“who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? the shadow knows.“
in early october 2020 i wrote a blogpost and quoted this same line from this vintage radio show – the shadow. that show – from way back – the late 30s through the early 50s – stated “as you sow evil, so shall you reap evil“. watching our country reeling – in a voting cycle after four years spent in political hell – in the relatively early stages of the covid pandemic, i asked, “what now?“
it’s five years later and the (repeat) administration of this country has traveled further down the road of evil than i ever thought possible back then. and i ask, “what now?“
carlos ruiz zafon said, “some things can only be seen in the shadows.“
the shadow soul of our country – and its inhabitants – is on display.
if we had looked only at the sky, it would have reinforced the black-and-white-photograph world we felt we were in. the sky was so november. but the photo was in color and, despite feeling differently to our core, the world was in technicolor.
the trail was mostly empty, which was a good thing. we needed to be there – our lack of hiking through interminable covid was taking a toll. exhausted from covid, exhausted from doing nothing, exhausted after doing anything.
and so the sky heightened our feeling – of walking in the black and white of this past week.
by now you know i am horrified by the election, by its results, by the actual people voting for these results. it cannot be clearer to me that there is a dividing line between me and those people who voted against my own family. it is black and white…that clear.
i’d like to go all maya/mlk jr./gandhi, heck, i’d like to go all jesus christ (“love one another; as i have loved you.” john 13:34). i suspect they would be just as horrified. quoting any of them as any kind of justification in or support of this horror story is hypocrisy.
because you have knowingly undermined the safety, security, the rights of my family, of people dear to me – and that’s pretty black and white to me. and i realize i can maybe love you, but not respect you, not want to be around you, not trust you or feel safe with you. your heart is different than i thought i knew. and i can’t pretend i don’t know or that it doesn’t matter. this – this – is becoming black and white to me.
love is a two-way street. turning your back on humanity is not love. the cruelty and immense intentional hardship you intentionally voted in for other people – yes PEOPLE – no better or lesser than you – is not love. hate, misogyny, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia are not love. fascism is not based on love – you have fallen prey to cultish, narrow, extreme, bullying, propaganda-laden thinking that is not – despite the whipped-up and warped misinformed disdain you express at the price of eggs, individual gender identification, compassionate social programs – definitely not – based on love.
i’m pretty sure that many are struggling with this right now. we are all out here, internally trying to figure out the unthinkable – how our families or friends have betrayed basic rights – values – upon which we thought we agreed. it’s unimaginably brutal and painful and hard to wrap our heads around. it is so very, very sad. but it is pretty black and white.
it’s november. i drag my eyes from the november sky – where i was beseeching the universe for answers. and i look beside the trail, where leaves are still turning and the deer wait as we approach.
“music moves our world.” bmi’s tagline: “we celebrate your talent. we value your music. we champion your rights.”
i don’t blame bmi. as an royalty organization, it is trying to keep up with an industry imploding on itself. the very same opportunity to ‘get music out there’ using online platforms is what is destroying opportunity to make a living ‘getting music out there.’
as you might guess, i just received a bmi royalty statement. the check, which will come later in the mail and stamped with a 55 cent first class stamp, will cost them more per penny paid for the stamp than i will receive per performance play of my music.
because i am a specific-detail kind of person, here are the details of that: if you take my check of $71.57 and divide it by the (just shy of 100,000) performance plays this particular quarter, it amounts to an average of .00074 of a cent per performance play (you read that 7/ten-thousandths of a cent). it you take a 55 cent stamp and divide it by the check, it is .00768 of a cent per penny of the cost of the stamp (you read that 7/thousandths). that’s 10 times as much as i receive per play.
to cite some examples: there were 7530 youtube views of my piece ‘last i saw you’. the royalties i earned for that are 66 cents. CENTS. the piece ‘i didn’t know’ yielded 49,085 plays counted on a few digital music services, which averaged $.00025 of a cent. that is 2/10-thousandths of a cent. way to make a living.
i’m not really sure anymore why i’m telling you this, except for the big word “awareness”. i think most people are not aware of the explosively-good-explosively-bad impact that all these music services have had on independent musicians. headlining musicians and independent musicians – a schism of differences. yet, i’m not a person with one or two albums, new to the industry, eager to do anything to ‘spread the word’. i am an artist with fifteen albums, multiple singles, in the industry for decades and who did all the eager-stuff for many, many, many years. and like you, i want to believe that all the time and energy and writing and practicing and recording and sacrifice and thought and perseverance and education and experience and drive and hard work i put in might yield something in return now – dividends – kind of like how a retirement works.
in these times of chaos – a pandemic, an uprising of protests striving for equity in race, in gender identification, in sexual orientation, in all manners of humanity – it seems that one of the most unifying calls is that of music. music does move our world.
why, then, is this so inequitable for us? because i don’t know about you, but there isn’t one bill in my bill folder that totals $71.57 over the course of a quarter. dog food alone costs $73.16 for a quarter. there isn’t a bill that is merely for $71.57 for a month. not the phone bill, not the mortgage, not home insurance, not health insurance (don’tgetmestarted!), not the gas/electric bill, not student loans (again, don’tgetmestarted!), not car insurance, not groceries, not wifi-cable. too much information, i suppose.
with thousands of cds in boxes in storage in the cds-have-gone-poof world, i wonder, as i have written and you have read before, where to go from here. most professional careers keep building, arcing in some positive direction. i try to remind myself that this music is played hundreds of thousands of times, millions of times a year. i try to remind myself of all the times i have heard that some piece, some song, some album, some concert, some performance has resonated with someone, that it has given them a moment of reflection, of peace, that it has buoyed them. i try not to be jaded by people who burn copies of cds for their friends or who change their email every three months to access apple music streaming for free.
but as i write checks or click ‘pay’ online for the accountant, the doctor, the mortgage, the water, the gas and electric, the health insurance, the phone bill, the wifi and cable, the car and home insurances, the student loans, the groceries, i wonder what would happen if somehow each of those things went poof and there were free ways to access all of them.
we put out a different water bowl in the kitchen for dogdog and babycat. neither one of them will drink from the bowl. we put their old water bowl in the next room, filled with water, so that they will be able to hydrate, but we were hoping that they would adjust to the new one. neither one of them will drink from the bowl. in the world they inhabit, one that must have low level anxiety frequencies they can feel from the-whole-outside-world, they do not like change. it’s been days and neither one will drink from the bowl.
“what now?”
in the past months and in what now feels like a broken world, we can face forward. we can set intentions and take one baby step at a time, all in unequivocal love of all humankind. we can be light for each other and we can hold fear tenderly. we can look newness of change eye to eye as we learn, challenge the status quo, embrace compassion and principle and stride confidently into a new time.
we can sit by the new bowl, encourage our dog and cat to drink from it, recognize their fear of the unknown, of change, and just love them.
reverse threading 