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