. Anyone who’s ever had a song unfold in front of them with zero effort on their part knows this feeling of having been given the song. Creativity’s origins may remain its secret alone, but I’m just happy it feels like visiting me from time to time.

So, we either give in to the impulse to create, or we staunch it like a blown artery, lest we bleed out. Stopping that flow breeds its own problems though, and I can see evidence of that in so many people who feel no outlet. Pressure builds. They have nowhere to pour the contents of their souls into, and so they fester and turn rancid, angry and unheard. Maybe that’s (one of) the things wrong with MAGA.

I don’t want to become embittered. I want to live life with joy, and I mean to say it through music. Doug gave me the courage to get back on this path again. I have never met anyone who believed in me so fully, and I have to remember that daily, even though the giver of that belief is now so very far from me. But not lost. He lives in the music, as do I.

That’s a bit of my backstory, why n=9 was born and why I intend to continue with it to whatever end. That end isn’t as important - I find the joy is in the doing. No idea what will or won’t happen, but this is a fluid beast and it’ll go where it wants to.

If you’re the least little bit interested in what this music says, please let me know. I understand - art is the most subjective thing on the planet, and there will be those who don’t like it. That’s cool, I do.

Think about what you create in your life. Do you need more of it?

Everyone does.

www.nequalsnine.com

Apparently I write a lot about water - I didn’t know I had such an obsession with H₂O until I saw it reflected back at me in the posts I’m writing here. My second obsession is fire. That suggests to me that there are opposing views battling it out within me; I’m either extinguishing competing ideas or evaporating them, but new ones do keep bubbling up, like it or not. But that’s everyone, right?

A rogue wave is about to hit me, one I have only just seen. It’s composed of seemingly unconnected things that have become a wall of roaring change. It’s a good thing, I’m happy.

Like most people, I usually bob along the surface, minding my own business, struggling to get through my work and my day. Sometimes I do the deep dive, submerging just long enough to see what I’m after, and every once in a while, I throw caution to the winds and stay submerged for long periods. Friends wonder whether I’ve died, or if I still like them.

And then I come up for air, towel myself off, and resume the everyday.

I have known those who live their entire lives submerged in the depths of complexity. They are special people, requiring a special understanding from those around them. The ones who receive that grace remain sane - others without that support usually fall off the narrow path we call life. They lose their minds or their lose their lives: to me they are one and the same.

I am absolutely not one of those people (gifted or cursed - take your pick) but I’ve known enough of them to realize that I didn’t come loaded with that intensity of focus. Yes, I have an adequate share, but not that kind. I count myself very lucky.

But chance sometimes forces me to acquire that intensity of focus for a short time. It can be painful, it empties my mind of everything else, demanding maniacal attention until it finally lets go, leaving me panting, gasping for breath. Those experiences wring me bone dry.

White-hot, searing creativity, it’s a hungry beast. Sometimes I get an inkling it’s got me in its sights. I’m being hunted.

The thing that totally fascinates me about these bursts, especially since I’ve seen enough of them coming that my radar’s gain is quite high, is that they have a ripple effect on things and people around me. I don’t know whether I can ascribe metaphysical properties to these phenomena, but nearly every time one happens, I notice a peripheral effect. Things compound, they build on one another, like a meta buzz.

I feel myself getting ready for the plunge again, an immersion that most definitely separates the remarkable from the mundane. If I lived in that state all the time, I’m pretty sure I’d flame out. But I do, after least afterwards, savor the experience because I ratchet up several notches energetically, feeling internal sparks that ignite my imagination. Without those rare moments when that heat just might set me on fire, I’d implode and become an inert lump of blandness.

The eve of this journey into the expanse is upon me, I can feel the rogue wave coming. The day to day still feels relatively calm - I do all the normal, blasé things one does in a day. It’s a calm that can fool one into complacency. And it may be that this is all in my head, because it is! Isn’t it? Or are there larger forces at work? None of us knows whether we are pawns or queens in our own lives, so making the choice between the two might actually be arbitrary. Especially if you believe we’re living in a simulation. Regardless, I choose to believe that I can make my own moves, irrespective of whether that’s truly the case. We are all being bombarded like wreckage on the shore, relentlessly, by events near and far. We try to hold it together yet tend to splinter into more and more fragmented pieces. Especially these days. We all feel the palpable weight of fear.

And the remedy for that? For me, it’s fashioning an idea, a course of action that I have conjured out of thin air, mine alone. I am making something. I cling to it desperately like a buoy bouncing around wildly on stormy seas, because it defines who I am.

Music is my core. I cannot live without it. The wave is right in front of me, and I’m going to jump in, with no expectation or guarantee I’ll resurface. There’s an excellent chance I will be obliterated on the rocks - and I can say that without a great deal of emotion. It‘s simply one of several potential outcomes.

And if I surface? Well, even if only for a brief moment, it will feel glorious. Every person on this planet is searching for why they are here. I’ve found my reason, but the logistics of realizing it are still murky. I don’t even know where there is. I have this very strong sense of the unknown that lies just beyond my fingertips. As a species, we’ve created such elaborate ways of masking the unknown by building up societies and traditions that give us a sense of belonging and of safety. Are they really? I’m not sure they are real, but we perceive them as being real, and in this bizarre existence we call life maybe they’re the same thing.

So, will this change occur only within me, hidden from all else? Or will it be reflected in a wider sense, and create a ripple effect? I don’t think it matters! The change within each of us can and often is larger and more profound than the ripples it causes. I think that change is it's own justification. The ripple, if caused, is not the reason to effect the change, it is merely its outcome. If no ripple, that doesn’t mean the change wasn’t worth the effort.

I’m convinced that these rogue waves come for a reason, to push us into a state of operating in the present, tinged with that bright outline that forces us to mentally record and react to everything that’s in front of us. And it doesn’t matter if we go along willingly, or if we’re dragged kicking and screaming into the water, it’ll happen. But we get to choose how we experience it. No fate but what we make, eh?

(Note: podcast video at the end of this post)

I recently had the great joy of being interviewed by songwriters Hatori and Jeremy Herzer, whose podcast They Can’t All Be Bangers has become one of my all-time favorites. Apart from the fact that they are both wildly entertaining, kind, funny people, they’re also accomplished musicians who’ve been collaborating on composing a song a week. And these are not throwaway songs - they’re really, really good. Fingers crossed they release an album of them soon.

But they also interview other musicians. I met Hatori through Melissa Mulligan’s Music Career Mastermind course, and we struck up a friendship. I like that this interview isn’t just all about me :)

But they were deft at peeling the onion, and so I found myself talking about things I have only written about. Scary to give voice to them, as if by releasing them into the air, they could create mischief, mayhem.

Who am I kidding? My skeletons are pillbox-sized. But it WAS fun to chat about our beginnings and through lines, and to hear each others’ songs. Music continues to delight, baffle and surprise me, I love that it can catch me off guard.

Here’s the interview:

I’ve never prefaced a post with a global message, but it seems wrong to just launch in, no warm-up. Might pull something. I would like to thank you for taking the time to read this and, hopefully, the other posts. My Substack has been a wonderful lily pad from which to explore concepts and beliefs I’ve been reticent to speak about before. So, thank you, whether you subscribe or are just passing through, it means a lot that you came by.

Et maintenant…

The term research has its roots in the French word recherche, which means to go about seeking. Cherche - to search. Re - again. Because you might just have missed something the first time. Or the second, or the umpteenth.

What some fail to understand, is that in scientific investigation, one doesn’t know where one is going. Not really, not fully. People want an answer, damnit! But science is one vast question mark, sprinkled, one hopes, with a few clues here and there. It is the unknown, and there’s way, way more of that than what’s known. It’s what makes it so appealing, and so very scary. The lucky, dogged, almost maniacally driven people who spend their lives chasing wisps of information in the hope they’ll be able to find enough pieces to jigsaw together a discovery, are rarely lauded. But they should be, because without them wandering in this lonesome desert of unknown possibilities, none of the inventions and discoveries the world knows would exist. Imagine working in a field where it’s quite possible all your years of searching turn out to reveal nothing, that your theory was wrong. It happens more often than you’d think. That takes some serious balls, in my opinion. Rabid, incurable curiosity is required to leapfrog, or at least crawl toward understanding how we, our world, our universe work.

But too many in the public think research has taken on an ominous tone of late. Some believe that a lot of what comes from research has a nefarious purpose. I would be lying if I said that no research has ever been conducted for sinister purposes, but I can tell you that the overwhelming majority of research, and specifically BASIC research, is practiced by people who have a driving need to understand the why of something and to solve problems. They are under attack, as is the entire applied science community.

But the pendulum perpetually swings, and some day in the future, it’ll swing back in the direction of “science is cool”.

In the meantime, art has taken up the banner of cool. Or maybe it never dropped it. Experimentation is expected, and often rewarded. The slowly fading giants of the music industry have tried over the decades to cram sub-par music down the public’s throat, with mixed results. It works for a time, and then… there’s a rebellion.

Art is like water, it’ll get in everywhere, squeezing through the tiniest crack. While companies like Spotify try to oxygenate their revenue streams with AI submissions crafted to trick users into thinking they were built by humans, the world is pushing back. Record companies are investing in old catalogs, rather than in new music, explained in this fantastic post by Ted Gioia. Musicians are rolling their own now, rather than chasing that ever illusive record contract. It’s fascinating to me that the net, home of Spotify and its horrific practices, is also the place where fresh, new music appears on emerging platforms and sites: defiant, experimental, unbowed. It’s evolution in binary form.

That may be a gross oversimplification, though. It’s hard to find new music in new places that have no dedicated server farms and PR outlets to provide speed and reach to millions. Billions. The net is behaving very much like an organism itself, with a gigantic number of “cells” that are born, live, die or spawn new cells. Cancers form and blossom unchecked, for a spell, until the organism kills them off. Or not! Whole ecosystems of business paradigms gain entry, become visible, then grow out of touch, lose favor and fall, allowing new platforms and services access to life-giving sunlight and visibility.

But within all that architecture lies creativity. We are so good at it! When left free to roam, we can imagine and build phenomenal things. But then people start to think they want to make money with it, which in of itself isn’t a bad thing. It’s only when certain people decide to coopt the creative process itself and regurgitate similes of existing work in order to turn a profit - I have a big, big problem with that.

Hollywood is grappling with that one too. Endless versions of the same movie get cranked out on a regular basis, but the public has gotten wise to that tactic, and has become bored. I’ll admit that I’ve been a big Marvel fan, but even I have become jaded. In the most dynamic scenes, I’ll find my attention drifting. The fresh plotline of an indie film that hasn’t been flattened into nonsense occasionally (if it’s lucky enough to get seen) captures the public’s gaze and rockets to fame. But they are few and far between, and I have to think that even actors get bored playing predicable parts, although they’re making a lot of money doing it. It’s a paycheck. Is that the metric that defines good art now?

Music isn’t as lucky as indie films. It seems to take much more of a push to uncover the gems that are literally lying all around us, if we only could see and hear them. But again, just like life-giving H₂O, music bubbles up from the depths, and appears miraculously in places you don’t expect.

I’ve been speaking with a few music supervisors (caveat - this is not a double blind study, and very few participants, so…) and I’m beginning to believe that they may hold at least one of the keys to unlock access to new music.

From my tiny sample size, I’m finding that these people are absolutely consumed with music. They live and breathe it, listening to it all day long, actively searching for new music to add to their shows. Discovering a new band that blows their minds is their holy grail. If they find something new and fresh that will work within a show, they’ll license it, thus introducing it the television, film or game public. Granted, this has been going on for years, but as old music either dries up, goes off copyright, or has so saturated the market that no one wants to hear it anymore, it opens the way for new music to enter the void. Music supervisors may just be the new curators of what’s to come.

Art is research of self, because only through your eyes do you peer, and whatever they see, whatever you hear, smell, taste, whatever you THINK AND FEEL, all that gets pulled into the crucible of your mind and your soul, and marries. What emerges from that fire is a wholly unique gem that has your indelible stamp on it - it IS you. It’s possibly more intensely personal than scientific research, though I might be wrong about that. Either way, I’ve been fascinated all my life with WHY, when you hear, read or see something for the first time, and it tweaks you somehow, showing up as undeniably human, achingly real - what is that? What is the secret sauce built into it that broadcasts truth? It’s either there or it isn’t. And when it’s not, it rings hollow, disingenuous, plagiaristic. AI.

I had someone say to me, many years ago, that science was what was truly important in the world, and art was essentially fluff. Nice to have, fun way to pass the time, but not integral for life. Well, if you go by the number of calories one has to consume on a daily basis, or how many hours a human has to sleep to function, sure.

But that’s existence. That’s not LIFE. Penetrating the outward veneer upon which so many of us live our daily lives can be tricky, fraught with things that may pop out and scare the living shit out of you. That’s what art and science have in common. They provide a space to investigate, dig, learn. To get surprised or shocked to your core. Because learning means acquiring something new. And if there’s any hallmark that defines humanity to me, it’s that we need to learn. Those who don’t believe in that, are the living dead.

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Whether a song pops out of my head, or comes via some mysterious otherland I can’t identify, it makes itself known. For me it’s like hearing a train coming down the track from far away - lyrics, arrangements, production done, roaring into existence.

I have maybe 5 or 10 seconds to grab it before it streaks by, on its way to another songwriter. When these things happen, I’m both elated and frantic, because I usually can’t catch them. But they’re wonderful, and I listen, hoping some other songwriter has successfully snared it. It hasn’t happened yet, but if it does, I’ll know that ideas do travel through the ether. They may not have mass in that form, but they have some serious charge.

Is a song a song if no one hears it? Unless you’re one of those amazing people who can read a score and hear it in its entirety, music lives, for the rest of us, when it’s played.

Think about that - it doesn’t exist unless you hear it. No mass or, very very tiny physical mass. It acts on molecules in the air, bouncing them off one another to produce sound waves our ears pick up and and our brains translate into music.

The song exists only as long as you hear it. When it’s done, it’s gone. I find this so fascinating - this is a truly temporal art. You could say that it gets embedded in your neuronal network (if it’s a good song, or a truly annoying one) creating an echo of that song that lives on in your brain. But it’s a recording, not the song itself. So, where did the song go?

(Partly) music is MATH. If I’d only heard that as a child, I might have paid better attention in school. Stripped down to its bare essentials, music is the coordinated alignment over time of specific frequencies that we interpret as having meaning. I don’t say that to lessen its impact or importance.

But beyond that, what makes it music? Why do some songs capture the world and others die quiet deaths, sinking to the depths because they’re never played?

Why do we need it?

I’ve thought, from an early age, that music is a far more complex language than the spoken word. That’s no slight on writers, but I do think there’s a difference between hearing music or the spoken/read word. We haven’t yet invented all the words we need to describe everything we encounter. Instrumental music is all there, we just don’t totally understand it yet. We love it, roll around in it - it’s like hearing a foreign language that we find beautiful, but cannot translate. All sound, no verbal meaning.

Listen to people describing music compared to describing other things. It’s different. Something comes over people when they talk about music, and I believe it’s because it’s so close to the root of who and what we really are. Which is that we are ourselves composed of frequencies, and we resonate or clash with other frequencies.

With words + music the listener is functioning on two levels. The score, that vast landscape of frequencies that move us, and then the translation into thought of what the words themselves mean. I’d love to find any studies that have mapped the brain of someone listening to instrumental music versus music with words. I know that my brain reacts differently depending on which one I listen to. It’s like instrumental music lets the listener exist on a primordial plane, feeling without thinking, but when adding words, it kicks it up a notch, layering new meaning over the top of that base layer. Which can lead to some really interesting juxtapositions of intent and misdirection, like Maxwell’s Silver Hammer. Happy little ditty, with very dark words sweetly sung over the top.

“Bang, bang Maxwell’s silver hammer made sure… she was dead…”

It may be that the language of music is already embedded within us, and needs no explanation. We feel it, we don’t dissect it. It’s often the common denominator between peoples and cultures, when everything else is misunderstood or distrusted, it gets through on a deeply personal level. It can turn people into friends when everything else has stopped working.

That’s why we need music. It might be humanity’s greatest love - the arms that hold us when we just can’t go on, the rally cry that pulls us to our feet. Its impact stretches centuries. Tell me this doesn’t lift your spirits…

If there are so many states a song can occupy, whether in the mind and soul of the creator or interpreter, reduced to ink spots on a page, when it’s played, or if lodged in a listener’s mind, then perhaps it’s always alive. Maybe the thought of it alone sparks it to life.

In that sense, it’s never done. Living things are never done, they evolve, and if they cease evolving, they die. Songs get rediscovered and reinterpreted, bits and pieces of their DNA wind up in other songs. It’s sonic evolution on a global scale, and it always amazes me that people continue to come up with new, original work with just twelve notes (or 24 halftones for some of us). Music is reignited in peoples’ imagination through thoughts and memories of other things. Songs change depending on where and with whom one is listening.

I’d like to think songs are living entities, but if neglected, they might tumble off the cliff into calcification, inertness. Robert Plant is constantly reimagining Led Zeppelin songs, which I’ll bet really infuriates the faithful, but I think it’s a wonderful idea. Listen to this interpretation of Ramble On.

Songs, good songs, can shapeshift in endless ways and still hold on to their DNA. So no, they’re never done. We’re never done, we’re always evolving, sometimes up and sometimes down, but movement is essential for all life.

Including music.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

A post-post -

I have to say, I have this thing about physics, especially quantum physics. But I hasten to add that I am an unqualified neophyte when it comes to understanding it. Still, it hasn’t dampened my fascination. I watched a sci-fi movie on Netflix the other night called Spectral, where the plot revolved around something called the Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC). Yes, they took liberties with what it could do, but still, it tweaked something in my brain. And hopefully by the end of this post-post, I’ll have successfully drawn a line between physics and music.

CAVEAT - I know there are physicists aboard Substack, and you may take issue with my description. I can only say that, without the benefit of a physics or mathematics degree, this is how it struck me. And I’m more than happy to be corrected.

The universe is divided into two types of sub-atomic particles: bosons and fermions. Fermions are things like protons, neutrons, quarks (which make up the former two) electrons, and a host of other particles. They are what make up the mass that we all play with and live in. Bosons, which include photons, muons, Higgs and two others (five at last count) have little or no mass, depending on which one you pick, and are basically the forces that act on the fermions, enabling things like the weak and strong forces and gravity. Can’t have one without the other, nothing would hang together if it weren’t for bosons. (For those who love a good mind bender there’s this other description…) Bosons also like to live in a quantum state, which means they can be in more than one place at the same time. They also don’t like to obey the Pauli Exclusion Principle, which says two different particles can’t be in the same place. So what if there was only ONE boson, but everywhere all at once??

Both fermions AND bosons can form a BEC under certain conditions, when chilled down to as close to absolute zero as we’re able to do here on Earth. The condensate is considered a different state of matter, as opposed to liquids, solids, gases and plasma. When properly chilled, they sort of lose their inhibitions about being individual atoms, and they can flow over and around one another, clumping together to form a “super atom”.

And beyond that, well, beyond that my mind isn’t able to hold the mathematics required to dive further in.

You may be rightly asking, what the hell does this have to do with music? Don’t be mad, it doesn’t directly, I’m just so fascinated by this I had to share. But, ok, it does…peripherally.

Ever heard this? It’s really worth listening to. Although there’s no sound in space because there are no air molecules for the waves to bounce around, NASA took spectral data captured by telescopes and assigned sonic frequencies depending on wavelength. Frequencies are the primordial signature of what has happened and what is happening out there. All around us.

Bosons create the field that fermions play and bounce around in. Fermions, when vibrating, create frequencies. When passing through air, those frequencies become sound.

Vibration is the hallmark of existence. Everything vibrates, from sub-atomic particles all the way up to galaxies. WE vibrate, Brownian motion jiggles our atoms in the dance of life. Our eardrums respond to soundwave vibrations, converting them to sound and music.

Listening to that NASA recording makes me think that frequency, which creates sound, and from sound, music - may be the fundamental expression of life itself. It broadcasts that it IS.

And so, on the journey from the deepest reaches of space, all the way down to you or I listening to a song, the underlying components are the same. We’re bathing in sound, in music, all our lives. What better unifier to think on?

When I ask this question, I’m speaking metaphorically, of course. Odd that I have to make that disclaimer. I don’t like curtailing my speech, and neither should you. But times like these demand that we be crystal clear about what we say and do.

A multitude of voices are making themselves heard, here on Substack and elsewhere, shouting into the looming inky darkness that our trajectory is a frightening one and we must steer events in a new direction. It gives me hope. But we’re going to need one hell of a lot more than that.

Frightening is not a word typically in my lexicon. It’s not something most of us encounter on a daily basis. Those who are marginalized here and throughout the world because of race, ethnicity, religion, politics or simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, they know this feeling. It lies in stealth-mode, ever-present, embedded deep within until some event launches it shrieking to the surface.

Many in the U.S. don’t know this feeling, but we’re getting a whiff of it now. I find myself alternately overwhelmed by what I see, hear and read, which is exactly what I’m meant to feel, and also extremely angry. How dare they?

That such a small group of people are able to upend everyone else’s lives seems absurd and frankly impossible. How could things have come to this? Where are the supposed guard rails we were told would keep us safe?

We’re all asking ourselves this every damned day. Republicans in the Senate and the House don’t appear to understand that hewing to this administration’s path will ultimately bring about their own downfall. Are they just “living in the moment”? They seem so scared of Trump that they’ll go along with anything he says. The American public will politically flay them in 2026, and beyond, because they’ll forever, and I mean FOREVER be tagged as The Enablers. I hope they can’t even get a job as a Walmart greeter. I hope they get booed in every restaurant they walk into.

A PORTEND…

Years ago my husband and I went to Hawaii with my family. We stayed in Maui for most of the time, but also took a couple of days and went to the big island to see the Keck Observatory, because I’m a rabid geek about all things telescopic.

I had kept my laptop in a room safe while in Maui, but took it with us to Hilo. Once we got back to Maui, we were scheduled to leave the next day to go home.

When we got to the airport, security was extremely tight, and we were ushered through a line to airport security who swiped down our luggage. The filter paper pads they used were loaded into a mass spectrometer to sniff for explosives.

My laptop lit that mass spec up like Christmas tree, and the mood in the room instantly, ominously shifted. The mass spec also took that golden moment to quit working, so there was no redo. We were commanded to sit down on chairs beside the machine as other people moved through the line, eyeing us like we were criminals. We were searched very, very thoroughly. The Maui Sheriff’s Department showed up, the Sheriff himself in tow, with questions. Armed militia toting AK-47s showed up, and again asked us many questions. All in all, a total of forty people. We were questioned about where we were born, where we worked, what we did for a living, whether we’d ever been abroad and where, who our neighbors were, where and when we got married. I kid you not, they asked every little detail one could think of about us, and they wrote it all down. They moved us apart from one another and asked more questions, to see if our stories lined up. They searched our luggage meticulously.

Not one, but two bomb-sniffing dogs showed up. The first jumped up on the table and carefully went through all our luggage. Nothing.

So they brought in a second dog. Nada. If I hadn’t been so freaked out, I would’ve thought it rather funny that, in the final analysis, they had to rely on another species for verification. They concluded that since we had visited and walked around a coffee plantation, we had picked up fertilizer on our shoes that had been transferred to our hands, which was then transferred to the laptop lid.

At last, six hours later, we were allowed to continue on our way. The mood shifted suddenly, all was fine, thank you, have a nice flight. I can’t really explain what a mind melt it is to have people looking at you with the intent in their eyes that says “I might have to shoot you” to “have a nice flight”. We had missed ours, and had to wait another 6 hours for the next one. They gave us a $15 voucher for food which would barely buy water in an airport. We felt… marked.

And lo, we were. When we got home, we began to notice that there was an odd intermittent clicking sound whenever we used the phone - we were being tapped. We also found out about a year later that we were followed when we drove anywhere.

All of that was scary and demeaning, but the thing that really got me, and why I’m so angry about what’s happening today, is that we began to curtail our speech IN OUR OWN HOME. Both of us worked in the 3D animation space, and it was common practice at that time to talk about software that would time out after the end of a subscription, as “time-bombing”.

We stopped saying that. We stopped talking about what had happened at the Maui airport, at first unconsciously, but then we realized what we were doing. And the realization was beyond chilling. We were muzzling ourselves, out of fear that someone, somewhere was listening and recording our speech. We actually searched our house for bugs, but found nothing. That doesn’t mean they weren’t there, just that, not being spies, we didn’t know how to find them.

At some point, months later, I’d finally had it, so whenever I’d pick up the phone, I’d tell whoever might be on the other end what I thought of them and their sordid little activity. They got an earful. I loudly complained to the ceiling and the walls how wrong it was to eavesdrop on people.

The phone clicking continued for about a year, then stopped. Guess they decided we weren’t dangerous after all. But it had the effect of shattering the warm cozy feeling of our sweet little home. It was no longer the haven it had been. It felt like the house had turned inside out, with us now exposed to the entire world, as unseen people picked through our lives, our words.

TIME TO BE BRASH

I hadn’t thought about that experience until these last few months, when it all came roaring back. This is how dictatorships are born: instill the fear that someone is watching you, listening to everything you say, feel, think, building a dossier that will brand you a criminal. This is the pre-crime police for real, but the only crime being committed is the setup itself.

I’ve written about Nicolae Ceaușescu in other posts, the dictator of Romania who had the entire population convinced that someone was listening in on every conversation in the country. At the regime’s peak there were approximately 15,000 agents employed to monitor communications, and up to half a million informants that spied on a country of 23 million. That’s a lot, though it didn’t mean everyone was under the microscope. But the seed had been planted and took root, creating an atmosphere of intense fear nationwide, and it took until 1989 to finally end his reign. It did not end well for him, or his wife.

We are in a different time because now it IS possible to gather all conversations, albeit illegally, sift through them with AI and identify suspicious persons worthy of further scrutiny. Or innocent people who decide to make themselves known by speaking up.

HELLO THERE. CAN YOU SNIFF THIS??

Still, not everyone, all the time, but it’s getting worryingly closer to being that. The “ICE” raids are occurring with one purpose in mind, to quell dissent and instill fear in the population. They’re picking people at random. Shades of Stalin. What better way to scare people?

And the only way those jerks win with this tactic is if we allow ourselves to be scared into silence. To stop protesting. To stop investigating.

When you meet a bully, there’s only way to survive the experience. Push back HARD. To be very, very loud, brash and unflinching in our speech, and to call out what the administration is doing. Otherwise we will lose the power of speech. I’ve heard that phrase most of my life, but it has taken on new, hallowed meaning for me now.

We have to use it to the hilt right now - otherwise we will become a nation of mutes. Because when we lose our voice, we lose our ability to change history. We are rushing toward a cliff which may only be 10 feet high, or it could be a mile. Height matters, because the higher that cliff, the more time and effort it’ll take to rebuild what’s been destroyed. And we have no idea how far down we will fall.

I can tell you honestly that I’m scared. I’m afraid for myself, my family, my friends, my community, people I don’t even know, our society, our country, our world. I am not used to being scared on a regular basis, but this is what this moment in history brings us.

TIP OF THE SPEAR

So, back to my initial question -who is the tip of the spear? Which someone will unleash judicial holy hell on these political blasphemers? Will that be enough? Is there a politician who can sway the frightened conservatives in congress that yes, we need to impeach and remove anyone whose fingers have been in this evil pie? Caveat - some of those very same Republicans have sticky fingers too. So they’re damned if they do, damned if they don’t. I do not feel sorry for them, this was a problem of their own making.

It’s looking more and more like it’ll have to be a combination of several factors. Judicial pressure that mounts and amplifies, corralling MAGA’s efforts to wriggle free of lawful constraints; hopefully congress, but I’m not putting my eggs in that basket; and most importantly, pressure from the public. We’re not used to doing this, not on a continual basis, and that’s what it’ll take.

But know this: the time has definitely come to know who your real friends are and to know a good lawyer. Pack a go bag in the event of, I don’t know, something, it’s hard to foretell what. Connect, or reconnect with your neighbors, plan on how to help one another should terrible things unfold. I live in earthquake and fire country, so it’s standard procedure to pack go bags for when things get too shaky or metal-meltingly hot. I’ve decided to transfer that calm, logical attitude toward preparing for natural disasters to this already horrific political disaster, and plan accordingly. Taking these very small steps does at least one thing - it gives you something to do to prepare, restoring some measure of autonomy and control. And if nothing bad happens, great! Crack open those MRE’s and have at. Or maybe not.

Mark Twain summed it up beautifully - “Patriotism is loving your country all the time, and loving your government when it deserves it.” Booyah.

Who’s the tip of the spear? We are.

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AXIS #1

In plasma, the fourth state of matter, and its showoff cousin HED (high energy density) plasma atoms behave in strange ways, losing their electrons and becoming a superheated quasi-gas unleashing immense power. Matter, which is the lowest, coldest form of energy, is massive, heavy. Everything can, and probably has been everything else, it only has to transmute itself from one state to another.

Moving up and down between these states isn’t something that we, as corporeal beings, have managed to do ourselves. But we’re uncovering the inner workings of how to make other atoms behave in these higher agitated states.

When I think about things like this, that have real measurable properties, I immediately jump to whether we have these levels, or states, within our minds. I think the answer is yes.

AXIS #2

In music, the interval between the notes is as important as the notes themselves, sometimes more so. That space may seem at ground zero - Energy Level One (E1) but it’s possible that what seems like nothingness is actually full of possibilities. A dark matter of the mind.

Those spaces give us the luxury of savoring and interpreting the prior note, before the next one slips like a sparkling droplet of reality into our consciousness. What’s in that space? It’s more than the absence of sound, there’s a palpable quality to it that lingers right on the outer edges of our senses, suggesting greater complexity. Out of silence come things that build worlds in our minds, populating them with rich, terrible, beautiful visions.

You don’t often find the words terrible and beautiful together when articulating what we experience with art, but I think they should often be together. Sometimes a thing is so beautiful that it’s almost beyond what a human can stand to take in. We actually recoil from experiencing something so blindingly gorgeous because we unconsciously realize we must be on a higher rung energetically to accept it. As a child, I came across supposed first accounts of people coming into contact with angels, finding them so beautiful AND terrible that they could not look upon them.

What happens to people when they see something so terrifyingly beautiful that it strips them of their ability to comprehend it? It outclasses our senses. Actual beauty, not the manufactured beauty we’ve been tricked into believing is reality, is composed entirely of truth, and that truth can be crushing, even if you’re approaching it with openness and honesty.

I wonder if what goes on out there in the universe is the same thing that goes on in our minds. Are our minds mirrors of it?

THE AXES OF BEING

We move and interact with things occupying different energy levels all the time. Picking up a coffee cup, sitting in front of a fire, feeling the electricity of thousands of other people all feeling the same thing at the same moment in a concert. We somehow become mentally connected with each other, engaging in a networked experience. Neural grooves within the brain, well-worn circuitry, is a known thing - what if we’re also capable of creating massive, instantaneous neural circuits outside of our brains, linked to one another, hidden but active within the space between us?

While sitting at a stoplight this afternoon, I started thinking about focal planes. As in where am I actually focusing not just my vision, but my attention? That made me think of near-field, mid-field and far-field focus, terms you encounter in film and television, and in 3D.

It wasn’t until I saw the Dutch master Johannes Vermeer’s painting of a still life of a jewelry box, which I saw at an extraordinary exhibit in the 80’s in Washington DC, that I realized I had never actually seen depth of field depicted in any painting more than 300 years old. It must be in a private collection because I’ve never been able to find a picture of it. (If anyone knows of this painting, or has another, earlier example, please tell me! )

Many camera lenses can only bring one area into focus - the foreground, midground or background. We are so accustomed to seeing movies and shows shot this way that most people don’t even realize it. WE see that way in real life, but the brain is really only paying attention to the area in focus, and so we don’t see that everything else is actually slightly blurred. You can notice it, but it takes practice.

It was obvious that Vermeer was looking at the still life he was painting through a lens, which only held the foreground in focus, everything behind it was out of focus. No one else seemed to care about that little painting, but I stared at it for a long, long time. Cameras have been around since antiquity, but they were essentially pin-hole cameras - a sealed room (camera obscura) with one very small hole that acted as a lens in one wall, letting light through that projected the image upside down onto the opposite wall. Everything was in focus because only the photons that were mostly aligned with the pin-hole would pass, so the image was sparklingly clear.

I long to be a camera obscura myself, letting only the truth in. Then everything would be in focus.

What ties these ideas together is that, at this delicate moment in time, when we are being pummeled by information, it’s quite difficult to pick a focal plane. It’s hard to hear the silence between the sounds.

We are so saturated with content that we are drowning. At least, that’s how I feel, because I can’t simply take in that information - I have to DO something with it, and that’s taking increasingly higher amounts of energy. Measured information brings clarity, but the flood we’re subjected to leaves no room to parse meaning.

These two axes - focal distance and the space between things in time become the x-y plot of our lives. They are getting gummed up by too much information, becoming nonsensical. I struggle to clear the field so I can rationally, calmly ingest what I see, hear and read, and make sense of it. It’s as if we’re all stuck looking at something very close up, and the long view is perpetually out of focus. But how can we be otherwise? We are at an inflection point no one alive has seen in this country. Crisis brings the present moment into very sharp focus.

Whatever we have to do to clear the field, we must. To take a step back for a moment. To decide what to pay attention to, and what not. To find the space between.

To give ourselves room to breathe. And then, to act.

Forgive me, once again, for my absence. The maelstrom of thoughts, feelings and ideas here can be overwhelming, and trying to contain them in a brain already massively impacted by recent events makes for a leaky mind. I hold each and every one of you as bright, shining beacons of truth and courage. It makes me proud to call myself an American when I read your posts. The cabal occupying the White House and halls of government are not Americans - they are small men and women whose fear and hatred of others drive them to commit unspeakable acts. Even though I’m not an overly religious person, I do hope hell is an actual place, and that they all have a dinner date with Beelzebub. Vengeance will be thine, America.

I spent five years abroad in my late teens and early twenties, and though I thoroughly enjoyed my time in these other countries, when I came back, I realized, by comparison, that there is literally no other country on the planet that affords people as much opportunity as the US. We take our freedoms - of free speech, of self expression, freedom of movement, the (by comparison) relative ease in setting up a business - as givens.

And they have been afforded to us, in large measure, although for some more than others, for as long as anyone alive can remember. This is why we’ve had such a slow reaction to what’s taking place. Why can’t somebody step in and stop this? What is the mechanism responsible for corralling overreach by the White House?

The Judiciary is one mechanism. It works slowly, but that is intended, because snap decisions about things like this could create boomerang events none could anticipate. I have a suspicion that SCOTUS is nervously eyeing the massive crowds that grow with each planned US-wide march. They should be nervous. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that some of them could be impeached. It’s happened before.

Congress is another mechanism, but we saw how poorly that worked out following January 6th. There are some excellent, committed and fearless people there, but they are not enough to resist the inexorable slide into doublespeak that the Republicans use to misdirect and outright lie to the public. I understand they are afraid, and they should be - they have, through self-preservation, greed and spinelessness, held the barn doors open, through which a political sandstorm will blow, scouring our society bloody raw and wiping the US clean of democracy.

The masses. Some of us are tired and poor, huddled in fear, wondering when the hammer will descend. Many of us are not so poor - not rich either, but making ends meet - we have a considerable amount of fear over what this administration may unleash on the population if it becomes too “unruly”. The very few who live in the clouds above the masses are flat-out bug-eyed terrified of what those masses may inflict on them. You know who you are. We know who you are. Oh wait, you’re not on Substack. I forgot - you don’t give a rip about anyone but yourselves.

I am overjoyed when I read posts from people overseas, cheering us on, not equating all of us with those who seek ultimate power through fear. People in other countries, MOST countries, have been overrun at some point in their histories, and that fact is kept alive in those populations. They don’t forget what it looks like when a country is descending into fascism.

We have several points in our favor.

1. We are a huge country, with almost 350 million people. Do you think the US government can watch us all? I’m reminded of Nicolae Ceaușescu, whose repressive government spied on Romania’s citizens, causing widespread fear, arrests and executions from 1967 to 1989. And he did that through ingenious propaganda, convincing citizens that EVERYONE was being watched. Which was ridiculous, of course, they didn’t have the manpower. Yet, it cowed an entire nation. Let’s not be that.

   Ceaușescu and his wife wound up being shot by firing squad, by the way. Just saying.

2. We live on a huge landmass. Again, referencing #1, how can a police force, or even the US military, police this country? There simply isn’t enough manpower to do it. And there’s too much ground to cover. They’d never be able to stamp out resistance, it would keep popping up in new places, whack-a-mole style.

3. We have never been conquered. This is an important fact, because it plays into the national psyche. We cannot even conceive of being subjected to another country’s will. Japan tried, it didn’t end well.

   Important caveat: this, however, leads to a blind spot most of us have, that our government will (usually) do the right thing by us. When it doesn’t, it takes a long while for us to wake up.

4. Social media. Yes, I hate it, don’t engage with it other than here, which I’m trying to convince myself is NOT social media, but it does seem to be morphing into social media light. Hammish, have a care with that.

   However, we can work this system to our favor, and it looks like people are doing that more and more. Meme the crap out of them. Everywhere. It’s destabilizing.

5. The power of the purse. Since the oligarchical class is consummately unconcerned with the welfare of the average person, what does tie their skivvies in a twist? That we will cease buying from their companies. I’m so gratified to see so many of us boycotting companies who’ve fallen in with Trumpco. It may take a while, but they will feel the pain. Musk is already feeling it, bigly.

   And yes, they’re currently robbing the treasury in broad daylight, but there will be repercussions at some point on that activity.

6. Marching in the streets. If it was good enough for John Lewis, it should be good enough for anyone. We’re all waking up to find that this sort of action scares the pants off those in power. It’s critical to keep this up, to get bigger and way, way louder.

   Important caveat #2: For some of us, this may lead to arrest, tear gassing, IRS audits, visits by police/ICE, false stories drummed up to turn you into a pariah, and, toward the very end of this story, disappearing. I understand and FEEL! the fear those words illicit. Surely this can’t happen. It is happening to a small subset of us right now.

7. A blind spot on the part of Trumpco. Watching this unfold is the weirdest thing I have ever witnessed. My disbelief is tested on a daily basis, and when I realize, with each aggression, that they’ve done more, it messes with my mind. The problem I think many of us have had over the past few months, is that we keep trying to apply logic and reasoning to this. By doing so, we get gut-punched by actions we would never do ourselves. It keeps happening over and over.

   But a sea-change is transforming the masses into a force that nothing can withstand. Zip.

We’re in for rough times. The tariffs alone will have huge ripple effects throughout the US and the world. There will be some who decide to shut up, pull back, and tend to their tiny island of stability, which I can assure you is NOT secure. They will be the same as the people who stayed silent during Kristallnacht. The Tulsa Race Massacre. All the atrocities the few have committed on the many.

They will live with the guilt and the shame of their sins of omission in their very own compartmentalized chamber of horrors for the rest of their miserable lives, and they should be castigated for opting out of the American Experiment. Or they won’t have any guilt or shame because they don’t qualify for the title of sentient human - they are elementals, meat bodies with no mind. Either way, I cannot, and will not, forgive them.

The rest of us - we must rid ourselves of this politically-wrought infection. Social gangrene has set in, and there will come a tipping point when our actions will no longer change the outcome. In the courts, on the streets, through the purse, with words and all the other arts, we must make ourselves heard, understood and feared. Right now. This administration will not stand.

Words have ways of sneaking by us. A cursory glance at one, along with the “official” meaning conveniently supplied, lulls a person into thinking all is well, the word and its meaning nestled snuggly in the folds of their cerebral cortices. I approve this message.

And yet, not so with some of them. Time can shift meanings - so it is with all languages, because they are living entities and mutate over the years due to social mores, population migration, and events that sometimes quickly alter what they stand for.

A new, yet very old word has been dumped into the collective conscious - the word Doge. Americans are so accustomed to acronyms they barely raise an eyebrow when new ones appear. And they’re kind of fun sometimes, acquiring not only their officially sanctioned meaning, but memings. Cute little squirts, skittering along through the underbrush of society.

Doge, in Venetian parlance from 697 to 1797, described the highest-ranking official in the Venetian Republic. The word “doge” comes from the Latin word dux, which means “leader or duke”. Elected for life by the Great Council - the assembly of Venetian nobility, the Doge was the head of state and head of the Venetian oligarchy.

And here, good gentlefolk, we have… a new Doge. The Department of Government Efficiency. A quirky parallel? An oversight? A coincidence?

I think not. Safe to say that acronym describes not only the department, but the creator of that department, who’s pounding away dogi*-style on the U.S.

On one hand, the speed and viciousness with which Musk is decapitating department after department can be likened to standing in an airlock, and watching helplessly as one man, with a deprecating smirk, pushes the OPEN AIRLOCK button. The audacity is, pardon me for saying this, truly impressive.

Not impressive in a positive sense. Impressive as in watching a nuclear detonation several miles away - not quite far enough - as the pressure wave advances on you. Remarkable as in seeing a 500 ft. tsunami arch overhead, seconds before it pancakes your future.

Whether it’s a genetic predisposition in humans or not, we cannot look away. We are fascinated and repulsed all at the same time. AND WE KEEP ASKING OURSELVES, HOW IS THIS HAPPENING?

Years ago I read an article on plane crash statistics, and the strange phenomenon of what can, or won’t happen inside the plane if it manages to land in one piece, but catches on fire. There are only seconds to react.

And yet, a very strange behavior was revealed. If no one jumped up to begin to exit the plane, no one would. A single person could initiate a group reaction, but if there was no one on that plane with that particular - what would you call it? - skill set? gumption? fearlessness? willingness to jump into the lion’s maw? - everyone on that plane would perish.

People are often stunned into silence and inaction because the events unfolding are simply too awful to understand. And so they shut down and bend the knee, retreating into a life drawn by others, for others’ benefit, not theirs.

That article posited that, on average, 1% of the population has that reaction, to be the one who will jump up and spark movement by the group. But I believe it’s actually a much higher number, and it can be learned. Honed like a sharp blade of truth that cuts through this jungle of lies.

I have been struggling to write something funny for about a month, and oddly, whenever I try to resurrect some funny episode from my past, nothing surfaces. I desperately want to write something funny! But I’m not feeling very jocular, and I’ll bet, neither are you.

It’ll return, I’m sure. We’ll all have a good laugh, over many shots, about the ridiculous phase the U.S. went through in its twenties. Rumspringa for nations. Its seems chilling to think that one hundred years ago, following the first World War, the world found itself in another rumspringa moment - an unprotected orgy of happiness and art, invention and discovery. The doges of the world had to shut that shit down as fast as they could - shame on the western world for thinking itself free! We must impose order. Better yet, whip up some chaos to cover any tracks.

If Trump knew what the word doge meant, he’d think himself one. But the word that fits him to a T is lackey. The Doge’s lip-smackin’, boot-lickin’, puddin’-face’d lackey.

And to Musk - only one option remains for supposed kings - off with his head (politically speaking, of course…)

*dogi - plural for doge.

I guess you could group things generally by whether they stand together, or whether they stand apart. It’s an interesting way to look at the world - obviously quite simplistic, but it’s worth doing from time to time.

Because you can tell a lot about a system, a forest, neuronal networks, a people, by whether they’re a or b.

Fir trees are pretty self absorbed beings, they can coexist with others, but they’re also good on their own, due to their insanely deep taproots, which tunnel down toward the earth’s core - the planet is their anchor. In some ways, they remind me of a few friends of mine, content in any capacity and able to adapt to whatever.

Redwoods and Sequoias, though, have extremely shallow root systems compared to their height, sometimes 1:20. In a not-so-strong wind, they’ll topple. So what keeps them in the land of the living?

Each other. These trees form families that are interconnected via overlapping root systems. They create a dense network that allows the entire stand to remain upright during storms.

And for most tree species (including fir trees, no diss intended), and a good many other types of plants, mycorrhizal fungi is the über brain, the underground mental transit system that connects them, trading resources, warning of impending invasive predators, among a lot of other miraculous things. They talk.

We have our own internal transit system. Axons and dendrites in the brain form connections - these are what allow us to develop and retain memories and move through life. “Those that fire together, wire together.” Our brains devote a huge amount of real estate to map connections with other humans as well as connections with the rest of the world. We are as strong as our connections, no doubt about it. And connections fade if we don’t stoke those tiny yet extremely important synapses from time to time.

There’s another aspect to this that is becoming more apparent to me - by enmeshing ourselves in the networks we really care about, we create a permanent home for ourselves, and when we’ve vanished from this corporeal sphere, there is a remnant, an echo of us that remains. It’s one of the few ways we escape mortality, even if only that we live on in the memories of those who have known us.

Then again, there’s that ageless argument about whether we’re simply bodies or also souls, and is there anything beyond these few decades we’re allotted. I’ve talked about that in another post. Here I’m focused on what to do with these ridiculously flimsy carbon shells.

Are we being good neighbors right now? Take a moment and think about your circles of friends, family, co-workers, acquaintances. Do you feel there is an underlying network of communication, and resource sharing happening? We, like almost every flora or fauna on this planet, are geared to work within a group setting. Because life out there can get very scary if you’re on your own, and the rock you’re standing on is likely to be wiped clean by the next big storm.

I’ve been thinking a great deal about connection lately, as I’m sure many have. Life has unraveled a bit, our ends are frayed, and we’re wondering if the whole sweater is going to come undone. We seem… shopworn.

But there is a way around that. Even if you do nothing at the moment other than dwell on the connections you have, and map ways to genuinely bolster them so that they’re stronger, able to withstand the terrible winds of change that threaten to blow us straight to hell - you and yours - we, will stand. In some ways, there is no you. There is only we. As a species, we’d do well to remember that.

And you will never lose you by being part of we.

When I was about 37, decimated by a crumbling marriage and completely lost as to where my life was heading, I read a book - The Postman, by David Brin. It was later made into a movie you’d be cautioned to avoid, but the book was brilliant. And it taught me something that altered my life.

Brief synopsis - in a post apocalyptic world, a traveler stumbles across a mail jeep with a dead mailman in it. The traveler is cold, so he takes the mailman’s jacket.

Throughout the rest of the book, as he moves from village to village, people hand him letters to take to other villages, assuming, hoping he’s an actual mailman. They yearn for a future where civilization is restored. He resists the idea but still carries the letters.

He becomes an (unwilling) agent of change, but ultimately undergoes a metamorphosis, helping to re-establish a mail system that eventually leads to a restored society.

Everything. Pens. Bowls. Constitutions. Wheels. Chewing gum. Rockets.

Take a pen. Someone had to dream up the idea. In the beginning it was little more than a stick pressed into clay, but eventually someone else dreamt up machines to make the parts for a new form of pen. Someone else had to design and build the machines that made those machines.

…knee bone’s connected to the… thigh bone…

When I began to look at the world this way, life changed for me. I don’t take for granted anything I use, and I marvel at what it likely took many people to bring into existence.

It also imbued me with one other precious thing - the realization that anyone can be a creator. Anyone can launch an idea out into the world. Will it be picked up and expanded upon? Not always, but that never means you shouldn’t try.

So, armed with that knowledge, I started Arkitek Scientific, a 3D animation company focused on creating engaging, descriptive animations for the life sciences and technology. I haven’t spoken of it much on Substack, and probably won’t going forward, but the reason I bring it up is because of what the book spawned in my head.

You can turn an idea into reality. Anyone can.

It’s 1995. I’m sitting in the machine shop of a biotech company, building equipment, wondering how on earth life had led me here. I’m looking at all the equipment in the room, newly marveling at the fact that the original idea for all these devices must have started in one person’s imagination.

And it comes to me; hey - I can start an idea too. I’d learned AutoCad and become enamored of computers. I love science. I’m an artist. Maybe I can blend the three and start a company?

Since I’m a subcontractor to this company, I’m asked for my business name. I want to build in virtual space - Arkitek. I decide to go back to school and learn 3D, and launch it. I tell anyone who’ll listen that I’m starting it, and at the end of my two years of study, people are coming up to me, asking me whether I’ve heard of Arkitek and if they’re hiring.

Holy shit.

It worked. I came up with an idea, floated it out on the wind, others picked it up and it gained mass. And then I had to build it, which my partner Doug and I did.

That anyone can generate an idea and translate it into a tangible reality is one of the greatest truths I’ve ever witnessed. So many people live their entire lives thinking it’s always other people who create, develop, build. Imagine. They are never taught they have that capacity too. This is one of life’s great tragedies.

Imagine the explosion of ideas that could arise if everyone felt they could. I’m convinced many people are unhappy because they do not know they have this ability within them. They were never shown, no one has tapped that inexhaustible well of potential. They feel unimportant, marginalized. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons we are where we are at this moment. Too many people feel they just don’t matter.

This past year I’ve been like a transceiver with intermittent capacity. I signal occasionally but mostly have been silent. That’s about to change. I’ve been listening intently though, and thoughts from others as well as my own have percolated and produced yet new thought.

I have reinvented myself four, maybe five times. It’s time to undergo a new metamorphosis. I may keep doing 3D for science because it’s fucking cool and I’ll never rid myself of the geeky joy of solving computational conundrums.

But music beckons. It’s time to rev up my mind’s engine and imagine a new future. To what end? I have no clue. It doesn’t matter that I don’t know. The important bit is that I allow myself the space to create in a medium that gives me far more than it takes. I will keep these three words ever present in my mind as I go forward:

Curiosity

Kindness

Inventiveness

I also remind myself of my goals for 2025 (so that you know I’m not lecturing you…)

• Listen to others, give them the gift of your time and attention. There is no greater gift you can give someone than your undivided attention. It lets them feel seen. Many times, you’ll be astonished and delighted by what you find.

• Be a good communicator. Say what you mean. But be mindful to not hurt others when you do so, unless it’s absolutely necessary. And it usually isn’t.

• Remember that most people say and do hurtful things because they’re in pain. And mental pain is the worst affliction of all. It’s usually not about you. Try, as gently as possible, to find out what’s hurting them. And if you can manage it, send them a little love. It goes a long way.

• Be curious about everything! Learn! Experience! The universe is yours to romp in. Whether you think there’s only one life or untold billions, right now is right now and you might miss it if you’re not fully engaged.

• Grab a bowl full of life and eat it up. None know the extent of their span. Pushing off dreams into the future carries with it the possibility that you’ve shoved them too far into the future, one where you’re not there.

• Many things need to be fixed in this world. That’s always been the case, don’t let it get you down, because the work will always be there. Life is like housekeeping - never done. And when YOU’RE done, it falls to another to pick up those tasks.

  Focusing on what’s good in life doesn’t mean you don’t see the downside. But it does give you strength and patience to deal with it.

• Love the people who’re really pissing you off. They honestly may not know how badly they’re behaving. The hell they’re living in within their own minds might dwarf anything you’re feeling. Or they might know. If so, karma’s a real bitch and the cosmic clock is ticking. Everyone pays, now or later.

• Don’t live a life wracked by fear, anger or hesitancy. True, there are endless injustices that must be remedied, but you have to keep yourself, your mind and your heart alive, open and functioning while you do so, otherwise you will not succeed.

I aim to effectively alter the current trajectory of things this coming year. How will I do that? I don’t yet know, but it will contain equal parts of commitment, faith in my abilities and love for others. I might only move the needle a tiny, barely discernible fraction, but I will move it. So can you.

Onward and upward.

Apologies to those of you who’ve been reading my posts. I took an unintended break, now back. And I thank you for being here, as I peel back the layers that separate me from what I most need to understand.

There are those I’ve been following here who’ve lately gone to ground, silent. I wait for them to reappear, pushing their heads up out of the leaves, and once again letting the words spill from their minds like the jewels they are.

There are others who’ve been almost manic, posting continuously. Possibly to hold at bay the angst-y feeling that seems to pervade the globe at the moment? Difficult to say, but it has that air.

I have been very silent. Quite still. I’m attempting to put a name to this feeling, which is an unusual state, but so far I haven’t come up with anything. This zone of quiet is occupied by only a few things - thoughts of my husband Doug, who died around this time last year. Thoughts of who I am and will become. Thoughts of those still here who I love and hold close.

Death brings stillness in more ways than one. There’s a profundity and a finiteness to it that is wholly different from anything else I’ve ever faced. It carries great loss and depth. But it also contains - and I missed it for nearly a year because I was so consumed by grief - something of endless worth.

It was a tiny breath of a thought, barely there. It waited patiently for me to notice it, and once I did, it unfolded before me. That something so small can expand to encompass my entire being, everything I know and feel, is extraordinary to me. I struggle to find the words to convey the enormity and simplicity of its message.

Life itself is a precious state. It’s not a permanent state, in the form we accept as being life. But to me, having thought about this over many dark days in this past year, life has many forms. We know, and experience one form, and when that is done, we mourn. Are we mourning for others or ourselves? For me it has been both.

Religion was developed by man to explain things he cannot. It is taught to us. And how can it be that only one is right and all the others are wrong? No one has proof, only our spindly stories we thread through each others’ brains.

There is something more than this, though. Spirituality just is, it emanates from us, if we allow it. We don’t need to be taught to know it.

Death walked in my door a year ago, sat down in front of me, and hasn’t gotten up since. I’ve asked it kindly to leave, but it has other plans. It wants me to understand its purpose. It tells me many things which I cannot even begin to describe well.

If life is a crucible, filled to overflowing with material on its way to becoming something else, then a phenomenal amount of energy is needed to get it to that state. Birth, like death, meets a moment when critical mass and speed reach their zenith, and something, we, emerge. We’re either walking through the door into this life, or out of it.

But that describes bounty vs. emptiness, and I’m not sure that walking out that door spells the end.

Energy and matter are neither created nor destroyed - they’re different states of the same thing. Matter is the lowest form of energy. What if life, in all its permutations, is simply us moving between levels, down into matter (ground state), to inhabit this rock for awhile, then up the ladder till we no longer have mass, but possess a shit-ton of energy (phase transition and beyond?). Apologies for co-opting established physics principles while talking about what are quite unprovable thoughts. But I cannot divorce the idea that we, our souls, are part of that equation. Why wouldn’t we be? I don’t think our ability to reason and to ask the most difficult questions about existence is simply a byproduct of being alive.

Death can pull back the veil of the daily meaningless distractions that we all encounter, revealing a deeper truth in all its rawness. Beauty, time, timelessness, truth, pain, awakening. We are tempered in this crucible, each time mixing different elements into new amalgams, emerging to ask these questions again and again.

My world is quiet. The birds are quiet. Even the dogs are quiet. I shrink from this vacuum, wishing for anything to intrude and break my reverie. But I know that this is where I’ll get answers, so I stay.

Words die the moment they are spoken. They are temporal, existing only in the briefest blip of time in which they are said, and then they flame out. Their ghosts often live on inside the minds of those who’ve heard them, but they’re shadows of their former selves. They can experience second lives through recordings, but something is lost, because hearing it live carries the power of that moment. 

The written word is an altogether different creature, not particularly dependent on time, and in some ways, dismissive of it. It waits patiently: it has mass. I sometimes wonder if there’s a subtle difference between writing them down, physically, and typing them in. In longhand, you’re downloading. On a computer, are you uploading? I’m not dissing either, just curious. And I’d be interested to know whether you think differently if you’re sitting down or standing while writing. I feel the difference. Maybe it’s because when I’m standing, there’s the potential I may just walk off. When I’m sitting, it’s clear I won’t be going anywhere soon. The words have lashed my legs to the chair.

Written words can experience the thrill of the now by being read aloud. But they know full well their real power lies in capturing the soul silently. Written words can have longevity - think of cuneiform. Any word may fall as softly as a snowflake, or thunder across the landscape and crash through the ages. 

Sometimes words can occupy a middle zone: single words or phrases that become touchstones in our culture. Sic semper tyrannis! (thus always to tyrants - curiously apt at the moment). Veni, vidi, vici (I came, I saw, I conquered - ditto). Interesting that there are so many phrases from a language nobody speaks anymore.

I used to think that the most impactful form of art was music, and though it’s not lost on me that words often weave their way in, I mostly paid attention to the notes. And now I realize the error of my ways. The written word is becoming increasingly important in my life, as I weigh this and that and search for meaning. What propels me? What propels you? 

The “propeller”, I’m convinced, is art. It is something endlessly made and unmade, formed, discarded and then reimagined. Fun aside: did you know that English is one of the few languages that uses two words from different languages to describe something? Cease and desist. Part and parcel. Pith and moment. The Angles and Saxons, when in close, often bloody contact, couldn’t settle on one or the other, so both remained in parlance. Is the language better for it, or merely redundant? 

It’s not at all like the description of baseball a friend of mine gave me, (but that I’m going to use nonetheless), when we were discussing the unholy and frankly outrageous idea of different ballparks having different sized outfields - something she termed “charming”. So, twin descriptions in English, possibly charming and forever married  or until the culture divorces them.

My dogs watch “TV” all day - lying by the deer fence, able to look at landscapes miles in the distance, scanning the horizon and alert to the slightest movement . They are in a constant state of watchfulness and this, for them, is utter bliss.  Humans should do more of that. I should do more of that. Whatever I have to do to continue this life for them, I will. Maybe one day I will allow myself to benefit from it the way they do.

Taking the long view isn’t just a handy phrase. Years ago I read an article about babies growing up in high rises that were separated by mere feet. If they spent the first few years of their lives cooped up in small spaces, unable to see things at a long distance, they didn’t develop what’s known as spatial skills, which as this paper summarizes, is critical - “spatial skills are a central aspect of evolutionary adaptation and a key component of human intellect.” The incidence of myopia in children is skyrocketing, mainly due to the fact that they spend much more time staring at screens than outside playing. They’re not getting the long view.

A friend I have been in communication with lately spoke of a generalized feeling of “slowness” coming on and pondered whether this was a good or bad thing. I think we’re both in agreement that the pace of life in the industrialized world is unsustainable. Social media is society’s digital smallpox. We have no immunity built up, and we are constantly overwhelmed. What is the vaccine? I think it’s staring at me through that deer fence. I must take moments throughout my day, and re-train my brain for the long view, both figuratively and visually.

I’m fragmented - as this post flatly confirms. I watch my mind flit through various partially related thoughts and my attempts to make them walk a common road may have failed. I need to unplug. I need to write. I want to communicate. These needs are in conflict with one another, but it’s essential that I discover a way of interlocking them to piece together this puzzle of who I am. I want to go on walkabout, but may have to content myself with an internal one. Maybe that’s what Substack is for me. My very own endless landscape. My long view.

I used to think that the few whose puzzles were already solved right from the start were the lucky ones. Now I’m not sure that’s true. They miss the hunt, the discoveries and the disappointments, which all add up to a life well examined. I wouldn’t trade any of it.

And so, I’ll keep writing. You should too. This is sustenance, we need it. Our tiny patches of love and chaos that we anxiously and obsessively tend. Something good will grow from this.

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My father once told me of a phenomenon in the Navy - when a ship was first commissioned, it was of paramount importance that the first crew be comprised of people who were dedicated, calm under any circumstance, and worked together like a well oiled machine. Whoever that first crew was, left an imprint that would forever be associated with that ship. Completely replacing the crew had no effect in changing it.

We seem to carry some imprints we cannot change. Whether biology or built-up libraries of social behavior that nip at our heels throughout time, it’s unclear if we can shake some of our… tendencies. And in some cases, whether we should.

That begs the question: are we a summation of everything we’re exposed to, accumulating learned reactions and suppositions that drive future action? Or are we first and foremost only a product of our biology, destined to repeat the same instructions embedded within our code and forever locked in cycles of behaviors?

A few theories floating around paint our existence as a possible simulation. Chess pieces on a board, directed by unseen forces we have no way of detecting. I confess there are times when it actually does seem like it might be true, but on the whole I have to reject the idea because it breeds complacency and lethargy. And let’s not forget depression. What would be the point?

I just thought of this - there’s a precursor construct to simulation theory that’s been on the books for hundreds of years. Calvinist dogma holds that fate is the driver of our lives. That we have no capacity to alter our trajectories because that’s already been decided by God. But what would be the fun in that, if the tiny chess pieces didn’t have the ability to alter the game?

I vacillate between these two concepts of dogmatically-derived ideas and independent thought, and it sometimes seems like we’re lashed between two bent saplings - each exerting it’s pull on our psyches, and in some moments, literally tearing us and the fabric of our societies apart. Nurture vs. Nature, the endless struggle.

The line is hazy where deep learning of our environment begins and dogma takes over. When a child touches something very hot for the first time, biology steps in, immediately withdrawing the hand, but at the same time, the memory of the moment is stamped like a die on the conscious mind. It has become an unwavering, un-erasable fact. Some surfaces will invariably be hot on occasion, but dogma teaches that those surfaces will always be hot.

We seem to carry some imprints we cannot change. Whether biology or built-up libraries of social behavior that nip at our heels throughout the ages, it’s unclear if we can shake some of our… tendencies. And in some cases, whether we should.

When George Washington stepped down after his second term, he made it abundantly clear he was headed back to Mount Vernon. He’d done his time. That act became enshrined in the canons of American history, broken only by FDR’s election to a third term from which he never recovered, dying in office. Following that, it took an act of Congress to formally declare no president should ever occupy the Oval Office more than two times. I’m afraid this will be tested in the not-too-distant future.

The collective mind of the country (let’s just say normally) has maintained throughout its short history that no one is better than anyone else, that the occupier of the highest office in the land is beholden to the office itself and that there’s no such thing as divine right of kings. That ideal is being beaten senseless right now, but I hold out hope that the overall imprint of our 248 year experiment will endure. Washington still looms large in the American psyche, even if unconsciously. Or are we a cargo culture facsimile of our former selves?

In the South Pacific during and after WWII, some indigenous groups who’d previously never seen outsiders began to mimic the outsiders’ behaviors, going so far as to carve and don wooden headphones, sit in bamboo observation towers, march in military fashion with hewn wooden rifles, and light signal fires on empty runways and lighthouses.

This mimicry was meant to hasten the return of cargo originally dropped first by the Japanese and later the Allies during the war. It became the dominant approach for a time, and then eventually died out. To be replaced by what? Humanity seems to require some form of structure upon which we hang current beliefs du jour, our projections for an uncertain future, and our sometimes erroneous recollections of the past.

An adjacent behavior exhibited by some cultures that had never had communication with any other, was that they were not able to actually SEE sailing ships on the horizon, having no frame of reference for what they were until they were right on them. The only moment in my life that I have experienced something even remotely like that was while living in Germany as a teenager. I woke up early, looked out the window, and caught a glint, but not what was glinting. After a few seconds, I saw a shape hovering motionless in the sky, illuminated by the morning sun, but I could not identify it. This held for another 10 seconds or so: it threw my mind into complete turmoil, until the object pivoted slowly, revealing an airship. Ah.

It was a revealing moment, one that has stuck with me ever since. After reading about cargo cultures, I had an inkling of what they must’ve felt. The mental gymnastics a person goes through, sifting through every reference they’ve ever encountered and coming up with… nothing.

Do you see any evidence of cargo culture in our society right now? Are we, as people who value the core principles the US was built on, unable to see what we’re really looking at? Is it so alien a view that we simple cannot understand?

Maybe. But I hold to this: America is the squishy balloon whose shape can be distorted completely out of recognition, but that will snap back to its original shape eventually. There is a deep, deep memory. The original imprint just might be strong enough to allow this to happen. It’s in direct competition with what we see on the ground right now, but this thought is a beacon I keep lit.

Who are we really? Are we simply biology expressed? Cranking out behavioral code developed millions of year ago? Despite all our fancy inventions, it’s inescapably true that we often sink back into the thick goo of dogmatic - read programmed - thinking.

To my mind, life is essentially an unfolding chaos. It exists outside of ourselves, churning toward the future like a cosmic steamroller, taking no notice of us. Sounds bleak, doesn’t it? Ah, but you know about Chaos Theory, right? That small areas hold immense uncertainty where calculations fall flat, but the farther out you go, patterns start to emerge. So, I don’t think of chaos in the way you might be thinking of it.

We try to impose our will on our impossibly tiny corner of the universe. Such a small patch, rife with incalculable variation. How are we doing so far? With no metric with which to gauge our progress or potential success, we determinedly march forward, unwilling to entertain the idea that we are improbable.

There’s something quite magical about that improbability. Yes, we’re built on biological structures, imprinted with repeatable instructions that mean many of us do actually survive to adulthood in spite of the million things that could kill us.

The line that separates dogma from determined can sometimes seem smudged, but there is a difference. Do we learn, record and disgorge information and foment action merely because we are recording devices? Or can we take the information we acquire, roll it around a bit, glean new insights from it, and chart a new path? I have to think we can.

I ask a lot of questions here because I have a lot of questions. Also, I know I suffer from GHFS - glass half full syndrome. It frustrates some people and they get cross with me. But if not hope, what are we left with?

You may think this post is a lightly cloaked screed about politics, and you’d be right. But what is politics if not society unveiled? And what is society if not behavior examined, then either enshrined or thrown away? Our behaviors either build or destroy, slowly or quickly.

How we do this - how we deal with one another, is the most important thing of all. Because if we don’t get better at it, little else matters. A good friend of mine used to say “this is the way forward.” He meant in the context of 3D animation applied to the sciences, God bless him, but I’d like to widen the lens. The way forward is expansion of thought that benefits society, not that baits it, traps it like a rabid animal and delivers the death blow.

As C.S. Lewis was fond of writing: Onward and Upward.

Think wide.

Thoughts become actions.

Actions become movements.

Movements change our world.

This fellow human loves you.

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