First: A moment to honor all the Cee-yoU-Next-Tuesday bombs I cut from this, even though I did not come up with an adequate replacement. 

I have listened to a few songs from the New Band formed by the Former Lead Singer of my Favorite Band. No links. No oxygen for this, beyond this post, which I do not intend to even share on my social media. Not sure who I'll tell at all.

I wanted to give it a chance. I felt like I owed it to… I don’t know all the years and good times and other songs, all the things the previous music got me through, particularly the worst of the past 7 years, to see where it goes from here. I mentally committed myself to giving it at least one listen, and forming an opinion, that I might or might not share. 

Before I get into it, I have a few things to say. 

JesusFuckingKentuckyFriedOriginalRecipeChristDeliveringGlutenFreePizzaOnAUnicycle, am I really grateful that I ended up just smart enough to have much smarter friends to learn from and glean wisdom from. 

An atmosphere of knowledge and thought and perspective and context makes a huge difference. Doctor friends. Health department friends. NIH friends. MFA friends. Writer and creator friends who do deep research for the sake of a story. Statisticians, social psychologists, analysts, researchers, nerds and geeks of all shades, some rising and shining to heights within their specialties, and some of them graduates of some dang impressive schools. 

Yes my friends circles expand well beyond there to so very many different walks of life, but the point here is having smart and trustworthy folks in the circle, around for the heavier duty things that my BFA in Illustration and MFA in Sequential Art don’t provide much insight into. Hey, some of those friends might look to me for some technical details about the materials of painting, or a chunk of trivia about an artist or movement or, y’know, painted comics. 

Some folks like to cry elitism or something at that, some soundbite word pushed to sow doubt and undermine trust in knowledge and experts, but if someone’s performing surgery, or diagnosing a weird disease, or figuring out the really weird shit about how brains work, it helps if they’re smart AF and/or educated AF. 

I – WE – don’t have to know exactly how every damned little thing in life works because others have done the work. Some can even explain it, if we want to listen well and long enough. But that takes time that not all of us are able to willing to invest.

Anyway, I’m grateful because otherwise, well, I don’t think it’d be that otherwise, but I can, from where I stand, if I squint real hard, almost see the appeal of going down some of those anti-stuff rabbitholes. 

We’re hardwired to look for patterns, to try to piece things together, to try to make connections in the ongoing quest to make sense of the world. And sometimes, we see things that aren’t actually there. Jesus toast. Mars rock face. Bunny clouds. Drunk octopus fisticuffs hooks. 


So if you’re looking for a pattern, you’ll find one if you want it enough. Even if it’s not actually there, and especially if someone who you believe knows more than you whispers in your ear that it’s there. And very especially if it makes you feel like you’re now in-the-know on something SO MANY PEOPLEZ don’t know about. Especially effective if there’s some brewing disagreement between you and your other friends.

Like snake oil salesfolk of times past, they spout just enough… sciency-ness? science-ish-icity? science-sounding-not-actual-science and/or much-abridged-science and/or egregiously microscopically cherry-picked data to make it sound plausible to any random armchair wannabe-expert. They throw in a few scary words like “experimental” and distill it into sound bites and one-line “arguments” like “worse than the disease” for trolls to spread as they LOL at those who “expect cloth to protect you from a deadly virus” (yeah, I saw someone actually using that to mock) and waving their hands over “big pharma.” 

I won’t argue that big industries of any kind aren’t problematic or shouldn’t be watched, but much of what’s gone around the past few years is 2nd-grade-bully-level logic playing on subconscious fears, at best. At best. At worst, well, we’re still going down that deep deep rabbithole. 

I acknowledge that there are a range of legit reasons & concerns for some to not get one vaccine or other. I know a few. I further won’t argue that the vaccine didn’t give some people a particularly rougher time than it did the vast majority. I know a couple. That stuff should be studied and something done for those affected. Statistics still speak to its effectiveness, and the more vulnerable in our communities make it important during a pandemic for those who CAN get vaccinated to do so. To take care of each other. Or get thee to a mountain or deep forest or desert while said pandemic gets more under control. 

Y’know, while deniers and anti-maskers held rallies, spreading the virus far and wide and counteracting much of the good that masks do, then used that as proof against the effectiveness of masks. 

JesusFuckingKentuckyFriedExtraCrispyChristJugglingFlamingPoopOnAVespa.

Like, dudes, you’ve seen what medical staff do and wear going into the ER, right? Washing your fucking hands is a protection against deadly viruses, and so is a scrap of material in the right place. It doesn’t guarantee you won’t get or spread anything, just like seat belts & airbags don’t guarantee you won’t get hurt in a car accident, or a helmet doesn’t guarantee you won’t get a concussion, or fuck, a condom doesn’t guarantee the spermy little swimmers won’t get where they’re not wanted. But you use these tools to reduce risk. To add a layer of protection. I mean, most of us “get” that, right?  Right?

But somewhere along the line Americans grew to expect everything to work exactly right to full efficacy and complete guaranteed protection and no side risks either and “RIGHT NOW WHAT’S TAKING SO LONG” and it better be on the dollar menu, too. An order of large fries with that, please. “Oh, it’s ready? Well, that didn’t take long, how did that happen so fast? That can’t be good…”

Psssst - that’s not how shit works. Shit is complex. The world is complex. Civilization is complex. Sometimes simplifying a few factors in an explanation can help with understanding, and sometimes, well, it just makes a fucking mess.

Anyway, on to the music…

As an artist, I can’t stand folks who say bands or writers or actors or whoever shouldn’t be political. That’s horseshit. They should write and sing whatever inspires them. So we all know who they are, and we should believe them when they tell us.

The first song they posted, I listened to it once that day, had some brief thoughts, and intended to listen again and review it by the end of that weekend.

Instead, my computer died, and procuring a replacement consumed any extra time I might have had to do anything even remotely like blog. Then things got way busier, and doing the listening & posting started to feel like homework I didn’t want to do, then I didn’t get back to it until today, with more songs from them lurking and an event at the Punk Rock Museum in Vegas on their calendar. 

Well. So, that first single: Dead Language. I found the tune catchy and well put together. Something I might happily sing along with in my car. 

Unfortunately, the message smacks of, bluntly, and I fucking hate to say it, “old man yells at cloud.” 

For decades previous generations have tried to blame various societal ills on “whatever the kids are into these days.” Cars, radio, comic books, rock & roll, TV, D&D, video games, Internet, smartphones, social media - they’ve all spent some time targeted & demonized by those who tend to only see the bits that support their critique. These criticisms like to ignore the positive contributions and inflate and misinterpret the negatives.

I hope I’m not the only one who sees irony in here: That what they’re criticizing - Internet/ social media - has contributed to the spreading disease of alternative-f@c†s, big lies, anti-vaxx misinformation, and conspiracy inklings - including some of the very things they’re aligning with. 

Anyway, I don’t know what else to say about it, except as someone turning 54 in the near future, I am fighting like heck against ever being that kind of Aging Person. I might not fully “get” it or participate myself, but I will try to understand the uses & impact both positive and negative for any future tech or culture things that strike me as weird as the world gets weirder and often more wonderful.

Song 2:

The song Where Were You? breaks my heart, as it’s a song of lost friendship and burning bridges. My heart goes out to anyone who would feel that way. 

I find the lyrics “The rearview mirror caught my eye /  So goodbye to everyone in it”  depressing as fuck, particularly on the other side of all the love and joy I experienced in the crowd at Bosstones shows. 

A rift like that leaves an ideal spot for some other something or someone to shove in a crowbar and pry apart permanently. And part of me wonders if maybe that first friend did try to be there, but someone wasn’t listening… The world may never know. But as a writer, I can’t help but try to imagine the unseen dots to connect. Because sometimes people don’t want the help they need.

I can’t listen to it. The music, again, is catchy & competent, but not irresistable. The sort of song that if the lyrics hit right, I’d stick it out and let it grow on me. But they don’t and I can’t.

My heart does break for anyone really feeling that way. I can empathize, but not actually relate. My friends were there through the mTBI / post-concussion syndrome hole of helplessness & spiraling depression that occupied a good chunk of the past 7 years. Some friends weren’t there, for all kinds of reasons or just boundaries. I don’t hold it against any of them. There were plenty who were there, well above and beyond, and I’ll always be grateful. So I have no desire to try to sing along with this. I listened, and I'm sorry for you. I hope this song helped you. I hope you find a way to fix what got broken. That's as far as I can go.

Song 3: 

And now we get to the third song they posted, the one that I could hardly get through. The one I draw the line at. I’m not giving their stuff another second of my listening. 

This song belongs in the dictionary as a top-notch example of what the kids these days call “cringe.” I kept pausing, it was so fucking cringe. 

“Where did Liberty Go? is the cringiest “later career” thing out of a musician I’ve been a fan of & respected. And I was a Styx fan in the 80s (owing to my older brother’s record collection) when Mr. Roboto came out and the whole Kilroy Was Here production. Yeah, to 13-year-old me, it was SO cool. Fast forward 40 years later, a few weeks ago, it came over the audio system while I was at a local store, and my brain screamed with the cringe the entire time.

Somehow, this song manages to be worse. I’m sorry, someone’s got to say it. 

After the car accident (Sept 2016), I joked a lot that I’d knocked myself into an alternate timeline. The years that followed brought a lot to fuel that feeling. With the brain doing better, I’ve let go of the joke. But this song brought that feeling crashing back. WTF is up with this timeline? Am I being punked? (LOL)

There’s a point where cries of “what about freedom & liberty” have more in common with a 14-year-old grounded for taking a dump on stage during the high school talent show. It’s just plain infantile. Anti-vaxxers / anti-mandaters are NOT some victims, they are aggressors. They put everyone around them at higher risk, just like a drunk driver.

(This is where it got very hard to remove all the Cee-yoU-Next-Tuesday bombs).

Stroll around the comments on these songs on YT, you’ll see what the Defiant are fueling: Little keyboard crusader trolls appropriating “bodily autonomy” and “pro-choice” (as if the flames of this insanity aren’t fanned by some legacy politician who supports banning abortions after some absurdly short length of time). 

I’ve asked it before: CONTEXT - Has it become optional? A vaccine is not nearly even remotely the equivalent to using a person’s body by force as a life support for a fetus. 

About choices: You can sit at home and drink all you want, but if you get behind the wheel of a car, you’re a danger to everyone around you. It’s not just your risk. Same thing with vaccines during a pandemic. Your community isn’t required to tolerate your willful ignorance so you can walk around the mall. Your unvaccinated ass increases the risk for everyone you come in contact with, which increases the risk for everyone they come in contact with, and so on AND SO ON. You’ve heard “going viral,” right?  VIRUSES is where that phrase comes from. Your “choice” can affect the health of everyone around you, not just you. 

Then worse, other trolls creep through the comments with declarations about how un-punk it is to do what you’re told — a 2nd-grade-bully dig at those who got vaccinated at best, it might be laughable if it were coming from someone under 10 years old, instead of some grown-ass ‘adult.’ 

Newsflash: Everyone who got the vaccine isn’t some fucking sheep, or blindly trusting, or a mindless zombie, or just not “bothering to ask” about it all. 

I have a suggestion. Try questioning some other answers, like the ones that feed into that ego-indulgent self-important notion that you’ve uncovered some secrets about the world. It doesn’t take a lot for the armchair “scientishts” who fed you those to sound a lot more credible than they even very remotely are. There might be a few actual scientists among them, but there’s fringe to be found in any arena. As with, say, global climate change experts, the 97% who agree on most of it should probably count more than the fringe. That history has some at-the-time fringers who were quite right (hey, Galileo) does not support your theories the way you think it does. FFS, take a closer look at the contexts. You're not the Galileo side of this. 

And finally, hey, Cee-yoU-Next-TuesdayS: Uneducated is NOT Punk rock. Willful ignorance is NOT Punk rock. Punk rock is NOT mere rebellion & contrarianism for the shallow sake of it. There are grown-up ways of questioning things and solving issues. 

I'll go with this actual punk rock, thank you: https://eugeneweekly.com/2022/05/12/punk-and-the-pandemic/

The Defiant want to pass their rhetoric off as punk, but it’s just getting the homework wrong dressed up as punk for Halloween. And it’ll be trick-or-tricking itself all over the Punk Rock Museum tonight.

For the record, I have no hate here for the individuals, just… deeeeeeep disappointment. And fear for the spreading ignorance. I still wish everyone involved well as much as I desperately wish they’d come to their senses. And see what they're standing next to. See what's using them.

I’d managed to cling to optimism for a while after January 2022, and maybe still have a sliver of hope that these rebels without a clue will eventually learn enough to unlearn the wiggedy-wack that’s taken them in and convinced them to spread it further like a virus against knowledge… Some sliver of hope that some stellar, soul-healing Mighty reunion, complete with a new friendship song above and beyond Don’t Worry Desmond Dekker (because if anyone could write such a thing, I wanted to believe Mr. Barrett still could), might materialize some day.

But that sliver has grown quite thin, and, depending on a lot of factors, I’m not sure I’d be there for it. Legends stumble. Many a thing I’ve fanned over has twisted its ankle and/or set itself on fire or otherwise dissolved in one way or another. 

(( Side note, I need (and intend) to spend some attention on what other Bosstones have been doing, particularly Joe Gittleman. And lots of other things. Working on it as best I can. ))

The line between clever & stupid is not that fine. The Defiant try to be clever, but it only looks that way to those more easily fooled than they. Some of the music (the 3 songs' worth I sampled) is pretty catchy, but not enough to warrant wading that deep into wiggedy-wack.

As always, your mileage may vary.

So, some weeks (months?) ago, my MacBook Air took a nosedive. It had been acting a little quirky throughout one particular week, and Friday night it went down and never came back up. Luckily, I had run 2 or 3 different backups Wednesday & Thursday, and keep all the super most important writing stuff on one cloud drive and also backed up to another cloud drive at the end of each session. I might have lost a couple of cat memes and the most recent screenshots I take of every word game I play for no discernible reason. But other than that, no worries. Well, except for needing a relatively current computer to do everyday things with. I have a few older machines around that remain un-upgraded for legacy software access, but I don't think gmail will even consider letting me use the mail clients on those anymore. 

I posted my plight on FB, asking if anyone had something they might sell cheap, and a few friends offered some older machines for free or cheap. I'm currently still using a loaner MacBook Pro 2015 from my friend Robin over at Kitten Associates, and wondering if I might still offer to buy it even though I technically don't *need* need it …because I have a 2019 MacBook Pro gifted from my friend Gordon.

Not long ago, before the Air took its plunge, I had been contemplating my current state of tech. My "big work" machine - a Mac Pro Tower - is 12 years old now. It still does the things I need, albeit somewhat grumpily and slow, but someday it won't at all. And not being in a particularly great position financially, if that were to happen, I would have to discontinue the graphic design offerings that I take on here and there. I haven't tried to push the tower for video, once a primary purpose along with all the graphics stuff, for quite a while. 

I did not expect the Air, a 2017 model bought gently used, to give up its ghost first. And I definitely did not expect MB Pros to show up as possible replacements.

As I was loading the 2019 with my various Apple softwares from over the years fresh from the App Store, for the first time in a long while, my brain drifted to Final Cut. Yeah, I had a license from back when I worked at the Apple Store, and hells yeah, I installed it. I was like, "holy crap, I could do video again."

A very short time later I had a quickie video project land in my lap to do as a favor for NEHW (New England Horror Writers) to warm up the skills, then an actual paid video project for one of my Apple colleagues from back in the day who needed some behind-the-scenes footage edited to go along with an independent movie he'd just finished.