Drinking Beer As A High School Dropout

Here I am in my mid forties, sitting all alone in my home office and drinking beer and watching old video games for the Dreamcast console. I have spent the whole day on Twitter, avoiding my chores, projects, and hobbies. The first of April is coming and a huge decision looms over me – do I enroll in a high school course towards completing my OSSD? Do I try a third time even though I had to withdraw from class the previous two times? Do I want to admit that I’m such a big loser that I couldn’t even finish high school by trying, once again, to do what the rest of you did in your teenage years?

When I was a teenager, it was the mid-’90s and life was grand. I lived in North York (Toronto) and loved every single thing I did. My hobbies included learning Slackware 1.0 (Linux), programming in C++, downloading warez (games), and composing music in trackers in DOS. High school at the time offered programming in boring Turing, biology, chemistry and physics and geography – who cares!  What a bore!  Studying covalent bonds, whatever those were, didn’t seem half as interesting as how to get LILO (pre-GRUB) configured on my 386sx-16mhz machine with 4mb of RAM.  Before long I was skipping classes.

It got to the point where my Calculus teacher asked me why I skipped 80 of 88 classes that year. I had no answer, I just told him math didn’t interest me. This wasn’t the real truth, for I loved calculus. But what was I going to say to him? Gee, learning from a blackboard and paper and pen is lame and computers are the future? Everyone who was smart knew that Linux would be the future. Back then we didn’t have Google, or books at the library, so I had to learn everything the hard way. Through trial and error. I had to use the man pages a lot, too.  There weren’t forums the way there are now, and there definitely wasn’t AI nor experts I could collaborate with. Everything I had to learn by changing one line at a time with plenty of print statements, and this held true for configuration files as well as source code compiling.

Many years later, after I had dropped out of high school and got a job in Toronto’s tech industry I would excuse my bad decision of leaving high school by saying there simply wasn’t enough time. And it was easy enough to buy into this illusion. I first noticed my faulty thinking when I explained this lack of time to my grandma. I told her my daily activities included hanging out with friends, rollerblading, coding, writing music, and playing with Linux. My grandma looked at me stunned, and she said that I was wrong in how I looked at things. She reminded me of her experience in high school during World War II! She had to take a train to school, not a subway. And at that it was a cargo train, without seating. She had to do homework, but also house work to help with the family, she had to cook, sew, clean, etc. I never did any of this. All I ever did was sit and stared at a computer screen. When I thought about it seriously, what my grandma said made sense. Except I was listening to it 25-30 years after the fact. She said I had time for both, school and personal projects, just like she did back in the ‘40s.

This was difficult for me to accept. I had always told everyone as well as myself that I was following in the footsteps of giants like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates – dropouts who made it big in tech. I felt I had made it big, too. In my 20s I was making more money than those who finished university and had “wasted their lives earning a piece of paper” – as I used to explain.  This of course wasn’t the reality. When I was a teenager my parents divorced. And a way I dealt with that was by imbuing myself into computers. I would put on my headphones and stare at the screen doing work and so it was a form of escapism or avoidant behaviour. Going to school meant having to deal with realities at home, which clearly I didn’t want to do. Writing music was more fun than studying chemistry or biology or physics even, but I had time for both. I could have had my mom help me at the dinner table after dinner for an hour every day!  I could have done my home work, passed my exams, and still composed all the music I wanted. I would have still had time to hang out with friends and play video games with my sisters. My grandma was right. I lacked time management skills. I was also poorly coping with the family situation.

Oddly enough there were no councillors calling my parents when I skipped class. My parents never talked to me about my missing of classes either. I don’t recall my dad ever asking me why I was home and working on Linux instead of at school. There was never a moment when a teacher asked me why I wasn’t showing up. I did still attend high school, but only the classes I liked. I would show up for lunch hour to hang out with friends, and gym was always what I was in. I sometimes attended economics as that interested me. I naturally thought tech would lead me towards running my own business. None of it ever materialized. THe lack of organizational skills I failed to learn in school lead towards a disorganized adult life. I had plenty of success in the tech world, but whenever something complex was asked of me I avoided it and skipped out. There were moments I even skipped out on work whenever a presentation was required of me. I got fired for it, too.

I guess all I’m trying to say is that this April I’ll be enrolling in high school classes as an adult. I have to admit to myself that for thirty something years I have been living wrongly. I have been pursuing things the wrong way, walking along the wrong path. I will need maybe five or six credits to graduate. I’m not looking forward to any of this. But it is time to set things right. It is time to finish high school. I believe my grandma was right. I believe I still have time for everything.

A Song About Love

One of my new music projects is an album called The Four Horsemen. It is a concept album in that I envision talking about and composing about my feelings about my high school and middle school friends, people I knew in the ‘90s. I wish to express how I felt about them back then, how I feel about the distance, and how it makes me feel not talking to them any longer. Part of my feelings is friendship, but also love for the girls who chose to be part of my life back then.

The album will focus on the core four people of my life at that time, which were Bahman, Mikolaj and Glen, and the fourth being me obviously – hence the name The Four Horsemen. I envision writing a track for each of them individually and conveying what we went through together, and why things turned out the way they did. Back then I thought we all would be friends forever. But now, at the age of 45, I sit alone in my office wondering what they’re up to as we don’t talk anymore. Also some negativity was present and I hope to convey that with each song.

The rest of the tracks on TFH will be focused on my high school friends. People like Beez, Liban, Esmail, Mahyar, Wanda, Mike, Ben, Denuja – and others – were there others? Did anyone else go to that school except for us? The friendships were so amazing that I swear we were the only ones in the whole school. That’s at least how I remember it, empty classes, empty hallways, just us sitting in front of the swimming pool in the hallway next to the music room, playing cards, chatting, eating lunches. At that time, too, I thought we all would be friends forever – and here I am again in my office at the age of 45 all alone without any of them in my life. I think I was told one of them had cancer and was dying. Did he survive? Did I misunderstand? I have no idea. So I want to write what I felt, what I feel, and possibly touch upon the future where I see all of us being friends again, together, whoever is still alive – hopefully all.

So to get started on this goal I chose love as the theme for my first opening track. The song is called Terrorist Activity. Since I was madly in love with Wanda back then, it is about her and I even though we never dated. Here are the lyrics, and then I will discuss them.

Terrorist Activity, Terrorist Activity,
Terrorist Activity…

Wanda sat in my round, black bean-bag chair
Her pumpkin hair, like a wet rag
in her hands, neon-coloured Keyboard mag
Bjork on the cover, Wanda smiled.
oh yeah, a beautiful rag, I swear…

Terrorist Activity, night ops, sparks fly.
Air raid sirens, helicopters and screams.
Mortars one and two away, is it daylight?
The buildings sway but the nations still hold
terrorist activity, it’s here to stay.

History class, second row, there’s Wanda.
In her hands, orange juice, probably Five Alive
Imbued, chatting, didn’t have a clue.
I sat down, opened the textbook, another war.
This lesson was for us all.

Terrorist activity, it’s in the air tonight,
Phil Collins sings on CNN all day,
missiles away, nuclear subs are near.
Red flowers on a corner, another kid dead.
Terrorist activity, must be fun for the family.

I remember your beauty, so long long ago,
blue and green, spinning round, full of life,
now wobbling, red and black, dead as the night,
Dreams of us, three kids, a dog.
Oh Wanda why did we get old?

I want to rewind the film, all the way to Bjork,
to press play and live in your smile.
terrorist activity, forever.

In these lyrics, I go back and forth between two different time periods. I describe Wanda twice in the ‘90s, and I describe the current world full of terrorist and conflicts. Now I’m sure all those bad things existed back in the ‘90s, too, but back then as a teenager I didn’t watch the news so it was as if they didn’t exist. But these days I watch the news every day and world issues are of daily worry for me – a source of never-ending stress. The idea of the song is that the place where love was supposed to be in my life was filled by terrorist activity as reported by the news and as experienced here in Canada.  I describe a memory very dear to me when Wanda sat in my bedroom waiting for us all to get together for a night out, and I described the first moment I saw her at school in history class. But these events are juxtaposed upon world conflicts, and especially neat is the parallel between wars in the history book and current conflicts.

The closing paragraph is about the future, so technically there are three periods in these lyrics, the far past, the present and the future. And in this future I explain how my dream was to have a family with Wanda, even a dog, but instead the Earth will be wobbling and will be lifeless from all the wars. I imagine Wanda and I getting old in this world, each living our own lives separate from each other and imagine that we were separated by these terrorist forces that keep love from triumphing. I close the song by wishing to go back in time to that moment when she held the Bjork magazine in her hands, but then before I say I wish to pause life in that moment forever, before I can think of the word forever the phrase terrorist activity is inserted by the news and so a different message is all that remains of our dreamy love.

I am not yet sure how I will compose the music for this song. I have several ideas I’m thinking about. I can record it as a dark electronica track all the way through. However I am more interested in recording the war parts as dark and moody but the ‘90s memories of Wanda as cheerful. I have never really composed such a song before where I change the mood so drastically with each paragraph so it might be quite the challenge, which excites me. I love those types of compositions the most. I am also debating whether to make it a trip-hop track, slow down tempo, maybe even using vocoder for the lyrics. Unfortunately I don’t yet know how to use the vocoder very well, but I can learn I suppose. I have many options as I haven’t yet recorded a single note. The work awaits.

What Is ORANGE13?

Suppose I was to give you a simple and quick answer and say that it’s a record label for releasing music – would there be a point to knowing any other details? But suppose there is a long explanation because it’s not really a record label and it doesn’t exactly exist – would a long explanation entice you to read more? Should I be mysterious and lead you on as many writers do these days with a hook somewhere near the end forcing you to read everything? I’m honest so I won’t do that. It’s a pretend record label that has become a blog category. Nothing more. I use it to release my own music productions and I use it to explore web design ideas.

I don’t know anything about running a business. But in January 2006 I said goodbye to my team at UUNET Canada (then Verizon Business, formerly WorldCom Canada and MCI Canada) to start a music label called ORANGE13. This is what I told everyone. They all signed a greeting card – some went through the trouble of encoding secret messages in printed binary form, which I never could decode. I’m just not that smart. I wasn’t quitting to start a record label, even though everyone knew my hobby was to be a musician. I was quitting because my girlfriend was abusive and I didn’t want that negativity to in any way negatively impact my co-workers, the customers, or anyone else at the company. I was quitting to protect what mattered to me a lot – all of them!

That is sort of the birth of ORANGE13 in my life. The corporate offices were located in downtown Toronto and on the top floor was a beautifully decorated penthouse. Like any other tech business, this was an ISP mind you, they had satellite television, showers, and a pool table, a BBQ, you know, fun things for us to socialize with and build that all-so-important team spirit. I loved going to that lounge area but there was far too much work and I was an overworking perfectionist so I never took proper lunch breaks. Many of us ate at our desks. Back then we were spending much time on IRC, on our custom made servers, chatting, exchanging tips and tricks of the networking trade. But one time I ventured to the lounge after work and that’s when ORANGE13’s seed was planted in my mind. For there was on the pool table a single ball left, the orange and white ball numbered thirteen and a pool cue. I immediately came up with the name ORANGE13 in my mind and decided right then and there that it would be the name for my music projects.

At the time I never really played pool. I didn’t get the game. Not that the rules were complicated, I just didn’t see the point to putting balls into pockets you know? Like I was in that building to do work, serious work, to route packets through the network, to configure BGP communities, to setup MPLS labels even, I wasn’t there to play pool. It felt irresponsible for me to spend any serious effort on pool, even though I worked there for six years and could have played a little bit every day and gotten really good at it. Nobody else on the team did. We played with our desktop Linux machines, and later when corporate took over from the US we played with our Windows NT shit boxes. No UNIX geek loves when corporate forces NT on them do they? Why is that? Why do we hate Microsoft so much? I mean they are coders like anybody else? As a musician I don’t hate U2 because they’re different than the music that I produce – yet I disliked Microsoft.

A year had gone by and I worked on more music, and then I got the brilliant business idea. I will hire my sister as she was a designer to make me a cool logo and business cards. That’s what it takes to run a business, a great image, right? So I worked tirelessly with her through 24 logo iterations, and she did such a fantastic job that my ORANGE13 logo is better than the Apple Computers logo I think! I mean it’s only fitting considering how amazing I am as a musician right? She made business card designs really quickly and I went to the local shop and paid good money and got like 2,000 cards printed. I gave a few to people at work, everyone was impressed, and then nothing. That’s right, nothing. That was the extent of how much I knew how to run a business. I was composing music daily, but never finishing any songs either. I had no product to sell, I had no website to market, I had business cards, and a logo! It was style over substance type of deal. I was a cluebag.

Then the unthinkable happened and I got a new girlfriend. She wrecked everything that could be wrecked in a man’s life. She destroyed all my friendships out of sheer jealousy, she made me cry often, she did this and that, it’s pointless to rehash it. But needless to say I believed that in love one has to put up with the bad as well as to love the good, so I thought if I wanted to be with her I needed to put up with all of her personality quirks – I didn’t yet know about mental health. She definitely had symptoms of bipolar, but I knew nothing about such matters. I was a driven passionate coder, musician and networking guy and I thought everyone else in the whole world was as sane as me! Boy was dating her an awakening I will never quite forget. After we parted ways I even stopped writing music for a few years because that’s how much emotional harm she had caused me. You see, I only wish to write music when I’m in a good happy mood. I find that there’s too much negativity in this sad world and I do not wish to contribute to it. So I want my music to mostly project happy vibes, and to nurture goodness. But she left me feeling sorry and down and I wanted to forget all about her and her sexy American accent.

So I spent a few years back home in Belgrade hanging out with little kids playing soccer, watching TV, and helping my grandma as much as I could. I cleaned the attic, the garage, the walls from cigarette smoke (did you know that walls turn yellow from smoke?), etc. It is there in Belgrade that I started, again, to compose music, and it was my usual happy vibe. The love of the kids and their curiosity of life, even dogs barking at night, it all coalesced into my rebirth. ORANGE13 wasn’t dead! The idea of me releasing music lived on even there. I had zero income, zero resources, and still I was composing some of the best music I knew I made to that point. I had brought my Macbook from Toronto with me and an old Toshiba and using them both I was in heaven. I never needed much in terms of hardware or software to achieve great results. My start in composing was in MS-DOS using trackers like Scream Tracker 3, and even earlier ones that made MTM files and MOD files which could only play four instruments at a time. I found some ORANGE13 business cards in my wallet, sitting there in my bedroom in our Vozhdovac home, and I wished to continue on my musical journey. I had fully recovered from my ex’s abusiveness.

Then a lot of terrible things happened, which is part of the reason why we fled to Canada in the ‘90s. I should have never returned to Belgrade, and now that I am once again safely in Toronto, I promised myself I will never return to Serbia for it is not a safe place for people with disabilities such as I am. You see I was born with cataracts and after a surgery at a very young age I would be left with low vision at best my whole life.  For one reason or another, while the people everywhere in the world are nice, governments are not, and Serbian authorities are quite mean. Without going into details let’s just say that their terrible attitudes followed me even to Toronto when I once again fled Serbia and even here they pursued me and in a way still do. So ORANGE13 never really became a real record label like I wanted it to.

I registered a website, but never built any pages for it. Well I did for a time, but it was a half-assed effort. It generally had nothing of any value on it. I still do not wish for the ORANGE13 dream to die though and I wish to use the name in relation to my music. I have so far released two music albums (including on Spotify and 100 other streaming services). I have three more albums lined up for release this March, totalling five albums. It’s not amazing music like I believe me capable of producing, but this is due to the abuse this world has put me through. I no longer feel the rest of you are worth my musical gifts. This is a feeling many victims suffer with and I am working through it. I feel music is my gift and one I need to share with people. I don’t exactly have designs on being rich or famous, I would much rather prefer to make money during a regular 9-5 job and releasing music for free on the side. I want my music to be a gift and freely accessible, and not some point of exclusion and luxury. I don’t need a private mansion with bodyguards type of lifestyle. I need a hobby and music makes me happy. So ORANGE13 lives on in blog form. It is now a name of the category where I write stories such as these, where I post things about my music. ORANGE13 is my music blog. That’s the simple answer. But it encompasses all my dreams about my most favourite hobby. And I have several hobbies let me tel you, but music is my most favourite one. I am still disappointed on a personal level that I haven’t yet collaborated with Depeche Mode. But I’m hopeful that can happen if I work really hard every day for a few years. Goals are important in life and that is just one of about a thousand I wish to achieve.  As for billiards, a few years ago I spent two good years playing pool every day at a Chinatown cafe and now I get it. Now I love the art of the pocket. But hitting the orange number thirteen has always remained a monumental move for me.

On Music

Why do I compose music? It is a question I ask myself more and more. Especially after being assaulted. Why do I contribute to the world that has hurt me? Shouldn’t I refuse and protest? Shouldn’t I be upset and wait for an apology from you all for mistreating me so harshly? Doesn’t contributing good quality music for everyone’s enjoyment encourage mistreatment? I never used to wonder these things back as a teenager before I was wronged. Back then in the mid ‘90s life was perfect. I had my family, I had my high school friends, and I had my DOS tracker program for composing. I couldn’t have dreamed of a better life back then. I never once wondered why I wrote music – it was just something I did and enjoyed doing.

Back then very basic things were pleasant. Things like the falling snow or rain made me happy. I know most people aren’t smiling to walk in the rain with an umbrella, but I do! Rain makes me happy, as does snow, as does the sun. I like being outdoors. But I also liked sitting in front of my computer, composing for hours. I tend to be very diverse in the things I enjoy and that I spend time with. Back then in the ‘90s I used Scream Tracker 3. It has a text interface for music creation arranged like a spreadsheet into columns and rows. Special codes are typed into each cell, such as X00 for left pan or S91 for surround sound, and then when F5 is pressed it compiles the music and you can hear it until you press F8. Then I’d make more changes and press F5 to hear them. It wasn’t real-time composing like most people know today. It was a paint-by-numbers process or rather compose-by-numbers. It was more similar to editing financial data in a spreadsheet than anything else. The way to tell a quarter note from a whole note is by how many cells are between them. It took me two years to master it.

I got so good at writing music that a scene publication even published some of my techniques. The e-magazine was called TraxWeekly and anyone who’s anyone had an article published in it. It’s like an industry journal for science such as nature where scientists dream of being published. Only as a teen I didn’t have an ego at all, I didn’t dream of being a published author, it just happened organically. I thought my ideas could benefit others and emailed them. It was that simple! In fact I am quite reserved and even shy when it comes to sharing my art so unlike other musicians at the time I didn’t upload my songs to various BBSes or websites for sharing purposes. I would write over a thousand songs and never release any of them. To this day I still haven’t released anything except for one album. That one I released even though it’s in a rough draft form because I wanted to listen to it on Spotify and it was easier than making MP3s. Goes to show how faulty tech development is these days.

Writing music made me feel accepted in this sad world. It made me feel normal and one with others. I was born disabled as at birth my eyes developed congenital cataracts. I had eye surgery at eighteen months and could see but with low vision. So using big letters in MS-DOS programs was far easier to work with then today’s tiny widgeted interfaces. I blossomed under those conditions, whereas today it’s difficult to get work done, and I was able to pursue a wonderful hobby in my spare time. Whereas many teenagers partied with drugs, alcohol, marijuana and other not-so-wise choices, I sat at home programming, composing, drawing in 3D software and Photoshop, I was rollerblading and watching movies with friends as well as playing games. I led a perfectly healthy and happy life. Music was integral to it all. I never imagined that writing music would become difficult.

Several years ago I got assaulted. It doesn’t really matter by whom or why – there’s never a valid reason for violence anyway. People often make excuses like he said something or he did something or he looked at a person wrongly. But those are all insane rationales for bad behaviour. Violence can never be justified under any circumstances. However, it left me questioning everything, every step of my life. I question even myself while brushing my teeth. I wonder if brushing my teeth will lead to being assaulted again. It sounds ridiculous but hear me out. What if those who assaulted me were jealous of my perfect teeth because their genetics was inferior and they had tons of problems and thus they bullied me into not brushing my teeth with violence? Just one of my countless thoughts I’ve had ever since the world gifted me violence into my perfect life.

I also question whether wearing nice clothes will lead to further violence. I question if being strong and physically fit will lead me towards being abused. Jealousy is a powerful motivator for people with mental illnesses who are violent. And any point of a person can be perceived with jealousy. What if a bully is jealous of my talent in music composing? Maybe writing music is doing a disservice to myself as it will lead to further violence against me? What if the people bullying me do not want me to shine? I have to ask these questions because there is nobody out there working tirelessly to protect me and my interests, nobody. My mom cares for me, and helps me, but she can’t protect me, she’s quite old. Other than her, nobody here in Canada cares or even pretends to care. I’m basically on my own. Just me and my music. And music can’t protect me, can it?

As a teen I never wondered about jealous people and what damage they can cause. Nobody in high school made fun of me, nobody insulted me even though I have a lazy eye and don’t see well. All my friends were respectful, kind and supportive. What’s more back then they all loved my music and would encourage me towards stardom. But I was always afraid of success. Deep down inside I must have known about jealous people, about bullies, about the violent nature of the rest of you. I’m different, I don’t have any violence in me, I don’t even get angry, I find both of those concepts alien. But the rest of you suffer from it and I live in your world and thus have to learn to co-exist. I have to learn to write music without the bullies knowing. And that is difficult since I also want to release music.

I don’t have any designs on being famous. In fact I’m terrified of the spotlight. In high school, on days when we had to present in front of the class, I would not show up for class. In fact I skipped much of my classes and the teachers never once called home either. Strange, isn’t it? But it allowed me to focus on Linux and programming, which was a sort of school I suppose. My high school was teaching basics of variables and arrays in Turing, which was boring. This is why I was skipping most classes. Who needs biology, chemistry and physics when computers and spaceships would be the future! This was my logic back then. But these days I dream of going back in time and finishing high school. I dream of releasing my music as a teenager, of getting that important feedback from strangers, from industry pundits, from experts whom I respected. I dream of having spent my time differently. Of instead of playing video games of having gone dancing or playing volleyball. Now that I’m a victim of your violent world I dream of something better instead of creating something better, and that bothers me.

I had a goal last year and I tried to stick to it as much as motivation allowed. I made a new folder every month with the name of the month and in it I put my music making experiments. At the end of December last year I tallied up all my files. There was merely fifty of them. My goal for 2023 was to write music every single day and to release an album every month. I believed fully that I could release twelve albums in one year. And there’s no reason why I couldn’t. But fear of violent people, even here in Canada violence rules society, prevented me. I would sit down to write and then I wouldn’t save my work. I would be afraid that saving a song would lead to a fully released track and then bullies would be jealous and would assault me. It’s a type of victim’s paranoia that is self-protective yet not. So instead of writing 365 songs, I wrote only fifty.

This month I have the exact same goal. I want to release twelve albums. But I’ve lowered the bar. I no longer seek to make professionally sounding works, but bad music. I want to release twelve bad albums. That way bullies can not judge me, and they probably won’t assault me if they’re busy laughing at how poor my music is. This goal makes me happy and I realize it is a stepping stone towards a full music career. Most notable artists do not release their experiments, or their bad takes, but I also believe in the #buildinpublic mantra. I want others to learn from my mistakes – I want a better world I suppose that is it in a nutshell.

I want a world of people holding hangs and singing kum-baya. I want people dancing, singing, and playing sports. I am tired of all this violence everywhere. Whenever I look at cable TV channel lineup for the day it’s either violence in entertainment form, violence in the news, or violent TV shows, or something boring. There is nothing in between, there is very rarely an educational show – maybe one nice show per day is all that is available here in Toronto. I remember back in the mid ‘80s when I first started watching TV daily as a kid in Belgrade, we had only three channels and it was packed with good quality content. Almost every show was exciting and interesting. Now some are tempted to say that this is because I was younger. No, show quality has deteriorated definitely. It can be measured. Netflix is all the rage these days, and they produce their own movies, and much of them are formulaic and repetative concepts from the past. Man with gun running around a city type of shows. Nothing interesting have I ever found on streaming services. So I stick to composing music and art.

In fact despite having low vision I’ve taken up a new hobby that might surprise you all. I’ve started to paint with a brush just like my dad Dubravko. I am not very good at it but that is not important whatsoever. I am thrilled every time I put a paintbrush to a white canvas. I enjoy it so immensely. I feel alive when I’m painting. Today, of all things, I’m going to sip herbal tea and paint something I’ve been dreaming of for a long time – I’m going to fill every part of the canvas with a different colour. A kind of kaleidoscopic effect. I’ve never done this. And maybe that’s what music will evolve to in my life. Maybe music reminds me of a weaker me, one who got beat up, abused, locked up and ignored. But painting still doesn’t have any negative connotations. And this is the most important thing. What emotions we associate with our art, with our creations, will be out there in the world. And at no point do I ever wish to contribute negativity to the world through art or any other means. I know a lot of victims of abuse write hateful rap music, or other negative lyrics or art pieces – but I do not wish to embark on such a journey. I wish to ignore what transpired and focus on positivity just like I did when I was a teen, happy in my comfort zone, creating and contributing to the world that made me that happy. Maybe by painting for a while it will bring back all those good vibes that I once associated with art and then I will be able to, once again, freely enjoy composing music. That is the ultimate dream. To feel free to create.

Start YORS Now!

Always and forever, ever since I downloaded the very first Nullsoft ware, I wanted to begin my own radio station. Back then it didn’t have a name yet, it was not a conceptualized reality for the software needed was not as easy as an app. These days one can probably just download and broadcast from one’s own pocket, no? Back then, you needed icecast. You needed apache. You needed cowboy 0.45 at least. You needed all kinds of tools, weapons of war, and perhaps even legalities. Isn’t there an app to clear tracks from your pocket, too? We’re there? We’re not there? Yes? Maybe? Do we want a pocket DJ with pocket lawyer plug-in along with pocket Square for donations? SomaFM is not quite that l33t, are you Rusty?