Today I awoke to learn that the funding goal set to launch “Witness Underground” out into the world was reached, two days ahead of schedule.  Not quite under the wire but not exactly a chip shot either.

I will be honest here, I really dislike crowdfunding as a concept, I think social media is a social toxin, and I did not enjoy the actual process.  I really stressed Scott out with my own stress about the process and I feel bad about that.  The whole thing was well out of my personal comfort zone.  That said, there was one upside to the whole thing and that was the amazing coalescence of a community of supporters, well-wishers, and fellow travelers.

Amazing people, big hearts, incredible talents, I am humbled by the support, the enthusiasm, and the love being shown on the Discord server, on social media, in appreciative emails, on video calls, it’s stunning.

I’m speechless.

Decades ago my brother and I started something that grew into something else.  Eighteen years ago I lost it.  And him.  I tried to make peace with those losses.  I went to therapy.  I started a new life.  I wrote hundreds of thousands of words.  I meditated.  I recorded music.  I cried and screamed and tried to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life and then this movie happened.  These people happened.  Thanks to this movie and the community of people who have responded to it, a future I never allowed myself to dream could be possible.  I keep waking up in shocked disbelief, like this isn’t happening, can’t be happening.  Nobody gets a second chance like this.

Life doesn’t work that way.

And yet, thanks to a whole bunch of incredible, kind, thoughtful, and supportive people, here we are.

Thank you, everybody.  Thank you so incredibly much.  I’m not good at showing my gratitude but I have more of it than I know what to do with.

I may not have been born yet when the late, great, Buddy Miles sang about Them Changes but I like to think I know what he was singing about.  Change is all there is, nothing ever really stays the same, not exactly, even in the most humdrum and repetitive phases of our lives.  Even though this is true and all things are always in flux, it’s very easy as a passenger through linear time to see certain events and choices, times and seasons, as if they are the starts and ends of chapters in a book.  A birth, a death, a move to a new home, a new city, a change in career, the end of a relationship or start of a romance, these are the easy markers, the ones that have dates and names attached.  Most of our lives, however, are lived in the interstices between those big changes.  

That is all as it should be.  Major changes are exhausting and (typically) somewhat rare.  We see them as major because they alter the day to day reality of our lives in some sort of on-going way and if that were happening every day or week or month I don’t know how I’d survive it.  You have to have at least a few days here or there to stop and read a book and eat a sandwich in peace, right?

The last phase/chapter of my life has been a bit of a mixed bag.  As I’ve written here before, I have floundered creatively, struggled to find my mojo, wrestled with a lot of self-doubt and a lack of ambition about the future.  The Trump era and the pandemic were not uniquely hard on me, I know that, but they came at an inopportune time in my life and more than once I found myself on the ropes, psychologically.  But hey, I’m still here, I’m still happening.

And that’s what I want to say today.  I’m still here and I’ve got irons in the fire again and it feels good.

One way to create change when I feel like I am mired down is to make a physical change to the environment.  So, several weeks back, I decided the time had come to create the workspace for the next phase of things.  I emptied out my basement studio, and went at it with a crowbar, popping floor tiles left and right.  Picked out some new paint colors (goodbye white, hello copper and blue), and started intentionally designing the new space.  I wanted the space to be a multi-use space which could be easily configured for home office, VR/gaming, recording sessions, video shoots, or as a home movie theater.  It’s a large space, 400+ square feet, with a small kitchenette area, so it can accommodate a lot of flexibility.  I decided that a hardwood floor would be important (bought cheap at online auction) and also decided that every major piece of furniture in the space needed to be on wheels (I have learned much about casters over the last month) or at least sliders.  

The room is absolutely coming together.  The majority of the hardwood is installed, the walls are painted, the A/V setup is progressing, there is a fantastic new desk/workspace, I’ve got a huge room divider curtain wall, smart lighting, new cabinets in the kitchenette area, it’s turning into quite the setup.  Watched some movies down there last night and it’s absolutely epic.  I have a bit of work ahead of me still, quite a bit, but I’m motivated by the release of the new album, the relaunch of Nuclear Gopher as a label, and a number of related plans I’m not ready to talk about here yet.  The space is taking longer to come together than I had hoped but it is already pretty dang usable and looking great.  Recording sessions will be commencing this month.  

As I’ve been spending evenings and weekends renovating and reconfiguring, divesting myself of old furniture and items that no longer serve any purpose, I’ve begun to feel a bit of my old self.  One of my favorite sayings, usually credited to Alan Kay of Xerox PARC fame, is “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”  I know the kind of future I want to inhabit.  I know that I feel good in the present when I spend time creating changes.  I know that our actions can create our feelings as directly as our feelings can spur us to actions.  Working a plan to change my life into the life I want to be living doesn’t have to involve some dramatic gesture or massive disruption.  It can start by writing some things, installing a floor, drawing some sketches of future ideas, getting a bit dirty and sweaty, digging in, building a wall a brick at a time.  There is no guarantee that my ideas will succeed or that the changes I am working on will bring wealth, joy, and inner satisfaction, but it feels right to be doing something.  I’m instigating a series of changes, moving into a transitional state to some new things, and I am more capable, more intentional, and more mindful about this than I have ever been at any previous stage in my life.  

I often say that “hope” is a four letter word (I am the writer of Pessimist Song, after all), so I’m not going to pin any hopes on this next phase.  Let’s just say instead that I am excited to get on the next ride in the amusement park, see what thrills it has in store for me.  Renovating a room is just a project, but it represents an investment in a future I want to create in which I DO create.  From that perspective, it’s vitally important and every piece of flooring I install takes me one step closer to that reality.  I have a future to invent.

The hardest part about losing my religion wasn’t unlearning the teachings. Doing study and research enough to replace the baseless fantasies I had believed in with reality-based information was intense, sure, but I love learning and I enjoyed the thrill of discovery. Who doesn’t get a kick out of the mental buzz you get when you graduate from the childish simplicity of seeing the sky as a sort blue bowl over your head to understanding how light is being refracted and diffused through the atmosphere to create the illusion?

No, the hard part was losing a sense of meaning and purpose. To be a believer was to belong somewhere and to know, really firmly and truly know, where you fit in, the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. I think I knew that this would be a problem long before I ever lost my faith because I had seen other people who had lost their faith who seemed to struggle with being happy. The sense of belonging to a higher calling, doing something universally important with one’s life, that’s something you can’t just casually replace. In the world of my particular faith tradition, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, it is perhaps one of the more extreme experiences of loss in Western Christian culture. It is possible to leave as I did, because you no longer believe the teachings, and you will experience the complete loss of family, community, and purpose in life and it is also possible to be expelled from the community via disfellowshipping, in which case you experience the complete loss of family and community but if you still believe, and many do, you get to at least retain the idea that you have a higher purpose. You just suffer with feelings of shame and guilt and anxiety until they let you back in.

In either case, the sense of having a direction in life on a daily basis, of knowing where you fit, is disrupted, brutally and violently.

The first three years after my loss of faith were the most transformative. There was a lot of study and learning and writing and change. I grew a beard and started doing meditation and wrote a lot of music and centered my life on the one thing that I knew mattered more than anything, the one true north… my son. Maybe I didn’t know the meaning of life anymore, but I knew that my boy and I were family and that I was responsible for being the best dad to him that I could be. This anchored me in a way that nothing else did. Then I met and married my wife and the three of us became my purpose in life. I may not have been clear on whether or not the universe was intentionally created by an invisible person who wants to talk to me in my head but I was very very crystal clear about the child and the woman who lived in my house, who shared their welfare with my own, and who I loved.

But purpose is a tricky thing. Life changes, times go by, and purpose sometimes changes shape. My son grew up, he moved out of the house, my core purpose in life, my core identity of Dad, was no longer the obvious reason for getting up in the morning, going to work, brushing my teeth, and bringing home the bacon. I found that my interest in creativity waned, which surprised me because it was such a huge part of my self-identity and I had thought that being creative was it’s own purpose in life. I had thought it was my core purpose, but I learned that it was actually something else and that the lose of a sense of purpose had a detrimental effect on my creative output.

When I was one of Jehovah’s Witnesses and making music in The Lavone with my brother Rhett, organizing and promoting various bands and albums via the Nuclear Gopher, building websites and making movies, the activities served at least three purposes. First, I had a personal creative outlet for my thoughts and feelings. Second, I had a sense that my creative/entrepreneurial activities were allowing people I loved to do things that they loved while staying faithful to Jehovah. Third, I found that my Nuclear Gopher activities were a testbed of learning that had the practical benefit of advancing my technical skills and advancing my more mundane (but financially stable) career as a software developer and therefore helped me take care of my kid and myself.

Take the religion and the child-rearing out of the equation and I was left with far less “cosmic purpose”. I didn’t need to run a record label to try to help support random musicians, there were already thousands of those. I was well enough established in my career that I wasn’t going to learn anything earth shattering by building another website, so no purpose there. I honestly couldn’t think of any sort of reason to create anymore, or at the least, when I did create something I could no longer see any particular reason to share it with the world. That was how I came to realize that being a creative person had never actually been my core motivation. A need to be heard, to have my barbaric yawp echo throughout the world, had not been my driving motivation and once it came down to writing to be heard, singing to be heard, or creating art to be seen I found that I just didn’t care.

It wasn’t just that. I didn’t care about, well, anything really. Creativity was just the most (to me) surprising example. After losing my faith, my belief in God, my family, my friends, the record label I had been working on for over half of my life, my wife, all of that, I still had a kid to raise. I had a new wife. I starting making my own music, without Nuclear Gopher and The Lavone. I had a lot of learning to do. That wave of purpose got me through most of a decade but when I became an empty-nester I was confronted again with “WHY?” and I didn’t have an answer.

I am not a career person. I have never wanted to climb a corporate ladder, I don’t talk about work at parties. I have a relatively successful career that has lasted nearly 30 years but the part of me that does my job and the rest of me are barely on speaking terms. I put on a hat and I go to an office (or login to remote things) and I do a thing that I get compensated for but in terms of personal identity? I am not my job, I have no sense of self tied up in my career. I am good at it, but there is no purpose for me in the world of software engineering. That’s just a thing I know how to do that pays better than most of the other things I know how to do.

I am not expecting to become a rich and famous artist or celebrity. Pursuing music, writing, or (another passion) filmmaking as an alternate career to the software one, trying to make myself known as a creator and deriving an income from that, feels like a dream that passed me by a long time ago. I’m pushing 50. I’m balding. I’m not some basement hero, some Nuclear Gopher dreaming of Armageddon and trying to make a dent in the universe before 30, I’m a middle aged guy with a well earned dad bod and a long track record of putting out records and making videos and stuff that (until recently) very few people have paid any goddamn attention to. Tilting at that particular windmill without some additional motivation feels ridiculous, like buying a Ferrari or getting hair plugs.

If I lack cosmic purpose of the religious kind, if I am no longer actively parenting, if I do not realistically expect to “make it” in the creative world, if I am not really interested in corporate or financial pursuits, why put out a new record? Why write this blog post? Why do anything at all? OK, yes, I have people who depend on me; my wife, the people I work with, even my son. I have animals who depend on me too. Four dogs and two cats at current count. If I were suddenly taken away tomorrow, to paraphrase the great Keanu Reeves, the people who love me would miss me. Which is great, I don’t intend to devalue that, being accountable to and spending time with people that matter to you is insanely important but it doesn’t really help me know what I want to actually do with my time. I mean, I can completely stop being creative and still be with loved ones. Most people, it turns out, are fine with just BEING. I’m terrible at it. After the first three decades of my life spent thinking I was part of a cosmic melodrama I just get antsy when I don’t know why any one choice or direction is of more interest than any other. Purpose provides this. Where do I want to expend my efforts, my time, my money? This is the purpose of purpose. Having a purpose clarifies your decision making, gives you a sense of direction for your actions, helps you decide what you want to do next. Living without a purpose feels more aimless, directionless, rudderless, and ultimately a bit pointless.

Ultimately, my struggle to have a sense of purpose in my life has been the central struggle of the last decade for me, the long-haul XJW symptom I have found to be the stickiest, the most persistent. I know, intellectually, that people who were never in a cult also struggle with the ultimate meaninglessness of existence, it is not unique to me or to people like me, but if I had never had the sense that I was part of some universal plan maybe I wouldn’t feel it to be such a loss, such a gaping hole in my heart. In my private journaling I often wrestle with what has happened to me creatively. After all, barring a little 6-song EP that I recorded in a day in 2014 I haven’t fundamentally been able to even make a record since 2012, something I used to do at least once a year. My public facing writing is minimal, my private writing is mostly a lot of navel gazing. My days are packed with activities but very few are social. I wake up, write, do the Wordle and Spelling Bee, start my work day, 9-10 hours later I log off, maybe feed the dogs, help make dinner, run to the store, or take care of some sort of errands. I don’t call, don’t text, don’t go on social media much, don’t see friends, I keep my head down. I feel like I’m waiting for something to change. Waiting for an internal levee to break. Waiting to have a sense of “this is the way” and, in the meantime, I’m just taking care of business.

This, my friends, has been, for me, the true legacy of losing my faith. I have found myself in a state where I don’t believe in ambition, don’t believe in myself, don’t believe in much beyond survival most days. A state where it’s a good day if I just wake up, experience something, and go to sleep. But it’s also a state I am profoundly dissatisfied with. I want my purpose back. I want to have a reason to believe in myself, a reason to do things, a reason to put myself back out there. I’m taking some steps. I’m planning to put myself back out in the world (even if I am not sure exactly why) and I feel that it’s worth sharing these feelings with whoever might read this. I’ve been out of the Witnesses for 19 years. I’ve built a good life for myself. I have everything to be proud of and happy about. I have a wonderful son, a long-lasting marriage, a respectable and stable career, a home, pets who love me, friends, some cool old sports cars, guitars, amazing memories, but it’s still a struggle. I still feel like the point is elusive. Maybe this is just how it is for everybody. I don’t know. I am just going to have to stop waiting to feel purpose and start doing. Maybe I can at least find some satisfaction that way. Time will tell.

Back in September I posted a Long Overdue Album Update! and now here I am with another.

I have made a series of demo mixes of the album and done additional tracking since then, including hiring some session musicians to add some horn and string parts.  I’ve also mocked up some cover art to use for the demo mixes although actual final cover art is still TBD.  As you can see, I’m naming the album Capistrano, which also happens to be the proper name of the Very Good Boy gracing the cover.  His nicknames are Cappy or Cap but his full name is Capistrano and he informs me that this is the first time anybody has ever named an album after him.  Go figure.

As of the most recent demo mix, the album consists of eleven tracks and runs about 40 minutes but there are a few things in flux and it could potentially (re)gain a twelfth track by the time I get it out the door.  I hope to have all the tracking done by next week and then it will be time to get into mixing and then mastering.  I’ve already started laying down songs for the next album.  Nothing makes me more excited to make music than making music.  🙂

I can’t wait to share this with the world.  It’s been a long time coming…