March 19th, 2025. Ketchup and downturn.

Institute of Musical Traditions has shown that they can’t sell tickets to folk musicians singing their hearts out, so they’ve booked a Lundi Gras performance instead. March 3rd saw an absolutely deliriously joyous audience dancing to the sounds of Little Red and the Renegades, grateful to tune out the world with beads and accordion at Saint Mark Presbyterian Church in Rockville, MD.

Last night a friend visiting from Louisiana got pretty verbose in his praise of me. Not just for my music but for my perseverance as it comes to community and building musical circles and he seemed pretty disheartened when I revealed unto him that I’m burning out. I feel like I’m betraying people when I’m down. Like I’m supporting too many others.

I let the reels play on my Instagram feed to remind myself what I’m being fed. What’s supporting me? Lots of ads for getting hard and staying hard. Lots of ads for gummies to help me with anxiety and depression. Lots of ads for mood lights and DJ gear. All interspersed with friends’ posts about fascism and fear.

I can look for any and all of the above whenever I want. I miss a feed filled with lizards and frogs and beautiful snowscapes. But that’s not what the algorithm wants me to have right now.

I’m listening to Mike Bragg’s performance from March 9th. I’m that far behind.

Good help is hard to find I guess. When the heat went out at Saint Mark Presbyterian Church in November of 2024, I figured I wasn’t going to have to worry about it for the ilyAYREheart show in 2025. As of March the heat is STILL not functioning in the community hall where Institute of Musical Traditions holds their shows so they’re blasting the temps downstairs and blowing it up the stairs with fans.

I skipped around the audio a bunch to find his two songs. Last night’s open mic in Takoma Park was filled with rage and sadness. One of the first USAID employees cut loose singing his heart out. Songs about ignorance and rising seas and violence and hate. I’ve been hosting open mics off and on for almost 17 years and I’ve never heard the pulse of my performers sound like this. We played through the riots in Baltimore next to glass walls in Harbor East as the texts and phone calls came in. We played through Trump’s first presidency. We played through the Pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine and the deaths and the lies surrounding Israel’s endless wars. We’ve played through wildfires and tornadoes. With our virtual open mics we saw people hiding in closets and people playing on porches suddenly going black as storms suddenly ripped their laptops away.

I’ve never heard our voices sound like this.

I’m a tiny little shepherd who doesn’t know how to do anything for my flock other than to let them scream and that absolutely does NOT seem like enough.

Through friends and family I know about the shootings at the CIA before it hits the news. I wonder if it WILL hit the news. I’m listening to other news interviews and there’s a casual mention of “if we have elections again”. This is just brushed off, not drilled into. Trump is clearly simply ignoring court orders as he’s brushed off being told to do anything all his Life.

I know I’m cynical and hurting in this post. I don’t think any of it’s hyperbole. But to be human is to know that even with the worst (or best) that the world is going to throw at you, you’re still going to die. To persevere in the face of absolutely, fatalistic hopelessness is the underlying substance underneath self-awareness. And so with that in mind, I too was able to really enjoy the music of Little Red and the Renegades, their unique New Orleans-adjacent music, and their very, very loud pants.
I cling to the fact that 1/3 of the country didn’t absolutely vote for a narcistic racist, but that they’re under / mis / mal-informed. Fox is still touting all the WINS going on, and how great the economy is suddenly doing, and about how anything that IS amiss is still the fault of the previous administration. And if you stay solely in your echo chamber, that’s all you can see.

And all-in-all, if we slip into complete capitalistic fascism at the feet of one narcissistic felon sex-offender, does this affect me? Am I still in a school that they’re going to shut down? Do I have a job that they’ll shutter? Do I have a voice on a radio station that they’ll silence? My Life will be shortened by my cost-of-Living but I don’t want to Live in this anyway. I’m just so sad for my friends who’re dying at this time, never to see even the potential end of this regime.

As above, the internet isn’t escapist. I can’t turn off anything much less everything. I’m too weak to just shut it out. Or maybe that means I’m strong enough? We watch television most nights. My high school self would be horrified. It’s not escapist either. What did office / cubicle culture do to the directors of Netflix and Amazon and Apple+? Show me where corporate culture touched you kids… cause you’ve clearly developed issues.

And then remembering car accidents like they happened to me. Some of them did. Heather and I struggling out of our crushed Saturn so many years ago. Dazed in my Volkswagon, coming to halt in the middle of the intersection. Is Will okay? Bleeding in my Saturn, bass guitar crushed through my amplifier. Skidding in my mom’s Pontiac convinced I’d killed my friends, Coke all over the dash.

There absolutely IS stupid overreach when it comes to government regulation, but I believe in averages. That in a democracy it’s ON AVERAGE good for the AVERAGE person. And that that’s where the government’s supposed to come in and make sure that bell curve of “average” helps as many people as is possible, if not always “practical”. But this whole thing that’s been going on with Dark Horse in Annapolis, MD? That’s outside the bell curve. They have a liquor license that covers music, but not dancing, and a) this was an oversight at the beginning that you’d think should’ve been laid out effectively from the get-go, and b) the “difference” isn’t really about the dancing. Apparently “dancing” auto-occurs if there’s more than 2 musicians on stage so for the moment, Dark Horse is limited to solo and duo acts. Now, we can absolutely throw down as a duo but we warned peeps that there shan’t be dancing. Just wrigglin. We did our best. And I’ve carefully chosen a photo that includes no audience. (Heather taking the stage at Dark Horse Annapolis on Thursday March 6th)

Visiting the tree where Maureen died. I’m “friends” on Facebook with the drunk who killed her. Collecting the glass. I was just taken back there forcibly. My mind remembering the stupidity of how beautiful it was but there was still red hair on the bark. I wonder how often James thinks of her, or if you ever get used to the loss of a twin.

I make it sound like there were a lot of car crashes. I guess there were. You grow out of it.

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