Hey Gunz Crew,
It’s 5:49am as I write this and I must say, upon reflecting on everything that is currently happening, it feels like 2016 never ended but rather extended itself. While I have been enjoying putting out Alexander, creatively, I’m in a tricky place. Some days it is easy to pick up a bass or guitar or my graphics tablet and other days, I’m sapped.
It’s difficult to even say it outright because you’d think the first love of my life, my daughter, would continue to ignite positivity and creativity but the problem is something even the one who means the most cannot help me dodge my emotional relapses.
Between the shock of lifestyle change in respect to activity and exercise, I found myself gaining 40 pounds yet 3% of it being body fat, my inability to so much as even look myself in the mirror without so much as a deep sense of personal disgust, depression sneaking its ugly head again and sure enough, amidst all the social media political upheaval and frustration due to our current U.S. President, while trying my hardest to reserve my feelings about the current social situation, due to how sensitive our American society has become, I felt guilty in censoring myself in the name of political correctness and out of fear of offending.
That’s a conflict of interest and conscience, given that while I understand some elements, it hinders freedom of speech, expression and so forth. This also includes humor. Some of us used to laugh at dark sinister humor on a regular basis but suddenly when the tables are turned, due to its incompatibility with our narrative, suddenly the very humor we snicker and giggle at in our private time suddenly is unacceptable because the face of our nation is the face some of us hide in our privacy even confined from the internet itself.
It’s easy to say that as a musician and artist that I can write of other things, given that life isn’t always about politics but as an American of Hispanic/Latin roots, it gradually has become difficult to ignore the hyper-political saturation of even the internet, which is now the domain of which we interact in.
I wonder sometimes if this is exactly what our government wants to see — a divide among its own people and watch us chew each other apart and in the process, watch some of us who are of artistic inclinations, stagnate through the distraction of political discourse and in turn, using elements that, while importantly affect our daily living, get sidetracked from our personal life journeys and destinies in the name of division, in order to conquer and control us.
My parting words of the day and may the important principle of Proverbs 27.17 encourage us, “Iron sharpens iron just as a friend sharpens another”.
Ron Gunz
