The stars will fall And their light will hit your head The planets will drop out of orbit before you know The pain of our brothers and sisters sharing these streets and schools with us. He was jogging She was in her own home You can think all you want Nobody’s thoughts ever saved a life Time to do something Step up to the plate and swing blindly And hit a cop in the face And smash your reality This country ain’t gonna live for long There ain’t no going back no there’s only the future So burn the past and let the wind have the ashes Ahmad Arbery Breonna Taylor Michael Brown Philando Castile Eric Gardner Erica Gardner Trayvon, Trayvon Martin George Floyd

Waking up new beautiful day every day Freedom and agency privilege to face reality Who decides? Are we all just trying to make things good in our lives? Are we all just trying to make things good in our lives? And ill-informed we side with violence, hatred, despair and out of the desperation we kill heedlessly. This system which governs our bodies disproportionaly affects Black and Brown bodies negatively. Rise up if you hear the call to rise Rise up! and hear the good words No justice, no peace No justice, no peace No justice, no peace No justice, no peace Step up and confront your Whiteness The power structures which uphold your White Supremacy must be overturned unlearned The etchings they have left in our bodies must be burned If there will ever be a free country there is work to be done by everyone. We must learn, we must fight together Some of us gotta learn more than others

Let your judgement be unclouded Let the earth bring you answers Listening to the water And telling the weather There’s hunger and strife in nature and justice is just a part of life The hierarchy of the wild exists across species and life-forms and forces bigger than all of them combined The water cycle The wind patterns prevailing Soil conditions fed on decaying matter And wildlife in brutal short time Winter bees live for six months Summer bees live for six weeks It’s just a chance to live their short brutal beautiful lives in peace Accomplish the simple attainable goal of perpetuating their species Have we been so far removed? So ingrained in our hierarchy That’s it’s right in our minds That some should live and some must die for no reason?

When I was sixteen years old I was a running man A vegetarian And I’d run five miles a day minimum with the team at Potomac Falls High School in Sterling, Virginia We were dominating cross country in Loudoun County and the Northern Virginia region going on ten years, the best team And my coach would always pep us up with wonderful talks before a workout encouraging us in the manner of an old wise crotchety relative Encouraging us to keep trying and persevering through the adversity that is long distance running “You don’t do it cause it feels good  You don’t do it cause it makes you feel good afterwards You do it to challenge yourself your mind soul body and self most importantly yourself” Skills you learn running eight or ten miles in the hot sun without a break, without stopping, without water They are lessons you carry with you the rest of your life on into your old age I’d always say to myself, “If I can run if I can make it through this race alive then I can do pretty much anything I set my mind to.” And I kept up in school and kept up practicing guitar, and I kept up thinking about what I could do  And I had a righteous state of mind, ill-informed yet still powerful in it’s own way, to be a vegetarian from age thirteen because my parents said “Oh you won’t last a week”   And playing guitar, trying to figure out the fretboard while my friends beat themselves up about their times "Sub eighteen minutes for a 3k ain’t good enough" I always thought while I was running I would say to myself, in my head, keeping steady pace, I would say “At the end of this there will be relief Water to drink to slake your thirst and there’s a cool grass shade to stretch your aching legs  So run harder, don’t let your feet win Don’t slow down cause that’s the worst thing you can do except stop” Push myself to my limits, to my mental limits and I knew, I learned my mental limits were strong  The bond of two, the bond of consciousness and flesh and bone and blood it all connects to And at the end of my junior year season my shins were giving out from underneath, stress fractures and I had to cut my season short anyway sit my legs in icy baths just to get the tendrils of pain to fade away and the next year after killing myself to get good grades to get 4s and 5s on special tests, very special tests I quit the team and joined a band I was playing guitar so often gig after gig event after event rehearsing constantly and I became extremely disillusioned with high school I had such high expectations I wanted the world on its feet for us and all the resources of the best school system in the country at my disposal while my friends smoked pot, cigarettes blew school off and fucked around I was trying to make it through seventeen seasons of South Park on Netflix and dating one of my best friends and decide if I should go to school “Do you wanna go to a big school lots of people or do you wanna go to a small school with fewer people?” How the fuck was I supposed to know what kind of school small or large, private, public, in state, out of state? I’d subject myself to it for the next 4 years How the fuck was I supposed to know? And in school I was constantly disappointed by the classwork, by the intelligence of the people who were supposed to be my peers So basically I said “Fuck school just let me pass  and I won’t disrupt your class any more than I have to” So I was just pretty much dedicating all my time to being in a band or a few at a time Booking shows and writing songs securing bands for dates and trying to meet as many people I could And my willpower was stretched out of me It’s not like running a race  It’s not like eating peppers instead of meat And I relied on the ones I was intimate with enormously for emotional support because I couldn’t cope with my inner feelings, discontent and anger, no matter how many drumbeats I learned or shows I screamed the whole time Something was missing always

Now I can look back on that fine year after high school coming back to Sterling still working on the band still trying to keep my girlfriend interested in me And after that year fucking around in school, started drinking  Started smoking pot And I can’t believe I made it through my spring semester twenty-sixteen I barely scraped by with Cs  There was one day I was at my friends apartment we were passing the bong and I hit that shit And I missed eight a.m. history exam And I missed eleven a.m. exam And I’m not sure if it was not divine intervention that allowed me to not fail out And even working on a music festival with my best friends couldn’t keep my willpower from leaving me Nobody likes to work on music festivals That’s not why you have a music festival And after that year I was so disillusioned and overwhelmed with life my friends their addictions their bad habits I had to cut myself off from them for a while, moved to a different house Where the addictions seemed more integrated  and in my fucked up state of mind that was what I needed  And that ended up being the saddest year of my life  I split up with my partner once early in the year and that pretty much set the stage for things We got back together and resolved the argument  I sought treatment for my mental illness  They had me on these blue pills and I’d sleep all day  That didn’t keep up, I just tried to stay in school and work at the Performing Arts Center I learned more about recording and mixing, acoustics and being a stagehand and the professions therein So we decided we were gonna move to Rhode Island She was gonna get her master’s and I was gonna leave the state that was my home for twenty-two years, twenty-two years So I graduated and walked across that stage  My family came out we had tacos downtown And my dad and sister didn’t fight or bicker Cause they were there for me And my best friend’s family bought him a hundred beers for our graduation party which was basically just a gathering on our porch We had a pretty good crowd crackin beers having a good time not giving a flying fuck about anything, anything, anything But that night at a party down the street I lost control  It’s a curse of my Irish ancestry and I remember everything It still brings me shame to this day It was my willpower that left me  Hanging by a thread And I had so much unresolved energy Two days later I packed up my shit and left and I came back to my parents house  Month of May twenty-eighteen, rainiest May in recent history June came I moved to Rhode Island  With the love of my life