This blog traces it’s birth back to a DiaryLand journal that was started by yours truly in 2001.  It has lived at RyanSutter.net since 2004.  On this blog I write about whatever I feel like, but common topics are religion, free thought, food, books, music, computers, and politics.

A little about me:

Born into a Jehovah’s Witness family and raised in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, I spent the first 30 years of my life as a Witness.  In 1994, newly married to my high school girlfriend, I finished vocational college and began the career as a software developer (or “computer geek”) that I continue to this day.  As a geek, I’ve worked in a number of mind-numbingly boring industries writing code in a language called Java.  I’ve also been a contributing author on half a dozen books about the same subject, at least one of which was translated into multiple languages.  I’ve never made the New York Times best seller list.

I have a son from my first marriage, Syd, and I’m married to a lovely young lady named Esther.  We live in a house built in 1876, the year Rutherford B. Hayes became president (note: he wasn’t sworn in until March 1877, but he won the election in 1876 and that’s what counts to me so nyah nyah, James), the telephone was patented, the Dewey decimal system was invented, baseball’s National League was formed, Tom Sawyer was published, the Jesse James gang was defeated, the four-stroke engine was invented, Budweiser first went on sale, Custer lost the Battle of Little Big Horn, and the first transcontinental express train went from New York to San Francisco in 83 hours and 39 minutes.

I’m an independent recording artist and performing musician, which I’ve done most of my life.  I’ve recorded multiple solo albums and performed with a number of bands and artists.  I was a founding member (along with my deceased brother Rhett) of The Lavone, Purple Triangles and The Frog.  In the last few years I’ve lead the band Trumpet Marine, played live as a member of Cindy Ivy’s backing group, performed solo shows in the Twin Cities area, and generally had fun.  My surviving siblings are also rather musical.  My younger brother Reed and sister Robbie are members of area musical collective Akai, and have also been involved with such acts as Kloey, Pop Riveter, Daytrip, SP3! and others.  It’s a family thing.

In 2004 I experienced a de-conversion process from my old Witness religion and started a life of free thought and free thought advocacy.  I went from Christian fundamentalist to atheist, humanist, and Buddhist practitioner, and I’ve blogged extensively on this subject.  As an advocate I’ve also volunteered my efforts towards Minnesota’s three leading free thought organizations as a member of the editorial board for MN Atheists, the webmaster for Humanists of MN, and a member of the board of directors for the local chapter of Camp Quest, as well as making numerous media appearances and founding and overseeing the XJWNet social network for former recovering former Jehovah’s Witnesses.

I have multiple literary projects underway and intend to be publishing a book or two in the near future.  In the meantime, there’s this blog.  Take from it what you will and thanks for reading.

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I made bread pudding. Yay me.

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Out of all the ignorant and offensive things that theists say, I’m not sure there is one that bothers me more than this one, the flat out denial that I exist.  Oh sure, says the Christian, Ryan thinks he’s an atheist, but it’s all a cover for living his sinful immoral life.  He’s not really an atheist because nobody can really be an atheist because there is a scripture that says that all humans actually believe in God on some level.

So, if I am to understand the logic properly, the theist is saying:

1. I (the theist) believe in God AND

2. I also believe that God writes literature AND

3. I also believe that this particular book (the Bible) was written by Him AND

4. There is something in the Bible that I think says that atheists don’t really exist THEREFORE

5. Atheists don’t actually exist.

Wow.  No arguing with that chain of, er… reason.  I mean, why actually talk to one of your fellow humans about their beliefs and accept that those beliefs are held with the same conviction your own are when you can just use your closed little world of circular logic to deny the very existence of alternate beliefs?

I see literally no difference whatsoever between the idea of Jehovah and the idea of Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or Bart Simpson.  These are fictional characters and they only exist as cultural symbols and shared points of conversational reference.  They are not actual personages and never where.  This is not something I wrestle with, not something I wonder about, not something that keeps me awake at night, not something I secretly doubt.  It’s a settled question.  There is no deeply buried part of my psyche that knows Bart Simpson is a real person.  I know that “he” is a character, invented by Matt Groening, voiced by Nancy Cartwright, and drawn by hordes of people working in dark animation studio dungeons.  It would never occur to me to wonder if somewhere, due to the prevalence of Bart Simpson in my culture, he actually exists as anything other than a fictional character.

This is precisely how I feel about the Biblical God.  There is literally no difference.  I don’t mistake my fiction for non-fiction.  Not even in my library.  I am far from alone.

Would this ignoramus go on record as saying that he doesn’t believe people who don’t like winter sports exist?  How about people who don’t like pizza?  Would he deny that Republicans or Democrats exist?  No, of course not.  Whatever other opinions he holds, he will at least acknowledge that there are other people who honestly hold alternate opinions.  But, where his opinion that there are invisible people who talk to him is concerned, he cannot even fathom that somebody else might actually disagree even if those people tell him so.

I think this bothers me so much because there is literally nothing more disrespectful of a person than to tell them that they don’t believe what they say they believe.  It says, “you’re whole life is a lie”.  It nearly always implies that the non-believer is secretly some sort of pervert or immoral person because that’s the only logical rationale available for why somebody would choose to make their entire life a lie.

I look at the Sodom and Gomorrah of my own life and I can see their point.  Did you know that I actually ate bacon this morning?  Bacon!  Pork!  The forbidden meat of the Jews!  I mean, sure, it was untreated, locally sourced, hormone-free, co-op bacon, but I doubt God cares.  At least according to some.  Then there is my sex life.  Marriage!  Without the intention of having children!  My wife and I are together because we like to be, not because we’re intending to make babies for God!  I bet the old fella would hate that.  Whoo boy.  Good thing I’m an atheist.  Let’s see, what else…  Science!  I enjoy the study of the natural world!  I accept the evidence of the natural world rather than stories and traditions!  Truly, I must die at Armageddon.  The world just cannot handle an environmentally conscious, nature loving, family guy with a wife and kid and job and three cats.  I mean, what if we were all like that?  The horror.  I shudder.

I can sit around and get all righteously indignant over this kind of lunacy all day but it’s so silly it’s hardly worth the effort.  Instead, I’m going to take the approach of arguing their point in reverse.  I am going to argue the point that theists don’t really exist.

To begin with, the default state of all babies when born is to not believe in anything in particular except eating and pooping.  They don’t look at a pretty flower and think “God made that”, they simply see a pretty flower.  If their parents tell them “God made that”, they will believe that.  If the parents says, “Allah made that”, they will believe that.  Basically, the kids brains get wired in response to what they are taught and every theist in the world is also an atheist when you change the subject to a God they were not indoctrinated into believing in.  Try convincing an adult to believe in Odin when they grew up believing in Jehovah.  Ain’t gonna happen.  So, the deal is, that theism is a system of belief grafted onto an initially atheistic person.

But doesn’t that mean theists still exist?  Following their anti-atheist logic, I’m going to argue no.  Here’s why.  Sure, there are people who claim to be theists.  Perhaps those people even think they really do believe in God, but when it comes right down to it, they don’t and they secretly know it.  The evidence lies in the fact that theists have to spend massive amounts of time and energy in reassuring themselves that God exists by reading devotional books, telling everybody just how much they believe, praying, and committing many other such acts of self-selling.  The entire life of religion is based around trying to keep yourself believing, keep yourself from doubting.  This is the only sphere of life in which people have to work to convince themselves of things they supposedly believe.  You don’t go around obsessing over the fact that you need oxygen to survive, writing hymns about it, saying prayers about it, swallowing down doubts about it, cultivating faith about it.  You simply breathe.  Fundamentally, the entire process of “cultivating faith” is the process of suppressing your basic, intuitive, inborn understanding that the stuff your parents told you doesn’t actually make a whole hell of a lot of sense.  Theists go nuts looking for evidence of God in their lives, without realizing that they don’t expend similar effort on proving anything else.  They don’t build up their faith that their car exists, or their house, or their dog, but somewhere in the innate, pattern-matching, problem-solving, sapien brain is something that says, “oh sure, mom and dad said god exists, so He certainly must exist, but He’s, well, invisible, and um, I can’t, you know, actually demonstrate this to myself without trying really hard, and, um…”.

This is like nothing else in the world.  Faith is only required because in our natural state we know that things that exist only inside our heads, that can’t be touched, tasted, seen, heard, or smelled are in all likelihood not there.  We know we can imagine anything but only experience through our senses.  Part of us knows this and throws up a little internal voice that says, “Sure, I think I feel God, but how do I know that’s not just an emotion?  A neuro-chemical?  No, no, no, don’t doubt, doubt is bad, go look for some external proof, or better yet just stop thinking like that and pray more, or preach, or read about how other people really believe and emulate them.”  Religious belief is a non-stop exercise in self-selling and stopping your brain from reaching a conclusion consistent with all of it’s non-God experience.  The whole God thing is a huge exception to all other rules we’ve ever encountered and it’s only through careful indoctrination on the part of parents, and diligent effort on the part of growing children and adults that this exception to the rule can be maintained.  And the exception cannot generally be maintained for other gods.  ”My god is undeniably obvious, but yours is so obviously ridiculous that I feel sorry for you.” is a pretty common theistic attitude.

So, my argument is that there are no theists.  There are only people who really really really want to be theists, people who sincerely want there to be a God and have dedicated their lives to denying the voice in their head that tells them it’s all nonsense.  They’re all secretly atheists because they were born as atheists, and they are atheists about other Gods, and they require physical proof of everything else.

Atheist: “You have a Ferrari in your garage.”

Theist: “No I don’t.  I don’t see a Ferrari there.”

Atheist: “But it is, you just need to have faith.  You only think you’re not a Ferrari owner because you’re in denial.”

Theist: “You’re a loony.”

That, my theistic fellow humans, is exactly how insane you sound when you say that we don’t exist.  Call us wrong, call us late for dinner, just don’t tell us that we secretly believe your story.  It’s crazy, it’s disrespectful, and it’s highly offensive.  And, if you thought my argument that you don’t exist was offensive, or disrespectful, you get my point.

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In a world containing such a tree of life, the world we live in, bad things will befall good people and we will call them tragedies, good things will befall bad people and we will call them travesties, good things will befall good people and we will call them fair and right, and bad things will befall bad people and we will call it just.  If we accept the basic dichotomies of good and bad things and people, those are the only four things that can happen.

I’m not sure such a radical simplification of reality is justified, in fact I’m sure it isn’t, but even in such a simplistic binary case as this I understand that all four of these things happen and I accept that this is inevitable.  ”Good” people will be murdered, as well as “bad”.  Hurricanes will be no respecter of persons.  All potentialities are available to all, good and bad alike, and it is from this simple reality that our greatest pains and greatest joys arise.  In such a world, the typical self-respecting “good” person will be disappointed in events two out of four times.  When a “good” thing happens to a “good” person or a “bad” thing to a “bad”, it’s hunky dory, but when a bad thing happens to a good person, or a good thing to a bad person we get upset, we feel that this is not as it should be.

Into this gap Christianity flows, telling us that we can live in a world in which only one of the scenarios is possible.  In this perfect world, there are no bad people and nothing bad ever happens to good people so only good things happening to good people 24/7.  In the majority of Christian sects, the bad people have been shuffled off to hell where they can do no damage and, in fact, have bad things happening to them all the time.  In the Jehovah’s Witnesses theology the bad people have all been simply murdered by God.. er, I mean, cleansed from the earth, so they aren’t around to cause trouble.  In this way, there are no more tragedies with their attendant pain, and no more travesties with their attendant anger.  Only good, and pure, and right, and just.

The definition of “good person” and “bad person” is, of course, one of the thorniest bits of this whole conception of the world.  Depending on your sect, a “bad person” could be defined as anything from a mass murderer or rapist to somebody who simply believes differently than the believer.  To use the example closest to home, in the eyes of most Jehovah’s Witnesses (including my own family) I am a bad person because I think the Judeo-Christian God is a fiction and the Bible is just a plain ol’ book with some true stuff and some false stuff just like any other human book.  I also think the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society uses cult manipulation techniques designed to keep members of the faith it oversees (the Jehovah’s Witnesses) from thinking for themselves in any way that the Watchtower disapproves of.  These are not popular statements among Witnesses, but they have the virtue of being supported by a large number of readily provable facts, so I don’t mind stating them.  If I’m going to be shunned either way, then why be quiet about it?

All of this brings me to the object that inspired me to write this post, the new album from The Akai, The Coldest Hour Is Just Before the Dawn.  In the interest of full disclosure, I am the older brother of Akai front-woman Robbie Matsumoto and Akai drummer Reed Sutter.  I am one of their biggest fans and have been since the two of them were born.  Sadly, I may be their least favorite person alive at times because nothing is more uncomfortable than thinking that somebody you love (God) is going to kill other people you love (our friends James, Jennifer, Josh, Chad, Mindy, Eric, Cindy, and Danielle, to name a few) and it’s all your own brother’s fault.  Of course, it’s not my fault that a bunch of intelligent, loving, wonderful individuals left the same religion I did for similar reasons.  We all did it independently of each other and I didn’t cause anybody else to follow me.  Still, it’s what they believe happened and it makes them very uncomfortable to be in my presence.  They feel threatened.  Reed told me he coudn’t stop thinking which of his friends I would tear away from The Truth next and no matter how many times I tell him that I didn’t tear anybody away, it doesn’t matter, the belief persists.  I might as well be murdering our friends, in their eyes.

Today I heard the new Akai album for the first time, purchasing it from iTunes and loading it up in my iPhone.  I listened to it with quite a bit of trepidation, as at least one song from their debut album was aimed squarely at me, but what I found was not vitriol from my siblings, it was something far more interesting…  the bleakest view of life I have ever encountered in recorded form.  This album is fascinating as much for what it does say as for what it leaves out.  This is music that can only be made with the good person/bad person/good thing/bad thing mentality.

The CDBaby homepage for the album says of the album: “A dynamic journey through the hours between dusk and dawn, ‘The Coldest Hour’ echos a mélange of reactions to a dark spot in human history with melody and metaphor.”, so, it’s a concept album of sorts.  What is the concept?  Reactions to a dark spot in human history. What is that dark spot?  Why, it’s this very moment.  Yes, Virginia, this appears to be a concept album about Akai’s collective belief that humanity is living in The Last Days, that Armageddon is coming any day now, and that paradise (the dawn) is right around the corner, with a fitting end to all the problems in the world coming any second now.  For all the beautiful arrangement, lush production, poppy melodies, and chimey bells, this is an album about fear.  It is an album that exhibits a siege mentality.  It is music produced by intelligent people living in the 21st century, with access to the Internet and the modern world, carrying on a belief in a Bronze-age deity, a publishing company, and an End of the World scenario that is so bizarre, tenuous and antiquated that it can only be maintained by instilling a deep revulsion to and fear of anyone and anything that threatens the belief.  Anything in the world, nature specials, newspapers, the words of co-workers, anything at all, is a potential threat, a tool of Satan, and a possible snare.  The proof is everywhere, including in all the people who have stopped believing the story about the publishing company that represents the will of a Bronze age god here at the end of times.  Surely, the more people cease to believe the story, the stronger the proof that the story is true.  Doesn’t the story say that people will lose their faith in the times of the end?

The more the 21st century knocks the beliefs of groups like the Witnesses down, the more that reason, logic, love, and compassion prevail, the more dramatically believers have to dig in to combat these effects and maintain their belief in their story.  The result is a view of the world that is insular, unhealthy, and extremely frightened.  That worldview, peeking out between fingers, cringing and praying for it all to end very soon, is all over this album.  These kids are smart, and talented, and wonderful people, every one of ‘em, but they’ve been scared to death by propaganda, threatened with the loss of everything if they so much as think for themselves.  You want to talk about a “bad thing happening to good people” scenario, this religion happening to these artists is definitely one of them.

But, really, what would the album be without the over-arching “end of the world” theme?  I don’t know.  Robbie and her husband Hiromi seem to have made a cottage industry out of writing songs that mock and deride the things and people they put in the “bad” category on each of these albums.  They rarely write about themselves, how they feel, what they like, or who they really are.  It is up to Reed with his jaw-dropping closing song (“As Long As It’s Tomorrow”) to bring a personal, warm, positive, human element to the album (way to go bro, lovely work).  Much of the rest of the album seems to be an (admittedly beautiful) epic wail of despair, but a wail of despair none-the-less, over just how badly Akai want this world to end and the next one to start.

It begins with the opening track, “When the Sun Goes Down” which, if I’m interpreting it correctly, is using a metaphor of a person hiding in their home, isolated, with drawn blinds, trying to keep themselves warm by the heat of their own lonely fire, in the dark times we live in.  If the “dawn” in question on the album is truly supposed to be the Jehovah’s Witness New Order/paradise earth, then it seems clear that the shut-ins are people who attempt to get by in the world through their own without the Watchtower Society.  This metaphorical person would find themselves cold, alone, and despairing with nobody to blame but themselves for their plight.  It’s a truly bleak and depressing view of the lives of non-Witnesses that The Akai seem to hold.  In all sincerity, of the many former Witnesses I have the honor to know, none of them are despairing about no longer being in the group or feel that the situation is sad or lonely except insofar as they are sad because of the way Witnesses treat them and find the loss of their previous friendships to be lonely, until they make new friends.

The Akai loves to write in the first person, using the voice of the metaphorical characters they are discussing, but they have no real understanding whatsoever of the feelings and perspectives of those characters because they can only see them as straw men, caricatures, based on misinformation provided them by the Watchtower Society combined with the extremely limited interactions that they themselves have with former Witnesses.  It’s ironic that Robbie’s former musical partner Cindy Ivy and the man who produced the first Akai album, Eric Elvendahl, have both left the Society and would both love to explain their new perspectives on life to their former Akai bandmates, but are now shunned by the group and unable to do so.  If nothing else, actually talking to Ex-Witnesses about what it is like to be an Ex-Witness would allow for them to write from that perspective with some sort of believability.  But, alas, no.  Rather than writing something honest about the experiences of their own lives, they write commentary on the lives of people they do not and cannot understand while simultaneously cutting those people out of their lives to make sure they never do understand.  All this in the name of faith.

After this beginning to the album, there is a string of three songs (Breath, Satellite, Paper) that have lyrical content so oblique that it’s hard to know how they fit into the concept album concept other than that they have the subtle undercurrent of menace and anxiety that pervades the album.  Maybe that’s enough to count them in.  I dunno.  Then track five kicks in and the band is making a statement, a very particular statement, aimed at one person: Cindy Ivy.

It’s one thing to record an unflattering song about somebody, another to let them know it was about them, and yet another thing altogether to record renditions of it on consecutive albums so that you can sharpen the point a little.  That is, sadly, what my brother and sister have chosen to do with “Drifted”, a harsher, crueler, take on their first albums “Adrift” in which Cindy Ivy is accused of being a liar, and a bad friend, and a generally bad person by my little sis.  As a good friend of Ivy, I want to go on the record as saying that this song angers me.  What kind of cowardice is it to record a song about how unkind your friend is and what a liar they are when you have no idea about their life because you won’t even speak to them?  Robbie, you won’t call Cindy, despite being friends for the better part of two decades, but you’ll rip her on two consecutive albums?  And this is Christian love?  Really?  Ivy deserves better and if you actually knew anything about her life in the last several years, you would know that.

The next track, Morning Follows Night, is explicitly tied into the concept album thing, including lyrics like “the sun cast down a floodlight / that woke our fathers from the dust and gave them breath and eyesight”.  Listening to it, I couldn’t decide if “sun” should be spelled “Son”.  It’s clear that this one is just plain ol’ shilling for the Watchtower.  Not a compelling song.  But, pretty, as per usual.  Same holds for “One More Candle”, the next track.  And the next.  Did I mention that the Watchtower Society refers to their “truth” as “light”?  Yeah, so, light = Truth (Watchtower style), darkness = Satan’s World (aka, everything else).  They’ve made a whole album about it.  They must really be feeling under siege…

The irony of track 9 is clearly lost on The Akai, but not on your humble record reviewer.  The reason is that track 9 is about my mom, Robbie’s mom, Reed’s mom…  our mom.  Our mom has some rather grandiose and elaborate ideas about the FBI, CIA, Mafia, terrorists, etc., and their nefarious plots to discredit her.  She has accused her children of being clones, accused co-workers of being undercover police, it’s really something else and it’s quite sad really.  She has not been diagnosed with anything officially but the general consensus view is that she snapped after she was disfellowshipped by the Watchtower and now feels such an overwhelming sense of fear and anxiety and paranoia that she is divorced from reality as you and I perceive it.  The events and thoughts of the first-person narrator in the song are actual things our mom has said.  The thing is, it seems that they are doing this song as a sort of send-up of our zany, crazy, wacky mother without realizing that the giant conspiracy theory she believes in is no less bizarre than the notion that somebody ate a piece of fruit 6,000 years ago which gave us cancer and bad morals today (among other things), then 2,000 years ago somebody came back from the dead to make up for the fruit thing, and any day now invisible spirit creatures will genocide 99.999% of the world’s population to set things right.  Oh, and did I mention that your thoughts are being monitored by an invisible man who wants to make sure you do everything that a publishing company in Brooklyn asks you to do?  Bring on the FBI, CIA and terrorist conspiracies, at least they involve people who are visible and no violations of the laws of the material universe.  I laughed out loud listening to a group of Armageddon-happy-end-timers making fun of the delusions of their own mother.  It was just too weird.  ”Yes, we’ve recorded an entire album dedicated to the idea that we live in the last days and a Bronze-age sky God is about to wipe out virtually our entire listening base and people who don’t understand that will be cold and lonely and miserable, but can you believe our mom thinks the FBI has her phone tapped?”

The next track has the title “An End Deserving” and, from how it sounds to me, basically tries to state that everybody who is about to die in the mass-murder-of-most-of-the-people-alive-by-God deserve it and good riddance to ‘em.  By the time I got through with this track, I was sick of the “darkness vs. light” motif.  Thankfully, the album ends with two tracks, one by my little sis, the other by my brother, that don’t seem to be thematically connected to the album beyond being really pretty.  ”Like You” and “As Long As It’s Tomorrow”.

“Like You” is a lovely little song that really showcases Robbie in a different way than any of the other tracks and almost makes me think of the old Kloey days with a little Frente mixed in.  It’s refreshing after all the doom and gloom.  Then comes the song I’ve played half a dozen times already, “As Long As It’s Tomorrow” by Reedo.  Galaxie 500 meets MBV with a little Velvets mixed in, simple chords, beautiful lyrics, perfect for driving at night since it’s about, um, driving at night.

I wonder if those two tracks are supposed to be suggestive of the dawn?  It makes sense, but that’s about all I can see of how these two tracks fit into the overall scheme of the album.

Overall, I find listening to this album to be a truly odd experience.  The insular and judgmental nature of a lot of the lyrics makes for some grating listening if you happen to be aware of what their metaphors are referring to or if you happen to care about the people they are singing about.  It definitely stands as a unique testament to the extent to which a fundamentalist group with a message as poisonous as that of the Watchtower can alter the way a group of talented young people express themselves.  But, for me, hearing Robbie and Reed being themselves on those last two tracks, getting a glimpse of the real voices of my baby brother and sister, voices I so rarely have the privilege of encountering, makes me happy I bought the album but the fact that my brother and sister are living such a frightening day to day existence, expecting the end of the world, afraid to think for themselves, is truly a tragedy.

You know, tragedies happen.  The world contains much to wail over.  But, beauty happens as well and the world contains much to celebrate and love.  A life spent obsessing over how awful everything is and how it deserves to end is not a life that can be enjoyed, it can at most be endured.  In such a life, “happiness” can only be found in relation to the handful of people who share your view.  In The Akai’s case, they feel warm and happy at their Kingdom Halls, but isolated and alone and under siege the rest of the time.  This albums unhealthy balance towards the dark, bleak, and cold, reflects that fact of their lives and it makes me want to give them all hugs.  They’re missing out on the wonder, the beauty, the awe and majesty of the complete experience of life.  As Reed shows with the closing track, they are aware that it exists, they can appreciate it now and then, they even use all the beauty they can muster to relate their bleak outlook, but they are under the misapprehension that we live in the darkest times of human history and that the world is darkness and despair, so that is what they see when they look out from within the protective bubble of their religion and, as their friend and brother, it makes me sad for both what they are enduring, and what they are missing.

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Well, this sort of speaks for itself.

My little brother Reed and little sister Robbie, the only two living siblings I grew up with, are so filled with fear and loathing of their big brother that they won’t even let me follow the Twitter feed of their band. Thanks guys. You really know how to show love. And you wonder why people who leave your religion learn to despise it so much?  Here’s why: it turns you into total jerks.

I came to one of their gigs (public show, public place) to show my love and support and they asked me (ever so politely, via email) never to come to another of their shows.  This is what the Watchtower Society does to people. It turns them into frightened, non-thinking, callous, mean, people who treat their own family members like dirt.

For those of you who, like myself, love Akai’s music, please do keep in mind that they are all Jehovah’s Witnesses, and would all shun their own family members for the rest of their lives if the Watchtower Society asked it of them (and it does, under penalty of judicial committee punishment, if any of their family has the audacity to leave the religion for any reason whatsoever).  They’re nice, and they are smiley, and they make pretty music, but they are also terrified, bigoted, insular, and filled with either pity or contempt for people who do not share their belief that the Watchtower Society is Jehovah God’s mouthpiece on earth.  Just a few weeks back I ran into the drummer for Reed’s old band at a mutual friends funeral.  I said “hello” to him.  He glared at me, turned his back, and walked off.  Shunning.  At a funeral.

Our friend had been a Witness.  His family treated me kindly when I came to pay my respects at the funeral.  He and I had lived together.  I had known him for 20+ years.  He had committed suicide.  It was extremely sad.  I attended that funeral knowing full well that people there would treat me like Reed’s old drummer Darren did.  How did I know?  Because, this is love, Jehovah’s Witness style.  It wasn’t the first time I’ve been shunned at a funeral.  I was shunned when my brother died too by the loving, kind, smiley, beautiful, Jehovah’s Witnesses.

It’s not their fault.  They were all raised in a cult and they do the best they can with the limited knowledge about reality that they have been allowed to have by the leaders who control them.  If they break the rules and talk to you, they can get in trouble in their own congregations.  Worse than that, they feel guilty because they think they’ve put loyalty to family above loyalty to God.  It’s like a test to treat your family like dirt when “god” asks you to.  And my family passes with flying colors.  They are as cold and icy and bitter and spiteful and loathing as any vengeful god could ask.  Gosh, it’s so beautiful, the depth of their faith.

But seriously, it still hurts like hell to be treated like this for, oh, going on six years now, by two people who you love, who you visited in the hospital as babies, and who you have sacrificed time, money, and your heart for for years and years.  I poured myself into their music, promoting it, urging it on.  I still listen to it, even though their last song contained a song against me.  They learned with instruments bought and paid for, often, by Rhett and I.  We lead the way for them and did everything we could to encourage them and now, because I’m an atheist and a Buddhist and because I have criticized the Watchtower Society, they won’t even let me follow their f***ing Twitter feed.  Nice.  Real nice, guys.  Way to stay classy.

I would like to quote the words of a young songwriter I heard once:

it was about love and how you shout love

but you don’t know love if you don’t show love

Who said that?  Oh yeah.  My brother Reed.  Throw hypocrite on the list of descriptive terms about my lovely family.  Self-righteous, cruel, hypocrites.

We love you so much, but if you don’t believe what we believe, you’re dead to us, we can’t even stand to have you sitting in the same room, we can’t even stand the idea of you following our updates in cyberspace.  Spiritual paradise.  Right.

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I have long loved the art of cooking.  As a child growing up with a mother who was pathologically incapable of making dinner, I found that I needed to learn to cook in order to eat.  I taught myself to read recipes at an early age, and experimented with scavenging in the kitchen to locate ingredients to try to accomplish the recipes on the cards that were haphazardly strewn about the kitchen.

It was through such curiousity that I discovered how to make a mean broiled pike with butter, dill, and paprika, as well as how to bake sugar cookies from scratch, and mix powdered milk, sugar, and Hershey’s powdered cocoa (the baking kind) to create a just-add-water hot cocoa mix.

I don’t want to give myself too much credit.  I lived primarily on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  Also, my mom occasionally made a tasteless grey beef roast with ketchup, so it wasn’t exactly purgatory (plus, she CAN cook, and now does, but she just didn’t for some reason back then) but I did learn some rudimentary cooking skills.

I took Home Ec in middle school and high school and furthered my cooking education.  I’ve continued, in my own way, to try to expand and improve my cooking skills in the years since.  During my first marriage, there was a lot of pasta and really boring dishes that were more akin to food assembly than cooking.  Then, after my first divorce, I got creative and delved into spicy foods with a vengeance, becoming a serious lover of all things jerk and szechuan, as well as becoming a big time grill nut.  Oh the steaks, oh the asparagus, oh the joy, the rapture.

When I was married to my second wife it was really a matter of personal survival.  During my single life, I had become so enamored of interesting and hot foods, and she was so uninterested in the same, that I had to develop the ability to make multiple dinners on a nightly basis.  I can’t even count the number of times I made myself a szechuan shrimp stir-fry and tossed off a box of shitty Kraft Mac ‘n Cheese for her (I wasn’t being mean, it was what she requested).

Then I met Esther, the person for whom food was invented.

Esther is a bookworm, but also the ultimate cookbook collector I’ve ever met.  I had never in my life imagined, let alone met, a person who collected cookbooks for the express purpose of reading them without any real intention to make the recipes contained within.  At first I couldn’t understand why she owned something like 50 cookbooks but had no food in her kitchen.  Then I got it.  For her, reading about food is nearly as satisfying as actually eating it.  Perhaps more so, because the imaginary food never leaves you too full and it tastes however you wish it to taste.  Her approach to food, the sheer love of it, the incessant reading of cookbooks, the sharing of recipes all the time with “doesn’t that sound GOOOOOOD??!?!!?” tacked on, has started me on a new phase in my cooking life.  That of truly learning the art and practicing it.

I have begun to read cookbooks myself.  And subscribe to foodie blogs.  And experiment with recipes.  And even plan meals days in advance.  I have started to daydream about visiting Pensey’s, the kingdom of spices.  I have drooled over photos of $20,000 hand-made French kitchen ranges.  I have started to feel that everything I eat should be made from scratch, all sauces and mixed spices included.  I want to make my own fucking ketchup, for god’s sake.  And grow a garden.  With heirloom tomatoes.  It’s really surreal.

As I write this, I am making pork country ribs with spices and vegetables in a Moroccan tagine.  Last night I made a sun-dried tomato pork tenderloin, roasted red potatoes with Parmesan, and sauteed spinach.  I don’t know what has happened to me.  It’s great.  :-)

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