politics – The Conscious Pilgrim

context

Even a portrait with a blank background still has a background. The background is not absent, it’s just blank, and it allows us to project our own background onto it if we wish to do so – but some won’t. Their lack of imagination or inability to align themselves with the artist’s vision may lead them to believe the artist was lazy, or that the work is unfinished.

But it’s just blank.

Sometimes I try to write like that.
Songs, not blog posts.
It doesn’t work for me, or at least I’m never happy with the end result. So I give it context. Then, in the editing phase, I remove some of that context.

I’ve been giving some thought to a series of short videos wherein I get into the subject matter of my songs, where they come from and why they were written. I’ve received encouragement into this because (a) I’ve got a lot to draw from in The Confusionaires songbook alone, let alone my own catalog from before that, and (b) people seem to be able to acknowledge that my songs are about real things, and that those things aren’t always super clear.

Every once in a while, I get asked what a song is about. It’s always flattering and slightly unnerving, because the genre that my band operates in doesn’t really have a Kerouac or Bob Dylan character. Most songs in the genre are about girls and cars, and while I don’t shy away from the usual tropes, I don’t really write about such things (to the point that my girlfriend semi-regularly gives me grief about not writing love songs).

Girls and cars might play a role in a story-song, but there is usually some larger statement at the heart of the songs I write… questions of morality, sense of purpose, nihilism, higher calling, death, internal struggle… you get the picture. But I make it catchy, and squeeze it into 2 minutes and 45 seconds at 250 bpm, and nobody really notices… until they do.

I imagine that there are people out there who have picked up on what I’m saying and not asked, and are taking me out of context. I honestly have no idea.

Beyond myself, though, I think we’ve all been taken out of context… and I would wager that we take someone ELSE out of context almost every single day, even if it’s small. Between phenomenons such as ‘vaguebooking’ and our propensity to only read the headline of an article and somehow feeling informed enough to voice an opinion on something. It’s to the point that most of the articles you see on social media now are just screenshots of stories, and I don’t think most people noticed.

It’s the reason you won’t see me jumping on bandwagons when it comes to people with controversial opinions. The way people are willing to destroy each other over differing opinions and misunderstandings is gross. I’m not talking about gender identity or nazis or any of that stuff – I mean actual differences of opinion, and actual lack of context, because I don’t believe that every right-wing voter is a nazi who hates poor people any more than I believe that all lefties are barefoot vegan hippies who use cloth diapers.

You, much like me, have things you’re conservative about and things you’re liberal about, but we’re forced to cast a couple of votes every half-decade to political parties who are constantly trying to point out our differences. Buzz-word authors and podcast hosts are trying to instill some measure of ‘holier than thou’ / ‘you’re either with us or against us’ rhetoric constantly, and if you’re not maintaining your algorithm diligently by being intentional with what you ‘like’ and what you remove from your feed, then you won’t be able to keep the wolves away.

I’m pretty accustomed to being misunderstood. My parent’s never really understood me. A lot of my friends never understood me. I’ve been misrepresented in newspapers when promoting my music. I’ve been called names I didn’t deserve. I’ve been shunned by communities and friend groups… and really none of this is special – it’s probably all happened to you before, too… yet here we are, doing the exact thing that’s brought us all so much pain over the years, only to realise that the pain from over the years has shaped who we are today…
And that’s not so hard to see…
… once we put it into context.

fatigue

I’m not sure that the general populous of the human race in 2025 even knows how to rest. With the general onslaught of information; this blog notwithstanding, there is a constant need to decipher misinformation and half-truths that; if we’re lucky, is only peppered in between bouts of 9-5 work and/or hustle-culture gigs, child-rearing, school, hopefully an exercise regimen and ideally some food prep… and any number of other things.

Personally, and as ignorant as it may seem, I unfollowed and blocked frequent posters of American politics. As a Canadian, American politics are foreign, and thus are not something I can (a) contribute to, (b) vote in, or (c) control the outcome of in ny way. Provincial and national politics are my business, but a lot of that gets filtered out because many Canadians don’t seem to realize that there’s a difference between American and Canadian politics, or are at least impassioned about both (most with a level of futility).

I can get into that more, but I probably won’t.

Most of us think we are slaves to the algorithm in some measure or other, but just as much as ‘liking’ posts influences what you will see later, so does indicating what is not of interest by way of hitting the X in the top right corner of a facebook post, or clicking ‘not interested’ under the ‘3 dots’ in the top right corner of a Threads post.

I won’t say that this has quelled my phone addiction, but it’s certainly tamed it.

Beyond that, I wear a Garmin Forerunner that tells me how well I sleep on a scale of 1 to 100. I don’t think I’ve ever crested 83, and I’ve gone as low as 65 which will make for a fairly sub-standard effort through my day. I generally get about 7 hours per night between 10pm and 5am with a 90-minute workout.

I’m by no measure a professional when it comes to proper rest and recuperation, but I have made improvements in my life. Future goals include (a) drinking enough water, and (b) amplifying my workout regimen.

I just try to do a little better as I go.

I hope you do, too.

treading lightly

Sometimes it feels like the whole world is walking on eggshells, and perhaps they should be. As we move forward as a society and as a people, we follow an inclination to do better than previous generations, but there’s always a select group of people who feel that things were better before.

This view is one of privilege, but not necessarily current privilege – more likely a place of past privilege that they are longing for. We’ve all heard it before – maybe we’ve even said it before – “Simpler times” when the dollar was worth more, in a time when nobody’s ever heard of autism, or being trans, or peanut allergies, or the climate crisis, or wage inequality, or whatever. Naturally, all of those things existed, but the populus thought it best not to voice their concerns. Everyone who wasn’t directly affected by those things got to be ignorant of those things, and ignorance is bliss, of course.

That’s all fine. Times change, and people change… but people don’t always change at the same rate, and at the current high-speed velocity of new information being blasted toward each of us, I think there’s a level of patience required for those members of previous generations who are not accustomed to this velocity of information.

I’m not speaking directly about ‘wokeness’ or ‘cancel culture’ because I really don’t think those things exist, and if I had my way, I’d never type those words again. I’m also not talking about the political institutions or billionaire villains of a country I don’t live or vote in. I’m speaking about generational differences.

Since everything needs a name, apparently, I am considered an ‘elder millennial’ or a ‘xenial’ which means I am technically a millennial, but share more commonality in my upbringing with Generation X, and I can tell you with 100% certainty that back in the 1990’s when I was a teenager, we were the absolute most accepting and most inclusive people we could possibly imagine. However, by comparison to today’s standards, we would all be considered climate-denying racists, and every last one of us is glad that the very few cell phones available at the time were not capable of taking and sharing video due to the absolutely insane shit that was going on. We did things and said things that wouldn’t fly now, and if there was some documentation of what was said & done back then, we’d all be in trouble.

But those people in the 90’s… they improved. They got better, and they had kids and raised them to be better… and their parents, who were essentially raised in the dark ages – they’re generally better people, too. But they got there (and are still getting there) at a different rate.

All that to say that people do change, and that redemption needs to be available to all of us. So many people have had some ‘viral moment’ saying or doing something that doesn’t represent them at all, but are denied the opportunity to atone for these things now because the audience has both made up their mind, and moved on.

All I can do is encourage people to take part in the human experience; not only as the first person narrative, but as a supporting character in someone else’s story. Listen and ask questions… and understand that we have more in common than we think we do – more in common than uncommon – and that just because someone votes for a different party than you doesn’t mean they’re a hate-filled bigot. Almost nobody is voting out of hate for an entire demographic of people. There’s a myriad of issues that face us all, and hardly any (or none, really) viable options for any of us to choose when it comes to ideal leaders.

We’re all doing our best.
Remember that we’re all doing our best.

life with fear

In light of recent election results, I figured it’s time to talk about fear. I’ve spent a good portion of my life afraid of a lot of things. It’s through conversations with other people that I’ve come to this realization, and I’ve come to the realization that I was actually raised this way.

I’d wager a guess that a lot of us were.

I don’t blame my parents for this. They did their level best. We’re all doing our level best… but that doesn’t change the fact that I was raised in this environment. We were a low-income christian family who; on more than one occasion, were cut off at the knees by the church, and when struggling what any atheist might call ‘sour luck’ my folks were told they had sin in their lives that they needed to sort out.

Now, I don’t care if you’re a christian, but if you are you’d probably have a hard time arguing that christianity isn’t entirely based in fear… fear of Hell… fear of Satan… fear of being ‘left behind’… fear of sex… at this point, I’m not completely sure what the selling features of this ideology are, save for the fact that we are all spiritual beings looking for connection and a sense of belonging, and churches advertise their ability to provide these things on billboards.

Okay… back on track… my folks didn’t have much money, and what they did have they were very careful with – to a fault, really. So much so that most opportunities to invest were seen as high-risk. Even clearly good investments, like real estate provided a level of anxiety that I can’t seem to make sense of now as an adult.

This is the tip of the iceberg, but I won’t divulge much more because; again, I don’t blame my parents and I’m not interested in placing myself above them as though I am superior, because I’m not – However, the message that this lifestyle supplanted in my mind at a deep, subconscious level was one of similar fear.

I grew up to be an adult who was ultimately afraid of failure and afraid of success simultaneously. That might sound like a contradiction, but as far as my art goes, it kept me from pushing myself to do bigger and better things because I was:

afraid to compromise artistically because I might not be happy with the result
afraid to push my art further because that meant leaving my comfort zone
afraid to fail, because any failure I might have would probably be public
afraid to succeed, because if I found success doing something I didn’t love entirely, I’d be stuck doing it anyway
afraid to commit to any band for a long period of time, because I was constantly starting over at the bottom… where I was comfortable
afraid to be alone, because the value I put on myself was tied to other peoples’ opinion of me
afraid to be with people, because of how inferior I felt compared to them

… I could go on like this for days. I trapped myself in a cycle of mediocrity because it was within my comfort zone. Not that the music or the people I was making it with were mediocre, but that my effort to have people hear it was… and these things fizzle out when you don’t try very hard. That’s just how it works.

In the end, I’ve made a conscious decision to not be afraid. At the risk of summing it all up and making it sound simple and easy and quick – it is NOT – I’m not afraid of failure – it’s how I learn, and I’m not afraid of success – because any success is a gift, and it can leave me just as fast as it arrived. Maybe faster.

Really, I choose not to be afraid every day. It gets easier with the momentum of the previous day’s choice.

During the covid times, I stopped mainlining cable news, because it instills fear by constantly showing exceptional situations and telling you they’re normal, when the reason they are newsworthy is because they’re not the norm.

I’m not afraid of Donald Trump.
I wouldn’t have chosen him, but as it turns out, I wasn’t consulted on the matter. I won’t live in fear of the things I can’t control, and who becomes the president of a country I don’t live in is most certainly not something I can control.

What I can do is call out injustice when I see it. I can advocate for people less fortunate than myself. I can use my art to broadcast messages of love and growth. I can challenge the status quo when I see fit. I can support those who need it.

Fear lives in the future, and the future is uncertain.
I live in the present, where there is no fear, and there’s no uncertainty.
There’s just us… doing what we’re doing right now.
So we must act accordingly.