I’m truly not sure where exactly to start this blog I have created. If I should focus on the topics of the last year, if I should go further back, if I should introduce myself to what I hope becomes a large audience.

I don’t have a a clue where to begin.
“Life is better when you listen to it in stereo.”

I’ll start here, with my little catch phrase I pulled directly out of my ass. Something I’ve been working on for the last 7 months is learning to listen again. I spent the last decade of my life living from experience to experience, relationship to relationship, job to job, place to place, and I can count on one hand the experiences that truly had an impact on my life.

I was neutral. To everything. That may seem hard to comprehend, or even difficult to define, that a person could go for so long and not feel a thing, but it’s the truth.

When I was 17 I lost my cousin to the raging oil wars in the middle east. Him and his brother were the closest to brothers I have ever had and I lost both of them to that war, though only one directly. It was this moment that started a chain of events that had left me neutral and uncaring for so long.

I am embarrassed to admit this, but never once did I see what I had become until 2016. That was the year I broke, the annum of my rebirth, the time I finally saw what I was.

An asshole.

2016 and my assy revelations will forever be a part of my history, and they are both subjects I will expand upon later, but now let me take this back to my original point:

“Life is better when you listen to it in stereo.”

Any of you who have had the distinct pleasure of growing up in the late eighties and early nineties surely remember music and TV before we had surround sound everywhere, when cd players still bumped and scratched at the slightest movement and our headphones worked only decently.

You might remember that without an expensive system there was no bass, you might not have heard the background singers, the music itself was low and scratchy.

That’s the difference between quality and non-quality, mono and stereo. That’s the difference in listening to people, jobs, experiences, your heart, your thoughts, and merely contemplating it.

I was living my life in mono.

Not hearing, not speaking, not sharing myself, not listening to the calls inside of my heart and head. I was existing. Not living.

So I guess this first article is an introduction, an intro to my new philosophy for the rest of my life.

Listen, act, live, and love in stereo….and don’t be an asshole.