Blog Posts

the do-gooders

The conversation around authenticity and being ‘self-made’ is always an interesting one to me, and the impetus for this thought today is from 2 very important events that I think we’re probably all tuned in to, which I’ll get to in a minute.

Nobody is self-made. Every last one of us has been shaped by experience and mentorship – some of those experiences are wonderful, and some of them are absolute shit.
Those of us who find ourselves in some of the crappiest situations we can imagine are there because of poor decision making, almost exclusively related to advice we’ve received, and trauma.
Similarly, many of the most successful of us have found ourselves there because of advice we’ve received, and trauma.

But whichever the case, we are guided and manipulated; like a shiny silver pinball being batted around a tilted table until we inevitably glide past our own limited control, and the game is over. Nobody wins at pinball… you just take longer to die than someone else, and then a bunch of people gather in a room and – metaphorically speaking – take a look at your scoreboard. Some people hold all-time records…

One of the highest scores of all time is Dolly Parton… despite a tragic upbringing and constant mocking and criticism at every turn in her life, managed to amass wealth to a degree that most of us will never reach, and did so by putting love and understanding ahead of her personal feelings.

Forbes estimates her value around $500,000,000.00 at a point where she’d purchased and donated 3.5 million books for parents to read to their children, countless fortunes given through charities, and created jobs for an innumerable quantity of people who; incidentally, she’d offered to pay for their college tuition and books for anyone who wanted to further their education. She; herself, never went to college.

She quite literally couldn’t give her money away fast enough to truly rid herself of it.

She’s an outlier in times of a Donald Trump presidency, who’s waged a trade war on Canada, which is an ongoing event that you don’t need to learn of from me when you can consult actual, credible news outlet… so all I will say is that he; too, has received trauma and followed bad advice in his life.

She’s an outlier in times of Elon Musk, a man who’s intent on colonizing Mars in an effort to get away from his family trauma and bad advisors.

I’ll end that list there, because I am not interested in discussing the motives of billionaires, other than to say that Dolly Parton would have been a billionaire if she hadn’t spent so much time giving money away, though a decent amount of her time was also spent writing, as she has more than 3000 songs with her name on them currently… which is probably a bit light, since copyright laws around creative works has a long, storied history of being shady.

I’m reminded of Fred Rogers in this moment, when he recounted an experience of about seeing calamity on the news and becoming visibly upset. His mother consoled him and said “Look for the helpers. any time something bad happens, you will always find people helping.“

To say that Dolly was a helper is a massive understatement, and there are obviously many accolades I’ve left out – but you’d be hard pressed to find someone who had something bad to say about her.

It’s easy to say that these are dark times, but I maintain that if you are looking for darkness, you will find it. So be sure to take a minute and “look for the helpers…“

Maybe even be a helper.
Seems we’re short on those.

As an aside, I received an amazing number of text messages and direct messages through social media within the first 10 minutes of the announcement that Dolly Parton had passed.

I didn’t know what to do with that information when I recieved it… and in retrospect, neither did any of the people who reached out to me. We all just needed to make sure that everyone knew that
The Queen is Dead. Long Live The Queen.

For the record, I was never a superfan of her music.
It was great, and authentic, and inspired generations of people to take the world on their own terms.

Personally, I just have a couple of her records, and a lot of respect.

trials and tribulations

Every time I leave to play shows, I know there’s a certain amount of danger and uncertainty that goes with that. We don’t talk about it – but it’s there… and what is essentially a stroke of bad luck feels all-encompassing, endless, and impossible.

There’s a long list of things to be grateful for in the midst of those circumstances, but that evades us when the bill comes. The bill in this case came in the form of a transmission shop invoices totalling several thousand dollars, and was accompanied by 2 tow-truck bills and a couple extra nights in a hotel 6 hours from home.

There’s a checklist though, and it needs to be acknowledged – and in spite of the fact that there are a million little things that are frustrating, there is ONE BIG ONE:
– nobody got hurt
Really… that’s good enough, but the checklist goes on, and the next 2 concerns are:
– the payment went through
– we didn’t miss any shows

The bummer count is pretty minimal:
– I got a new nephew I had to put off meeting
– shit’s expensive

Ultimately, that’s a successful trip by many metrics. Even more successful when you account for the fact that in 30 years of doing this, I’ve never been stranded anywhere. We’re all happy & healthy as far as it goes.

My time stranded in Lethbridge, AB furnished me with a decent hotel and the ability to get some work done, I was able to get a prescription renewed, I had a guitar with me, it was probably the best weather conditions that town has had for most of the summer, and everything I needed was within walking distance except for the transmission shop where my whip was parked, and being there a couple times only cost me one cab ride. Otherwise I was chauffeured.

What’s more – the crazy situation that brought about our bass player’s wife’s gut feeling that something was amiss. She was attending an event relatively close by, decided to wander up to an area with cell reception, and worked out a plan to get us back on the road for the last show of the trip with their vehicle… it wasn’t without it’s logistical challenges, but ultimately a miraculous set of circumstances once you take a step back.

Beyond all of THAT… the ability to pay comes straight out of a strange set of circumstances around a sum of money that we received. Still not without it’s frustration and emotional turmoil… and repayment, of course – but it was possible.

Miraculous.

30 years on, and there’s still signs in the sky that we’re supposed to be doing this.

Where are we this playing week? Castle Mountain, near Pincher Creek… about an hour away from where I was stranded a few days ago.

If you see me grinnin’ (you won’t, but if you do…) it’s because I have a lucky horseshoe supplanted somewhere.

to climb the ziggurat

“If one would like to climb the Ziggurat, one must begin with the first step”

“If one would like to climb the Ziggurat, one must begin with the first step”

It’s been a week of training hard and using some dietary constraint, but it’s been good. I feel strong, and healthy… and… well, tired – but that’s a whole other thing.

One thing I’ve learned about myself is that when I am training hard – typically for an event – that all my habits fall in line… particularly around food, but also with other things, such as taking in inspiring information, and staying more organized in other aspects of life. And I’ve been fortunate enough to have some conversations this week that reminded me of the early days of training and losing weight.

I’ve met a lot of people in the past 7 years, and these are people who did not know me when I was big. They only know me as this person who I am, and I am sure they wonder what, where, when, why, who, and how I became who I am. I reminisce about the early days of weight loss because I had SO FAR TO GO (for those of you who don’t know, I dropped roughly 160 lbs. between 2020 & 2022) and when that’s the case, all strokes are broad strokes.

When you want to lose; say, 100 lbs, it’s the drastic measures that will net drastic results. These are things like Juice fasting for 10 days at a time, weighing all your food down to the gram, comprehensive training schedules, early bedtimes and even earlier wake-up calls. All of these things are effective because you were probably doing none of them previously.

But if you want to drop; say, 25 lbs, and do it AFTER you learned everything you needed, you WILL assume it’s something you can just do.

It ain’t.

I can’t necessarily just start getting up early because – I do.
I can’t switch to a whole food diet because – I do that too.
I can’t start working out 5 days a week because – you guessed it…

What I can do, it tighten the screws.
Maybe I’ve been a little lax on my diet – but I’m still vegan, so I CAN remove the vegan junk food.
Maybe I’ve been getting up later – 5am instead of 4:30am…
Maybe I’ve been letting my workouts be a little slack – but it’s still 5 days a week and still a solid 90-minute session.

So… this battle is fought in the minutiae. The small measurements that require fine tuning must be made in a way that I couldn’t have made last time around. So I’m back to weighing my food, structured workouts with goals in mind, prioritizing sleep – the things I was mostly doing already, that now I have to commit to in a deeper way.

I’ll often hear about things in podcasts, like diaphragmatic breathing, intermittent fasting, certain types of equipment – and they are described as the 1-2% factors. (i.e. if you are climbing boulders, and some friend of yours saw a reel that said a breathing exercise might help you, and brings it to your attention).

That breathing exercise might help, but not if your muscles are weak and undertrained. Muscles; after all, do the work. However if you are a trained boulderer with a strong track record, but looking for some personal bests… a breathing practice could make all the difference… since it might improve your performance by 1 or 2%, that small amount is going to have a lot more impart on someone who is 95% of the way to their goal than it will for someone who is 25% of the way.

At any rate, there’s a lot more “1-2%” improvement advice out there, and if you’re not immersed in the game, and getting your thing done,then that 1-2% is going to be insignificant.

So you have to figure out where you are…

And despite my negative self-talk… I’m a lot closer to my potential than I feel when I look in the mirror.

Confusionaires new record is in the pre-order phase.
Get excited.
Buy several.
They make excellent gifts.
How many can I put you down for?

back in the black

There are seasons to everything. Except Edmonton weather, I guess. Edmonton weather has been a carnival ride with varying vomit-inducing speeds, but I guess I’ll save that line of complaining for another day.

The fall; historically speaking, ahs been the ‘back to basics’ time for me. Summer comes to an end, and the loathing associated with the malady of late nights and lazy afternoons comes into view. This is when I find myself growing weary of half-assed workouts and lazy sundays, and my thirst for personal discipline and productivity are in play.

It’s happening now.
It’s a couple weeks early, actually.

I’ve found my macro balance and am staring down my meal plans, and am formulating my workout plan for the winter, to commence Monday. There’s a lot of things I wish I had gotten to this summer, but my resentments are mostly based around the summertime and the fact that my favorite mountain bike trail has been continually washed out week after week, and I can’t complain too much as I prepare to launch my side-hustle business that I may have an artistic collaborator on. Who could be upset about that?

I’ve learned a lot this year so far, particularly pertaining to my mental health and to the mental health of the people around me. There are a lot of things that I thought about myself that are not true, and in retrospect, I was trying to convince myself were true. You can sell yourself on just about anything, for a while. Maybe forever, if you stop searching – but who wants to stop searching?

Not this cowboy.

I’m back in black in all the ways.
I’m on top.
Even making that assertion feels good. Right. Strong.
I’ve been mourning and issuing sympathy to my younger self, and as important as that is, I am now seeing that I can give grace to my younger self without letting my current self wander off-leash.
That kid needs grace… but this man needs to kick his own ass into gear.

It’s time to run miles and write songs and build circuits and lift weights.
… now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve been doing those things all along – just not to the intense degree that I love. I realize that my regimen is still more disciplined and intense than most people, but this isn’t about most people. It’s about me.

Even the nights are getting longer and the days are getting shorter.
It’s cooling off.
It’s go-time.

I know I have a tendency to let things slip when I’m needed… and I don’t regret that at all. That’s part of being human, and part of community. I just wish I could return to discipline in a more effective and efficient way.

This summer has been fraught with crazy event after crazy event, but a (more) disciplined morning plan would have helped me.

As well, I only just realized that I’ve been receiving messages from this blog and just stumbled upon how to check and respond to them. There’s an embarrassing amount of correspondence over the past few years and to those who have reached out and gotten nothing back, I apologize.

Hopefully it’s not too late for the collaborations and re-posts that have been pitched to me. If you sent me a message once upon a time, and you’re still reading this blog, I’m sorry. I’ve begun replying to these incredibly overdue messages.

If you’re in Grande Prairie this weekend, I’m playing guitar at The Great Northern with Robin Kelly’s Elvis Tribute “Long Live The King” and I’ll be at Sterling Skull getting my leg colored on by Chris Rhyason, the damn coyote himself.

Stop in at the vegan bakery across the street on your way in 😉

still runnin’

Hey all,

I think things are becoming more normalized in my life in a “the only constant is change” sort of way. It’s becoming clear to me that; as I reflect on the past in an ongoing exercise to reconcile the future, things were always in flux, always changing. Moments of total chaos followed by a brief reprieve, followed by a mixture of happy and sad events.

They say “if you’re going through Hell, keep going,” and although the horizon sometimes feels like a Hellscape, I’m reminded and comforted by the fact that without bad days, you wouldn’t know what a good day feels like. Silver linings… dark clouds…

I used to write a lot about the 4 food groups – pressure, stress, time, and friction -as a way of ensuring growth and development. All beautiful things are a product of these 4 painful elements of life… it’s how diamonds are formed, it’s how babies are born, and it’s how seeds become flowers. I was on about that quite a bit through the pandemic as I trained for a triathlon and a half-marathon, and the main difference between those bouts of struggle and these bouts of struggle was that I chose those ones, whereas the ones that I’m finding on all sides of me now are not of my choosing.

Or are they?

There’s an inevitability with life that it will end. Grieving will occur and gratefulness for the time spent will come into view eventually. Between now and then, there will be graduations, student loans, stock market fluctuations, mortgage renewals, moving days, tattoo appointments, triathlons, work days, thunderstorms, vehicle payments, computer crashes, gigs, records, trips to the mall, new furniture, declining credit cards, birthdays, holiday weight…

… you get it.

And guess what – we choose the vast majority of it, one way or another. I suppose that’s why our biggest problems and traumas come from the things we didn’t – or wouldn’t – have chosen for ourselves. Nobody chooses their parents… nobody chooses to be held up at gunpoint… nobody chooses to be assaulted… nobody chooses to be gaslit or gossiped about… nobody chooses disordered thinking, or disordered eating, or chronic illness, or anything like that.

But they do choose what to do about it.
And what I know now through both first-hand and second-hand learning,
is that it’s never too late to make a change, and take control of your circumstances.

And so… I keep runnin’… both physically and mentally… literally and figuratively.

tempered growth

A little artistic progress, and reminder that going slow is okay…

I’m dipping my toe in the pool of promoting a product I’ve been developing all year. It’s pretty exciting. I mean… I’ve only done so by way of FB and Instagram ‘stories.’

  • The website I’ve been developing for the past few months in my spare time (ha!) has not been launched.
  • The webstore has not been launched.
  • I have not posted demo videos (or… made them).
  • I have not yet initiated posting on the instagram page I registered for this.
  • I have not started a Facebook page.

That’s all coming soon enough.

What I DO have is TWO products, a possible 3rd that I’m considering, and a few others in the wings that are at the tinkering phase, and won’t see the light of day for a while regardless.

These are guitar pedals, by the way.

I’ve managed to find a project that combines my knowledge of many of my interests, including but not exclusive to rock & roll music, vintage aesthetics, hot-rodding (by way of style and decor, modification, and customization), sound design (by way of my discerning ear)… There’s a thrill in the pursuit just as much as there is in completing a project.

… and I’ve managed to weaponize my AuDHD hyperfocus.

Primarily, I’m doing what I always do when it comes to artistic endeavors (and there are very few parts of this that are NOT artistic,in my opinion) and that is, I’m making things I want to have. As much as I’d love to collaborate with someone else, The bar for quality at this point is:
Would I use this? Does is have a place in my pedal board?

Recently I got ahold of a program to design some enclosures of my own… and as fun as that was, it was a bit of a let down. I got to a point where I was really excited about a design and when I submitted it for quotes, it was UNREASONABLY expensive… like more than I want to charge for a finished product… for a single part.

It was simultaneously encouraging and discouraging. Discouraging because I wasn’t able to do what I wanted, and it felt like I’d spent all this time developing an idea for nothing… but it was also encouraging, because if I found myself in a place where I had to scale-up to meet demand, I have a pretty good idea of how I would do that.

Not to bolster my own ego or anything… but these are marketable and useful tools of the trade, and with how many people come and ask me about what guitar pedals I use and take photos of my pedalboard after I perform, it’s not a far stretch to say that I am getting a desirable tone from my equipment, and that people will take guidance in that regard from people they’ve garnered respect for.

So I guess I’ll have to stay respectable for as long as possible.

This isn’t my first foray into business. I was part owner of a short-lived record & art store on Whyte Avenue in the early 2000’s called ‘rUckUs’ and have been an entrepreneurial live music artist and bandleader for most of my life… but this is different.

This isn’t an event entertainment service, nor is it a brick & mortar shop with finite hours and a fixed location. It’s a self-developed product, or line of products that is for a niche market of performers and collectors. I’m not limited by performance budgets or music repertoire, nor am I hampered by lease agreements or overhead utility costs.

I am only limited by my own imagination and the current scale by which I can operate… but tempered growth is possible.

What I really want to do is to enjoy the process – and I do – but neurodivergence, excitement, and impatience make we want to bolt for the finish line… so here I am, reminding myself that there is no finish line.

missed one

I’ve been posting every week on this blog, without fail, for a few years now and this week I dropped the ball completely. Equal parts disappointed and embarrassed – I found out when someone asked me about it.

Whatcha gonna do? Earlier in the week I was belabouring the topic: What am I going to write about? I came up with nothing… and nothing is what I posted.

I still feel shitty about it, not because I’m saving any lives by doing this, but because I’ve been feeling a bit of a struggle to maintain the heavily disciplined routines I’ve built over the past several years. I can blame medication, distraction, rock & roll, new business ventures, old business ventures, playing gigs, work, money, the weather, and perhaps even love – but in the end, I have to own it.

My disappointment in this failure knows no boundary, so I’m hoping that writing about it will help – as it usually does.

I still don’t have something to write about this week… so this is what you get.

It’s short.

Thanks for reading it anyway.