Maybe

   Maybe we're all hostage to a corporate-government cabal of outright grifters and psychopathic nerds. Maybe our sclerotic empire is shuffling toward catastrophe, riding the AI hustle into Weimar-style inflation and debt oblivion, and listing toward fascism. Maybe our tax dollars seem only to sharpen the longest knives, to build the bombs our proxies drop on children and families in countries we couldn't have located on a map before we read about them in the news, while our government threatens our neighbors, extorts our allies, and terrifies and incarcerates the most vulnerable among us, then turns around and pawns our wild lands and clean waters for short term gain with all the ethical concern of a cancer cell. 

     Maybe the politicians on both sides are bought off, and the money intercedes like a clutch between the gears so that our votes are too often a ritual pantomime. Maybe we're bought off ourselves, as we dither and temporize, perform for our tribes, playact identity politics and entertain ourselves to death, walking around on the stilts we simultaneously lengthen and saw through a little farther each day. 

     Maybe we all wander the digital funhouse, never sure what's real, walking headlong into mirrors, lost in certainty and righteous anger at our neighbors, some preferring Hollywood nostalgia, the easy lie, the tax break, the reflexive jingo patriotism that Johnson called the last refuge of a scoundrel, while others strive for the valor of a correct opinion, as long as it doesn't interfere with our wealth or comfort, always willing to join the good fight on any issue that flatters our pieties, so long as it requires no discussion of class, and doesn't jeopardize our place near the top, just below the billionaires and the multimillionaires, where we've pulled up the ladder behind us and barricaded ourselves into expensive neighborhoods with artisanal bread and expensive coffee, and people who speak and dress just like we do, while the rest scrape. 

     Maybe we ignore the desperation and despair that drive the opinions of our neighbors, Americans like us, whom we've written off as beneath our contempt, the ones who fly the flag without irony, send their kids into the military and work two or three jobs, mortgaging their futures as their real wages decline year over year, sold out by both parties and ready to tear the whole thing down; or maybe the ones who hang "Fuck ICE" signs in their windows and quietly drive their undocumented neighbors to work and prenatal appointments. 

      Maybe this is all true. It's no stretch to say that this world we've made is a furnace and a charnel house, and modern history reads like a butcher's bill. But we still have to locate our work — even, or especially, when that work is play — and go like hell, and use what we have to help, however we can. 

     Much of the time it feels pointless, self-indulgent, and meaningless. But it's everything. Every time you think of quitting, consider your life without the ones who lighted your way: the art they made, the stories they told, the songs they wrote, the love and work they put into the world. Then keep going. It makes no sense, and it's the only thing that makes sense.

*****

TOUR  — We're in Chicago (Berwyn) tonight (10/21), in Minneapolis on Thursday (10/22), and then out to Thompson and Fargo, ND. to finish up the tour (10/23,25). In November we'll work our way up the coast of California to Oregon and Washington, and I'm breaking even, if I'm lucky. 

Numbers are down across the board for live music, attendance down twenty-five or thirty percent with the war and tariffs and inflation, and that percentage is where the whole of our margin resides. Flights, hotels, gasoline, rental vans, food: everything has gone up in price except us. 

I know it's hard to justify a night on the town when you're barely getting by. So I'm asking you to please share this with anyone you know in Chicago, Minneapolis, Fargo, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Portland, Seattle, etc. — any town on our line — so that even a few more people will know we're coming to town. The hardest part is ringing the bell these days.

Or just share it with someone who needs to hear it. I woke up early on the road and wrote it out in a notebook and haven't been able to figure out what to do with it, so I thought I'd send it to you.

Get out there and do your work, and vote your conscience, early and in-person if you can, and then be ready for whatever comes next. Ready with fierce love, and courage.