Don’t wake me when this is over
Just let me drift amidst my dreams
I need to regain composure
And right now my heart is still and asleep

I refuse to believe
That we’ve become so obsolete
Don’t wake me when this is over
‘Cause I need to find the time lost in between

If we get back
To lovin’ each other
Can we get back
To learnin’ how to live?
We are strangers in this land
With so much left to discover
Can we get back
To learnin’ how to live?

We look to the heavens above for advice on our lives
Searching for God at the bottoms of bottles and in strangers’ eyes
We’re living in desperation, drowning in medication
Lost in the folly of our age

You know, I don’t watch the news, I remember the day I decided to stop watching it. It was a sunny day in 2018, around this time of year, and I was sitting in my therapists office and I went on a rant about how bothered I was by all the things going on at that time, I don’t remember what they were now. When I finished talking she said, you need to let go of what you cant control, because it’s just making your anxiety worse. I thought about how maybe ignorance is bliss. Maybe if I don’t know Iran is sending missiles at Israel I can sleep easier at night.

Today my brother and I were chopping wood, and my sister came out and started talking about the wars going on over seas, and whatever is going on down south where people don’t have water and there’s flooding and what not. She talked about how she didn’t feel meant for this world because all these things were so fucked up.

For a moment I almost googled to learn more about it, but I realized that the click bait I’d see would do me no good.

And then as I continued to chop and stack wood I kinda went off in thought. Was the world this way when I was a kid? Did I just not see it because I was a kid?

I wonder at what point as a society we lost our way, became divided, and stopped being kind to each other. And what caused it?

Have politics always been this dividing?

It seems to get more and more extreme each year, and each election things feel more and more tense. You have people not willing to be kind to or even talk to other people because of which way they vote. There’s this weird level of self righteousness and entitlement in the world today that I don’t understand.

Just because you don’t agree with someone doesn’t inherently make them a bad person, and just because they don’t agree with you doesn’t make you a bad person.

I think the media, and the instant access to so much information has made us forget who we are. I’m not going to tell you which way to vote, and it’s none of my business which way you vote.

What I love about restaurants, and maybe why I wanna open my own so bad is the sense of community you get to build. Every day people come into 1928, and it’s familiar faces, it’s people who live in a community coming together to hangout, drown their sorrows, celebrate, fucking whatever. No one is talking politics, no one is arguing, they’re all just existing, and we’ve cultivated a space they feel comfortable doing such. It’s the only restaurant I’ve worked at with such a wide demographic. Half the bar can be twenty-somethings hanging out at a place they find cool because of the decor. The other half a bunch of grumpy rich people who have one foot in the grave and one foot on a banana peel. Sometimes I’m pouring random shots for groups and sabering bottles of champagne. Other times I’m explaining to an elderly person that if I turn the music any lower it’s going to be silent dinner, or letting someone yell at me because their food was too expensive(I don’t make the prices).

When I step out of that building there is no sense of community anymore. We’ve just become a bunch of strangers. Every day I walk by hundreds of people so focused on their phones that they’re not even noticing the world around them. I remember when I went to a city and colour show, and Dallas asked the crowd to put their phone away for one song. He said:

For one song try to be kind to each other, put your phone away, don’t send a mean tweet, say hello to the person next to you, and just be in this room. And at the end of the song you can all take your phones out and tweet about what an asshole I am, but stop trying to remember it so bad you forget to experience it.

From that point on at every one of his shows I’ve been to, which is probably 7 or 8 now, I use my phone less and less every time. At this last one I took a video when he got on stage of the first song, and maybe one other photo. Other than that my phone was in my pocket and I danced and sung the entire time, I wasn’t focused on remembering it, I just existed in that field as I was and let the music take away the weight of everything I had been feeling. I left feeling relaxed, recovered.

He makes a good point though, why the fuck is it so hard for people to just be kind to other people. I’m not talking about the people you know either, I’m talking about the people you don’t know, I’m talking about the strangers. Every day everyone wakes up and they’re dealing with their own shit and they’re just trying to figure it out and get by. We’re all fucked up, and we’re all fucked up in our own ways, but it wouldn’t kill any of us to just be a little fucking kinder to one another. Maybe it would make the world feel a little less heavy.

If we get back to loving each other….

J.