A visit to the beautiful shore of Lake Michigan in South Haven, MI brings us this first of three videos in the most beautiful and sacred place in the world of LowGenius.  We discuss what it might be like here if a giant oil spill were to happen.  We discuss the death sentence of apathy.  We discuss how the toys of affluence are choking us all to death.

One of the things I’ve found interesting about the various responses to this video is the suggestion that I’m just “jealous” of other people’s affluence.  And yeah, you know, I’ll cop to that, at least to a certain extent.  I mean, it’s pretty sick and disgusting that people drive cars that cost so much that I would never have to worry about my income again if I had that money in my hand.  Yeah, I’ll admit that I envy the ability of those fortunate enough to have been born into material comfort and security to exploit those accidents of chance to ensure that they always remain secure and comfortable, when I’ve spent a substantial part of my life sleeping in cars and on floors and in borrowed spaces because I started off broke, stayed that way, and consequently have had a difficult time learning to be anything else.

Yeah, I’ll cop to being jealous of that.  I’d give my ass to spend just a few years of my life able to be who I am and do what I see appropriate and meaningful without having to stop and get diverted by worrying how I’m going to eat and where I’m going to sleep from day to day.

Unfortunately what I *won’t* give is my integrity, and that puts me at a distinct disadvantage in this society.  Which also pisses me off, because you know when you’re a kid growing up you always get these happy little fantasies that if you are a person of honor and integrity and strong ethics, you will reap the just rewards of those qualities including financial stability, the respect of your peers, etc.  I’ve tried as hard as I could over the years to act ethically and with integrity, and all it’s done is ensure that I’m unemployable because nobody, anywhere, ever REALLY wants to hire someone who thinks for themselves.

BUT I DIGRESS.

*deep breath*

Anyway, yeah.  When I originally posted this video it unfortunately led to a huge and completely diversionary discussion on my Facebook of the relative merits of hemp as fuel and polymer base, where someone with good intentions wrapped me up in about a week-long back and forth over silly-assed tangents (including the somewhat meritorious argument that hemp is NOT a cure-all, and the far less meritorious implication that since we can’t find a magic bullet we may as well just stop hunting) that had nothing to do with the original point.  This is one of the primary reasons I won’t be getting involved in back-and-forth discussions of my work in these videos anymore:  I keep getting sucked in to spending ten or twenty or a hundred times as much energy and time defending myself against non-sequiturs, tangents, strawmen, and ad hominem as I spend actually producing the videos, and none of those things increases the likelihood that I’ll be able to support myself doing this.

Therefore, I’m not going to do those things anymore.  BUT:  the point here isn’t some “hemp is a miracle-cure-magic-bullet” campaign.  Nor is it to “steal” anybody’s “fun.”  I am not jealous of a jet-ski, and while I miss going out on my dad’s boat when I was a kid, I’m not jealous of those who still have that ability while I don’t.  Indeed, I find them kind of sad, because from what I saw while I was in South Haven, the vast majority of them are now pretentious materialists with more money than wit or character.  What makes me think are they any different now than my dad and his friends were thirty years ago?  Well, obviously some of them aren’t.  It was the 70’s and 80’s, man it was all ABOUT the party and all that for a lot of people.

But you know…there wasn’t a single kid at that marina any of the times I went there.  There were no families.  There are probably ten to fifteen times as many slip spaces now as there were back then, and yet there’s not a thousandth of the fun.  There was nobody just chilling and relaxing and having a good time.  It was all people hiding behind thousand-dollar sunglasses and million-dollar boats, and as far as I could tell a lot of them had no appreciation for or interest in actually boating, only in having a bigger one than the guy in the slip next door.  A cat like my dad?  He wouldn’t even be allowed in the marina these days with his lil 23’ Reinell trawler.

He loved that boat, and so did I.  Somehow I just couldn’t imagine most of the people I saw on boats loving much of anything other than the number of digits left of the decimal in their bank accounts, nor could I imagine most of the boats I saw being loved.

So yeah…my feelings for those folks don’t really constitute “jealousy.”  “Pity” is more like it, much like I pity people who go see a band like My Morning Jacket at a 500,000-seat festival and think they’re getting anything that even approaches a concert (or even a “musical event.”)  I’d rather see the Electric Jug Band play on an old school bus frame in the back woods of southwest Michigan than see my ten most influential bands at a Bonnaroo or even, sad to say, Lollapalooza.  Why?  Because that’s what it’s all about, not all this flash and glitter and empty hype.  Sorry, I know I’ve got friends in ‘the industry,’ and I know that given the chance I’d probably join them, but I’d do it knowing that what I was heading into wasn’t anything remotely like the places I was hoping to go when I started playing.

I’d do it knowing that, like those aloof and remote childless boaters, “success” by any current standard would constitute failure by all the standards that actually matter to me.

I just can’t see anything there to be “jealous” of, but then I think we’ve already well-established that I Just Don’t Get It.

Meantime:  take a look at a beautiful place, appreciate it, and allow me to exhort you to not only keep it beautiful, but get off your duff and contact your elected representatives to make damned sure they are keeping it beautiful too.

Thanks