Getting Back to Writing
What’s the difference between speaking your mind or writing it down?
After years of working as an educator, DJ, editor, journalist, musician, label head, event coordinator, artist manager, running an international English publishing department, traveling incessantly, and working for questionable corporations, I’m getting back to my own writing. Not that I ever left it, I’ve been working on my own book series for over two decades, and I finally have an incredible mentor helping me finish the first book in the series.
But, as pretentious as it sounds, I feel the world needs independent writing more than ever. Maybe not mine, but I’m here to add my voice to needed causes. We have too many AI-operated and controlled avenues these days, it could be argued we desperately need more organic thought and writing.
There’s plenty of my writing online, from my portfolio, the years I spent writing all I was asked to for Gaia.com, to the years I spent working as a journalist for several publications, or my old pieces here on Medium.
But now I’m back, and in a big way. The world is changing, so we need more raw, educated, honest voices coming forward with harsh truths, uplifting stories, and informed opinions. So, hopefully you can find that somewhere out there! Kidding. You’re in the right place if social justice issues, peace, art, music, esotericism, ancient civilizations, spirituality, communciation, equality, diversity, education, or history interest you. I am writing to educate as many as I can, and inspire actions to help each other.
A BETTER WORLD IS POSSIBLE.
I’m not saying anything new. Well, I am, by my basic act of putting my own words together, but I’m not necessarily saying anything that hasn’t been said before, and it has probably been better worded by a smarter person.
I’ve been writing since I was a kid. My grandfather, Jim Fitzgerald, wrote for the Detroit Free Press, battling it out publicly with Michigan’s KKK and crooked politicians, before handing his column space over to Mitch Albom.
Since youth I’ve barely understood what it was to be a writer. At first I thought too little of it, then too much of it. David Foster Wallace spoke on the perils of perfectionism. Sometimes I shy away from writing, my own mortality versus the ink glaring too large and too dark, overpowering.
I’ll never be anywhere near my heroes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin, Hunter S. Thompson, Philip K. Dick, Marvin Gaye, Ray Bradbury, Lou Reed, Assata and Tupac Shakur, Terence McKenna, Che Guevara, Kendrick Lamar, or the like. But I can still put my words onto a page to try and affect others positively.
As I’ve aged, I think to be a writer, you just write.
“Don’t Just
Don’t just learn, experience.
Don’t just read, absorb.
Don’t just change, transform.
Don’t just relate, advocate.
Don’t just promise, prove.
Don’t just criticize, encourage.
Don’t just think, ponder.
Don’t just take, give.
Don’t just see, feel.
Don’t just dream, do.
Don’t just hear, listen.
Don’t just talk, act.
Don’t just tell, show.
Don’t just exist, live.”
― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
“Don’t let the expectations and opinions of other people affect your decisions. It’s your life, not theirs. Do what matters most to you; do what makes you feel alive and happy. Don’t let the expectations and ideas of others limit who you are. If you let others tell you who you are, you are living their reality — not yours. There is more to life than pleasing people. There is much more to life than following others’ prescribed path. There is so much more to life than what you experience right now. You need to decide who you are for yourself. Become a whole being. Adventure.”
― Roy T. Bennett
RISING TIDES & CHANGING SEAS
This last year has been, well, to use a scholarly term: fucked.
Difficult. Hearbreaking. Life-changing. Beyond a dark night of the soul.
In the last year my life has dramatically changed in a myriad of ways.
My mother, Christie Anne Fitzgerald Smith, passed away the day after Christmas last year, 2023, after a year-long battle with ALS — Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis — better known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
There’s a lot I want to say. There’s a lot I feel. But one thing that has felt overpowering in this last year of my mother’s death: nothing feels appropriate. Nothing feels right. It feels weird to laugh. Every smile tinged with unspeakable loss. I’ve come to realize, that’s what life is. Love and loss are the yin and yang we live by, whether we acknowledge or accept it.
On top of that, I moved across the country, bought a house, went through a divorce, road tripped across the country, and recorded new music in LA…
And too much else. I wish I felt accomplished. I never stop working, but it never feels enough. I’ve lost my mother, my wife (now ex-wife), my job, my house, my cats, my car, etc. etc. I’ve been rebuilding my life, after it was all burned to the ground, but I’m not sure if I’m doing anything right.
As the wise man dubbed Biggie Smalls once said “Shit Done Changed.”
So.
Why am I becoming more vocal? I’ve always been a rebel, a low-key resistance fighter, a counterculture artist on the fringe, always trying to find a rational voice between art and oppression. But no more. Our lives, our jobs, our time, our money, our taxes; they are being used against us.
“Action is character.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Quiet cancelling, low-key cool; these are meaningless in the face of fascist destruction manipulating the West into destroying Palestine, the Congo, Sudan, Venezuela, Taiwan, Yemen, and the list goes on. People and places are not pawns and spaces on a chess board for the uber wealthy to destroy.
Many my age and younger recognize what 2pac said long ago:
“They got money for wars, but can’t feed the poor
Said it ain’t no hope for the youth
And the truth is it ain’t no hope for the future
And then they wonder why we crazy, huh”
I’ve witnessed the all-too-common tragic realities that materialistic-based capitalism has turned all of our American Dreams into. The good-ole-boys-n-girls red-blooded fighting attitudes have morphed into patsies protecting white-collar white-supremacist pedophiles parading as heroes. The never-ending negligent narcissism, segregated sociopathy, victimized guilt, first-world superiority, age-old colonialism and imperialism keep perpetuating themselves, sprinkled with the violence of war, genocide, starvation, prejudice, injustice, racism, and now Zionism… when does it end? The ‘West’ — led by the united corporate evils of the US, the UK, the UN, NATO, Israel, and BlackRock — wage war on BRICS nations and any other country with less global power and more natural resources that can be exploited.
Last year, while I helped my family take care of my dying mother, I also went through a divorce from my partner of over 10 years, and I also lost my corporate ‘safe’ job of over two years. My company told me that I could work remote when I moved back to Michigan from Colorado to take care of my mother in her final days. Then they pulled the rug out, all of a sudden my six-month contract was cut in half, and then some. Now I’m teaching.
Like cops, never trust corporations.
“Benito Mussolini created the word ‘fascism.’ He defined it as ‘the merging of the state and the corporation.’ He also said a more accurate word would be ‘corporatism.’ This was the definition in Webster’s up until 1987 when a corporation bought Webster’s and changed it to exclude any mention of corporations.”
My life has transformed so much, yet it’s so hard to describe. I’m a completely different person than I was a year ago, although that person was also completely different than the person I was two years ago. Even though for the majority of the previous decade, I was mostly the same. Maybe evolutions of the same being. Not like now; I feel utterly reborn, in a really unappealing, painful, gross, shocking way. Like Neo waking up from The Matrix levels of upsetting and gross. But I’m still here.
After living in Detroit, Scotland, Denver, Northern Michigan, criss-crossing the Mediterranean and America… I can confidently say, I know no more.
The amount of my experiences has amassed only to more humility.
My father has worked since he was 11. I have worked since I was 14. He grew up in back-water Michigan, working on farms, escaping his reality in a broken-down commune in forgotten hillbilly Hobbit-land by abandoning his rural life on his motorcycle to become the ‘cool guy’ in the bigger, nearby podunk town. My mother was like a princess to him, the daughter of a well-respected newspaper publisher, my aforementioned grandfather Jim, who left The County Press for the Detroit Free Press by the 1980s. Over time my father became the publisher of The County Press, taking over for his mentor and father-in-law. Ink flows in my veins.
My mother passed away before she could turn 68. My father is entering his 70th year, and yet he is still working. Where is the justice in that? Is that the American Dream? They scrimped and saved and worked and went to school, but they lost their retirement together. No golden years. Just work. What’s weird to me is that my father doesn’t mind it. I respect that people find purpose through their work, especially when it’s someone like my father working tirelessly to better local communities through local papers, organizations, and committees. He is a dedicated public servant and communicator; a true pillar of the community.
But when my mother, my father’s partner of almost 50 years, became diagnosed with a fatal illness, a deteriorative disease… not only could he not stop working while she was sick, he’s still working now after. Maybe he will work until he dies. Maybe that’s what he wants. I respect his wishes. My grandfather had an excellent retirement, he also survived the Great Depression and WWII, using his GI Bill money to study journalism at Michigan State University instead of going to West Point, as his superiors had wanted him to. I’m not one to judge how people live their lives, especially my four treasured elders who raised me. I just find it weird that my grandparents had a long, glorious retirement, in which they got to travel the world after my grandfather wrote on everything from local family stories to international social justice news. My parents got nothing.
My point is, I was raised to believe my family were middle class, maybe even upper middle class. I grew up feeling privileged — white, mid class. My parents did what they were supposed to, they worked their jobs, raised their kids, helped out their communities… and then lost their life savings along with millions of other Americans in the financial collapse of 2008.
Only recently have I realized that all sociological labels humans put on ourselves and others are extremely limiting. Statistics are helpful, adjectives and adverbs are often unnecessary. We make shit up. From labels to value. Everything has changed since 2008, even since 2001 — and not just 9/11 — but the oft over-looked realities of 9/10/2001. Then WikiLeaks, Assange, Snowden, Trump, Brexit, 2020… Endless wildfires, police murders, death, disease, genocide, war, coups, destruction.
There is no light at the end of the tunnel for my generation or those younger than me. The only hope we have is resistance to the psychopathic “ruling class” turning our world into dystopian hell.
Some people, they don’t have silver linings. Because they are either not present enough, or not grateful enough, or a combination of the two. Not everyone has the same opportunities, and not enough is done to acknowledge privileges and equal the playing field for humanity to survive.
Everything in life is classism — the 1% manipulating the 99% against one another, laughing to the bank while we kill each other, slaves of debt.
So what actually matters?
It’s all the classic sagely bullshit. All the old aphorisms. They’re true.
You don’t know what you have ‘til it’s gone. Live each day like it’s your last.
I try to remind myself how lucky I am for what little I have. Even while struggling more than I ever have before, I work at being grateful.
If we stop to take the time to smell the roses, maybe we can process how beautiful life can be. If we take time to save the flowers and the humans left alive from amid the rubble, we could make life special and meaningful.
If we keep working endless hours, ultimately as wage and debt slaves for the tyrannical corporations fueling our sadistic world governments to keep oppression and genocide going the world over, we might never realize happiness, presence, gratitude, or any sort of deeper purpose, let alone any sort of understanding. We need time to grapple with the infinite.
We are paying for housing we’re never at, because we’re always working.
We are paying for cars we mostly use to get to work and otherwise never use, because we’re always working.
We pay for kids to be in school, or daycare, or college, or go into debt trying to keep them safe, because we’re always working.
What are we working for?
It’s not like any of this is conspiratorial. We know, for a fact, with evidence and receipts, that the majority of world leaders are, as they say, “Epstein Islanders” — disgusting ‘ruling-class’ pedophiles all connected to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell — everyone from the Clintons, the Trumps, the Bidens, Prince Andrew, Obamas, celebrities, royals, you name it. Epstein is the US version of Jimmy Savile — pedophilic ties to the royal family and all. Epstein and Weinstein did not happen within a vacuum, just as the well-documented and investigated scandals of the Catholic Church and the Vatican point to well-known corruption that continues to this day.
There is more to it, which has unfolded very loudly in the last five years, which I will not go into. There is more to my personal unfolding and subsequent rebuilding which I’m not ready to go into. There is more to the cancellation of our treasured WhateverFest in 2024 that I can’t explore yet.
So keep on reading. Because I’m Irish, like my grandmother Pat and another hero of mine Terence McKenna, I have the Cecltic gift of gab. For better or for worse, I am here to offer an alternate lens into reality, something a little grittier and more real. I’m here to help others by exposing radical truths often covered up by corporate interests willing to turn us into Soylent Green. These are revolutionary times. We all have responsibilities to act in order to try and make our world a better place.
“Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests.
I have certain rules I live by. My first rule: I don’t believe anything the government tells me.
Sooner or later the people in this country are going to realize: the government does not give a fuck about them. The government doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare, or your safety. It simply doesn’t give a fuck about you. It’s interested in its own power. That’s the only thing keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.
Personally when it comes to rights, I think one of two things is true: either we have unlimited rights, or we have no rights at all.”
- George Carlin
More soon comrades, stay strong, keep your heads up.
Treat others as you wish to be treated (unless they are Zionists, Nazis, racists, corporate oligarchs, or abusers — set them aflame, publicly.)
Communicate, organize, support one another, share resources, uplift, hope. Class consciousness starts through helping those close to you.
NO WAR BUT CLASS WAR
Yours truly,
—
https://underflowrecords.com/quells
