Wanzology

One Year

 Well, now, well, now, well, now, brown cow. Hey! Hi! How are you? Uh, welcome to a special edition of WANZOLOGY!! Today, this particular episode marks one full year of WANZOLOGY broadcasts. Thank you for being here! Thank you for being a part of it! If you're new, stick around, okay? Maybe you'll hear something you can relate to. If you're a veteran, I want to thank you so much for sticking around and supporting me and helping me get to this milestone. Dun da-da-da!

So what shall we talk about in one year? Well, the way that my life kind of works, I'm supposed to look at what it was like, what happened, and what it's like now. What happened was in January of 2023, I was laid off from my tech job and spent most of 23 going, “I have absolutely positively no idea what I'm going to do!” By the end of the year, I had tried to put together a public speaking platform and stalled out at the whole marketing of it because I wasn't really sure how to go about marketing myself and putting myself in position to have a shot at gigs.

It occurred to me, thanks to one of my friends, “Why don't you start a podcast?” Now this idea had been around for years, me starting a podcast, but I hadn't really thought about anyone being interested in what I had to say. And the more friends I talked to and the more I listened to me talking to them, the more I started realizing that, you know, I have a pretty distinct way of looking at life, and it's different from a lot of other people.

Mind you, I'm not a doctor. I'm not any kind of psychologist or anything like that. What I am is someone who tries very hard to pay attention to all the little decisions he makes. Because those little decisions add up to big decisions. And I have in the past year made some good decisions and some really, really, really bad ones, really bad ones.

But last year about this time, I was coming out of a really piss poor period in my life. I made a huge mistake in trying to end a relationship I had no business messing with. And I was trying to move on and then my car got stolen, I thought I was going to have COVID all this happened the week of Thanksgiving last year, by the time the 1st of December last year came around, I was sick and tired of feeling like crap. So I did a little research, went out and bought myself a nice car, tried to get used to having a nice car, try to talk myself into deserving a nice car. 2024 started off with me reading about this book that I wrote when I quit touring. It's called #THEBOOKOFWANZ, and it's available on Amazon. The book came from an idea that one of my tourmates gave me when he heard me talking to some kids outside of a show. And he said, that sounds really prolific, you should, you should tweet that. I tweeted often about my conversations that I had with kids outside of the shows with Macklemore and Ryan Lewis in 2012 and 2013. When I left the tour in 2015, I decided it would be kind of cool to get all the tweets that I had made together and put them into a book. And I had met an independent author who talked me into publishing it. And so, I followed her lead and put together hashtag the book of wands. Now, I haven't really done justice to the book, because again, this was something that somebody gave me the idea and it said, oh, it seems like a good idea at the time. Yeah, I've never done that before. So I started reading chapters in the book for this podcast, and got about seven eighths of the way through the book and discovered that I had made a huge editing mistake. Now, mind you, the book came out in 2015, and I thought I had edited it already. Proofread it, had other people read it. But nobody, and I do mean nobody, saw that I had repeated two or three chapters. Now, when you've already done something, and you think it's okay, and then you come to find out that it's wrong, that is a little debilitating, mentally. I have a long history. replacing victory with defeat. I have a long, long history of zagging when I should zig, moving when I should stay still, staying still when I should move. And I suppose everybody is like that, but, you know, it's a little different when it’s Moi, it hits a little different when it's me, just like the things that you do hit a little different when you look at other people and what they do.

Well, there's nothing I can do about it now because I'm, you know, the book's been out for almost a decade. Now, what did I learn? I learned that once again, I have gone to extreme measures to prove to myself that I'm human. And accepting that fact is still extremely difficult because I try not to think too much of myself, but I do think of myself and even when you do the best you can and you still don't complete a task or don't do it very well, you feel some sort of way about it. And Lord knows, since last year I've felt so many things. Good and bad. There have been good days, bad days, and extremely terrible days. Yet, I'm still here. And that's the only peg I really have to hang the hat on. I say, you know, as long as I'm still breathing, I've got an opportunity. And I have really no choice but to believe that, because I have no idea what the outcome of any of my choices is going to be. All I can do is try to be responsible and stand by those consequences, whether they're good or bad. And man, sometimes they're bad and painful. You try to mourn what you've lost, you try to look over how you got to that place of loss, figure out what the lesson was that you were supposed to already know, and hopefully you don't repeat the same pathway and make the same mistake again.

Only, what happens if you really, really try very hard not to repeat the same mistake, but you do anyway? Take a different pathway, but you still end up in the same place of failure. What then? It can totally skew your perspective on self-evaluation. And that's kind of where I am today. While it is joyful that I have gone a year doing something week by week, there's technical issues sometimes, I mean, a couple weeks ago the power was out, so I really couldn't make an episode, it took hours, hours for me to be okay with not publishing an episode, but transistor the outfit that distributes the podcast. still sent me a badge of consistency. This is the one-year broadcast and I've done a number of broadcasts in a row.

It gets to be about Saturday and all I try to focus on is what am I going to talk about? What am I going to talk about? What am I going to talk about? Well, after I finished reading the book, I said, I can only talk about the one thing I know about and that's me. Because I know I'm not the only one who goes through some of the mental machinations and challenges that life requires. Picking yourself up and dusting yourself off, or not letting your shine dull the shine of others, or just being a good human being. It's simple, it's just not always that easy. Life is circumstantial. I've said it a lot and I'm gonna say it a lot more. We all make decisions depending on the circumstances that we're in. And sometimes they're good decisions, sometimes they're mediocre decisions, and sometimes they're just plain bad decisions. And you never know before you make the decision which one it's gonna be. Do your best and hope, hope for the rest.

So one year, what have I learned? I have learned that life is always challenging. I have learned that life, even in its worst moments, when you lose somebody you care about, or you hurt someone you love dearly, or you lose direction on what you want to do with your life, you become confused and unsure. Your confidence goes away. Life is still, really, the only game in town, and if you keep breathing, whatever it is, good or bad, you're going to get through it, if you're still breathing.

My father once said, “Son, there are only two things in life you have to do, die and make decisions. I don't recommend the former, so you better get damn good at the latter.”
And there's not a day that goes by that I don't think of that phrase. Because I'm unsure of myself all the time, even right now, talking to you. I have absolutely, positively no idea who's listening, if anyone is listening, if anyone even cares. But I have to accept what I don't know. I have to accept I may not ever know. I'm never going to know everything. What I have to keep in mind is, where's the opportunity to learn, and how do I go about learning? If going K through 12 and then going through college has taught me anything, it's taught me that I am able to learn.

You and I have that in common. We are able to learn things if we're paying attention. You can watch somebody do something that you are thinking about doing or maybe have tried and They're successful at it and you haven't been or they fail at it and you've been successful. There's a lesson in all of this. There's a lesson in every single human being you encounter, you just have to find it and the best way that I found to find these lessons is to look at the similarities more so than the differences. There is only one Species of human being on this planet, and every single one of them is doing exactly the same thing. Living. The ironic thing is that everybody doing the same thing is doing it just a little different from anyone else. Everyone is unique in how they live their life. is unique, and I find that fascinating. So I watch people as much as I can to find similarities, and maybe, maybe I can learn a better way of doing something I'm not very good at. Maybe I can learn a better decision-making process and ask that one right question that determines the validity of a choice. Is it a valid choice, meaning that you have a good chance of successfully executing that choice? And you don't really hurt anybody else. Goes good for you, doesn't bug anybody else. Because as humans, we’re gonna mess up. Wrong context, but still, the song that's been on my mind is from Human League from back in the 80s: “I'm only human, of flesh and blood I'm made. Human, born to make mistakes.”

The mistakes are inevitable, and I'm still grappling with how do I handle making the mistakes. There are some that make mistakes and don't care. They just keep bullying on, right? Like they do no wrong and even if they do do wrong, it's always something or somebody else's fault. There are some who won't move, won't try anything for fear of making a mistake. I'm trying to be somewhere in the middle, like a two-lane road. One side's going East. One side's going West. Down the middle, blip, blip, blip. Staggered line, right? Both sides have white lines to mark the edge of the road. Well, I'm trying to be in that middle of the middle stripe. I'm trying to stay in the widest part of that painted stripe in the middle of the road. And I am so not always successful, but I'm, I'm working on it. Maybe, maybe I’ll get better at it, but I know one thing, and I'm going to leave you with this. Life is a participation sport and no matter how bad things get. There's always somebody worse off than you. There's always someone that you can help and there's always more for you to learn.

All you have to do is pay attention. Happy birthday WANZOLOGY!!! Happy birthday to you. One year. Hopefully we can get through a whole nother year together. I'll be hoping and wishing and praying.

Do your best. Leave the rest people. And I'll see you next week.

Peace.