THOUGHTCRIME
I have not intention of making this a space that talks about politics—you could throw a bottle of Victory Gin in any direction and hit a pundit writing a hot take about current events. But I’m also a human being living in the midst of my nation’s identity crisis, so here’s what happened: I was working on a long-form post about the soundtrack for Troilus & Cressida composed back in 2020, a stage production for Seattle Shakespeare Company cut down prematurely by COVID. This transported me back to those days of uncertainty and false narratives, when we retreated to the great online and were promptly mislead and taken advantage of by wackos posing as truth tellers. I still put my faith in experts (such as people who actually study infectious diseases for a living) rather than a YouTuber with a case of the feels or a Facebook algorithm leading me down a personality-biased rabbit hole. Needless to say, my personal dark times were hard to write about.
From roughly 2020-2022, my connection to music diminished and I no longer knew (or cared) to share that part of myself. It took a momentous birthday project (and the late great Chris Whitley) to feel creatively re-energized again, and then a surprise project to pull me further into the light. My plan was to write about all of it when…current events happened. If you’re reading this from a future date, I’ll just say the first week of 2026 was full of serious upheaval in the United States (and a cherry on top of 2025’s shit-storm). The audacious level of gaslighting and blatant lies we were expected to swallow was downright dystopian and, well, I was pissed. It was hard relive the darkness of days past when the clouds are black as night and raining down on the here and now. But, as the expression goes: hopelessness is not a plan. I shall return to complex thoughts in an era where “Newspeak” has leapt from the page and where too many people seem cool with totalitarianism as a way of life—but first, I need to regroup.
As long as there’s a tomorrow, there’s hope.
