Message to Zsolt:
It’s been a week, man. Bunker to bunker, how’s it holding up in Serbia? I can’t look at the news. I get filled in by Christal and my buddy Warren. We do Borderlands 3 together once or twice a week for a bit and catch up. Between the two of them I get enough of a picture to know I don’t even want to look.
And this is coming from a guy who looked meticulously for years and years. So closely. Who tracked the progress of this coming meltdown so carefully that people thought he was crazy. And now here it is.
And I’m not even in touch with my own family. Have I told you that? You might have gathered that if you’ve been reading the blog. When I say I’ve had some psychotherapeutic breakthroughs with the help of this remedy, I’m talking about deep family shit. We will, in good time, go into that. But not without proper medication and maybe some good beer. Preferably in a country that is not falling apart.
Here’s how it looks to me in a nutshell, from the pieces I gather through my two news sources. Remember, I used to torture Christal by reading the worst news, all the time. I really kept up. I was smart. Brilliant even, at synchronizing sources and tallying everything up and getting the big picture. I did hard work like that for years and years with absolutely no reward. Other than increased anxiety.
I take that back. I did it because it was my destiny. Think I’m kidding?
Now, like Luke when he puts away that scanner and trusts the Force, I’m not looking. I don’t even need to. I might be missing a few climate details that I would definitely have picked up if I were still in the swimming pool of what is still called news, and which would have definitely flattened me and killed this final disco dance at the end of it all experience I’m having. Otherwise, I’m pretty confident that I can put together a coherent picture from casually talking to my two sources.
I’ve been saying to Christal recently that we are all in a general panic right now. There’s no focus. When WWI happened, people knew what to be afraid of. There had never been bombs dropped like that before on cities. And people focused on the bombs, the sirens, and the worry that one might drop on you. Later, in the 80s, my generation had a similar, more abstract anxiety about whether a nuclear missile would land on our house.
These were new innovations. Bombs from a plane, then self-guided bombs that could kill everything living. We could focus our fear on those innovations. Right now we are on the precipice of a new innovation. It might be aliens, it might be some kind of divine reveal, a la apocalyptic predictions, or it could just be a new weapon. It’s usually a new weapon. Usually not a deus ex machina. I’m trying to be the deus ex machina, but we’ll see.
So we’re waiting for the next new weapon to focus all our fear on. That’s what I’ve been saying since about Christmas. Well, for now at least, it appears the ‘weapon’ I was saying was going to appear is the AI model just released by the Chinese.
You see, we Americans have gone totally crazy, as you know. We allowed capitalism to spiral out of control, and greed ate everything, and the bad guys just kept taking and taking and taking until we’re now on a burning planet and one billionaire gets to tell the president what to do.
Along the way, we put all of our faith in new technology. First, we put our faith in the way social networks would allow us to keep everyone in check while also opening all new avenues for ad revenue coming from people who don’t even have a budget for it. Tremendous.
Then the social network fever turned into AI fever, and a man who runs OpenAI became the most powerful person in all of technology. He’s it, man. The rest are still billionaires, but this guy is now king. As a king, he instructed the president who just exited after one term, and the Congress who supposedly hated that president, to draft up a plan to save America.
He told them, “I’m the King of Tech, and I know how to solve everything!” And they listened. And he said unto them: “We need microchips! Fast, fast microchips. It’s like a nuclear race now, but with processors. They’re going to have faster processors that require less energy and we have to get there first! In order to do that, we should take all the taxpayer money that should be spent on food and housing and medicine (#VISION2025) and give it to a big chipmaker who will of course use all that money to suddenly innovate really, really fast because that’s of course exactly how it works!”
So we did that. Because billionaire culture met up with peak corruption at exactly the same time AI became the new weapon.
And guess what? The chipmaker’s stock went through the roof! And all of the politicians who were drafting this law got in on what is kind of a ground floor compared to what was going to happen to the stock value, so all of the legislators got rich too! It was beautiful.
But then something happened. And it just happened recently.
China said, hello. We have an AI too. It is much better, much faster, and it requires much less energy.
And you know what? Somehow, mysteriously, just before the public caught wind of this, all those politicians who got so much richer off of that chipmaker’s stock managed to sell all their stock so they wouldn’t lose a penny when the King of Tech’s infallible plan came tumbling down. Amazing!
And then America was not on top anymore. That’s right now. And now we have something to focus on. Because, brother: we should count the days left where the dollar is the world standard. The clock is ticking, and rich people are now going to run from America as fast as fucking possible.
Take all the money out of this thing that they inflated to have one or two more yachts to cruise over the remains of migrant boats. You know, instead of feeding, housing, and giving free medicine to the people.
So, just like your guys in Serbia, our guys are at their end game. There’s nothing left. And now we all will suffer for their excess. And everybody who fought for the American idea of freedom and died for it, all those souls who believed in free speech back in the day…well, I guess they fought for nothing.
Unless I can turn this around, single-handedly. Myself. It’s up to me now. Just like it’s always been. Stephen will fix it. He will fix even the impossible, and when he can’t fix the impossible, we’ll blame him for the fact that it can’t be fixed. You know. Because we need something to focus all this fear on. Oops. I think that was the spoiler to our medicated beer story about my twisted family life I promised you. At least I’ve saved you the details.
Meanwhile, on the street level, I’m still being Mr. Music while I’m trying to save the world (and working projects for money to boot). After all that struggle and frustration about how to get a damn app to just play local files in a playlist, I finally realized I can just use Soundcloud. So I forgave myself for overlooking a solution I already knew, because, really, it’s not even local with Soundcloud. That’s why it didn’t occur to me. You have to pay to play local files on Soundcloud. But — who cares. It’s private, so it amounts to the same thing, and I can actually play with the album cover and give each track an individual artwork cover. Fun! I include a link to the private playlist below.
I love what you did with the light switching on and then Lynch-swooshing into Saving Daylight. Do you think you can layer in the effect I’m attaching to make it even more Lynchy? And yes, your thought to add a similar closer to When I Was Young is awesome. Do that, please. And then, for God’s sake man. Send me the second invoice. I think we’ve finished this baby.
Speaking of babies, one of the reasons it’s taken me a minute to respond is Baby Can’t Be Helped dropped today. It was a pretty amazing run-up. Just having fun in the command center, Monday to Friday, fingers on the controls of all the social accounts, and finally getting the hang of it. I posted some TikTok videos that have generated some interest, if you ever feel like checking those out for a laugh. You’ll get a sense of how I’m responding publicly to what’s happening. I really want to encourage hope for everyone on both sides, but it seems to do that, I have to not look. For now, anyway.
I can’t wait for us to get enough traction with the album for it to roll into some kind of visa for you. And then we will be free to make the last great music anyone can record before the planet dies.
The producer replied to my wonderful, really human message about his work and his dad’s work and how much it meant to me that someone with his stature would reach out to me through my website like that, and he replied with basically a rate card. And his prices include all the work you do. So now I’m thinking — do I really need a producer?
Or do I need a good studio engineer who wants to collaborate as equals on some cool new sounds, for less than what a producer takes, and with more freedom? Food for thought re LP 2. Jaymes With A Why.
Alright my brother. I’m winding down at the end of a long week that ended with a more or less successful birth of Baby. Writing this to you over a good j and a good cuppa java is my ultimate release party for this track. Really couldn’t ask for anything better or more appropriate.
Your mixing magic shines through every single play of Baby and King Jaymes. You and I make up some kind of double helix.
Love from the final chapter,
SJ