ericprincessdragon

Tag: love

  • Dust / Been Missin’

    In October 2023 we began the first round of Tim Bulster’s song-a-week songwriting group. This came at a perfect time – I had resolved to dedicate the fall and winter to writing and recording, stepping away from other obligations to hold space for that. I was also on the mend from a rough break-up that happened a few months before and coming out of a depressive spell that followed (and preceded).

    Writing became the main engine for processing everything I was feeling. There was one evening where I was trying to play guitar and felt so disconnected from the instrument – there was a huge emotional block and I couldn’t stand it. I started playing with the intention of letting out anything and everything I was feeling. I spent the next couple of hours improvising a handful of songs and this unlocked something in my process. From that point forward I began to put more intention into externalizing what I was feeling, which meant connecting with my body and tapping into whatever emotions I was feeling at the time.

    Dust started on October 9th, 2023 – the very first day of the writing group. I began the song that morning after reading Tim’s first email. I began singing “I’m sorry” and then it started to pour out from there.

    I was reflecting on the past, reflecting on the period of my life spent traveling, on the people that I met and places that I went, the places that I hadn’t returned to and the people that I have lost touch with over the years. These reflections… hurt.

    I have a basket filled to the top with journals, trinkets, things I found along the way and wrote and scribbled – sketches, doodles, notes, lyrics, contact information on places I traveled, phrases and translations in a number of languages, and other things which I’m scared to look at. At the time of writing this song, the basket was under my bed, and I thought it was a good reference point for how I felt about this period of my life and about this past.

    I was envisioning the dust-sealed old box of notes, physical material artifacts from this period, and I feel cowardly, too cowardly to return to them. It just hits something deep – longing, regret – the emotions that come with a past lost, a connection lost, a friend lost, with the words that haven’t been sent or said yet, the things I’ll never get the chance to say because it’s too late. These artifacts carry all of it – and they’re from some of the simplest, most wild, most ambitious, most dangerous and reckless and careless and carefree and wonderful and rewarding times of my life. I loved those days.

    “Dust” starts here:

    Under my bed
    Tucked away are pictures and notes
    Written by a ghost and left for someday
    Someday I have the strength to reconnect

    The ghost is a past version of me. There was simply too much happening all the time, every day – too many adventures to remember it all, too many periods of motion without stopping to reflect or write regularly. Even if I went through every note and drawing, there may be more lost than recovered. I still haven’t found the strength to dive into the box.

    More than 10 years have passed
    Haven’t taken one glance
    Just let the dust take it over
    The words on the pages
    Places and faces
    Phases and names
    Feel so far away in the dust

    Going into the chorus:

    I know someday I’ll go back to the places
    As they remain, everything else seems to change
    Some friends have passed and gone
    I know now how I was wrong
    Not to connect while I had the chance

    I have returned to many sites of my early travels. I love to return to places just to soak them in – to see what I see, think what I think, feel what I feel, remember what I remember. There are places I’ve yet to return to which I still intend to. And even more so I hope to reach out and find some of the people I’ve lost touch with out in the world. Those I still can. Others are gone now – people I can only connect with through memories, photos, dreams, or if I’m lucky, their art and music. I regret not reaching out to them more while I still had the chance.

    When I’m really struggling, I tend to withdraw, hide away. I won’t reach out. I remember in some of the worst of times grabbing my phone and looking at the contact list, stopping on names for a moment, but not being able to bring myself to just ring them up.

    It’s so simple. It’s such a simple action – just pressing a button on the screen. But what if they answer? I will have to acknowledge the difficulty that I’m facing. I will have to acknowledge that I’m not doing well, that I need help. But if they’re not doing well? And what if they’re not available? What if they don’t answer and never call back? More pain on top of what I was already feeling.

    I don’t know that these thoughts would even go through my head in that moment. It’s more of a general feeling of paralysis. There’s this part of me that wants to reach out, but I just cannot bring myself to do it. And instead, I isolate. It ain’t good, but that’s where I was at and that’s where I was writing from in verse two:

    Heavy in bed, I lay awake
    Thinking of you and all my mistakes
    All the dreams I didn’t share
    The words I didn’t say
    The songs I didn’t sing
    I wrote them for you and I locked them away
    To pick up the phone, look at your name
    I wanna press my thumb
    But I’m paralyzed by my aching heart
    My heart aching, but I know that someday we must reconnect
    No matter how much it hurts, I know it
    Someday we must reconnect
    I can’t lose you like the rest
    I want so bad just to tell you I’m sorry

    The song moves from the dusty past which I’ve hidden under my bed to the present where I’m lying in bed struggling, wanting to connect, feeling unable, and recognizing that I just need to do it – I have to, before it’s too late. By the end of the song, I still haven’t accomplished the task. I leave this song as a declaration of love, of hurt, of regret, of accountability, of genuine apology. If not a request for forgiveness, at least an expression, an explanation, and hope for understanding.

    The last chorus:

    I’m sorry I didn’t call
    I had no good reason at all
    I love you with all my heart
    I’m just hurt by the distance that’s grown between us
    That’s left us in the dust
    That’s left us in the dust

    Interestingly, one of the friends I had in mind when writing this actually reached out to me for the first time in a couple years that morning while I was finishing up the recording.

    Been Missing

    “Been Missing” is the sister song to “Dust.” Where “Dust” is the somber snapshot – reflecting on the past with regret and heaviness – this is a song of triumph. When I’ve managed to overcome that disconnect, let go of the regret, and make the connection.

    I was truly inspired after writing “Dust” to actually reach out to some friends from the past. I started writing “Been Missing” after a very long and deep conversation with an old friend I hadn’t talked to in years and seen in even longer. It was a sunny day and I was just getting to the beach when I took her call. We walked and talked for close to two hours – catching up, going through all the motions of reminiscing about the past, joking and laughing and getting very serious, sharing the difficulties we’d gone through and the good things in our lives. The dogs were running around on the sand. The sun was shining. After the conversation ended I took that feeling of goodness and put it into this song.

    I tried to write in the motions of that kind of catch up conversation. The questions that come with it: How have you been? Where you at these days? What have you been up to? How did that one thing work out? Have you seen so and so?

    I want to know that the people I care about are doing well. But it’s not always that way, and if it’s not, I want to hear about that too. I want to know what their struggles are, what their dreams and hopes are, what stands in the way of those things. I want to know if I can help.

    And eventually it’s my turn. Where have I been? What have I been up to? Where do I begin… There is always lots to catch up on. Many of my old friends don’t even know where I live. People will ask me how Portland is and I’ll say I don’t know, I haven’t been there in some time. It’s five hours away from me. Sometimes I’m catching up with people and I realize my life is crazy – weaving between periods of intense travel or isolation, of staying home, relationships in and out, being intensely focused on family, or music, or work, or just being far, far away for extended periods of time. So much happens in this life and I’ll often lose track along the way.

    The part I love most about reconnecting with old friends – the discovery that though much has changed, much is the same. One friend says “No time passes in the hearts of good folk” and I am so grateful for this. When I can reconnect with someone and it feels like we’ve just picked up from where we left off. Sure there are things to catch up on, but the understanding, openness and love has been there all along – across great distances in space and time. We can still be ourselves, silly and ridiculous, deep and thoughtful. And receive each other as friends. I cherish these connections.


    Been Missin (Original Demo)

    Been Missin’ (Live from home)

    Where you at 
    These days 
    I’ve missed you 
    Since I been away 
    Tell me now
    What’s changed 
    And what’s remained the same 
    Let’s take our time
    Catching up
    Before we get to reminiscing 

    Have the years been kind to you
    Have you done the things that you wanted to
    And when you did how good was it
    Take me there I want to know what 
    I been missing 

    Where have I been
    Where do I start
    Some years happened to someone else
    And I lost touch along the way
    Between everywhere and nowhere

    Do you
    Remember the last time
    Last time it was just you and I
    I do

    In the grand scheme of things
    It was less than a blink
    But in these brief human lives
    It was a long long time

    Now talk to me I want to know what
    You want today everything that
    Stands in the way of your dream
    I love you and you know I believe

    Though much has changed
    Much is the same
    Our bits are as dumb as ever
    One second we’re on the ocean floor
    The next we’re in an uproar
    Our laughter scores the night
    And sleepless voices jam til sunrise
    You don’t stay up like this 
    But you’re not surprised
    We did the same thing last time

    Last time it was just you and I
    And when we did 
    How good was it
    We’re here today I’ll never forget
    What I been missing
    What I been missing

    P.S.

    I still struggle. I still withhold and isolate. It all goes in phases. I still haven’t opened up those notebooks, revisited those trinkets, revisited that past. And I still haven’t reached out to some of those whom I dream about and write about and think about. Some of them are gone. Some of them I’ve lost touch with, lost contact – I don’t know how to find them. And others, I just have no good reason at all. But sometimes I pick up the phone. Send a message or make a call. And when I do, it’s good. No time passes in the hearts of good folk.

  • Can’t Abide

    Work Work Work Work Work

    I started working at 13. A few days a week after school I bused tables, delivered drinks and food, took drink orders, cleaned and vacuumed at the end of the night, and handled cash at my uncle’s restaurant inside the El Monte Airport in the San Gabriel Valley – now renamed the San Gabriel Valley Airport. The minimum wage at the time was $6.75 an hour. For a 13 year old that felt like real money – enough to buy almost anything I wanted, which at that age was mostly CDs and music gear.

    What I remember most from that time was the feeling of being in the real world. School felt like a false reality, full of tedious drama and conflict from students and teachers alike. Work was different. People treated me with common respect. They spoke to me like a person. I was building actual skills, meeting actual people, having actual experiences.

    I worked in restaurants and a cafe through high school and into my twentieth year, from my uncle’s place to a local cafe where I learned to make coffee and espresso, and eventually Rod’s Grill, a 50s diner in Arcadia that operated for 70 years before closing in 2024. I worked there from the age of 17 to 20.

    During that time I was getting out into the real world more and more. I started studying music at Citrus College at 17 and outside of work and school I was playing a lot of music, often gigging on the weekends and going on adventures further and further away. I talked about some of these times in my entry for Our Golden Days Have Passed – and I will write in more detail about these times in future entries. I was taking less hours at the restaurant and eventually stepped away altogether to focus on traveling, just a few months before I left for Europe on a one-way ticket.

    From that point on I never took on a regular job again. Over the next year and a half on the road I sustained myself through minimalist living – couchsurfing, hitchhiking, sleeping outside, “dumpster diving” – and work exchange wherever I could find it. The summer of 2013 I worked across Ireland on a farm and homestead and in a couple of hostels and guest houses. In one summer I worked with horses and sheep, cleaned rooms and bathrooms, made beds, pulled weeds, painted sheds, helped prep and serve dinners and more. Hours of labor in exchange for a place to stay, food, and whatever else came with it. I continued seeking similar opportunities as I kept traveling across twenty-odd countries over the next few years. I did small money gigs here and there and even turned down opportunities for steadier paying work to keep moving.

    Those experiences changed something fundamental in how I think about work, time and money. Living simply, traveling on almost nothing, what I needed to be happy became pretty clear: food, shelter, people, nature, music. That’s about it. If I gave a few hours of my day to sustain a lifestyle I loved – even without making much (or any) money – that felt like a fair trade. I started to understand the difference between basic needs and higher needs. There are many things far more valuable than money.

    Traveling and returning to the US made this even clearer through contrast. The sense I got from many people I met across Europe was that their jobs were a means to an end rather than the end itself – people prioritizing close relationships with friends and family, meeting up daily as a matter of routine. My mom worked two jobs for most of my life and vacation wasn’t part of our vocabulary. Many Europeans receive nearly a month of paid vacation per year. In the US many can’t afford to take a day off even while sick. In the United States there seems to be more of a cultural expectation of devotion to the job.

    In the years before I settled in Oregon I earned occasional money teaching guitar lessons, performing and touring, doing temporary farm work, running live sound and production gigs. When I first arrived on the Oregon coast my first paying work was yard work, painting and planting for a local business – found on Craigslist. Soon after I started to find there was a real need for audiovisual skills in my area. I was unexpectedly offered work running tech for the county and simultaneously started getting more and more requests for photo, video and audio work.

    These were skills I had been developing for years with no intention of making a living from them. I took pictures and made videos, recorded and made music because I loved doing those things. And then I found I had a role to play in my community – skills that offered something beyond just making money. In recent years I’ve worked on community events, supported small businesses, venues, theaters, community groups and artists.

    I don’t work in the traditional sense. I’m a gig worker, an independent contractor, and I’ve had to establish a business entity for some of what I do. But ultimately not much has changed from the days of working farms and hostels across Europe – I’ve only continued with that same understanding of work and time. I put in countless hours into projects that don’t pay: my music, this archive, supporting friends and family, supporting community, looking after the dogs and cats, improving and building at home.

    I still travel often but the minimalist life on the road is behind me. I have real responsibilities, bills and debt to pay, and I need to earn some amount of money. But I don’t often seek work – through close connections with community, family and clients I keep my expenses low and find enough regular gigs to make ends meet and then some.

    Can’t Abide

    I recognize that for years – working odd jobs, living outside conventional employment, often broke or close to it – I could be perceived from the outside as someone who just needs to get a job. I resent the idea that the primary meaningful way to contribute to society is through holding down a job, that the J.O.B. has priority over all other forms of work and effort. I’m not lazy. On any given day I’m usually stretched thin juggling multiple projects and responsibilities, paid and unpaid, with no regularly scheduled activities and no real routine. It’s a chaotic way to live and at times I lose the balance and suffer consequences. But overall it works for me.

    In the hook I wrote: “I don’t think that a job brings us closer to God.” When I say God I’m not necessarily referring to the Judeo-Christian God. I’m talking about divinity, truth, deeper fulfillment – things I believe can be found in nature, in loving relationships, in acts of service and kindness, in our own motions towards self-actualization and genuine self-fulfillment. There are jobs that bring people closer to those things, but a job in itself is not divine. I think it’s important to distinguish between the job and the work. The work I take on needs to offer me something beyond money – I need to be building skills, contributing to something worthwhile, growing in some direction. The more time I spend on money gigs, the less time I have for the things that feel more essential.

    Can’t Abide was written during Tim Bulster’s song-a-week challenge in February 2024. I picked up the guitar to work on something else, started playing the main melody, opened a new project and had most of it within a couple of hours. I wrote a placeholder for a verse, told myself I’d come back to it, then listened the next day and realized I’d already said everything I wanted to say. That clarity – knowing when a song is finished – was something I was actively working on at the time. Around then I wrote in an email to the songwriting group: if you write what’s true to you, you can’t write badly. I still believe that.

    There’s a deeper root to all of this. Two family stories that came to me through my dad, both absorbed as a teenager. Both of them died when I was still a child – I wouldn’t hear these stories until years later.

    My dad visited my uncle on his deathbed and nervously tried to make conversation. My uncle wasn’t interested in small talk. All he could tell my dad was that he had wasted his life – he spent it chasing material things – and that it meant nothing. I didn’t feel my dad was trying to teach me a lesson when he told me this. He was expressing something that had hurt him deeply, almost from a place of trauma. But I took it as a lesson directly from my uncle to me. Like he had lived an entire life to arrive at something so that I wouldn’t have to suffer the same course and outcome.

    The second story was about my grandfather – my dad’s father, who came from Cuba, lived through the revolution, spent years working for nothing in labor camps before escaping to the United States. He worked hard his whole life and at some point was doing quite well. But through a series of misfortune and the weight of his habits and addictions he died sick and nearly broke. My dad told me that at the end he would ask to borrow small amounts of money to bet on horses at the racetrack. It hurt my dad so much to see his father die that way. I took it as a warning and another lesson – that a life built around the pursuit of material wealth is a dead end.

    Looking at what I have today – the skills, the community, the family and friends, the creative work, the home, the life I’ve built on the Oregon coast – it’s in many ways more than either of them had at the end. I haven’t been so focused on chasing money or chasing things. Everything I have came through community, family, friendship, art and travel – through the things that brought meaning to my life.

    I believe I am destined to lose everything, sooner or later. Even if I manage to keep it all to the end of my life, I will still have to let go and say goodbye. I suspect that what matters more in the end is how our efforts in life move through the world – through the people we’ve known and loved, through the art and stories we leave behind, through the work that will outlast us.

    “Can’t Abide”

    ^ Original Demo ^

    ^Live from home version^ (video below)

    I don’t want to trade my time
    Just to make a dime
    Off a dollar made for someone else

    They say I don’t want to work
    Like I’m just a lazy jerk
    Who only wants to take and give nothing to the world

    Well I don’t think that a job
    Brings us closer to God
    And all the money we make
    Means nothing in the end

    If I’m gonna take what’s mine
    Then I will take my time
    I’ve got dreams to fulfill in this life

    I’ll work for what matters to me
    I’ll work for my community
    I want to leave the world a bit better than I found it

    I know deep down
    I can’t abide the nine to five
    If I’m to live my life
    If I die broke I’ll walk that road
    I’ll go chasing the light

    I don’t think that a job
    Brings us closer to God
    And all the money we make
    Means nothing in the end

  • Timeless Expanse

    I often remember a series of dreams after waking. After a long night of dreaming especially, but also during shorter bursts. The dreams I was having during the days around Stephen’s services were getting extremely vivid – emotionally and spiritually charged in a way I don’t often experience. I believe those qualities are always present while dreaming on some level, but everything intensified during that time.

    I’ve been thinking about what may have led to this specifically. Grief is too broad a word for it. I think the fundamental thing that happened in that time was that I gave myself a pause – to sit with my feelings, to feel them, to be with friends, and more deeply to be with love. Losing Stephen cracked me open. It opened me to loving my friends more consciously, to trying to love him – which then means loving something without an obvious physical form. And perhaps loving something greater than any one person. Something eternal. Or something simpler. Right now eternity feels quite simple to me. I was feeling the timeless quality of the present moment – not something vast and distant, but something immediate and close.

    The night after the viewing I had one of the most vivid dreams of my life.

    In the dream, from the point I could remember, I was at a house party. It felt like LA. I felt a bit anxious and out of place, so I was quietly making my way out when I bumped into a guy while passing through a doorway. I apologized immediately and politely, but he was angry and had violence in his eyes. He would hear nothing of what I spoke. He and his friends pursued me as I tried to make my way out.

    I could feel many eyes upon me. I was clearly an outsider in this place. I could sense how badly they all intended to stop me – these men intended to hurt me. With growing intensity I tried to escape, outside and inside, and they followed. Then when I was cornered, a stranger showed me the way out, showed me the way to safety.

    I found myself in another house with a couple of old friends. I felt much safer, but not at ease. I could sense these men were still looking for me. Still in pursuit.

    With some intention I walked through a doorway – and suddenly I was standing inside what looked like an observation deck. A round structure built of what looked like bronze or brass, possibly copper. Roughly 30 feet across, with large windows all around.

    I was scared at first. I felt trapped. And then I realized – there is no time here. I had never been without the burden of past and future. But this was a place outside of time. And with that realization I no longer sensed that burden. No past, no present, no future. It felt eternal.

    I was no longer scared. I felt a deep contentment as I looked around and saw an environment unlike anything I had ever seen or imagined. In every direction – a vast expanse of what looked like mountains made of clouds, or clouds made of mountains. I didn’t recognize what I was seeing as purely solid, liquid, or gas. Whatever it was, it was also colorful – like sunsets, like all the colors of sky mixed together, all around me in every direction.

    I didn’t want to leave this place. I didn’t want to wake up. So I thought – I must take this in. Make the most of this.

    Some grand question came to mind. Without speaking, I asked this question directly to the timeless expanse.

    The response was immediate. A rumbling like thunder’s roar burst and tore through the atmosphere. It was like no sound I have ever heard, yet I could understand it in words right away.

    I remember everything about that experience – the fear and the contentment, the colorful clouds of mountains, the rumbling, the sense that I was not in one place, that there was no gravity, that I couldn’t tell whether there was glass in the windows or only open air. I remember being overwhelmed. I remember being humbled.

    I don’t remember what I asked. And I don’t remember the words that sounded in my head when the answer came.

    I seemed to wake up.

    Outside now. Bird songs and wind in the grass. Deeper gusts and the tree chimes. The grass dances before me. I sway with it, moving with it, dancing in the wind.

    Deeper still – in the distance – the sounds of people, my brothers and sisters in this world, ripping and roaring and cruising along their way.

    Funny sounds of chickens and frogs
    And dog barks here and there all around me
    Closer to my heart — Loki rustles in the grass
    Om is chewing rubber
    Streams of wind, like strings, crescendo from every direction

    An interruption. A motorcycle ripping down the road. Taken out of it.

    I held on to the moment for some time. I was talking about dreams, but the music of the moment overwhelmed me. So I wrote it down. I spoke it.

    I took something inside me – a feeling, an image in motion, a thought, an intangible idea – and I wrote it down, and I spoke it, and with that gave it a tangible place in this world.

  • Our Golden Days Have Passed

    This is the last song I wrote for the winter/spring round of the 2026 songwriting group. It was written during an extremely emotional time. I was mourning the sudden death of a dear friend – Stephen Reed – and I had returned to the LA area, the place where I spent the first 20 years of my life and a few more on and off after that.

    I took two trips down and spent nearly a month there consecutively – more time than I’d spent down there in seven or eight years, including flying home for a weekend in between. I was returning to people and places I hadn’t returned to in far too long. I knew that I had to. In this time, I had to reconnect.

    The relationships and conversations that came out of that month were long overdue. Some of my oldest and dearest friends – people I’ve known for half my life, people we were brought together by music. We played in bands together, played countless gigs together. There was a period for me from about 18 to 21 where my life revolved mostly around this community. We were studying music, working whatever jobs we had, but most of our free time revolved around each other. We played cover gigs, corporate events, fundraisers, weddings, country clubs, bars and restaurants. Beyond all that, we all had original projects going, playing bars, clubs, house parties, pizza spots and more. When we weren’t playing we were together – piling into cars to go on all sorts of adventures day and night.

    We were young, idealistic, naive, lucky. Life felt simpler then. I’m not sure we knew quite who or what we were. I know I didn’t. But somehow none of us have changed all that much. We’ve aged into our 30s and 40s now – still young, but no longer living wildly and freely and recklessly. The gigs and hangouts no longer feel endless and playful in the same way.

    I drove by Rad Stop – the first building a group of my friends began renting, which turned into many things over the years. First a rehearsal studio, then a bike shop, eventually a warehouse with many rooms used as artist studios and residences. It was one of my main home bases when I was visiting and spending time down there between 2014-2016. I stayed in several different rooms throughout the years. It was eventually condemned and demolished. Rad Pro, the successor to that space and the place where many of my early recordings were made – where I lived, kept space, and ran live sound for bands – has since moved and the original location is all boarded up. But Rad Stop is simply gone. When I drove by it was the first time I’d been in that area in eight or nine years. Where it once stood there is now an empty lot surrounded by a fence. In between the cement cracks there are weeds reaching up to the sky.

    I had a conversation with my old friend Ivan that I keep coming back to. He told me he’d been quite sad thinking about the people we came up with. He wanted to put on a concert in his parents’ backyard like he used to, invite bands from back in the day – but he quickly realized that three of the bands he thought of have all had members who passed away at tragically young ages. Stephen is just the latest in that string of three. Ivan said that they used to feel like we had so much promise, so much potential, all of us reaching for our dreams. But we’ve lived long enough to see the end of some of those dreams, the end of some of those stories. To him it appeared that those were golden days, when we were becoming. But those days are gone and now we are what has been.

    I replied: that’s bleak, bro.

    I told him I don’t feel that way. For me the growth has not stopped. I’m still learning, still crossing boundaries and finding myself on the other side of good things. I still believe in our potential – individually and collectively. We are still here and our stories are not done yet. And even in the case of Stephen, the actions of his lifetime are still ringing out in ways that are truly powerful and surprising. His work and influence on earth is not done. His story is not done.

    But still I was definitely feeling Ivan’s sentiments. It seemed like many people I visited with were struggling – with their work, their living situations, their relationships and the grief of losing our friend.

    Friends told me they wished I hadn’t left. They asked if I was coming back to stay. I told them no. Leaving one gathering, a friend asked if I was heading back to Oregon. I said yes. He asked when he would see me again. I said I don’t know.

    I’m writing this at home. I just stepped out the front door and into the forest. I feel no worry for tomorrow, little stress from the day. I’ve managed to find myself in a place I genuinely love, living a relatively simple, but fulfilling, interesting and peaceful life in a small town by the sea.

    But I carry complicated emotions around it. Deep gratitude for this life sits right alongside shame and guilt when I return to that place and those friends. In order to find this life for myself, I had to the old life behind.

    This song became a meditation on these feelings, these thoughts. Giving into some of the bleak and fatalistic feelings of the time and all that comes with the idea that our golden days may have passed.

    “Our Golden Days Have Passed”

    I left pieces of my heart in chunks down below
    Hit the road to save my soul
    To build new life I let the old one go
    I didn’t mean to abandon you
    I didn’t mean to abandon you

    Is it too late to say I love you too
    Is it too late to show my face in this place
    Where we once built a home now it’s an empty lot
    Gone without a trace fenced up and blocked off
    Now there’s just a few weeds reaching up J
    ust a few weeds reaching for us

    Our tribe was broken up spread out and beaten down
    And I feel like an alien when I come around
    Until we’re face-to-face and we start digging in
    We’re all struggling

    What started with a dream ended in death
    The best of us is gone we are what’s left
    Becoming has past now we are what has been
    Stuck in the present
    Our golden days have passed
    Our golden days have passed

  • World Is Abstruse

    This song began with one image in the summer of 2021. I was driving past a local liquor store and I saw a woman getting out of her car. Across her car door was a very large sticker – almost as wide as the door itself – that said “TRUMP WON” I only saw her for a moment but I got an immediate sense of this person: confident, proud, unbothered. Everywhere she goes she is presenting that opinion to the world. I can’t think of a single opinion I hold that I would feel compelled to place across a vehicle for all to see at all times. That takes a certain kind of confidence. The first lines came to me in that moment.

    Parked at the liquor store
    Propoganda on her door
    Proud to be salty and free
    She’s not alone
    Just one of many many
    Living in a twisted fantasy
    We can call it a lie but she’s living in a separate reality

    From that image the song became an exploration of something I was seeing everywhere – people living in what felt like genuinely separate realities, unable to agree on even the most basic shared facts.

    It got me thinking about perception itself. Take something as simple as color. Two people can point at the same object and both call it red. But is what I see when I look at red actually the same experience you have? What if the color you experience as red looks the way green looks to me, but we’ve both learned to call our experience by the same word? We’d have no way of knowing.

    People aren’t simply lying. They aren’t simply deceived. On some level they are genuinely inhabiting a different reality. “We can call it a lie but she’s living in a separate reality.” If we can’t agree that red is red and blue is blue, how are we meant to find common ground?

    Parked in the arm chair
    Screaming into the chamber
    Silently yet violently so
    He’s not alone
    Just one of many many
    Acting out a twisted fantasy

    The character in the second verse was written as the counterpart to the lady at the liquor store. Where she is out in the world, moving confidently with her ideology on display, he is stationary, screaming silently into an echo chamber. I was thinking about local Facebook groups, the constant infighting, people repeating the same talking points as everyone else on their team with complete confidence – like parrots. They don’t seem to be arriving at these positions through any independent process. They’re finding the newest opinion and repeating it loudly and proudly. “You can watch the monkey do, you can do just as they do.”

    Underneath all of this is something I think about as the world of man versus the world as it is. Picture a flower on the side of the road. It wasn’t planted, it wasn’t watered, it doesn’t belong to anyone. It’s just a flower existing as it does for its lifetime – whether or not we describe it, name it, argue about it. That’s the world as it is. The world of man is the layer on top – the words, the symbols, the ideologies, the parties and clans. That layer only exists within human consciousness. It has no physical or material reality of its own. And yet people are dying and killing in the name of it. Seeking answers from the universe, asking the great unanswerable questions – that I can understand. But outsourcing understanding of reality to a pundit, an influencer, a politician is just dumb.

    Speaking of dumb, I first titled this song “The World Is Obtuse.” I thought obtuse meant difficult to understand. It must have been almost a week of working on the song before I finally looked up the word and realized the word I was reaching for was abstruse. I was embarrassed. I realized – not only is the world abstruse, difficult to comprehend, but the word itself is difficult to understand. I was being obtuse.

    The world is abstruse and humans are obtuse.

    This song and My Opinions came from a similar place and around the same time. Songs written out of fatigue, frustration, disappointment, worry – from watching people I knew personally, friends and family, fighting online over talking points and ideological battles that seemed so removed from actual life.

    Meanwhile, I was living alone with my dogs in the forest on the rural Oregon coast. Without need for any of that conflict in my day-to-day life. I was simply looking after myself, the dogs, the house and spending most my time in nature. It wasn’t until I opened Facebook or took a drive into town that any of that nonsense entered my world.

    The World Is Abstruse

    Parked at the liquor store
    Propaganda on her door
    Proud to be salty and free
    She is not alone
    Just one of many many
    Living in a twisted fantasy

    We can call it a lie but
    She’s living in a separate reality
    We can call it a lie but
    She’s living in a separate reality

    We have to imagine
    As she’s cruising down the street
    The grass may be blue while the sky is green
    There’s no way to know it
    It’s only a sight for her eyes
    For her it may be red
    For you it may be blue
    Red lies blue lies it’s purple in disguise
    For you it may be red For her it may be blue
    What is the truth
    The world is abstruse
    How could it be so plain to see
    Yet it’s lost on the majority
    The world of men tells of parties and clans
    But to me it’s all make believe
    Look around
    Life is here now

    Parked in the arm chair
    Screaming into the chamber
    Silently yet violently so
    He’s not alone
    Just one of many many
    Acting out a twisted fantasy

    We can call it a lie but
    He’s living in a separate reality
    We can call it a lie but
    He’s living in a separate reality

    What is the truth
    The world is abstruse
    Seeking answers from the news
    Yeah that’ll tie your noose
    You can watch the monkey do
    You can do just as they do
    Cause it’s a man’s world
    And we’re living in a zoo

    Seeking answers from above
    That I can understand
    Seek the answer from a man
    You’re being a dumbass
    Seeking answers from above
    That I can understand
    Seek the answer from a man
    And you’re being a dumbass

  • Gutter Baby

    In all my travels, never have I met a gnarlier bunch of traveling folks than the “gutter punks.” I once got off a bus in New Orleans and immediately got heckled by one across the street yelling, “Hippie! Give me money!” Hitchhiking around the U.S. and Canada, I met quite a few – jamming, sleeping and hanging around on the streets, trying to catch lifts along the way.

    Inspired by people I met on the street around Montreal, Humboldt & Mendocino counties, this song is an amalgamation of stories I’ve heard from these folks, some of my own experiences traveling, and some inspiration for a happy ending from someone who made it out from the streets into a “normal” life.

    My first demo for this song was completed in January 2024 as part of a song-a-week challenge. Though most of it was written then, some of the lines go back to a dusty notebook I filled around 2014-2015 when I was hitchhiking around the states real heavy. I was looking for notes for another song when I found these words. I scrapped most of what I had written then, but the core idea was there – the story of a “Gutter Baby.”

    Just a baby
    Fourteen years old
    Scared to go back home
    Take your chances
    Hiding in the streets
    And learning to survive
    Starting a new life as
    A gutter baby

    Find some punks on the street
    Who take you under their wing
    They get you high and teach you to get by and you start traveling
    In every new town new trouble with the same struggles
    You graduate from the bottle to the pipe and to the needle
    Oh gutter baby
    Gutter baby

    Gutter baby
    Rabid on the street
    How did the world forsake you
    Gutter baby
    They got you hooked
    Hooked on poison hooked on violence
    Hooked on crime giving every reason
    For them to jack you up
    Gutter baby

    The cops know just who to fuck with when they spot you on their beat
    They’ll take any excuse to pluck you off the street
    They don’t care whether they lock you up or drive you to the edge of their town
    And they know that no ones gonna trip if they beat the shit out of
    A gutter baby
    Gutter baby

    Not a baby
    You’re growing old
    With dreams of your own
    Done with trouble
    All the drugs and drama
    All the death and all the trauma

    You leave it in the past
    You’re cleaning up your act
    You’re going to be a dad
    Now you have yourself a chance
    To give a love you never had
    A baby
    Your baby

    It ain’t easy to build when you’ve been beaten down
    And thought you’d be the next young punk to end up in the ground
    You’ve been cast aside abused and brutalized and didn’t know why
    But all the pain and trouble means nothing when you look in those eyes
    And see no struggle
    No fear
    No struggle
    Just a baby