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I played my first solo show at a porno theater.

It was hella difficult. Not because the venue – the "Fine Arts" Cinema on Congress Street in Portland, the space now occupied by Geno's – showed dirty movies during the day. My friend Shawn booked the show, Trent and Miah shared the bill, Amy was there, so were John and Kate, Josh, Sharon, Jason, it was by far the coolest group of people I'd ever met.

That's a big part of what made it difficult. I've played clubs and festivals packed with hundreds of people but in a way it's harder to play for a small room full of people you know.

But I played it anyway.

Earlier that day I'd totaled my car. Josh and I stepped out of work for lunch, I tried to take a left onto St. John and got t-boned. The wreck got towed, we went and started drinking.

It wasn't a terrible decision. I was shaken up, all nerves, and I needed to calm down. The accident and the drinks combined to make me numb, which helped with the nerves I would have had for the performance, and at the same time made it harder technically. If I'd been worried about curating my image, I would have cancelled. But I played anyway.

Also, I'd found out that week, my grandmother who raised me was having her last days. With airfare way more expensive back then, and where I couldn't see how I'd get the time off work, I played anyway.

Brenda recorded the show. I've played better, but maybe never more honestly. I sound like a wounded animal because that's how I felt. Once I started playing, I didn't care that I was in pain, I played anyway.

I'm sharing it for the first time, not because I think it's good. No one who was there told me I did a good job. But it did make an impression.

I'm sharing because it's a work of art. I perservered and adapted and made something happen.

Art is repetition. Music is repetition. You've gotta do it, over and over again. Even if the gig is weird and getting there drags.

You've gotta play anyway. You've gotta show everybody the truth you've been hiding.

Gotta expose yourself.

Imposter Syndrome gets talked about a lot right now, as something people need to overcome. I'm not sure about that. I think Imposter Syndrome (let's call it IS) may be one end of a continuum, and at the other end is Dunning-Kruger.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect (DK) is an unproven hypothesis in Psychology that people with low ability at a task overestimate their capability. While it hasn't been formally proven yet, it has the ring of deep truth to me.

The guitar riff to "Louie Louie" is a great example – it's a three chord rock song, but the third chord is supposed to be minor. More often than not, when you hear someone playing that riff, they're playing it wrong. But they don't know that. They think they're AWESOME! And if you suggest otherwise, you'll likely get some gnarly attitude back.

Seems the attitude corresponds to both the low ability and the overestimation. The DK end of the spectrum has a person telling themselves, I'm good at this, I know everything that needs to be known. Which stops them from looking any farther.

IS goes too far the other direction. Questioning everything constantly leads to analysis paralysis. In order to function in the world, we sometimes have to accept uncertainty, and trust we've done the best we can.

Zen Buddhism names the middle of the spectrum "beginner's mind". An absolute beginner doesn't make assumptions, or pretend to know anything about the subject. They approach it with openness to all its possibilities. A spirit of exploration, but also acceptance of the thing "as it is".

Maintaining beginner's mind takes effort. As time goes on, we learn about our subject – and some of those things we think we learned turn out to be incorrect. We have to constantly balance questioning and action.

Measure twice – but you gotta cut once.

Some things get called 'acquired tastes', inaccurately. They should be called 'earned tastes', because you have to put in the work to learn them.

The art behind any earned taste consists of repetition and variation.

For years, I thought of Claude Monet as cheesy. The impressionist version of Thomas Kincade. No doubt largely due to the use of the water lilies in every other dentist's waiting room, the freebie calendars businesses hand out at the holidays, you know.

Seeing one of the water lilies in person changed that. He created them at epic scale: six feet tall and 42 feet wide. If you stand dead center at arms length, it fills up your entire field of vision. Like the 19th century version of a VR headset or curved gaming monitor, it is immersive.

And he painted somewhere around 250 of these. But always at sunset, in the same colors.

In his Cathedral series, he switched the restriction, and created transcendant art.

In 1892 Monet rented a space facing the west facade of Rouen Cathedral. Over two years, he painted the subject about 30 times. The same subject from the same angle, but at different times of day, different times of year. On a muggy brown summer's night, and a crystal yellow winter sunrise.

Monet intended through this innovative restriction to capture the essence of light itself. Through repetition, the similarity fades, and what's left is the difference. To do this he employs super modernist technique: following the contours of the cathedral, he builds up paint so thick it makes a sculpture standing off the canvas, so tall it actually casts a tiny shadow on the flat paint behind it.

Blues music has several similarities, which make it an earned taste.

All blues incorporates some restriction. Sometimes it's a limitation of the instrument, or the performer. Sometimes the performer and their instrument are hyper-capable, and the limitation comes from the form – blues without limitations becomes jazz.

Learning how to listen to blues depends on repetition. One excellent method: go through the standards – 'Rollin' And Tumblin'', 'Dust My Broom' – and listen to versions by various artists. The similarity fades, and what's left is the difference. You'll start to feel the personality of each artist emerging from the material.

We take it for granted now, but the layers of paint Monet built as if sculpting were avant-garde and controversial at the time. Likewise, blues music often has a barrier learners need to overcome in its production. Early blues got recorded on early equipment, the sound quality is often terrible by modern standards. And recording conventions were less formal. A performer might give a little spoken word intro before starting a song, or maybe stop mid-song to address a thought. Tuning is not standard.

Programming is an art which requires an earned taste. You largely do the same thing over and over again, that's the repetition. Every time, you do something a little different, that's the variation.

You're trying to separate the similar from the different. Computers are hella good at doing the similar, so the better you can identify the different, the better your program.

But every time you try one thing, you reject all the others. In order to do any one thing, you have to abandon the rest of the universe.

Innovation comes from restriction.

This wraps the post a day project – thanks for reading along. I'm not done writing, but I'll scale back to once or twice a week.

See, contrary to what I said the other day, I never quit. Just change.

Humans evolved as "persistence hunters". The only things humans can do better than other animals are jog and sweat. But it turns out, on the African Savannah, those two things combine to make a lethal pack. Average herd prey can run in bursts as fast as a car, but can't sustain that pace for long. Eventually the prey collapses from heat exhaustion, and the gang beats it to death with nothing more than rocks and sticks.

We exist because we persist.

I persist in wrestling with Hemingway's rule: "Write one true thing. Write the truest thing you know."

Here's one true thing: nothing ends, only changes.

They say you are what you eat. That's literally true. We're made of nothing but the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe.

So we're made up of the energy of all the plants and animals that came before us, and as their energy turned into ours, someday our energy will turn into another form.

Balancing today against tomorrow is the most basic human problem. We don't know how many of each we have – uncertainty. And until we know how many, we have to keep going – practice. But as we repeat we learn, and as we learn, we don't do the same things – change.

Practice uncertainly, then change.

Again, thank you for reading. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends.

"Behold, this day I have put before you a blessing and a curse."

In the Old Testament, God says this to the Israelites. The Old Testament can seem dusty and irrelevant. But this is eternal wisdom – true of every day.

It can seem like today the world is headed for disaster. But in many ways, this is the best time in history to be alive.

Fewer armed conflicts – wars – rage today than at any point in human history. Per capita income, life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy rates, all consistently improving around the world for the last 50 years.

The diseases modern medicine has eliminated reads like Mike Tyson's early '90s boxing record – a list of crushing victories. Typhus, cholera, polio, rubella, smallpox, bubonic plague, many more no longer even memories.

And this blessing demonstrates our curse. Our grandparents stood in line to get vaccinated because they knew the horrific toll of disease. In perfect health, our creeping killers now stem from despair – suicide and overdose move up the list of threats. This unusual new disease appeared, and within 18 months modern medicine produced a vaccine. An absolute triumph of science, and all we do is complain and argue about it.

It's an amazing time to be alive, but we don't appreciate it. Along with prosperity has come tremendous change. With that change, uncertainty and fear.

Every time has its own unique spirit, its zeitgeist. The unusual thing about this moment, we wake from this long and brutal dream of history, rub our eyes, try to look into the new light.

In our time, we have access to all the accumulated information of the past. Both modern physical scientists, those who make useful things like vaccines that keep our bodies alive; and the ancient spiritual scientists, who tell us how to stay alive inside.

We'll need both to succeed.

I get asked a lot, how does a person start sharing their creative work with the world? Let me start by listing reasons I've had in the past not to put my work out:

What if no one likes it? What if too many people like it? What if it's not as good as I hope it will be? I'm not ready. I don't have time. I don't have some other thing I need.

Look at all those reasons. Just writing those out makes me realize this needs to be a series. I'll start with the first one, but the same answer covers all of them: love, acceptance, flexibility.

Start by finding something you love deeply. There's nothing wrong with casual dabbling, but it lacks fuel. Sharing creative work involves tons of grunt grinding, which consumes motivation.

Creative fuel is like finding a hole in the world where the light leaks out, that can only be plugged with your work. Holes are hard to see though. If you don't see yours, just keep looking, experimenting, being a fan, asking questions. That process is worthy by itself.

Once you find material you love, ignore the numbers. I go out of my way to ignore how many likes my posts get, or email click rates, or any other number. On any site I can, I'll skip the dashboard, and open the post editing screen directly to avoid seeing them.

The problem with numbers is they disassociate you from the fact that there are people on the other side. That one solitary "like" or click or view could be really, really important to someone. Are you going to turn your nose up at changing one person's life because it's not enough?

Accept you're going to start at the bottom. Unless you had fame handed to you by circumstance – which comes with its own set of matching, monogrammed baggage – everyone starts there. Overnight success is the visible tip of the iceberg, and under the water is years of hard work. Accept you're going to start at the bottom.

The bottom has a huge hidden benefit: built-in flexibility. If the possibility of success is tiny, so is the chance of failure. Mess around, try different things, have fun!

Here's some perspective: if you're already doing creative work and not sharing it, then you're getting 0 likes right now anyway.

Nowhere to go but up!

I practice breathing whenever I remember.

Not the physical act – we all do that every minute. What I practice is not taking breathing for granted.

One day, I will want to take a breath, and I won't be able to. When that happens, I'm really going to regret all the times I could take a deep, clean, breath, and I wasted that moment on some negative feeling. Wishing I had something, wishing the world was different.

All negative feelings come from ingratitude. So when I feel a negative feeling, I remind myself I can breathe, and that's pretty good.

As I breathe in, I ask for forgiveness, for everything. For wasting time on negative emotion, for failing to do unto others, for whatever.

As I breathe out, I allow myself to be forgiven. To do good in the world, I have to get up and face it every day. And I can't do that with a feeling of guilt. Only love.

Take a breath now, feel how good it is. Remember that feeling.

One catastrophe deserves another
Wreckage relentlessly smashes days in daze
You and I, this thing called past, we
Endlessly discover
Repeating differently, we're
Constantly amazed

In a dirty wind out of Eden, even
Wings get smothered
Feeding on entropy, gaze in distant haze
Angel of History
Doomed to watch and suffer
Falling Backwards endlessly, he
Blazes progress' maze

Into the Future
We act like actors

Did those feet in ancient times
Walk on mountains green?
And was the holy lamb of God
In pleasant pastures seen?
And did Countenance Divine
Shine on clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among Satanic mills?

Into the Future
We act like actors
Into the Future
We're all Falling Backwards

We're all Falling Backwards

We're all Falling Backwards

I started writing about bassists to work my way up to this unusual choice.

Chuck Berry is my #1 bassist because I believe he was the most important artist of the 20th century, and he played bass on the most important song.

By "important", I mean having the greatest influence on the greatest number of people. Picasso was a great artist, but most people probably couldn't tell his blue period from Duchamp's bathroom. I bet like McDonald's “served”, the number of people who recognize the guitar lick to "Johnny B. Good" and the vocal hook to "No Particular Place to Go" approaches the billions.

Chuck ain't McDonalds though. In songs like "Too Much Monkey Business" and "Roll Over Beethoven", he perfected the one-syllable-per eighth note vocal style. This delivery had ancestors in a country form called the talkin' blues, but only through Chuck it would eventually become rap. His punishing electric guitar rhythm set the stage for Ramones, his winding complex leads for Metallica.

On "Memphis" though, Chuck takes rock 'n roll, and uses it to invent 'rock'.

What's the difference? Musically, Chuck is still working the vein he started with "Maybelline", which was a re-working of Bob Wills' song "Ida May". As he put it in his autobiography, he was playing what he called 'hillbilly music' – white country – in the style of the current black R&B. Chuck invented mashup and remix culture.

Lyrically "Memphis" is a miracle. It's sounds like it's about a lost love, and it is, but there's a twist. Unlike the dance of the same time, this lyrical twist isn't a fad – even once you know the girl is his daughter, it's still worth repeated listens. "Memphis" is a poem by Chuck Berry, set to music by Chuck Berry. It's bittersweet and full of tiny detail, the groove moving the narrative along as much as the dance floor.

Rock was created when Chuck broke all the rules, in a simple and obvious way that everybody else could follow. Rock 'n roll songs were all about girls and cars – "Memphis" bent the form into a new shape, opened the possibility to how much more rock songs could be.

His legacy and importance were almost immediately drowned out, both by brilliant remixing formbenders like the Beatles and Dylan – neither of whom could have done their work in the late 60s without him – and primitive copycats in garages who only learned his lessons of power and volume.

But isn't that such a huge part of the act of service, in giving your creation to the world? If you make something really popular – like, internationally popular for decades – then some people are gonna do their own thing with it.

So it's no surprise Chuck plays a gnarly lead bass part on "Memphis" – he's got bassist mindset already. Serving the song more than himself.

Listen, dance, think, enjoy, go Johnny go!

This Thanksgiving, I feel grateful to live in America. Gratitude ain't always simple though. I think of America like family – important for the soul, but challenging for the patience. Let me tell a few stories about family – one long and two short – to illustrate.

I never knew much about my heritage beyond my grandparents. I had a vague idea that one of my ancestors had built ships here in Maine, but that was it. One day, my Dad mentioned his mother had written out a geneology going back many generations, but he didn't know what had happened to it.

Turns out my sister had it. One scan-and-email later, I was looking at my grandmother's handwritten diagram. She had listed out birth names of each couple, and made a little set of symbols for brothers and sisters.

I was struck by all the detail. As I looked, I realized this was oral history, and I started to hear it recited in her voice… "Ebenezer Hall married Hannah Anderson, and they had 11 boys and 2 girls. Ebenezer the Second married Sarah Haskell, and they had six boys and one girl…"

I searched the internet, and found results instantly. She had gotten an amazing amount right, and a few interesting things wrong.

Like family, there was both good and bad.

The good: I am cousins with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, probably the most famous writer from Maine before Stephen King. Longfellow wrote an epic poem called 'Evangeline', about the Expulsion of the Acadians – the forced removal of French-speaking people from eastern North America during one of the many conflicts in the early colonies.

Grandmother would have been pleased as punch to learn about Longfellow. More interesting though, is how she got the genealogy wrong. The bad part.

The person she listed at the top of the tree was Hateevil Hall (what a name!), a Revolutionary War veteran, and from all accounts a real character. Hateevil did have a son named Ebenezer, but not the same. Instead, the person she listed as Ebenezer Hall I was actually Ebenezer Hall II.

Ebenezer Hall II was not a good person.

Born in Taunton, Massachusetts, he moved first to the town called Falmouth, Massachusetts, which is now Portland, Maine. Ebenezer III was born there. A few years later, Ebenezer II moved the family to Matinicus Isle.

Matinicus is a little rocky tooth of an island, part of a small chain 20 miles off the coast, battered by the open Atlantic. Ebenezer II moved his family there in 1750, claiming territorial rights on the land, and started setting up a farm.

The Penobscot tribe used the islands for hunting and considered them sacred, but they were still mostly willing to put up with their new neighbor. Until the day, in order to make more hay for his growing herd of livestock, he started setting the other islands on fire.

Ebenezer's presence was illegal under the treaty between Massachusetts and the Penobscot, and the tribe wrote more than once to the Governor in Boston. The Governor sent an official order for Ebenezer to leave, but he ignored it.

In their last letter, the tribe warns that Ebenezer's presence has become intolerable, and states that "if you don't remove him in two months, we shall be obliged to do it ourselves."

They waited four more years, but finally in June 1757, they laid siege to the house. Ebenezer was killed and scalped, but the rest of the family was left alive (which further suggests their beef was really just with him).

In certain cases, you might be able to argue some killing as justified, but atrocities like scalping are personal. The mutilation of a body after death has echoes of our primate ancestors – chimps will tear their opponents' bodies apart after a battle. For human beings to achieve the frenzied state necessary to commit such a horrifying act, it's almost always a group of men who have convinced themselves that some threat to their identity requires vengeance. Killing may have justification, but scalping comes from a demand for satisfaction.

So much for the simple concept of the peaceful native, living in harmony. These were men with bloody hands, well accustomed to brutality. During the colonial conflicts between the British and French, native people aligned themselves to fight on one side or another along lines of ancient tribal animosity.

But we need to view all of them in the perspective of their time.

Ebenezer's great-grandfather John Hall arrived in Boston in the fall of 1630. 19 years old, he had made the hazardous journey by becoming an indentured servant, and worked for without pay for five years. What makes a person take such a risk at great cost? Religious persecution.

The Puritans, while not a likeable group, were America's first refugees. When Henry the Eighth couldn't get the Pope to approve of his womanizing, he created The Church of England, and made it illegal to practice any other belief.

In 1630, London Bridge still displayed the severed heads of the executed as a warning to others. To someone like John, born in a filthy, overcrowded, crime- and plague- ridden English city, North America must have appeared practically deserted.

It's amazing what a person can get used to. The brutality of the natives, who hung scalps outside their settlements as a warning to others, wouldn't have struck the Puritans as anything out of the ordinary.

As a human family, we are slowly waking up from eons of ordinary brutality.

Story two – flash forward to Friday night. I'm riding in a Lyft to see some rock 'n roll in downtown Portland. Chatting with my driver, I learn he's an immigrant whose parents left the Soviet Union during its collapse, moving through several countries before settling in America.

He has another driving job which takes him to the most remote parts of Maine. People up there aren't bad, he says, they just have no exposure to the outside world. Without that exposure, any offense they give comes from ignorance and curiosity rather than malice.

Still, he likes Portland's immigrant community better. "That's what makes this country great," he says with an unusual accent, "the mix. Everyone brings different ideas, and when they mix together, you get new stuff."

Hell yeah to the mix. This country is not always the kindest, or the wisest, but it is the most interesting. Filled with the most possibility.

Last, story three. On one of my recent Wikipedia binges, I learned about the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation for Education and Reconciliation. If the names sound familiar, it's because the founders, Keith and Phoebe, are descendants of the 1896 Supreme Court case that resulted in the "separate but equal" doctrine.

Fifty years of legally sanctioned apartheid followed. My Mom told me about a family outing in Georgia when her little sister threw a tantrum because she wanted to try drinking from the "colored water" fountain. She innocently thought it was magical rainbow water, but this time was the opposite of innocent – her parents had to hustle them out to avoid a potentially dangerous situation. Eventually it required the upheaval of the Civil Rights era to overturn.

But overturn it did. Keith and Phoebe met as a result of exploring their heritage, which they obviously view through the perspective of the past. There's a picture of the two of them at the intersection of Royal and Press streets in New Orleans, where they placed a plaque commemorating Homer Plessy's arrest after boarding a whites-only train car.

They're looking into each other's eyes with genuine smiles, hard earned appreciation. They're bonded through their shared past, like me and the Penobscot.

They're family. A messy, mixed, American family.

I'm grateful for the possibilities.