In building out this site I've taken to going through old art projects.  Picking through things I made from 5 years old, 18, 23 was almost anthropological.  Its reminding me of how a drive to make art has always been there.  Why?  What did it give me?  I've absorbed music at a deep level as long back as I can remember - playing records on my fisher price player.  My older brother began to run with punk friends and I got into dead kennedys, adolescents, black sabbath and metallica.  The first music purchase I ever made was Kill 'Em All on vinyl. 

But I also had close friends who were into reggae.  A lot of Jamaican acts would come up through Santa Cruz on the west coast circuit and play for the hippies.  One friend was American-Indian whose mom took him away from an abusive dad.  The other was a child whose dad was in prison with a mom who was away all day in San Jose with her Chiropractor boss who she soon married.  We all wanted escape and adventure.  They were older but barely.  I had honed my ability to pester my older brother's friends to allow me into their own escape rituals, so I plied my trade on Josh and Barry, They could be abusive - but dangled excitement before me.  Once, beneath the Kings Chair eukalyptus, they promised me a puff on a roach if I put dog shit on my tongue.  They laughed and ran.  But I needed their approval, so I followed.  We became a wrecking crew.  I invited them to sleep over in 3rd grade and we shimmied down the drainspout outside my window on Friday nights and found teen keggers in parks and scored free beer by shocking the revelers with our precociousness.  Their parents smoked weed and they would score it off them.  I could sometimes get it from my brother.  We "shoulder-tapped" at Days market to get alcohol and clove cigarettes, then laid down in the tall grass over looking the "Gully" with the Boardwalk in the distance.  At home my parents were screaming and tending to my younger siblings.  We went to the Civic Auditorium to see Mikey Dread, Eek-a-Mouse, the Wailers, Ras Michael and the Suns of Negus, Culture and sometimes crap acts like Turnip the Beats, who put baskets of turnips and beats on the stage.  I would get high out of my gourd and skank with my eyes closed pressed up against giant speakers.  

And we did acid.  This my brother and his friends had.  I remember begging Noah all day for a piece of a Goony Bird.  I finally wore him down and spent the night in his room discovering how the neighbor's house looked like a strange orange woman and my face was drippy in the mirror.  When my mom called upstairs for me to come down and wash the dishes, I complied but found my hands no longer worked so escaped back upstairs and begged my brother again - this time to go down and wash the dishes for me.  Barry eventually took too much acid and after a particularly harrowing experience listening to Iron Man in the dark, he never seemed the same again.  We experimented sexually in the dark on other occasions and I still remember the taste of his little dick in my mouth.  This, maybe the deepest of secrets, I had probably initiated it through the plausible deniability of "Truth or Dare", a game I had also played being sexual with other friends - Tony, Patrick, Luke.  I was discovering my sexuality and it felt good, despite not understanding it, it was maybe in the deepest sense an imaginary practice for my later interest in girls.  We were young though - pre-pubescent.  Once on the car ride home after an "orgiastic, wtf?" sleepover, Patrick related the events to his mom and she was I think horrified, counseling us to discontinue the practice at once.  As I aged these became embarrassing memories, shared with no one.  Barry eventually killed himself long after I had moved north to Seattle for high school.

I used to help Josh on his paper route, after listening to Depeche Mode and the Sex Pistols and drinking kamikazes.  Being drunk may have helped when I once went over the handlebars after the saddlebags were sucked into my tire.

I arrived at 4th grade too stoned to focus, late and in trouble from riding my Bmx into a marsh with Josh for an early smoke out.  Soon after, Barry got sent home for not listening and barking like a dog on all fours in class.  He had been on acid.  Our first run in with the police occurred after drinking a bottle and trying to get into Josh's girlfriend's bedroom window.  A police cruiser showed up and we fled.  Drunken and tired, I thought I might hide behind a clump of grass in the gutter.  The officer brought me home and my dad answered the door completely nude.  I was told not to hang out with Josh and Barry any more. 

The drug-induced perceptional shifts, combined with needing to be in a safe and recognized place, and using attention-seeking behaviors to get it must have been highly reinforcing for artistic expressions.  The class clown, the "initiated" one - gratifyingly exalted into a position of secret knowledge - positioned by powerful acts taken from venturing into the priestly temples of older children and surviving.

My art was writing and drawing in my pre-adolescence.  As a teen I became excited by the video camera and into adulthood began thinking of visual storytelling.  But by then I had discovered the guitar (via an old banjo upon which I taught myself to make rhythm and melody).  As my devotion to the guitar grew, and songwriting advanced, drawing seems to have faded - at least as a singular form of expression and locus of what I needed to say.  While I never put down the pen, the images became more realistic and no longer so burdened with narrative.  They became, it might be fair to say, icons in a way for other stories of my imagination and reflections, whether more fully realized in song or not reflective at all - mere patient projections unadorned with reason.

I've often wondered how it came to be that the party of Lincoln became the party of Trump, and the party of segregation became the party of the Voting Rights Act.

UC Davis History professor Erich Rauchway wrote a nice little blog post over a decade ago detailing how it basically happened between 1866-1936.  He ends with this nugget:
Now, one can get cleverer and point out that although the rhetoric and to a degree the policies of the parties do switch places, their core supporters don’t—which is to say, the Republicans remain, throughout, the party of bigger businesses; it’s just that in the earlier era bigger businesses want bigger government [federal aid for the transcontinental railroad, for the state university system, for the settlement of the West by homesteaders; for a national currency and a protective tariff] and in the later era they don’t [banking, securities, and currency regulation; relief for the unemployed and pensions for the elderly; wilderness conservation; improvements to roads and electric infrastructure; support for unionization; and much else].

David French argues against trans-inclusion by gender-alignment in sports.  The NYTimes readers seem overwhelmingly supportive of his position.  I commented on a fundamental problem in the piece.

While this is a complex issue, a glaring omission is the practical reality for most trans athletes - they are children participating in school or community sports. What is a 10 year old trans girl or boy supposed to do if they are forced to play on a team that doesn't align with their gender? Much science shows gender has real biological phenotypes in the brain, so while there are clear athletic performance characteristics in chromosomes, so too are there gender characteristics. In addition, while French states he harbors no ill intent towards trans people, but as an evangelical Christian, cards on the table require acknowledgment of his faith's ugly history of homophobia and misogyny. These are real precepts that continue to plague a majority of its thought leaders, who are at this moment making sweeping calls for legal persecution of trans people without doing what French also fails to do in this piece: take into consideration their real-life experience.

Further, French and the readers seem unaware of the substantial science on the this issue, in particular the consensus that testosterone is the principal factor in athletic performance.  

I found this court declaration from the ACLU by Joshua D. Safer, MD, FACP, FACE that lays out the intricacies quite well. There are many considerations in this debate, but one salient factor appears to be testosterone levels and nowhere more so than in youth sports.  In closing, the brief notes:

After a transgender woman lowers her level of testosterone, there is no inherent reason why her physiological characteristics related to performance should be treated differently from the physiological characteristics of a non- transgender woman.







After a transgender woman lowers her level of testosterone, there is no
inherent reason why her physiological characteristics related to athletic
Case 1:20-cv-00184-CWD Document 22-9 Filed 04/30/20 Page 18 of 48
After a transgender woman lowers her level of testosterone, there is no
inherent reason why her physiological characteristics related to athletic
Case 1:20-cv-00184-CWD Document 22-9 Filed 04/30/20 Page 18 of 48

- Apparently immigrants come to America instead of other countries.  Really?  Why.  What's better about America than most industrialized countries?  
Pros: diversity, higher education, .... drawing blanks
Cons: lower pay for low-skill work, lackluster K-12, no universal healthcare (welfare in general sucks), public transportation/infrastructure sucks.
Am I missing something?

- going through old albums and (trying to) properly master.  My early stuff was very acoustic, vocals OK but tended to be overly nasal, somewhat intense and more literal.  Later stuff increasingly multi-instrumental and tonally expansive, more thematically vague, larger repertoire of genre use.

- Expertise:  how much time investment in college degrees?

• according to Cal Poly Humboldt a typical university unit = about 45 hours of student work (class & study)
• A 120 unit undergraduate degree would = 5400 hours
• A 45 unit graduate degree would = 2025 hours
• A 50 unit PhD would = 2250
• Thus, roughly 9675 hours.
• Add to this any professional experience beyond this, calculated as 52 work weeks in a year, at 40 hours/week (granting academics often take summers off, but many are writing books, etc.) and you get 2080 hours per year.
• So next time you're dismissing the expertise of, say, an epidemiologist with 10 years professional experience, you're dismissing their 20-30k hours of study and practical experience in their particular field.
• Add to this the fact that at this point their knowledge is highly subject-matter-specialized.  They simply know a TON about their particular subject.  Even if you dismiss 2/3 of that experience as secondary - housekeeping, meetings, teaching, non-relevant work, etc. - you're still looking at a solid 10k hours of very intense expertise in that subject.  But let's also grant that even all that non-specific work certainly provided expansive knowledge about how to think and evaluate ideas.

- This month I went in for nerve injections for my neck.  Basically, epidural-type targeted injections to try and numb my pain.  The first visit made me puke on the operating table, and nothing but injection-site soreness to follow.  The second visit thankfully didn't induce vomiting, however pain reduction was zero.  So, at this point, given that my original injury (2" neck wound while surfing here) occurred in 1989, that's about 33 years of pain.  Initially, the pain was maybe a chronic 3-4 (see below).  I'm currently averaging level 5-6 chronic pain.  This is constant, 24 hour pain - especially relevant when REM cycles offer the only real respite, and while drifting into or out of sleep it's always there - just me and it on the pillow. In bed, what this looks like is laying in a position for 1-2 minutes while the pain builds, and then having to turn my head when it becomes too uncomfortable

Pain scales are hard to establish, but I generally rate thusly:

1. slight: am I even in pain? (have to really think about it to feel it)
   
2. very minor: pain there but barely (stubbed my toe this morning)
3. pretty minor: pain is there but no big deal (day after workout)
4. minor: pain is there but can be ignored (recovering from common cold)
5. kind of uncomfortable: pain is there but can mostly be ignored (bad allergies)
6. uncomfortable: pain hard to ignore (minor common cold)
7. pretty uncomfortable: pain hard to ignore and maybe can't work (bad common cold)
8. very uncomfortable: can't work or do anything (flu)
9. extremely uncomfortable: pain can't be ignore, intense bad thoughts
10. horrific: dear god screaming make it stop?

This is all of course subjective, and doesn't really take into account the psychological effect of chronic suffering.  For instance, when in a foul mood, the sensitivity to pain greatly increases, as do the negative thought.  Alternatively, when engaging in highly reinforcing activities, the pain can be ignored much more easily.  I will often be too sore to go in to work (pain 6/7), but at home, after taking ibuprofen, acetaminophen and a gummy (usually 5 mg of THC), I find myself in a state of happy distraction and doing art or other "fun" activities despite the pain.

I was an intense skateboarder (old video), and I tend to think this exacerbated by body's dysfunction.  Although, I still really don't know what that is.  X-rays and MRIs have always been pretty normal.  I've tried many therapies: nutrition, vitamin, chiropractic, acupuncture, cranial sacral, Rolfing, the "Egoscue Method", multiple rounds of physical therapy, yoga, hot yoga, pilates, massage, steroid injections, prolotherapy, and now neural blocks.  But all to really no effect.  The best I can surmise is the locus of the pain is always most intense around a lump of scar tissue at the original injury site (right near the C1 cervical Atlas, beneath the base of my skull).  The pain is intense and dull, triggering muscles spasms that are near-constant around the back of my neck and in the past 10-15 years extending into lumps of muscle knots on the sides and front of my neck, under my jaw.  The pain and stiffness then radiates up around my skull into my temples and sinuses, as well as down over my shoulders, into my thoracic spine, as well as down my biceps and triggering tightness in my inner thighs and calfs.  Any excessive physical activity can be a trigger - certainly strenuous lifting or arms work.  But so to can allergies or colds.  Stress worsens it, as does depression - which the pain also contributes to (a fun little feedback loop there).

I can't really skate anymore - I basically gave up serious skating around 2000, after about 15 years of daily practice.  I can skate - but the pain keeps me from being able to skate like I used to, and what I can do is basically just carving around, little grinds, little ollies, rock and rolls... and these just aren't that fun.  When I skated I liked to go fast and reckless , doing tricks and shit.  And if I can't do that it's not very interesting to me.

So, putting waking and semi-conscious hours of the day at 18, multiply that by 33 years, you get 216,810 hours of constant pain.  Hey - I'm an expert!!