Since it’s a quiet Saturday morning and we’ve all done enough doomscrolling, let me slip in a personal aside.

I’ll try to keep it short.

1/

As many of you have heard before, I never had an interest in Twitter before the last election.

I joined when a friend pulled together a small group to try to combat some of Trump’s massive advantage here.

Figured I’d post occasionally, do my part and that would be it.

2/

I was just a dude on a sofa typing on his phone.

Then I posted a thread about Trump’s narcissism and suddenly I had a bunch of followers.

And then another thread kind of took off and I had a bunch more.

And then it just became this inertial insanity leading to here.

3/

That never ceases to be surreal and weird and hard to reconcile.

There are an indescribably complicated array of emotions that go along with suddenly having the eyes of a large room looking upon your words and thoughts.

3/

It strips you a bit bare; subjects you to judgment; opens you up to both love and hate.

It robs you of the choice of privacy as bad actors look to make weapons of whatever might embarrass or diminish you.

You are naked upon the stage. You either lean into that or you don’t.

4/

I leaned in.

For better or worse, I’ve vomited up things both light and heavy about being a father, about my own father dying, about my last decade in all its infinite cataclysm.

I literally wept on a bar stool writing about the first event of my son’s I wasn’t attending.

5/

I’ve put a lot out there.

But I’ve also held back some of the personal tumult of my past few years.

I glossed over the extent to which I hit probably the deepest emotional low of my life two years ago.

6/

It was something like an emotional balloon payment on a decade of things stoically endured but not fully grieved.

We don’t mourn for the lost home while we’re busy fleeing the fire.

That comes later - and it is unexpected and hard and complicated.

7/

Long after the flames have been put out, you’re left with rival emotional forces competing for control.

You have survived. Are you not happy in that? Can you not see the blue sky?

Your life is still unrepaired. Will it ever fully be? What is lost will never again be.

8/

I went through a long string of individual fires which just blurred together into whole years in flames.

When my father passed away two years ago next week, it was like the last of those long-burning fires had been put out.

Nothing burning. But so much burned.

9/

It hit me with a weight I didn’t expect.

It was an emotionally harder time than during the fires themselves.

As it turns out, it is emotionally easier to fight for survival than it is to have survived.

Plus, you’re tired, broke, hurt and smell like smoke.

10/

So, after 3 yrs of vehemently resisting, I created a Ko-Fi page to accept help.

Put it in my bio. Dropped it in an occasional thread. Made light of it.

Called it beer money.

Positioned it as an open guitar case in front of sidewalk busker. A tip for having entertained.

11/

But there were times when the support people threw into that tip jar kept my car on the road and kept my phone turned on and kept my stress below code-red unmanageable.

It wasn’t just beer money.

It changed an incredibly hard stretch from crushing to survivably hard.

12/

People here provided support more meaningful than they knew when I needed it more than I could say.

And for that, I am profoundly thankful.

13/

And beyond just me, I am grateful for the soft ways our community here supports and sustains its members.

There is strength in shared pain, fear, outrage, resolve... and hope.

However it is that we came to have this community, I’m grateful for it.

14/

These have been the longest of four years.

They’ve been hard on all of us. They e been hard on me.

Whether you ever threw coins in my guitar case or just stopped by every now and then to hear a song, thank you.

Here’s to a happier play list ahead.

15/15