Today my pasta dough was dry. I threw it in the trash. Then in anger, I played a game of online chess and quickly lost. I always lose when I’m upset.

What has the nation I was born in come to? The US government’s terrorization of its own residents is a terrifying display of brutality. The kind of brutality I’ve read about at school, studying events that occurred either far away or long ago. I am no longer asking myself if the US has passed a point of no return, I am asking myself when that point was passed.

Seriously—if anyone reading is asking themselves “how bad is it really?”, the thing to confront is that in our cities, agents of our government are violently targeting brown people on the streets. In our cities, going outside with brown skin is unsafe. To answer the question “how bad is it really?”, it’s as bad as it gets. A nation willing to murder its own people is a nation with cancer. It will destroy itself.

In my own life, work feels meaningless. What am I supposed to do, clog my followers’ Instagram feeds with the songs I’ve been working on? Spend long days at the studio not acknowledging the state of national emergency? No, there are more important matters that need attention. Still, I haven’t attended a protest in 5 years. I haven’t volunteered my time supporting the undocumented immigrants in my own city. I haven’t slashed a single goddamn tire. When faced with the gravity of my nation’s descent into darkness, I am impotent. I am useless. I am a piece of shit.

Today I will find a way to do something good. Somehow.

Last night, my girlfriend coined “Productive Tuesday“ (PT for short). So when I woke up, the bar was set, game on. For me, that meant dealing with 2 things I greatly dread: getting back to my clients and going to the gym. Today started with the latter, and after finishing a relatively unambitious workout I was feeling pretty good, confident in my ability to handle whatever challenges Productive Tuesday might throw my direction.

But then came the correspondence. To make things simple for myself, I started by making a simple list of all the people I was irresponsibly neglecting to get back to. The first 5 or 6 entries came easy; they were already floating around in my head. Then I plumbed the depths of my text messages; the list got longer. Next, my emails; the list grew longer still. Instagram DMs, I was in trouble. By the end of this painful exercise, my list had climbed past 20 entries.

The fact that I am able to maintain a career as a freelancer with such atrocious communication is a miracle, plain and simple. The source of my dysfunction is still somewhat unclear to me, but I have my suspicions. When someone asks me for something, I either say yes or say nothing at all. No is a hard answer to give, and I’ve got a pretty weak disposition in this regard. In fact, if I have to say anything other than exactly what someone wants to hear, I overthink. I overthink for days, my mind racing with terrible imagined outcomes on loops. This goes on until my silence has become a bigger problem than any answer I could have given.

I really have to stop doing this.

My girlfriend mentioned that I should focus on doing some work at my real job to make some money this month before I focus on other interests. I responded that my blog (now 4 days old) was occupying the role of a full time job. She responded that my last 2 posts were on average 2 sentences long (thankfully she didn’t mention the absence of any readership or form of monetary compensation). The implication here is that 2 sentences a day is hardly full time work.

I started today with 2 fewer lamps than I ended it with, a smashing success. Still didn’t manage to get any work done.

Today I paid 8 dollars for a cabbage. I felt the price was excessive but I received no sympathy from my cashier.

Hi, my name is Oliver. I make songs. I started out making them alone, then with friends, then for friends, then for strangers. It’s strange to think about where you started and then to think about where you are now. It’s easy to make our life story make sense when we look back on our past and subtly revise our history to make a cohesive narrative arc. Lately I’ve been wondering if my own life story is a sort of subtle fabrication I’ve created for myself. I guess it doesn’t really matter if your story is true to history or not, it’s still your story.