August 5th and the week before…

Hrm, forgive me… the galleries in the new update of WordPress did NOT work the way I thought they would!

Below – a new-for-me-to-mic instrument : the bowed psaltery! I’ve played them, restrung them, tuned them… never miked one before! Thank you to James BonTempo and TruthTables for bringing one out to Teavolve!

Then, on Thursday night – Kristen and I joined up at the Wieland’s open mic night here in Catonsville before I had to head out to Frederick to play with Rowan. Just enough time to catch Allison’s set before having to head west.

And on Saturday : I volunteered to run sound for the Takoma Park Folk Festival sneak preview which did a great job of presenting one artist from each stage to a SOLD OUT room at El Golfo in Silver Spring, MD.

August 3rd, specifically.

I’ve always Loved conspiracy theories. I grew up frequenting the tiny section of the public library that had a couple of books on UFOs and long-hidden plesiosaurs, I pored over photographs of cattle mutilations and thrilled to the tales of Barney and Betty Hill.

I managed to compartmentalize that pretty well, believing in UFO visitation and believing in POSSIBILITY while also giving a fair amount of skepticism to any passing acquaintance who told me tales of the supernatural because I was okay with cryptids and greys, but ghosts and God were … not outside the realm of possibility but definitely suspect.

The internet came along and all of the above made for thrilling reading, but as I became more able to read peoples’ direct accounts, not their words filtered through the kind of editor that can procure legitimate publication,  I became more and more aware that seeing a sasquatch or being probed by a Reptid seemed to come hand-in-hand with some pretty bizarre political theories, poor grammar, racism and a the kind of dramatic abuse of the common comma that gave the impression these people were defending themselves against their alien tormentors with shotguns loaded from the punctuation bin of a defunct letter press.

When Heather and I toured through Roswell and Corona, NM I made a point of going to their UFO Museum and seeing the reports that had been reprinted in those “legitimate publications” in their original, unedited form – sometimes written in crayon, in childish letters… I try not to be judgey about peoples’ handwriting when it comes to placing weight on their observations… but…

In any case, many of these websites have plugged right along, and now they’re experiencing a Golden Age as the Birtherism and White Nationalism and absolutely insanely hate-filled Nazi rants that have always shared space with visits from Angels and Nordics (the extraterrestrial ones obviously) and chupacabras surge into the limelight. Fucking QAnon shows up at Trump rallies and now the Washington Post, which seemed unable to see the folly of writing article after article after article about Trump and the shock and surprise of his sudden popularity now popularize these most inane corners of conspiracy enthusiast… seemingly incapable of helping themselves.

I Love reading these things. I would never share them in a serious manner. In this day and age of easy self-published websites and easy self-published books, anyone and their attic-dwelling mother can get a website online and sell their scrawled drivel in a professional-looking package – and yet I take some semblance of pleasure in noting that even now, also in the day and age of ubiquitous spell-checking from right inside your browser, these people still make absurd spelling mistakes, AND  as everyone ALSO has a camera in their pocket more powerful than most SLRs, websites that are resolutely devoted to these ideas still need to post fuzzy photos of fundamentally UNIDENTIFIED flying objects and, rather than posting some slyly snapped photos of Nazi polar bases, they’ve included images from Star Wars comics… amazing how the Nazi slave base has an ion cannon and hanger bays for their land speeders.

Maybe I can get Disney to sue them out of existence?

Sigh.