Hello all,

I hope this post finds you well. I don’t say much outside of spamming your news feeds with art that I’m doing and have done. I do apologize for the sheer volume of it. I know it can be annoying because I annoy myself posting it. Life has given me a lot to say these past five years, and I’m wondering what it all means if not to share it. I’m wondering if it matters in the scheme of existence, but knowing it doesn’t won’t phase me, it seems. Or maybe I just don’t actually know what to say.

These days – for me – it’s a mixture of two extremes. I am, on one hand, about to make the move of a lifetime and join an intelligent, insightful, and altogether graceful and challenging woman in New York City. On the other, I see the greater reality of life on this plane as a crippling one. We have a political discourse all around us with players performing card tricks and calling it magic and they didn’t even produce our card. We have a caustic mess where everyone operates with obstinate and divisive mediocrity, panning the screen for the red herring instead of just fucking listening to the products of reality…we used to call them facts…and discerning with thoughtfulness, compassion, and truth until something is found that is better than the thing we just had. That’s called progress and progress is what America is all about.

America. It’s such a pointless word, really. Pointless unless it is to the world that beacon of goodness, generosity; more than anything, a lightning rod. The whole world looks to us and we’re failing before their eyes.

But even if you don’t think these things and even if you couldn’t care less about me because I think these things, doesn’t mean we can’t find common ground. And that common ground – to me – is Love. In turn, Aleppo. You can’t see videos taken to record one’s last words and not be affected. You can’t see rivers of blood running through streets of a once great city and not cry. And you cannot see children who are beyond such tears, and not want to die not for them, but instead of them.

We feel these things at our core. So I’m left with wanting to do anything at all.

I will, at least, be donating anything I make for the foreseeable future off of my music downloads and book sales directly to UNICEF. Buy things if you want with that knowledge. Or donate to them or any other agency directly. But know very well that if you’re like me and your wallet is empty, we cannot become numb to what we’re seeing. This cannot be reality anymore. We are Americans. And our complacency, yet agency for the world somehow must lead humanity out of this Dark Age.

On a more personal level, I haven’t seen most of you in quite a while. It being the end of the year, I extend to you a merry Christmas and a happy new year. I love a good number of you a good deal and we really should drink beer together before I leave Cleveland in February.

If nothing else, please be mindful of reality. Cherish this often cold, sometimes bitter hell: Life. It is far too prescious to ignore it. We are all in it together. Such clichés can never be not but true.

In love,

Michael

I just don’t know what to say anymore. To disseminate consummate language in the interim doesn’t seem to be enough. Who even knows, really? They’re saying we’re post fact but I and every other thinking person in the world call bullshit. Or at the very least, a collective mind twisted. Conspiracy is one thing, but it’s for the back room at a bar, late at night. It isn’t for our president’s Twitter feed. It isn’t for the intellectual to pursue in any way but the mental masturbation it entails. Barack Obama was always born in Hawaii. Global warming has never been a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese government. And two million illegal votes were not cast in Michigan. These are simple truths in a time of crippling reality, where somehow so many of us have succumb to caustic and dribbling madness, foaming at the mouth at the prospect of screaming Fuck You at a group of others who just happen to share our vicinity but not our vision to get to the same place we both most likely want to end up. We don’t argue. We fight. And that’s a problem.

But it’s a problem of which Donald Trump is now the face. The drunk screaming at you about immigration isn’t drunk and the bar he should be patroning at last call is our national stage. He is a buffoon. He is deranged. But he is not post fact. He’s just a liar. Plain and simple. We are not post fact. Propaganda isn’t to be believed. It is to be smashed by the forces of goodness and decency; of a return to reason and knowledge.

We need justice and mercy in an equal dose. So let’s talk.

Yet if one cannot be convinced by the language he speaks, then there’s an issue. And that issue is not a difference of opinion. It’s of raw ignorance. But when a 5 is a 2 backwards, maybe we just need to hand out more mirrors. I, at least, intend to.