From the Depths of the Unknown

Emerges an Indie Writer & Book Publisher

It's All Back On with It's All Over Now

It's hard to believe that it has been nearly two whole years since the last time I wrote anything on this blog.

A lot has happened in my life and in the world since the last time I did in November 2020 but one thing that has not happened is me publishing anything. In fact, it has now been over four years since the last time that I committed anything to print. I suppose that's why my last few blog posts (when I was still doing them) had more to do with what was happening in the world at the time. Or whatever random bullshit that spewed out of my mind and found a home on this site. Let's be honest that there has been a fair amount of that over years as well. I am not ashamed of it. In fact, the sheer amount of random bullshit is kind of a point of pride for me.

Lately, I will be honest, my efforts to keep up with these things have been pretty minimal. I even considered (for a very short time) taking an indefinite break from writing. Thankfully, that thought did not stay in my mind for very long. At least not while I have ideas, and I always have ideas. At least, I have so far. This is just the pace that works for me, I suppose. Rest assured, I am living my life thoroughly between in the silences.

I do hope to do more writing on this blog again, but we'll see what happens. I need to knock some cobwebs off -- even though I do plenty of writing for work. That is just not the same thing, though. Sometimes, I still work on short stories, poems, and songs -- everything just takes longer nowadays. I need to do this type of writing occasionally for my soul (if that's a thing), and blogging usually scratches that itch in just the right way if the others things don't or I need to feel inspired, because for some reason blogging about them usually inspires me to work on those other things more.

Also, because I do slowly-but-surely work on the above-mentioned things, I do sometimes have something new to announce -- even if it might seem like it has been a while since the last update. Maybe it has been a while. Okay, it has. Today I actually break my unintional period of silence to write about a couple of developments, publishing-wise.

First, I am still working on my short fiction collection, Xennial. Basically, there are ten stories, and one needs to be finished, then all five of the new ones need to be thoroughly edited and rewritten, then everything needs to be copyedited and proofread. To be honest, a big part of the delay is that these stories aren't particularly timely and I have been working on this collection for what seems like forever so I am kind of burnt out on it. It is pretty much just some 30-something navel-gazing about a time in his life in his twenties that has long since passed. I am definitely going to finish it and publish it, but I am not setting a firm date on it until I am more done with it. It will probably be 2023 or later before it finally goes out. So that will make it a 40-something navel-gazing about a time in his life in his twenties that has been even longer since it passed. That's fine. I have already been working on it for like 12 years, what is another 1-2?

Second, I am focused on publishing a different, albeit much shorter, four-story short fiction collection called It's All Over Now. A bit fatalistic, I know, but it's fitting. See the Gott Press Home Page for a bit longer of a description of it. I am pretty excited to release this collection, which I hope to do in time for the 2022 holiday shopping season. It will definitely take some work on my part. I have to really thoroughly edit and rewrite a couple of these, and then copyedit and proofread all of them, but it's much more doable by the end of 2022 than the other collection. Plus, these stories are a bit more timely. I also have to do all of the cover art and design work for it, but that's not too bad. That part of it is actually pretty fun. I just have to figure out how I want to go about it this time. That is harder, but I do have a few ideas already.

That's okay. I have time to figure that out, because I need to focus on actually finishing it first before I can really safely start that. I actually have a deadline to finish it though (more to come on this soon), so that motivates me to think about it and work on it, and gives me a justifiable reason to complete it other than I just enjoy doing it.

You wouldn't think that it makes a difference but sometimes it just does. Let's see how it goes. Hopefully, more to come soon.

Some Election Day Musings

It's nice to believe that a hero is going to step in and save us all from our collective suffering, but the reality is that hero doesn't exist. It's a myth we've created to help ease our suffering as we all go through the events of our lives--a fantasy, a lullaby.

For some reason, the increase in suffering only seems to magnify that belief in a benevolent savior out their just watching over the collective and keeping us safe from, ostensibly, each other, and maybe the occasional natural disaster--although, many of what we call those today are actually also man-made or at least made worse by man, like Fukushima or the earthquakes caused by fracking and mining, but that is neither here nor there if someone is just going to come along and make it right at some point when it gets bad enough.

Aside from the damage we do to our planet in the name of convenience and progress, most of the time the reasons for the things that actually cause our sufferings are a result of decisions we've made in our individual lives and because of actions we've taken or not taken. If you knowingly do something wrong and do it anyway, and then suffer the consequences of that, it is one thing, that is on you; however, it is entirely another thing when you do something you have been led to believe is the right thing but then have to find out the hard way that it is decidedly not. For a subset of people, that seems to happen more often than it does for others, so maybe some things that we see are universal truths just aren't. How much of what we know and believe is actually just conditioned into us by other seriously flawed individuals, and maybe our own gut instincts are just wrong because of this?

Maybe some people just continue to follow the same path and make the same mistakes repeatedly, likely just repeating the same patterns of mistakes our parents made, is because what we call our instincts about what is right and good in the world are actually just some persons' opinions that have been bred into us through some generational societal Pavlovian experiment, and the keepers of the experiment today are operating in bad faith. These opinions and behaviors are being forced onto us so we just go along with what works best for the benefactors of this experiment, these fascist power-hungry individuals who have such little faith in other human beings that they feel the need to make everyone else battle each other and suffer so they can stay at the top. The Trickle-Down theory is nothing more than a pyramid scheme.

However, I don't think it has to be that way. We don't have to keep falling for the con.

Our relationships with the world and to each other don't have to be so fraught with violence and just this generational cloud of negativity that hangs over and brings us all down and pits us against each other. Life doesn't have to be a competition, or maybe we can just reframe the competition aspect to what it truly is, us collectively struggling against the limitations of the natural world, the effects of what we've done to it that are now irreversible, and the universe at large.

While it's important to keep the things from the past that work well, an inherent part of the American experiment is that the idea can be altered to fit what the moment demands a necessity, and this ambiguity could either be its biggest strength or its worst weakness, but if the changes are made to truly ensure that society is protected--even from itself--that's when it's working at its best. Being adaptable when new evidence presents itself is one of the fundamental principles of the enlightenment and also just science, in general. The constitution was never meant to be a be-all-end-all. The evidence of that? The Bill of Rights. A built-in way to amend it.

Maybe we just need to start by being more adaptable, in general, as individuals, more amenable to change when new evidence presents itself. There is nothing wrong with admitting that you've been wrong about something, and changing yourself to improve your situation. That's how we grow. 

Our biggest mistake as a society was thinking of ourselves as the best. And because we're the best, everything we do is the best That is an arrogant way of looking at the world. We stopped striving for actual greatness because we stopped to pat ourselves on the back for too long. We decided that we were the chosen ones, and fuck the rest of the world. We were the direct recipients of all the light and glory, but we didn't take into account that when the sun was setting here it was rising somewhere else.

It's highly unlikely that anyone is going to come along and save the day; in fact, this is usually when someone much worse takes control and takes society down an even darker path because these types of people are good at convincing enough others that they are the savior they've all been waiting on. But hey, maybe there is a certain point where the lessons of the past need to be repeated to save future generations. The problem with that is there might not be any future generations if this thing gets bad enough. The doomsday clock has never been this close to midnight.

Rather than nuclear war, nowadays, the biggest threat: scientists are saying that we are at the beginning of a mass extinction event. It even has a name, Anthropocene, and it's called that because it's largely what we Anthropos are doing to the environment that is causing it. It doesn't have to be that way but it certainly can go that way and it's looking more and more like it will. 

Maybe entropy is the fundamental law of the universe. Maybe it's too late. Maybe no matter what we do at this point, it won't matter. 

It certainly won't if we take up that mentality. It's a flawed way of thinking about it. Maybe I was wrong when I said that heroes don't exist. Maybe instead we collectively are the heroes of our own stories. If anyone can affect a lasting and impactful change, it's us. We should be saying that it won't matter unless we do something now. What that is, I have no idea, but I think one step in the right direction is to elect more responsible leaders, and by responsible, I mean a sense of responsibility to society and not just to themselves. That is what should matter over any party affiliation.

If only we could collectively agree on that.

Fighting the Good Fight

The problem with protesting or "rioting," as it often gets labeled, is that no matter how just the cause, it almost always leads to violence, and fascists aren't known for fighting fairly. Just ask anyone who witnessed the events at Kent State or Jackson State in May 1970. My fear is that something similar, or worse, is going to happen next. I fully support the cause of the demonstrators, and I mean the real activists, not the right wing agitators.

Before I continue, I think it's important for me to say, no matter how obvious you think it might be: No one deserves to die like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, or any of the countless others before them. No one. They were murdered.

That's why there is a lot of anger and resentment from their communities, and the countless others, and why it is completely justified. It's not like these men and women that keep getting shot, beaten, strangled, or whatever, by state-sanctioned "officers of the peace" want to be martyrs. I am sure they would have much preferred to keep on living their lives, but unfortunately, they did not get that choice.

The purpose of the police, and the military, and indeed the entire government at all levels, is to act on behalf of the people and protect the social contract, which guarantees the rights of all citizens, not just a select few billionaires. There shouldn't be varying levels of rights for you depending on who you are, how much money you have, or what you look like, but that is the way it seems to work.

It is my understanding that the Defund the Police movement intends to do just that, not to eliminate the police, but to transform the forces in all communities to perform this intended function of acting on behalf of the people and not to act as a standing army as they seem to be becoming with all of the military weapons and body armor and whatnot, to help the good officers weed out the bad ones, and to make sure the bad ones are held responsible for the bad things that they do. Police should be representative of the communities where they serve and should be protecting them and not putting them in more danger, but unfortunately, for some people, that is exactly what police do, and you have to wonder, if it's not their race, then what is it that connects them?

Further, how many more people have to die before real reform will actually happen? Everyone deserves the same rights, which according to the Declaration of Independence, are inalienable. Of course, at the time that was written, many of the founding fathers only included white, landowning men in that statement, but, you know... That's a detail that even the most well-intentioned among us often overlook.

When I see people complaining about the "rioters" especially poor white people (who have been victimized plenty throughout the centuries--just ask the Irish) I know, for most of them, it's because they are missing the point. Not that ignorance is really excusable anymore due to technology, but... A lot of the willfulness of their ignorance stems from the propaganda they have been force-fed for decades to distrust academic institutions, the humanities, and the news media. In order to truly change those who are able to be changed, we first need to unplug them all from the umbilical of this propaganda machine and dismantle it once piece at a time.

The people complaining about the protesters who aren't missing the point, those folks constantly speaking in dog whistles and coded language, who seek to keep stirring the pot and distracting everyone from what's really going on, those are the people who need to be revealed to the public, who need to be prevented from causing the harm they are wreaking on our society.

At least (at least among my peers and the people I'm connected with through social media) most agree that the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were wrong, so that gives me a little hope. Not much, but a little. That said, there is still a long, long way to go.

The problem with that is it might be too late.

A Dreamy, Breezy Post about Sunshine & Rainbows & Shit

Or, What I Do in My Basement is Wholesome so Fuck You

[Sorry, I don't Mean to Sound So Defensive, I Just have to Keep My Online Persona Consistent As to Not Draw Any Attention to the Fact that I Might be a Dynamic Human Being Capable of More than One Trance-like Emotional State]

There's not many better feelings than driving through the countryside on a sunny day, the brightness carefully suppressed from damaging my eyeballs by my Bob Dylan shades, stretches of trees and farmland flashing past on either side, the windows down, a cool almost moist breeze wrapping it's invisible scarves around me and through the cabin of my car, the sun-bleached asphalt unwinding ahead, with music blasting, me singing out at the top of my lungs--

That's one thing I need to do more, but I have nowhere really to go right now. Of course, I would also have to wait for a nice day. That might be a while, at the rate things are going. I mean, I could drive somewhere just to drive--just to leave the house. Get some fresh air.

There is something to be said about driving around on a gloomy day, too: the window cracked, the fresh drops filling my nostrils with their perfume, listening to the Allman Brothers Idlewild South, the slow slosh of the windshield wipers--back in my twenties I would have had a cigarette, the menthol and tobacco wafting with the rain scent creating a sort of intoxicating potpourri.

This weekend has been more like winter than early May, though, and the only thing fun about driving around in winter is driving at night when the snow is blowing, an X-Wing Pilot flying through hyperspace. "This is Red Leader..." As fun as that is, I am not in the mood.

That's Ohio for you, I suppose. Instead of going on a drive, I have barely left the basement. I have spent a long, seemingly endless amount of time down here, re-arranging my shit--getting my organ bench from the garage, sitting my trunk on it and using the combined structure as a table for my synth and my drum machine, and moving my guitars and drum set around to make it all work. This might actually be my favorite basement setup yet.

This space really works really well as a one-man recording operation (and maybe eventually for live-streaming) but it would only be conducive for a full band if it was like a three piece or four piece, max. Four piece might be stretching it, actually. It would definitely be loud and sweaty... Gross. No, I like the idea of doing a one-man band thing, and I like the idea of being a member of a band, but I wouldn't want that band to actually practice here after we gain more members than my brother and me.

We'll see. We really just even need to actually practice more than once or twice to really be considered a thing. I mean, what else have we got going on?

One thing as a musician that I strive to do, really as an artist, in general--because actually this is also kind of the essence of writing fiction--is take my audience to a specific time and place, and fusing these two disparate media together can help make it even more real, more present... And it has been a dream of mine to do for a long time.

I did kind of a proto-version of it with my novel, Escapes, creating a playlist on Spotify that covers music mentioned in or relating to the story. I am listening to that now, actually. It has a weird mixture of jazz, rock, punk, alternative, metal, and pop, as the story covers a lot of territory musically.

With my upcoming short story collection, Asshole Years, I would like to take that idea of combining music and reading to the next level. After I finish editing and proofreading it, the collection will go into production and I can set a firm release date. While that's taking place, I will start working on an accompanying soundtrack--think Pink Floyd but with a noise punk-alternative-new wave edge.

That's really why I got an analog synth. To add to the space rock-psychedelic ambient flavor of my sound. When I used to perform regularly, I would often get compared to Syd Barrett or Pink Floyd. I don't know if that's actually true, but that's what audience members (and totally different people) have told me after performances, on more than one occasion. Anyways, I plan to start composing the new, mostly instrumental songs for the collection soon, and I will include a download code or something with the book, and really lean into that.

And actually, to tie it all together with a neat little bow, driving around seemingly aimlessly is one theme that does carry through the collection, somewhat. I guess it's good that I'm in that frame of mind. Maybe I need to go on a road trip for the inspiration.

If the goddamn weather ever cooperates long enough.

30-Something Navel Gazing At My Navel-gaziest (And 13 Other Reasons Why Smooth is Better than Crunchy)

Sometimes, I feel compelled to write about politics, but then I question that urge, and ask myself if I really want to be another voice in the echo chamber. The problem with so many people feeling their opinions are valid just because they have them has kind of made holding any opinion seem absurd. But hey, you know where the US is ranked in education.

If I hold any particular political viewpoint--and it's sad that this is in fact looked at as a political viewpoint--it's that the humanities are important and provide something vital that you can't really get through facts and figures alone, unless you're truly looking at the macro. It's the humanities that help people to build empathy through the experiences of others, to get anyone to look at the macro in the first place.

It is more evident than ever that we need the humanities in our everyday lives, because not enough people are focusing on the bigger picture and how they affect it, and many seem to have a difficult time recognizing that we, as a collective of individuals, have become overly narcissistic and that it is seriously damaging our society. After all, if Donald Trump represents anything, it's narcissism more than anything else. I look around me, and look into myself, really deeply, and I come to the conclusion that too many people have stopped listening, myself too, to some extent, because they are focusing so hard on shouting out into the abyss, to the detriment of everything else in their lives. Listening, and really, actively paying attention to what's happening around you instead of hyper-focusing on what other people think about how you think about things is important and something that we often forget to do.

But maybe nuance really is dead, and we are really living in a post-nuance universe.

After all, it does seem like everything has to be a bold bright explosion of sensory overload navel gazing narcissistic masturbating pile of maggot infested horse shit, which let's be honest, is necessary to view in 4K, in order for people to pay attention. The maggots just don't seem real enough with less definition.

I am pretty sure this is what Ray Bradbury in the 50s, Kurt Vonnegut in the 60s, DEVO in the 70s, William Gibson in the 80s, Chuck Palahniuk in the 90s and Radiohead in the 2000s were all talking about in their own way, and I hope I am adding in my own small way to that conversation, because it's more relevant than ever.

As an aside, I recognize that those are just a few examples from a nearly infinite number that I could have chosen, and that there are probably many that I am even unaware of that might be better examples, but these are all ones that spoke to me in some way.

Anyways, as a Xennial, I grew up in the age when the public internet was in its infancy, before it was quite so universally accessible, and the speeds weren't really fast enough to do any significant computing, so it was easy to look out into the universe wearing major blinders, but not hard to avoid if you were open to finding things you weren't expecting. True, you had to be looking for something in order to find it, but you also had to be open to understanding it if what you found contradicted your viewpoint. That doesn't mean you had to change your viewpoint, but you had to at least question it. And you had to be looking. You didn't have to accept anything as a hard-fast rule, but the fundamental rule still remained the same. Look...

Fast-forward to today: the idea that this and others of the old rules also still apply, that you're not always right and it's a good thing to censor yourself sometimes, has gotten lost in the abyss--just look at the chatter on Facebook or Twitter on any typical day and you'll see what I mean. Of course, these rules are all interrelated.

By the way, the point of being anti-censorship and promoting freedom of speech isn't that censorship itself is wrong, it's more based on the enlightenment principle that censorship is only reasonable when it is self-governed, and you develop the ability to understand right and wrong from learning, and thus avoid making mistakes from understanding them through the experiences of others. Hence, it's okay and actually really important sometimes to withhold saying something if you're not really adding value to the conversation. True, sometimes the only value that something has is the contribution itself, but I suppose that's something you have to take the time for yourself to decide too, and that maybe, even if you decided to do something once and think something once, it does not mean that you can't change your mind when you get new information that changes your understanding of the thing.

Everyone just needs to take their fingers off the triggers and back down little, or a lot, even, and really stop and think about things, and start paying attention to what is really happening. Just because you have the ability to share your feelings instantly for the entire mega-verse to see, maybe a little filtering isn't a bad thing sometimes, or maybe even more often than not, it is a really good thing, and it's okay to think things through a little before reacting to something.

That's another thing the humanities can do, if you let them: they can help you develop a little emotional intelligence. Emotions are primal but trainable, if you take the time to question yourself a little and be willingly to admit that sometimes you have bad ideas and that it's good to learn from others, you will be better off. Can I just say here, yay multi-culturalism! And I am not sorry if that offends you because fuck you.

I know I can be guilty of being ignorant sometimes too, and it's safe to say that I have had plenty of bad ideas over the years, and many of them involved alcohol, but that's neither here nor there. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that I am better or worse than anyone, but I am saying that I try to hold myself to higher standards than what my actual nature sometimes wants me to, and that's a good thing.

Also, it is not my intention to be lecturing anyone, but take what I am saying for what it is, nothing more, nothing less. Maybe you agree, maybe you don't, and I am open for a real, intellectual debate about it, but other than that. I am right and you are wrong, so, as they said it in The Midnight Gospel, put that butt plug in the asshole of your universe.

Music That Kicks My Ass and Other Three, Four and Five-Letter Words

Today's blog post is brought to you by the schwa and 40 oz bottles of Miller High Life. I plan to spend the better part of today figuring out how to play the guitar solo in the Kingsman classic version of "Louie Louie" because to be quite frank, it's about goddamn time.

By the way. I also really love the original, the Richard Berry and the Pharaohs version, and the Toots and the Maytals version is also high up there. Joan Jett and the Blackhearts? Hell yes! That version slaps too, as the kids say. I wonder, did the Ramones ever cover it?

Unfortunately, it does not seem like The Ramones covered  "Louie Louie" (that I could find in a 30 second Google search) but, of course, if they did, it would probably kick ass!

Anyways, I am getting a bit off topic, or least on a different tangent about the same topic, and I do really want to talk about this guitar solo. As a self-proclaimed "Louie Louie" super fan and someone who's been playing guitar for roughly...25 years...Jesus...I feel a great amount of shame that I don't already know the entire Kingsmen version by heart. The rest of the song, of course, is a cake walk. I am determined this time around to get it, though. Give me a few years and I will get a bar band together that will play nothing but EVERY goddamn version of the song I can find.

This solo, when I have attempted to biff my way through it before, like what ends up happening most of the time that I attempt to learn someone else's song, I always end up jamming on my own thing. Call it a habit or call it a curse. I'll let you decide. I guess that's probably why my guitar playing has never gotten real complex. I have learned a bunch of catchy riffs but never the complete song unless it's just straight chords. I have also learned scales and chords and shit, but the best way to learn how to apply the theory is by learning to play songs...Naturally...And I have never really really done that on a serious level.

Giving up on learning it is not an option this time, though. And I am going back to other songs learn them in entirety, as well. I am hoping by the time this whole epidemic things is over, I will come out of it a better guitarist (and a better drummer too...but that is a whole different blog post).

It's taking a while to get to a point where I am ready to record, and that's okay, but I hope to start before the end of the year, and I think that timeline is totally reasonable at this point. I might tide myself over by getting out the old drum machine and throwing something fun together for old time's sake.

At least I don't need to work a whole lot on my bass playing to get into recording shape. That will more be a matter of coming up with the bass lines, and that I usually just improvise because that's what works well for me, I think.

Anyways, what it all comes down to is that I am going to use this time I am stuck inside to create something to listen to, hopefully. We'll see. I will certainly give it the old college try.

On that note, I have some jamming to accomplish. See all you crazy folks on the other side!