Category: Blogging About Blogging

Zen and the Art of Catbox Maintenance

I enjoy cleaning out the catbox. I consider this a great spiritual achievement. One could easily find it an icky chore, but no, with proper ventilation, attitude, and gloves, it is a gateway to enlightenment.

The weekend, that grand invention of labor unions in recent centuries, I embrace it. Work has been good, creative work has been good, today I swim, do laundry and housecleaning and “clean up nice,” as mentioned in my recent “Doin’s.”

There’s this cafe in North Beach, I don’t recall the name, I don’t know if it’s there anymore, but on a nice Spring or Summer evening in 1986ish I sat there in the open front next to the sidewalk at a table with a girlfriend and we sipped cappuccinos and watched people, and I felt entirely where I wanted to be. It’s a nice feeling, sometimes, to be right where you are in the moment and not feel you need to be somewhere else. A luxury, a blessing, a great luck. That cafe is now the Happy Accident Cafe in

Much of my earlier youthful creative output was driven by a certain anxiousness, desire and dissatisfaction, wanting to be elsewhere, frustration. I think that’s true of a lot of rock n’ roll and youthful music in general, right? I Can’t Get No Satisfaction, one of my favorite songs of all time, I mean it’s all right there in the title.

I put my angst to fairly good use, I think, in younger days. At some point, adulthood beckoned and I didn’t know what to do with it. Ya wanna have kids? Nah, not ready. Ya wanna do something other than chase your band dreams? Nah, not ready. I was a teenager until about the age of 50, I think. It was fun. I recommend postponing adulthood, for those who want to. Some of my friends were born grown up. Old souls, already mature as kids, comfortable in their shoes. Satisfied. It takes all kinds.

Now I do the adulting, in my own peculiar way. It is also fun. Why did the world decide to go stark raving mad just as I decided to grow up? One of life’s mysteries. What next, I wonder?

I do have a few remembrances to write for some recently passed friends. I’ll see if I can actually do that. Very adult-y, this dying business. In youth, that seemed more abstract.

Gotta do the exercise, take the vitamins, eat and sleep right. Oh my I must prepare my taxes also. With all the patience and Zen of catbox cleaning. Severe adulting, that.

Oh, THANKS sincerely for your purchases of The UpTones In the Studio 1987 EP, and my recent solo material, and other Berkeley Cat caterwaulings! It is, dare I say, SATISFYING! To get our material out there, and speakin’ o’ UPtones, there’s actually more, where that came from. Archaeology to be continued..

How to stylize a name, funny thing, right? We started, it was The Up-Tones! ..complete with the dash and exclamation mark, and why not? Still my favorite, honestly. There was also an arrow on the left side of the U, pointing up, naturally, and sometimes the dash was also an arrow. We loved arrows. Very Mod, the arrow thing. We did shows and in the newspaper ads the stylizing was text only, usually all-caps, just “THE UPTONES” and sometimes even the utterly mundane “UPTONES” ..I was disproportionately mad, about that. Called the club, “Our name is THE UpTones, can’t you?!” To no avail, usually. And they never did the arrows. I have an arrow pointing up on my arm – my only tattoo – and a useful reminder of which way is up. Got it when I was 18. A bit faded, but it remains! As tattoos do.

Well anyway, cheers to all here, thanks for following this mewsletter and hopefully enjoying some of our records. Stay well and do the necessary adulting, I say, but not toooo much!

Eric Din,
BCR Catbox Maintenance Officer (CMO),
signing off

cropped from a poster from 1983

Republished from the Berkeley Cat Records Mewsletter:

A Renaissance Within

And some delightful paradoxes

There’s a wonderful quote, attributed to Henry J. Kaiser –

“When your work speaks for itself, don’t interrupt.”

I don’t know in what context the famous industrialist said that, but I generally like the advice. I also can’t completely follow it.

Someone else said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Seems that’s been attributed to a number of notables, its origin unclear.

I ponder these quotes as I find they present certain paradoxes. Artists have to say something about their art, usually, even if it’s minimal. “Here’s a song I wrote last week,” actually gives an audience a lot of context. From that we know we’re going to hear a new song, and an original song, by the singer. So naturally we then perceive it differently than we might if the singer simply started in playing the song cold.

Then you have artist statements, which can present a resounding rejection of Mr. Kaiser’s advice, as illustrated by one of my favorite interweb properties, the Instant Artist Statement Bollocks Generator. (Hours of fun, that!)

And I can see dancing about architecture. Surely, why not? Dance about anything, I dance about frogs. I will swim about poetry this morning.

This last year or two, or four or five – the hazy continuum of societal madness we surf, trying not to lose our own minds – I’ve been on a prolific creative roll as a songwriter and home record producer. As I’ve mentioned before, part of it is therapy, for lack of a better word, processing it all, and trying to keep my head and heart right. And I have become quite free with my words – free associating, as they call it in Therapylandia – trusting instinct with curiosity to learn what’s going on between my ears.

In the course of these adventures, I started calling some of my songs Beet Poetry, in an obvious nod to bongos and the Beat Generation, and vegetables.

One of my favorites from this batch is Me And The Little This Is Fine Fire Doggie

Really fine therapy, that was, and I’ve been grateful to learn from some friends that it provided them too with some soothing medicine.

So looking back on recent years, I’ve made more new original song recordings than I ever expected or planned to. Paradoxes upon paradoxes, these interesting times provide a wealth of inspiration, though I would prefer a stable, rational society. Travel and friends and work and family and conversations and births and deaths all in, I seem to be inspired generally, these days. And I have this new song I’ll publish this weekend, which is a celebration of all of that.

There’s another quote I remember from childhood, “The world is as you see it.” It’s from a famous Indian guru, whose name escapes me, though I’m pretty sure the idea has been passed down for millennia. It’s another imperfect but useful thought, and I work with it. Since we are each a perceiver of the world, the world exists within each of us, and therefor how we perceive it is how it is. And extending from that, those around us may tend to pick up our vibes and see things similarly — I mean, if you’re around people who are miserable, that can tend to rub off, and same if you’re around happy healthy creative joyful generous people. So a gift we can offer others is to try and be well and happy ourselves.

The Vogons, brilliant invention of Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, are not happy beings. They are miserable, and they would prefer it if you are as well. I liked it best when they were safely ensconced in that hilarious work of fiction, but somehow, apparently, they have leaped out of the book and were put in charge of our federal government. This too shall actually pass, and I address the matter directly, in my new song!

Let us dance about architecture and eels, celebrating life, the universe and everything, standing on the desks, my Captains, and willing a Renaissance to be.

Yours fondly,

Eric Din
Berkeley Cat Records

reposted from my Substack

Reblogging – On The Great Musical Rabbit Hole That Is “Pandora Picks”

One of the highlights in my time working at Pandora has been contributing to and enjoying the monthly Pandora Picks playlists. These are curated by Eric Shea, with single-song selections from some of our fellow Pandora music-heads. We listen to a lot of music here of course, and since we each know and love different sets of genres, the Pandora Picks playlists tend to be very eclectic. You’ll have a classic jazz piece next to an experimental metal track, followed by an underground hip-hop gem, and so on. I have found these playlists to be music-discovery treasure troves, along with the engaging and informative spoken intros from the pandas who picked ’em. I haven’t missed one opportunity to contribute a pick since I joined the team here, and I look forward to it each month.

Read on and listen forth!->

https://community.pandora.com/t5/Creators-Blog/On-The-Great-Musical-Rabbit-Hole-That-Is-quot-Pandora-Picks-quot/ba-p/191493

Funs and Thank Yous

Good mornings and Happy Fridays

I appreciate the “This is the wrong future” voice memos a few of y’all have sent in! This weekend I’ll mix the rest of ‘em in and make a final mix of

Meanwhile, here’s an amusing.. amusement, from our beloved Bandcamp:

What you need to know about evolving global tariff policies

It’s.. a

!!

But hey, a lot of people are saying..

Gosh darn it.

I miiiiiight do one other more remix before releasing this album to the streaming wilds. Possibly maybe

since the bass tone is a little bunchy clunky, and I haven’t yet determined if I think that’s a feature or a flaw.

I DEFINITELY support the California redistricting measure and hope you will too. It’s awful that it comes to this, but come to this it has.

Oh, speaking of remixes, I mentioned a while ago that I made some minor remixes of some of these songs, for this album, after releasing the initial mixes as singles. A fun bit: Those minor remixes really helped the tracks, to my ear. The title track in particular, This Worldly World, really benefited from this extra attention. And, I realized another thing about that song, which continues to reveal itself to me, in its journal-like way: The whole song is a tribute to my friend and career counselor Luke, not just the last verse. I mean, I think, as songs do, it can mean anything to anyone, and I hesitate to spell out its meaning to me, but for this one, I will. The first verse:

If I could just see round the bend
Or someone tell me how it ends
I wonder what-ifs leading to and from that day
Could it have gone another way?
I honestly can’t say

Could be about any pivotal day, right? When a fateful decision was made, or a dreadful accident happened, or an election went terribly wrong, even. Right? Anything. And let that meaning be open. But what it was, when I finished that song, was Luke’s suicide. It’s hard for me to even write that word. It remains impossible for me to fully grasp. Luke was infinitely successful, and brilliant, and widely loved. I’ll speak of him from time to time as I unpack all this and move along.

Shannon Wheeler drew the lovely cover artwork for my original single of This Worldly World, and on seeing it, I thought, that’s also an album cover. So, some months later, it is. Much love to you and yours,

Eric

Crafting Craft Music in This Worldly World

Greetings fellow travelers.

One of my favorite moments on my new album This Worldly World
is the outro on Tropical Snow. That whole piece flowed out of me in a fun process of observing, really. I listened and let my hands do what was asked of them by the music as it emerged. Took a few short hours and was very complete, and the ending part was a delicious surprise.

Sometimes, sometimes and not always but sometimes for me, creating original music is easy and fun and satisfying. It’s almost always fun and satisfying in some unique ways, but not always so easy. Tropical Snow was all of these, and when I hear it, I hear a calm and peaceful place in myself which I’m glad exists, and that I can visit sometimes.

A nerdly guitar note – I used my Joe Meek VCQ3 optical compressor rather heavily on this track, especially near the end. Hard compression can be a really cool guitar effect, but I usually don’t have much use for it. For this, however, it was just the medicine on the lead line near the end, when the song fades into the sunset.

Semi-nerdly related notes – I used, on this album, three main instruments: a Martin acoustic, a Fender B-bass, and my one-off custom Telecaster-ish bit of magic which came to me by luck and circumstance decades ago. For the drum tracks, some of them are me playing hand-percussion at home, others are edited and looped studio tracks from some of the great drummers I’ve worked with in sessions over recent years. The vocals are almost all mine, and I still don’t use autotune for anything. It’s a choice, not one to be on a soapbox about, but a solid choice for me because I like the unique quirks in our human voices, and I do not consider them imperfections at all. I wish less recording artists and producers would squash the “real” out of their human voices, but that’s just me.

As for soapboxes, I will get on mine to say I think Ai-generated music and other Ai-gen content is a Bad Thing That Causes Harm. Caps for emphasis. Especially regarding artistic or creative work, it is antithetical to creativity. It makes me sick and I wish it would go away. There will be examples of gooder (sic) uses of it, but I think in sum it is Bad For The World (more caps, more emphasis). Part of my passionate opinion there comes from my knowledge of the joy and discovery involved in creating (ahem) CRAFT MUSIC! A term which makes me cackle – it came from a colleague of mine in jest – he said that’s what music made “the old way” or words to that effect may eventually be called, like Craft Beer and such. Slow food? Anyway I worry for younger folks who enter a world where this exists, where you can text-prompt a thing to make a thing and there it is and whoop, you’ve done little with your hands, little with your mind, and less with your heart. I hope instead they go to music lessons, practice their scales diligently for hours upon hours, feel the exhilaration of mastering a difficult passage which had once seemed daunting and out of reach, and then play it joyfully with their hands, with their hands. And I’m sure many of them will, and I hope folks encourage it. It does wonders for a body and soul. I guess I wouldn’t harumph so hard about Ai-slop if it were not for the absolutely horrible environmental consequences it brings, at a time when we should be actively and literally saving the earth from doom. This is of course, the kind of thing I rave and rant about in some of my songs.

Well, I hope you enjoy my Craft Music, Slow Food record, made by me mostly, with the help of a few great human friends, and a pair of wonderful cats. Still waiting a few days til I finalize track 14 – which will have a few more voices chiming in at the end, per this fun. Then after that I’ll send it to all the streaming services.

OH! Also, streaming release of Russ Ellis‘ Songs From The Garden album TBA soon, in another post. It’s been available on CD and on Bandcamp since November of 2021, and along with being a personal favorite of mine, it is also Berkeley Cat Records’ biggest seller. It too, was made by human voices and hands! Quite a great bunch of ’em, in fact.

Til next time, Good morning and good luck,

Eric

Berkeley supervises a mix

Trees Falling, Hearing Them,

Migrating Geese, and, Happy June 1 <3

Occasionally I’ll write something and then revisit to edit it a few times (or more than a few) as I discover exactly what meaning I seek to convey. Or even, simply, understand what it is that I am trying to understand. Writing is discovery, often, I find, and sometimes it’s easy, sometimes not. I joke that songwriting (or any kind of writing) is for me either easy, or impossible. There’s a grain of truth to that. Sometimes my best work happens when I put in very little effort and find myself laughing and smiling as a piece makes itself with the aid of my hands and voice. And as I’ve observed before, I think that may be “The Muse” rewarding me for the other times in which I sweat and toil through dark puzzles in search of a distant beckoning source of possible light. Dramatic? Why yes, Petunia, it can be.

Hi! CaturSunday, had a nice morning walk, saw bunnies (yes rabbits) and some honking geese on their way north. Humbly grateful for this visit to our unique and lovely planet, may we care for her.

I’ve received a few really sweet notes recently, from folks out there who have somehow found and listened to some of the music I’ve written and/or produced, and it really means a lot to me. I just used the word “really” twice in one sentence, and for me, this must mean I really mean it! The ol’ tree falling in the woods metaphor, we artists and writers must deal with it. You put a record out online and at the moment you upload it, untold thousands of other tracks are uploaded to the same platforms, many of them now “generated” by “AI” (Artificial Idiocy? Apocalyptic Imbroglio?), and amid them, also some brilliant, heartfelt works from actual hoomans. So in all that context.. I’m glad our “trees” are heard and appreciated sometimes. Thank you.

What else? On nothing. Here’s our Madison Avenue Man single floating along a nice cool summery river, courtesy of our pals at Distrokid.

All best,

Eric Din
Berkeley Cat Records Chief Tree Forest Listening Officer (CTFLO)

Oh, PS! For clarity and context –

  1. I didn’t write “Madison Avenue” – that’s a cover, you can read about it here, and
  2. The blog post I edited a few times, leading to this train of thought, is here.

Exile On FB Street

Peculiar end to my Facebook saga:  After trying unsuccessfully to quit, numerous times over the years since 2007, I was unceremoniously banished on December 24, 2024. They won’t tell me why other than that they can’t confirm my identity. Well, that’s a chuckle, because, I can’t, really, either!  Who am I?  OK, well I mostly know. Eric Din. Eric Roy Dinwiddie. Same same.

But FB. I could go further with the effort to get back in, but nah. I wasted some time there, as one does. It’s a time-wasting engine, designed to suck your energy oh and yes they are ruining society in myriad ways. Bye bye. So the 1500 or so people who I was friends with there, they can still find me if they want to, and anyway FB wasn’t showing most of them my posts anymore, which was frustrating.  If I shared a cat photo it would get all sorts of likes and loves and awwws, but post a new song and like, two, three people respond. I get it, I prefer cats too. But how much is indifference from my pals, and how much is FB simply not showing the Bandcamp or other external links to them?  No way to know, and weeds grow in the mind.

I have less weeds in the absence of all that.

Twitter, I quit that venue the day whatshisbutt took over and called it “X,” I mean, come on, the worst rebrand since New Coke, and as much a failure.  Everyone should quit but they won’t cos I don’t know why.  I guess the more followers one has there, the harder to leave, and I get that.

So now this blog is a tree falling in the woods.  I wonder if anyone sees it.  I could look at the stats but I don’t care that much.  I’ve become indifferent to indifference.  I feel at peace with myself and my work and my art and my cats and the earth.

Last year saw some monumental disappointments, near and far from me.  My longtime friend and more recent career coach died by his own hand, a little more than one year ago, and that’s still very hard for me to even comprehend.  His choice, he rests in peace, no judgement here, but I do wish he had chosen to stay.  Then the Nov. 5 debacle to end all debacles.  And right now not one but two of my dear old friends are dealing with cancer, and I pray for their victories and health.

What does it all add up to here for me on this Thursday morning with a little welcome rain approaching this weekend?  Gratitude.  For this moment and all the moments.  For all the moments with each of the aforementioned friends, which I remember so vividly.  I have in this life tried to spend my time with people who savor life and music and art and tend to treat themselves and others with love and respect.  And the mind in its vastness can hold so many memories and some in startling detail.

60, I’ll be 60 soon.  With some amount of surprise, I now feel that’s an accomplishment in itself.  I like the number, I like the age, so much more than I had earlier expected to, somehow.  I keep my memories with me, they are wealth.  Even the hard ones, all gifts.  And in some contrast to the state of the world, my own life has been full of luck and good work and good play and wonder and joy over these recent years.  We never know when something will go awry and I am grateful for every good moment.

This song, which went live in the streaming worldly world today, was a nice step in my journey, dealing with some of the above.

Nerding Forth About Time Signatures, Time Machines, AI, and The Future

A few weeks ago I experimented with a Ska pattern in 7/4 time. It worked spectacularly and I loved the result, so completed and published it as Inside the All Night Ska Disco at Area 51.

Just yesterday I started messing with a ska-adjacent pattern in 6/8 meter, and it got very tropically islandy shangri-lala delighty, so I am eagerly following through with that.

By humorous coincidence, yesterday I came across a ridiculous, probably AI-written, “summary” of Ska music, in the increasingly rotten Inter-mess. In this garbled splutage, it was stated that Ska music is in 4/4 time. Fie, unimaginative robot!  Ska music is usually in 4/4 time, get it right. It IS in 4/4 until someone does otherwise, and I am sure plenty of earlier examples do exist before mine.

“The future is unwritten,” Joe Strummer reminded. Good thing to note, generally, and why especially now, I would think.

So far my attempts at creating a magic sci-fi time machine to put every eligible voter back to Nov. 4 2024 for a make-up exam have failed. We certainly shouted it from the rooftops last year, said loudly and clearly what will happen if that election goes south. It. Is. Now. Exactly. As. Predicted. Whoopsiebears, now they mad. Wiser persons than I may understand it.

I did manage to fashion a 1983 time-capsule, that was fun. Orwell said there might be trouble, and, well.

Good morning!  I’m sipping a nice Peet’s French Roast, brewed in an old-School drip coffee maker from the before time. We’ve probably had this trusty machine since the ’90s, ever faithfully delivering its oh so important yield at the start of each day. Obsolete it is not.

Driving a Chevy Bolt, and GLAD I never got a Tesla. Horrified, that what has been one of the leading EV-makers is now so irrevocably tainted.  It’s not fun times for Tesla owners, as drama ensues, and presumably used models are not fetching “Blue Book” as the brand plummets straight to hell.

What next, we wonder?  I dunno, Joe, the Future is full of Uncertain Tea. But as you say, unwritten.

I’ll keep recording new original songs whenever the inspiration strikes me, and post them here or here per my whim. Whims are good for artistic direction, I find. These tunes are also in the big ol’ streaming world, including now YouTube, so, find ’em anywhere – Pandora, Apple Music, DEEZER, Spotify..  As the pipelines get flooded and polluted by AI-generated content, I’ll be among the artists creating our own material. For what it’s worth, and I don’t know what it’s worth, but it feels right. As long as it feels right, I will do it. One small part of the vast human discussion. The cats seem to enjoy it.

Audio Journal Of A Music Curator

In 2017, I started working as a contractor for Pandora Radio in Oakland. Pandora was creating their on-demand streaming service, integrating it with their classic radio service, and I joined a team optimizing music metadata for this launch. I took to it right away, loved the work and the people there, continued on, and SXM eventually hired me full-time.

After a year or so, I started adding little by little to what is now a 230+ song playlist. Most are songs I’ve come across while doing my work as a music metadata specialist and catalog curator here.  Sometimes a track really stands out to me in some way, and I add it to this personal playlist,
Din’s Pandora Picks.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been listening back to it anew, and frankly I’m blown away by the quality of so much of it. It’s an extremely eclectic, genre- and era-agnostic listen, with the only common thread being that this is all stuff that rocks me in some way.

It happened that The Specials, on my shortest short list of favorite bands, released their ENCORE album around that time.  Track 1 is their reprise of The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum, which I also had the pleasure of seeing them play live at the Fox Oakland on their final tour, just down the street from the Pandora office.

No One Sleeps When I’m Awake by Canada’s The Sounds is a stunning rocker with a unique mood, and brilliant vocals and instrumental work. I found myself playing it on repeat, soaking up every detail, in the car, and on my earbuds and home speeks.

The set runs roughly chronologically from there.  Songs I found recently are at the end, with my earlier discoveries nearer the beginning. A great majority of the selections are in the proverbial “long tail.” Some started there and then got much more popular, and a few are old favorites I arbitrarily added along the way cos they compelled me!

At this point, I’m pleased about the whole playlist and quite delighted to share it publicly. Tooooo many favorites to call out, but that’s why it’s a PLAYlist! And you may play it.

Hop on in, tune in, turn up, rock out. I’ll continue to add to this as time goes on, whenever the inspiration strikes.

Self Care, Care Self, Caturday Musings Selfie

A friend of mine posted on Bluesky yesterday, “my self-care skills aren’t up to this.” This summarized concisely and eloquently what I think many of us are wrestling with presently.

I seem to renew my commitment to taking good care of myself often, with varying results. Today it means waking up early and reading and writing a bit as the cats do their pre-dawn romp, and preparing to learn to play Pickleball. Indeed Pickleball. A fast-growing social sport easier to learn than tennis, and, social.

Reading and writing and listening a bit. The amazing wealth of good material at our fingertips, should we care to curate the experience actively, that Internet of yore, still exists to a degree. In the late 1990s I was thrilled by the possibility that somehow there wouldn’t be a “mainstream” anymore, in terms of culture and music, or just about anything.

I was a huge fan of Google, when they first popped up. For me, their original simple site was ideal, and really it was the first Search Engine (remember those fancy words?) that actually worked for me. Their web-crawling text searching gizmo delivered desired results consistently, and they pretty much blew the competition in that space away, pretty quickly.  I remember finding websites and then later blogs, while these were new emerging forms of communication and creativity, and immensely enjoying the sort of decentralization of it all.

As a musician and band guy, the whole world changed when I was introduced to the MP3 file, I think in ’97. Boom, level playing field for access and distribution, you can send a song to a friend or share it out as widely as you please, and I was all-in, let’s go.  The UpTones had in 1995 released a live CD from a 1989 performance, and around 1999 we made MP3s of a couple of the tracks,  started uptones.com and shared ’em up.

At the time I was part of a startup company called MP3 4U, with Matthew Kaufman and some fellow travelers who believed great things were afoot, a renaissance brewing for both music fans and music creators. And during that time, I watched the stats closely, from our website activities – who was listening, where and for how long, which songs etc. – with these reports I generated from downloaded server logs. It was a great nerdy time, and I loved seeing this view of things.

One UpTones live track, Get Outta My Way, not surprisingly a sort of signature song for the band, started getting an absurd amount of downloads, starting in the Bay Area and then far beyond. I remember the rush I got seeing downloads from Tokyo one morning, it was exciting, we were there, without being there, our music was distributed and available, and we did it ourselves. It was free, of course, we made a loud point of that, buy the CD if you want to, but have an MP3, on us, thanks for listening, right? So eventually that MP3 had a million downloads, and we toasted the occasion at Brennan’s, the storied hofbrau in West Berkeley near our office at the time.

Sipping said beers, the question arose, why not an UpTones show? We hadn’t played one in twelve years by then, and we’re getting emails from kids who have the live CD or MP3s saying do a show already. So we did. Put together a crew with as many original members as poss (6, I think it was!), auditioned some horn players and in walks Jeanne Geiger fresh from her Hayward State music degree and a new chapter of UpTones began. We played at iMusicast. That was a great all-ages venue, silly name and all, and we did maybe five gigs there in the early to mid 2000s. It was a case of one thing leading to another, and I don’t think any of that would have happened if Beserkley hadn’t released that one live album, and the subsequent MP3 adventures.

Things have funneled in the strangest way, now. It seems social media sites with all their promise have really rotted, most acutely Twitter, of course, my god, how hideous that pile. Its dumb new name, its Nazi twit, ugly, ugly ugly. FB which was my jam since 2007, started with a lot of fun and joy and sharing music posts and political fundraisers and random thoughts, oh and kitty pictures. Tons of ’em. But, as things went, the joy eroded from my experience there, slowly over time, to the point where it had become just a habit. Even the pages I maintained there, for Berkeley Cat Records and for the UpTones, lost relevance as FB required payment for “boosting” posts just to have them visible in the feeds of people who had actively chosen to follow said pages. Bait and switch, standard procedure, I guess, but I’m out.

So what do I do now? Well, I blog here, and maintain these little outposts on the Interwebs, sort of like the olden days. I make every effort not to purchase anything via Amazon (100% successful of late). I am having a little bit of engagement on the aforementioned Bluesky, hoping it continues to grow in healthy ways. Healthy. Health. Self-care. Really just saying aloud I need to triple down on that, focus, remind myself, not let this encroaching dark age in but rather simply be aware of it as I live my own renaissance.  Aware of it enough to know I don’t have my head in the sand, but not following the “dailies” – to use a moviemaking analogy. I know them, I voted to prevent this and I know what it is.

“Corruption is just Tuesday, now” I said, in this bit of wordplay, and look, the head in the sand thing!

That was a one-off, and looking at the date.. Wow, January 29, 2024. One year ago. How much has happened in that packed year.

To quote my departed great friend Luke,

All love, soon forward,