i prided mySelf for the longest time on being offline more than the typical millennial archetype. But i finally caved a few months ago…
When i was (seemingly) hopelessly addicted to opiates, needle fixation, benzodiazepines, alcohol, prescription (& non) amphetamines, cutting/blood letting, orgasms, television, kleptomania, relations with & attention of women, dopamine in general, & whatever else to distract me from the Present Moment i couldn’t stand to be in, i told mySelf that what i was doing was diving out into the void & oblivion & sacrificing my mind & body to make some type of tortured-soul-art with my songs that would resonate deeply with people after i died from misadventure… Now that seems pretty corny & cliche & pathetic. i’d be heartbroken if the children i’m raising went down that painful & lonely-even-in-a-crowded-room road.
Change of Heart & Mind
When i first started journaling my intention was for it to be a death journal; a self indulgent suicide memoir. Luckily, i had a complete paradigm shift away from being a science-as-dogma material world rationalist, who used that outlook as an excuse for nihilism & hedonism (which is usually an extension of narcissism) but then had a change of perspective to a consciousness first (as opposed to matter first; as in the mind not being a result of the brain but vice versa, the brain just being a 3D transmitter & receiver) worldview where coincidences don’t exist & instead are synchronicities that are winks from the creator/Universe reminding us that everything is interrelated. & then that led to my time filling up with yoga, meditation, barefoot walks, fasting, reading again, swimming & cold water immersion, being selfless for the sake of others & trying to keep in check the self centered nature of the human condition, & then the journaling went from poor-me-pity-partying to dream journaling, intention setting, & gratitude lists.
So all that is to say my intentions behind making music & words then putting them ‘out’ has changed. Where as i used to find comfort in this idea that my work would surely find an audience after my death of despair, i now believe that the people that are meant to hear & read it will do so & if my role is of a small scale that’s okay. Nothing may resonate with people in a big way for me to see in my lifetime, but as an optimistic thought exercise, it may be granted audience by extra dimensional beings (whether angels or aliens, hopefully not demons), people in the future, or AI. - Even though my music & the whole Of Wolves & Whales Modus Operandi aims to affirm that humans create music AI never could because it can’t feel pain & transmute it, aka Spiritual Alchemy. -
RIP Rob Maher. & as always, Synchronicities
i recently performed a couple songs at the National Spiritualist Alliance’s Voices in the Village (thanks to the MVP performer of that night Matthew Thornton, also ‘Cello Monkey’ on Instagram, making room for me to park beforehand) & i stumbled over some words alluding to my past addiction issues before playing; & afterwards Matthew told me about this friend that he had collaborated with, Rob Maher. Rob left the physical plane on Halloween in a car crash & had his own similar mental health & substance abuse issues. His funeral will be held in July. Synchronicities (or meaningful coincidences) are a big part of my change in paradigm. i get them all the time & they remind me that this place is more alive & interconnected than we were taught. & i had just performed a song that starts out with the lyrics ‘You got clean on New Years Eve, But shot up on Halloween…’ & so (side-note neurosis) ever since KW & i got married at the Boston court house two summers ago i never like saying ‘my wife’ cause i feel like an old square, but then when i say ‘partner’ i feel like a cowboy, or a lawyer - & even though a cowboy-lawyer would be an interesting thing to be, i’m neither - but so when i showed Rob’s obituary to KW, when she walked by right when i was looking at it on my laptop, she pointed out that she & him have the same birthday. i had played a song of his (posted below. a jarringly incredible song that gets better each time you hear it) that Matthew accompanied on & had sent me online, on our way back from a camping trip & she had made notice of that voice he had.
My point in all this rambling is trying to figure out what the point of putting stuff out is. It can’t just be narcissism & ego validation. i wish for Rob what i used to wish for mySelf. That his songs would find a large audience post mortem & make worth of whatever suffering might’ve gone down & make easier his absence to the people that knew & loved him, that his songs are touching all these people’s lives… & maybe one day that’ll still happen; but until then his work will sit there without the external validation of thousands or millions of ‘views’ or ‘streams,’ waiting to be stumbled upon in the vast void of the internet. Making us, or at least me, wonder what we do this all for.
The old me would use the fact that Rob’s songs (songs with a hard earned stoic beauty to them, one you can hear has faced down the ugly) are collecting virtual dust - while videos of what can quite literally only be called & considered AI brain rot slop & commercially mass produced insidious drivel are amassing millions of hours of people’s attention - as license to unblock certain numbers from my phone, grab a hypodermic, spoon, cotton swab, water, & lighter, hit up an ATM, make a drive, grab a certain powder from a certain person, & go park my car in some ideally scenic but mandatorily secluded space & go join Rob in the Bardo… Check out of this demoralizing shit show for good with a dose my body doesn’t have a tolerance for anymore…
But that’s the old me. i have a baby girl now i can’t do that to. & i wouldn’t want to anyways; because what i see in her, & children in general, is this ingrained ability to shake off even the heaviest of drags & just general darkness & then see the beauty in this place & in humanity itself. i made a point to listen to Rob’s music as often as possible, at first out of a duty to do for him what i’d want done for me, but then because his mellifluous voice & subtle but fully sonorous melodies got me going back for the experience of actually just listening to the songs themselves. & i’m going to be as bold as to say i consider him a kindred spirit. i hear in his music, & the little else i’ve gathered, someone like me who refused the mundane tediousness of the material world. & what others, from the outside looking in, might see as self destruction might actually be trying to a hold a perspective of this human experience that’s, to modify the saying, through the eyes of babes. A refusal to coalesce to modernity’s matter of fact dullness. Trying to find something beautiful in the gaudy circus underneath the cacophony of vulgar exploitation; Trying to find something transcendental in the midst of the garish bedlam of the carnival’s ballyhoo.
Above is the album Speciecide by Rob & Matthew’s sonically surreal & velvety resonant project Fuzz Puddle that is worth multiple listen throughs, because more reveals itself each time. Rob has his own bandcamp page too where you’ll find everything he wrote in his bio to be a bit poignant from the vantage point of his recent leaving of the land of the living. &, on the living, that is of course who death is hardest for. i personally (again, in my humble opinion) think & know that Rob isn’t truly gone. His body may be, but the energetic force (& i’ll say soul) that sent out that coyly mellow voice of his, & that brought the pen to paper to pour out his lyrics was not just a body.
As i’ve heard the Susquehanna Sage Michael Wann (MikWan) point out: you can tell a lot about somebody by their relationship to animals, & animals relation to them. In Rob’s obituary his family mentions his connection to animals, to which i resonate with immensely; so, to end this possibly too heavy of a word salad with something light are some short video clips of a recent period where i kept having interesting experiences with birds. The first three videos are of a bird that was staring at me on a driveway & let me pet her then flew away to a nearby tree. The last one is a bird that flew in my open bedroom door when i was playing my guitar. Be easy on yourSelves Out There, ‘life is short’ became cliche’d because it’s true.
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— JW