"The Goal" - Beware the Snare of the Machine (Part Two)

Part Two of my response to Stone Bryson's piece

We Become Junkies.

We are all junkies in this sense. We become numb to things like our significant others, the natural world, our families, our friends, because we are so focused on the shiny goal. We were programmed like this from the jump.

Family, partnership and community are a thing of the past, or are looked at with some arrogant judgment and labeled “trad”, we treat the people closest to us like fucking trash, and we keep pressing forward— because one day, one day, we’ll finally feel alive, if we could just GET THERE SOMEHOW.

How is that logic any different than that of an addict? It isn’t.

Then the day came when I realized… holy shit… WE HAVE BEEN LIED TO.

This is part two of a response to

Stone Bryson

’s piece, “The Goal”. If you want to read part one, you can read it here.

The Tower Moments

This all happened in 2023. I was totally unaware of how something I loved and lived for had become something that was killing me.

And it has nothing to do with music. The issue isn’t music. The issue is my MIND.

The issue is also this stupid consumer/hyper-production culture, it’s anti-human and everyone should shut the fuck up about it if you ask me.

First… The Sky Turned Green

I wasn’t used to tornados. I’d never been around them. Tennessee has them A LOT. I had been told… if the sky gets green, watch out.

I was alone in my apartment and the sky turned HULK Green. There were tornado warnings everywhere, and that night they actually did touch down right by where I was. Luckily no one was hurt.

When I saw that shit approaching, I realized something. I had traveled all around the country trying to outrun vaccine mandates so I could live in a place where I could continue to create and perform music while also working a job / earning a “living” if you’d call it that, without having to take a genocidal experiment and “show my papers”, which I refused to do. So I ran, thousands of miles, for years.

Problem with getting used to running is… it’s hard to stop. Like anything else. Motion stays in motion, rest stays at rest. Balance is the liberator.

I’d lost a great many people, and I’d been in fight or flight for so long. I didn’t have anybody close to me where I actually lived. When I moved to Tennessee (Nashville), I did not know anyone there, nor had I been there before. I just knew I had to keep it pushing.

I left Oregon in 2019 and went to LA. 2020 happened and SHTF, I eventually left LA because of it, went back to Oregon to regroup, then with the money from a tax return plus money I made driving GrubHub since the businesses were still closed, I packed my Honda and left. Boom. That’s how I wound up in Nashville. That was 2022. But the realization came in 2023.

The tornado was coming.

I knew no one I could go to for help. I lived alone. There were no “shelters” if SHTF. Anyone I knew in TN by that point lived at least an hour away from Nashville, as I resonated with people who lived OUTSIDE of the cities much more than I ever did with anyone in the city.

I also was in the habit of so much movement constantly that I never really visited the same place twice. I was so guarded I couldn’t even see it yet. And to numb the dire straits and loneliness of that existence? I doubled down harder on THE GOAL. That goal was music. Other than my life and my soul, guess what suffered from so much pressure? The music.

I then realized: I could die here tonight, and no one would even notice. Does anyone even know my address? How long would it take before someone noticed I was missing? How long would it take for someone to find my body if I died here? A month? Would anyone even be around to identify it? Who would be called? Everyone I know like that is on the other side of the country. Would anyone even care? Or would I just rot and be a Jane Doe?

This may sound morbid or dramatic to you — understand that I am leaving A LOT out here, as I’m not about to tell you my life story. It was a fucking painful feeling that hit me to my core. I had sacrificed the most important thing in life: community.

And I stood facing the greatest fear any human has, if they’re being honest with themselves:

Dying alone.

Dying isn’t the greatest fear. It’s dying alone.

Inventory your fears if you don’t believe me. Write them all down, then investigate them one at a time. Ask yourself, what fear is underneath this fear? Keep going until you reach the bottom. You’ll surprise yourself.

That Was Only The Beginning. I Was Still Blind. But Not For Long…

I decided, fuck it, I’ll just go on the porch and watch death come. At this time in my life, pretty much all my interactions or “friends” were on Instagram and other social media apps— another reason why I no longer engage in that fuckshit. What the fuck are your internet friends gonna do when a fucking tornado is coming!? What are the people in your DMs gonna do when SHTF!?

Nothing.

This system of everything being virtual and people being isolated and all this shit— is it making more sense to you now?? Is this hyper-individualism repulsing you enough yet?

Well, we’re not done here.

Don’t worry, I won’t leave you on a dark note. There’s beauty and music to share at the end.

But I also won’t bullshit you either.

I watched and waited for the tornado. Smoked a cigarette. I decided I was ready to die and I’d do some Memento Mori meditations and just welcome it. Go out like a fuckin Stoic.

Funny thing is… when the tornado touched down, it was a few miles east of my apartment. It never took me out. I’d been through several tornados in my time in TN, that was the scariest one.

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More Gas on the Fire of Realization:

I came from a very different culture — I am from the west coast, Oregon. When I left Oregon, I moved to Los Angeles. Over there, it’s normal to be in your 20s and 30s and be single, working on a career, and not be married with kids. If anything, they look at you like you’re nuts if you’re working toward some creative goal or career and decide to have kids / get married, especially if you’re a woman.

But Tennessee? Whoa. People there get married and have kids when they’re 20 years old. That was the weirdest shit ever to me. Obviously a lot of marriages/relationships don’t work out, but I remember being asked ALL the time how many kids I had. I’d say, “None”. I never wanted any— ironically, until about the time that tornado came through. Then I realized I’d drank the kool-aid and maybe I had cheated myself out of a hugely important part of life. I’ll maybe get to that later. Anyway:

They’d look at me crazy and say, “Really? Not even one kid?” Nope, not even one. I’d know if I had given birth, pretty sure I was never that disassociated from reality.

I’m not making a case for this-or-that. Do what you want. I had never wanted kids. There was only one man I had wanted to marry, and that man died. When he died, something inside me told me that we had fucked up, the matrix had glitched, and we’d have to repeat it in another life or something. I was just waiting around to die in a sense after he left the earth.

I hid that grief though.

Again, I doubled down on the music… but I doubled down so hard that i squeezed the life out of myself and my creativity suffered a lot.

I began to re-assess what I wanted in life. The wheels started turning. If you fast forward to today, it’s much more balanced, but holy shit there’s nothing like being 33 and thinking, “has all this been a lie?!”

Then Something Changed.

I released a song that I was nervous about, but it actually (despite being censored yet again on YouTube) did really well. The reason why it meant so much to me is I made a music video where I showcased members of the freedom community doing their thing:

Shooting guns/teaching others how to use firearms properly, teaching permaculture classes and digging swales, working on their homesteads, yelling at people in their local government offices over tyrannical mandate laws and threatening them with the punishment of death for violating the Nuremberg Code (Shoutout to Matt Baker for that clip haha) or simply playing their guitar, performing on stage, sharing real ass lyrics about their lives, transformation, healing, and revolution.

For the hell of it, I’ll share the video I made. Not because of my song, but because of the people in it. The song was originally something my producer and I put together to answer a sync call for a movie about a football team. They wanted something that sounded like an anthem you could easily sing at a football game. So I wrote the lyrics accordingly and we designed the sound accordingly. It doesn’t sound like the rest of my music at all, but for some reason, the lyrics were what made me decide to release it on my own, and I decided to showcase all the people I personally knew who were making a change in REAL LIFE.

And what a gift it is, to be able to say that I personally know all of these people, and a great deal of them have changed my life in significant ways… ways that you do not come across often.

This is THEM.

See the credit list to find out who each person is… and I highly suggest connecting with all of them.

Fun fact: I shot and created this video on my phone in that same apartment that almost got hit by the tornado in TN haha.

Yo, what is happening with the timeline? I just went to link that video… I released that 10 months ago!? How?! How has so much happened and changed in 10 months?! Excuse me while I shed tears and try to shake off the time stretch..

Onward—

I released this video, it was censored on YouTube, meaning a big fat no-go in the algo. That’s typically a death sentence to a music release because it means no visibility. Instagram and other platforms didn’t like it either. The reason?

The clip of Matt Baker yelling at politicians was on the news in 2021, and of course every fucking screen said something about “COVID-19” so I got hit for having something that said COVID in the video, (youtube doesn’t allow you to display or utter that word unless you are deemed “health authority” or “verified news source”) and also, my friend Jay who is a firearms instructor, they didn’t like the guns.

I got dinged for the weapons on TikTok/IG and I got dinged for the Covid shit on YouTube. The violation on YT? “Mentioning of a sensitive event.” Yeah. Bubble wrap world.

But it didn’t matter! For the first time, it didn’t matter.

Because the people who I cared about seeing it (the ones in the freedom community and the ones who were wanting to find it) STILL found the video. Then THEY themselves shared it. Grassroots shit. That was by far the most fulfilling thing ever.. because that was the mission. That was the only goal with making that video. For them to feel acknowledge/repaid in some way… just for being who they were. And for them to be seen. And for others to know that hope was not lost, and there are people in the solution every single day.

Cliffhanger — something was still missing

You know what was missing? I had achieved something I had been wanting to achieve — connection, community, honoring people who were (in my opinion) very unsung for who they are and what they do —- but there was no one around to SHARE that joy with. There was no one around to SHARE that happiness with. There was no one around to share life with.

To top it off, the people who were around were actually bitter or low-key mad, because for ten seconds something wasn’t about them, and something good happened to someone else. Gross. But anyway, that’s just a side note about the crisis of envy we have in this world, which is honestly just stupid.

That’s when I realized “The ACTUAL meaning of Life.”

Because you can truly “have it all” — whether its money, success, even your goal as a musician, or a yogi, or a writer, traveler, photographer, whatever…

But what is anything if it cannot be shared with the ones you love?

Correct me if I’m wrong here, but have you ever been there before and felt that?

Shit is real.

So I knew things had to change. I knew I had to come out of hiding. A place I had been in for YEARS. To a slight degree, I still am… but I fight every fucking day to get closer to freedom.

I then wrote this article… which is insane to me that this was still not even a year ago:

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Wanna know how funny God is?

One month TO THE DAY of writing that article (technically like 26 days later but whatever) I met the man who would become the next person I’d fall in love with since Dylans death a few years prior. Truth is though, I hadn’t loved anyone in a VERY long time. But the only person I loved that deeply? That was Dylan, and when he died, something in me told me I would never love again… so when this next man came along, I thought it was God giving me a second chance at life, and it was like my life went from black and white to all the color being put back in — all of a sudden.

It’s hard to write this. But the reality is —- that situation wound up being one of the most, if not THE most, abusive relationships I’ve ever been in. Everything happened at lightning speed too. All of it. It’s impossible to explain to an outsider. You were either one of two people or you weren’t.

However, it resulted in me having to pack my shit and leave the state of Tennessee entirely. That’s why I now live in Florida.

Technically, I was pretty over living in TN… or at least Nashville. I stayed around longer for him, cuz he was “getting his shit together” and then once he did, we were gonna have that “dream life”. HA.

But it’s funny that right as I decided to open back up to connection, someone showed up within 3 to 4 weeks. Was it really brutal in most of the ways? Yeah. But would I change it or take it back?

No.

I wouldn’t take it back because it reminded me that my heart is not only capable of love, but an unbelievably deep love, even in the face of tragedy and betrayal.

It showed me I was capable of mercy and compassion on a level I had never experienced before.

It showed me that love was not dead. It is very much alive.

I also got to know that force that we call God on a new level too. How could THAT ever be a bad thing? Sometimes, blessings come disguised as nightmares.

I had given up on love.. but because of that experience.. I know love in all forms is VERY much alive.

Also… I got in touch with a softer side of myself. A lot of the old me is dead, and that’s a blessing, because that was never really me in the first place, it was that armor I spoke of in part one of this article.

Plus, now I live in Florida… which is my favorite place I’ve ever lived, and I’ve been to many corners of this planet! 🐊

Of course one evaluates themselves and the risk factors that left them vulnerable and more likely to wind up in an abusive scenario, especially after being out of that cycle for so long, but that’s not necessary to include here.

What’s the point?

Stone already made it.

Don’t fucking work so hard that you forget to live and then all of a sudden you’re dead.

Decide for yourself what the fuck your destiny and path is. At the end of the day, other people are throwing out opinions from the nosebleeds, because NOBODY knows you like you… and maybe that is why we run from ourselves.

I wonder what would happen if we slowed down, and stopped?

Just enough to remember— remember our energy, remember our voice. Remember how it’s different from the billions of clamoring noises and opinions around us… and that we are NOT those things… but something else… something that only we can define.

So no matter how disruptive it is… no matter how painful it is… no matter how many people you have to be okay with them being all the way twisted wrong about you and even disappointed in you.. no matter how insane it looks/feels/sounds… if something doesn’t feel right, find out WHY, and then find what feels right.. even if it feels like hell on your journey there.

There’s a difference between the hell you feel when you are growing, transforming, jumping into the abyss and paving a new way, versus the hell you feel when you engage in a life cycle that sucks the soul out of you to where you don’t even recognize yourself in the fucking mirror anymore.

The monotony that takes everything and rushes you to the end… the end of the conveyor belt. For no reason at all. Other than your energy was harvested and you were distracted and suited someone else’s agenda because of it.

Find the agenda of your soul.

Maybe this song by Simrit Kaur will help you. I’ll leave you with this.

Thank you,

Stone Bryson

. I have come a long way since I realized that the way of “the supreme goal” was NOT the way…. and I still have a long way to go. It’s like playing whack-a-mole. A quest toward balance and a practicing of the art form of not giving a fuck, with its natural curveballs and occasional backslides.

You know, Life.

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Thank you for reading, and a special thank you to Stone Bryson. That story you wrote was a gift… you reminded us in the most beautiful way that Death comes for us all… so, what are we really living for? That is the magical question, and the most adventurous one to answer. May we begin the adventure now. If we have started and drifted, may we recommit to the Grand Adventure now. XO