Too Much Machine

So, I guess this is a blog. Welcome to my blog. Let’s get bloggin’.

I’m putting these posts under the same moniker as my mostly dormant Substack account. I had high hopes for that platform, but got kind of disenchanted with it as I watched it slowly, inevitably turn into yet another version of Facebook, with a bunch of reposted videos, echo chambers, and such. I don’t really have a plan here, beyond trying (trying, mind you) to make whatever this is a weekly thing, and to give you something to read on a regular basis- disjointed, garbled, and scattershot as it’s bound to be. I have a lot of noise in my head, but I can make an educated guess that these posts will be touching on a lot of music and art, songwriting, maybe some essays, scattered fiction, half-baked (but passionate) socio-political diatribes, more navel gazing than is probably necessary (or healthy), and general gobbledygook. It’s also entirely possible that the occasional balderdash, falderal, and poppycock will surface. No promises, falderal fans. Let’s just see what happens, shall we? Hell, I’m just glad you’re here. 

Happy Year of the Horse, everyone. Here’s hoping that new, magnificent beast finds you with your saddle, ready for the ride ahead. I’m no expert on Chinese Lunar Years but, as I understand it, this new one is all about change; shuffling off that which doesn’t serve you, ditching baggage, and entering a new period of creativity and enlightenment. 

That last part sounds pretty damn good to me, as it no doubt does to all folks who consider themselves “artistic types”. The middle part about shuffling and ditching does, too, because I’m tracking in a fair amount of mud on my boots from the Year of the Snake (more on that in a bit). It’s that first part, the “change” bit, that has me a little shook.  

Call it my Midwestern Anglo-Saxon upbringing, blame it on my Zodiac sign or my generally undramatic middle class childhood, blame it on the bossa nova, but I’ve not, as a general rule, been a big fan of change. I like stability. I like dependability. I don’t care for chaos. And, seeing as how chaos is the coin of the goddamned realm these days, you can probably guess how my last year or so has been going. 

And I’m betting that you’ve been feeling it, too- the vertigo that comes with non-stop outrage, existential dread, and the ever-expanding awareness that our entire reality has been built on radioactive sand with scotch tape and snake oil by a cabal of soulless, morally-bankrupt, power-hungry, pedophilic monsters with more money than they could ever possibly need and an apparent immunity to consequences. For over a year now, I’ve not really felt like myself. It’s as if I’ve been on crazy pills and, while a bit of Machine to rage against is useful to an empathetic, creative person, too much Machine can be exhausting and paralyzing. And that’s pretty much where you can usually find me lately: on the corner of Exhausted and Paralyzed. As a result, I feel like a traitor to my chosen vocation; at a time when I should be churning out art at a furious clip, I wrote exactly one (kind of shitty) song, in November, just squeaking in under the wire of a year that should have been a goldmine of righteous inspiration. 

Then, in December, my father passed away at 96, after a long struggle with dementia. Watching the kind, brilliant man I knew and loved slowly disappear over a decade and grappling with the concept of grieving someone we essentially lost years ago dropped a final, rotten cherry on top of the already very Emo sundae that 2025 had become. As such, I’ve been vacillating between “too many feelings’ and “dead inside” with alarming and dismaying regularity. 

Jesus. This post has taken a turn. Again. 

Confession: this is actually my second attempt at writing this piece, and I keep ending up in this dark neighborhood. But you know what? I’m gonna lean into it. I’m not writing this to vent (OK, maybe a little, but not just to vent, anyway). I’m writing this for the same reason most of my songs skew a bit towards gloom. Once upon a time, when I was spinning out about the general lack of mirth in my music, my wife, who is smarter than I’ll ever be and an expert at talking me off the ledge, told me, “your music makes people feel less alone.” It was a good and overdue reframing of what I had, up until then, considered a weakness. Don’t be ashamed of or embarrassed about your dark side. We all have one, and it can be useful. Toxic positivity divorces us from reality. If you’re feeling bad, it means you still care; you still believe that things can be better than they are. We just have to find a way to keep what everyone from Horace to Winston Churchill to Nick Drake called “the Black Dog” on a leash. 

Writing and playing music is my main way of controlling that dog, and by far the most dependable one. Traditional clinical therapy is problematic for me. I know it works for a lot of folks, and I’ve done it myself, and it felt..alright, I guess. But I can’t shake the feeling that I already know what I need to do going into it, that everything the therapist is going to tell me is basic common sense, and that I’m wasting both parties’ time. I know it’s a cyclical thing for me, and I just need to ride it out, while trying not to cause harm or stress to those around me. Overthinking? Underthinking? Cop out? I don’t know. Ugh. Brains, amirite?

Your world, your reality, is a suit. You put it on. It’s a baseline, generally comfortable enough to function in, a bit restrictive in its tailoring, but you make it work. Over time, it gets threadbare. It doesn’t fit right. It falls out of fashion. The powers that be tell you that a new suit is too expensive, your old suit is the one you have to wear, and that everything will fall apart if you change it. Fuck that. This suit sucks. It’s started to smell, and it doesn’t serve us anymore. It’s time to go shopping. I’m not really talking about suits.

As for me, I’ve got my eye on a new suit for 2026. It’s simple, timeless. Understated, but well-made. Sharp, but functional. It’s a little pricey, but everything worth the trouble is. And it’s a change, something I’m trying to get better about embracing

Oh- and it’s a good suit for riding, I’m told. 

Giddyup.