11 p.m. tonight, I hopped on a train on the Upper East Side and headed home to Brooklyn after a wonderful dinner. The trip is probably 7 or 8 miles, but for those of you not used to traveling by subway, that equates to about an hour late at night. Those aren't exactly the moments that try men's souls, but it's a great time to have an iPod. I've been gravitating to music from my teens this week, and flipping through the artists, I land on Rush. From there, I hone in on "Spirit of the Radio," from 1980's Permanent Waves.
Music in my teens was a very different thing for me. It wasn't tied down by any form of nostalgia. Even my deep passion for music of the 1960s was really an exploration of something that was new, at least to me. Rush was my second or third concert. My brother Jeff and I went when I was 15 — Moving Pictures tour at the (then named) Brendan Byrne Arena in Jersey's Meadowlands. It was my first experience with a full multi-media show and it floored me. Next time I saw them, I was 30 and being paid to photograph the show for a music publication. As 45 approaches, I plan on seeing them again.
Today, music easily unleashes a wave of nostalgia and an iPod is something to be handled with emotional care. I grew up in the reasonably well-to-do suburbs of Jersey. That's not to say we were wealthy, but certainly comfortable. The towns I lived in — to the best of my memory — lacked any significant people who weren't white and was completely devoid of people who were poor. Looking back on my teen years, I should have been oblivious to the rest of the world, but in truth, I was never more outraged than when I was in high school. I woke up. I realized I was privileged. I realized that my government (this was the Reagan years), was funding destabilizing wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador, recklessly destroying lives for some bizarre ideological reasons that had little to do with reality. I realized the gap between the poor and wealthy was expanding. I watched the transition from Carter's recession to Reagan's "recovery" and realized what mainstream media wasn't talking about: That large portions of America weren't getting a piece of it. That the economic measures that defined a recovery failed to take into account how it impacted the poor and the middle class. This realization hit me when I was 17, and I was disgusted.
But to turn to "Spirit of the Radio":
Invisible airwaves
Crackle with life
Bright antennae bristle
With the energy
Emotional feedback
On a timeless wavelength
Bearing a gift beyond price ---
Almost free...
When I was a teen, reality came into my world via the radio. No, it wasn't public radio or some radio news documentary. It was music. I caught the tale end of an error where adventurous DJs still had the ability to play what they were passionate about. It was Dan Carlisle on WNEW FM coming into my room at midnight and saying "Meet Iggy and the Stooges." It was WBGO introducing a kid in the suburbs to Gill Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson's "Winter in America." It was the end of an period where major labels took risks and radio stations weren't driven by corporate-controlled play lists. The world was coming to me through a stereo.
The DJs and the artist they played were my heroes. They were my grounding in reality. They were the ones who started me on the path to music journalism. And some 15 years later, when I began writing about music, I was driven by the passion to return the favor they did for me: to turn people on to music they'd otherwise would have never heard. Over the 12 years I wrote about music, it never brought me a lot of money. But every time someone thanked me for exposing them to a new sound or an artist thanked me for really taking the time to "get" what they were doing, I counted that as a victory.
But back to high school: Over the following years, I would march on Washington, write letters, get involved with progressive organizations, and set out to change the world. I would later come to realize that no one really cared what a teenager thought about world events. I was angry, frustrated, and unshakingly idealistic. I was determined to change the world if I had to do it one person at a time.
The danger of an iPod is that it carries the entire soundtrack to your life. Nostalgia is a dangerous thing. The music of your youth is loaded with years that have flashed by faster than you ever imagined, lost innocence, and the realization that things are never as simple as they seemed. For me, it carried the hardest realization of my life: You don't get to change the whole world, only your small piece of it. It's a sobering thought, but it makes you think many, many times about how you treat the people whose lives you do impact.
As the ride progressed, in the MTA's typically sluggish style, I realized that my values where the same, but my idealism was gone. I understood a lot as a teenager, but I didn't understand the luxury of outrage. The beauty of being young is two-fold, at least for those whose families have enough money to provide for them: a lack of responsibility and little enough experience on this planet to see how justice is beaten down again and again. It's easy to be outraged when the majority of your day isn't spent busting your ass to earn the money to pay the bills. It's easy to be outraged when you still believe you have the power to change the entire world. It's not that I'm no longer appalled by the injustice of the world, just that the energy to be outraged had been largely beaten out of me. That realization in the sad part of nostalgia.
One day, when I was still in high school, I turned on the radio around midnight, but Dan Carlisle was gone. There had been no farewell broadcast, and I never knew where he ended up, though I imagine it was some station in some other part of the country. His time was passing, though. The days when DJs could get away playing Iggy and the Stooges were coming to an end. I would become a music journalist in the mid-90s, and I would see the major labels unravel under their own greed. I would turn off my radio, and turn to friends and colleagues for new sounds. I would turn to the internet and the many cool, devoted people who still worked in the music industry because they loved music more than then despised the industry. And as I finished my ride home tonight, I wondered where Dan is now, and whether he knows that he brought the world into the sheltered bedrooms of a teenagers many years ago.
For the words of the profits
Are written on the studio wall,
Concert hall ---
Echoes with the sounds...
Of salesmen.
What were the biggest and smallest places you’ve lived in?
Submitted by Jack Yan.
Biggest: My ego.
Smallest: My ego after a bad breakup.
No, this wasn't created to go viral. We were having a low morale day in the We-Care.com office, so being the boss, I made an executive decision to crank George Micheal. As it happened, my developer's cell phone takes half-decent video. I share this because I have no shame.
I've been struggling a lot recently. Not struggling like "going under," but more the type of wrestling you do when you're life feels stressful and insecure.
Feeling insecure is nothing new to me. And, to be honest, it's not necessarily driven by circumstance as much as it is by the inner workings of my mind. These days, I'm finding myself to go through a fair number of mood swings. Not bi-polar mood swings. Really, the more basic kind. Some mornings I wake up just feeling a little bit down. During the day, when I'm engaged, I feel pretty good.
Probably, to talk about it, you need a snapshot of where my life is right now: I'm closing in on a year back in NYC, after 19 years living away in Minneapolis. It's also the anniversary of my taking over as General Manger of a web start up.
When I moved here last February, I was flying. I was discovering or rediscovering life in NYC and my new home in Brooklyn. My job was still in the honeymoon phase, and the work was quite manageable. Final paychecks and vacation time and old freelance checks were still coming in from my previous life in Mpls. The first date I went out on was a woman who was smart, beautiful, and fun. I was enthusiastic from our first meeting and so was she. We both had lives, but both wanted a partner and kids. Everything started falling into place.
And then, everything started to crumble. Despite the enthusiasm, the relationship quickly ended. The extra checks started coming in, and while I couldn't claim poverty, the base costs of living in NYC really hit home. Then the true state of the start-up I'd inherited kicked in, and I found I had longer hours and less money (I have an OK salary with very good profit sharing) ahead of me, at least for the foreseeable future.
Then the economy bottomed out. This hit me in a number of ways. First, I have a modest stock portfolio. Despite being modest, it was the safety net that allowed me to sleep soundly while running a start-up. Even in a worst-case scenario, that portfolio was something that could float me between jobs. It quickly lost half it's value. Then there was the job market. If this start-up didn't work, other jobs were now scarce. Finally, there was the reality of the business itself. Building up a start-up in a down economy is far riskier than in good times.
My dating life took a down turn too. Oh, I've been on plenty of dates, but there's been something cynical about it. I've seen some bad behavior on first dates that has blown my mind. And people dating in their late 30s and early 40s often date looking for a spouse. (As much as I hate to admit it, I've had my brushes with that too.) I think NYC breeds dating cynicism as well. There's something horribly sad about going out on a date where both people really just expect it to go nowhere.
So, I woke up this morning, feeling just a little down, and I had to ask myself why. Why was that real lust for life that I felt before. My safety net maybe somewhat gone, but overall, I'm making more money than I was then. (Our owners are truly good guys. When profit sharing turned out to be farther away than any of us thought, they came through with a raise.) I'm not at imminent risk of losing my job -- though everyone is feeling some risk these days. And I've built up a real nice social network in a short time, so my life was, in that way, better. So what's the difference?
This morning, I sat quietly, and just tried to understand the physical stress I was feeling and see what it meant, and it all came down to hope. I wasn't feeling hope.
Hope is a precious commodity. My first months here were filled with hopes for a new business and a new life. Then things happened that left me under a cloud. Think about hope as a commodity. That's what this whole election was about. When Obama won, there was a surge of hope. That surge, though, has dwindled over the last two months of the outgoing administration. The economy has continued to worsen. Iraq and Afghantistan have not improved. And war has broken out in Gaza. It's like we made a decision for change in November, but we've been stuck with our old failures since then. (And yes, they are our failiures.)
I woke up this morning feeling financially insecure. I woke up this morning accutely aware that I was 42, single, and missing being in a relationship. I woke up this morning feeling ike things I wanted — a relationship, the success of my business, a little more breathing room in my budget — were all out of reach.
But when I stopped to think why I felt so bad, it wasn't my circumstances, it was my loss of hope. Oh, sure, the circumstances are a big influencer. Success for my business would make a personal shift easier, but really, it's about hope. It's about not adding the stress that comes from worrying about failure to the stress that is already inherant in a start up. It's about going into a first date with a sense of fun, flirtation, and possiblity, instead of dragging the pessimism of that past into the picture. It's about looking around at my life right now as saying, Things are pretty good. Becase even in better times, it can all fall apart tomorrow. That's the reality of life. I'm now in the midst of a bad time globaly, but while tomorow remains uncertain, today, my life is still pretty blessed.
Happiness, I'm coming to believe, is less about what you have and more about the hope you can sincerely hold for the future — even in darker times. And nurturing that hope may be the greatest challenge of our lives, because without it, we simply accept what is no matter how unaccaptable the sittuation.
The Washington Times put us right along side Bono, in its December 10, 2008, article Random Acts: Web Purchases Fight Poverty.
Another online Web site hoping to stir up shoppers' altruism is We-Care.com, made up of more than 650 retailers that offer discounts and coupons for a variety of items on gift lists, thereby saving the shopper money. At the same time, each retailer specifies what percentage of the purchases made can go to a nonprofit, school or association of the shopper's choice. "Shopping responsibly means giving back to the community" while engaged in some pleasant activity, the site notes.
How often do you do laundry? Do you have your own washer and dryer or do you have to leave your home?
One of the first lessons of moving back to nyc is that wash and fold service is only slightly more expensive that a laundromat. So, I've stopped doing it, but someone else does it every other week.
Now, the bigger question is, why does everyone of Vox want to know how often everyone else does their laundry?
If you had to be on a reality television show, which one would you pick?
Start-Up Company Survivor. Oh, wait, that's my current role.
What do you see yourself doing on this day next year?
Submitted by Beautifully Broken.
Answering the QotD.
Hey Everyone. I'm on Inside Mac Radio this afternoon. They're interviewing me at 1:09 PT/4:09 ET. You can listen live or download the podcast. It's only 11 minutes long, so take a Bill Break this afternoon.
Update: Turns out the term "live" is being used loosely. The interview doesn't air until 12/13 -- though it will probably hit iTunes sooner.
We-Care.com was mentioned in a NY Post article on charitable giving and holiday gifts!
"'CAUSE'" AND EFFECT: Companies Hope Charitable Gifts Fill the Stockings"
