Curated Dissonance: The Job Market

Probably the biggest concern we hear on the public stage regarding the emerging technologies of AI research is the threat it poses to American jobs. While many of our lawmakers seem willfully unconcerned or unaware of the purported fallout of this phenomenon – or perhaps just unconvinced that it’s an issue that they will need to deal with during the current election cycle – the Interwebs are teeming with opinion pieces on the development of artificial intelligence and robotics as a tool in the workforce. And while I’m sure you can find the edge case that claims the alarm bells are wholly unjustified, most of the social ecology seems to agree that the issue is real – just not to what depth it requires our attention.

I always find it particularly interesting because I was automated out of a job in 2010, effectively ending my career in radio after 15 years. Then it happened again in 2013 when the technology at USPS advanced to the point where they could close down that big-ass remote encoding center in south Wichita (though we were fortunate enough with the union contracts that they took extra steps to help find us alternative positions). This isn’t a new problem; it’s just never been as omnipresent as it’s about to be.

While robotics have steadily advanced to help large-scale industrial manufacturers slim down their workforce over the past couple decades, replacement of white collar jobs has been less visible. With the tools currently in development, that’s about to change. As of right now, AI can theoretically cover most tasks in business and finance, management, computer science, math, legal, and office administration roles. In most sectors, actual adoption has not reflected this theoretical capability. Reliable prediction models now suggest, however, that most professional positions will be effectively eliminated in the next year to 18 months.

18 months. You read that right.

Over the past year or so, I’ve been on the lookout for job opportunities commensurate with my background and skills. I have a strong resume, and I interview well, but the competition for management jobs in every sector in steep. In recent months, my wife has also joined the search. With a strong accounting background, she’s had more opportunities roll her way, but the results are similar (thus far; she has a couple of really good prospects in play as I write this, so here’s hoping it’ll turn around). As challenging as it is for experienced talent to find decent jobs in the current market, entry level applicants are facing a veritable desert contrasted with just a decade ago.

A report out of Anthropic throws this into fantastic perspective, measuring their observations of current AI job coverage in different sectors of the market based on what they know their LLM project Claude is capable of handling (Angelo, 2026).

While layoffs are inevitable, the lack of new opportunities is a critical concern. At 50 years of age, my career is significantly in the rearview mirror. I have skills that will likely get me something lucrative in the days ahead, as I nudge out other equally-qualified applicants who don’t fit some hiring managers image of an ideal candidate, but I can’t expect to get comfortable. I’ve been involved in some pretty hefty change management situations in the past, and I have a sense that the disruption represented by AI innovation will shake up the market in ways that will keep me on my toes for years to come – and ultimately drum me right back onto the street.

While the implications are potentially ludicrous in scope, like most Americans I can really only concentrate on my own domain. This fall I decided to tackle yet another graduate degree with an eye toward advancing my career in the field of project management, but now I’m starting to wonder whether it’s a realistic pursuit. I’m not abandoning the prospect just yet; at the very least, I’m learning a lot about a discipline that is applicable to the business world in a very broad sense. But I have some decisions to make.

And that’s my takeaway. Jonikka and I have a 5-year plan, which starts as soon as we’re back in a cash-saving motif with our collective employment situation, that is geared toward crafting the life we want in the years now and retirement. It’s a good plan, and it’s adaptable if the situation changes – so long as we can avoid plunging back into a sitch that eats up our savings before we have a chance to seriously invest in our future. Ultimately, I’ve had to make wrestle with some important realizations and figure out how to embrace the future with all of its uncertainty, lest we be left spinning out without a Colonel Sanders to reach for the brake.

Damn, That’s a pull.

This is only one way that AI development affects both our current paradigm and our future opportunities, and some of the assumptions laced into this approach kind of ignore some big-picture eventualities. I think I’ll back up and take a running jump at the rabbit hole the other side of those eventualities in my next article, before we move away from strictly focusing on the job market and start running headlong into the craziness beyond.

Angelo, J. (2026, March 6). Anthropic just mapped out which jobs AI could potentially replace. A “Great Recession for white-collar workers” is absolutely possible | Fortune. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2026/03/06/ai-job-losses-report-anthropic-research-great-recession-for-white-collar-workers/

Curated Dissonance: A Brief Introduction

Like most of us who are plugged in to one form of information sharing or another on the world wide web, I generally see posts catering specifically to my point of view. Whether it’s about art, humanity, politics (oh, yes… politics), religion, business, philosophy, entertainment, or my hobbies and interests, I can rely on the invisible hand of the social media algorithm and the mass media data crunching that tries to sell me the kitchen knives I was just randomly discussing with my neighbor to quietly curate the content of my everyday perusal of online mundanities. But weirdly – and you may have noticed this in your own perusals – there are rather significant differences in presentation of ideas and opinions based on how arcane the content happens to be.

Allow me to demonstrate.

Like much of the modern world, you probably live within an information silo. Nearly everything we encounter online is presented with a focus on engagement. Social media tracks what kind of articles you read or memes you share and categorically designs your online experience to feed you more of the same. Amazon consistently pushes you toward collections of consumer goods related to items you’ve purchased or examined, while the news app on your phone monitors your topics of interest and produces endless articles and videos of similar merit. You’ll note, however, that in the case of, say, political discourse, your feed will inevitably shape up to provide almost no dissenting viewpoints (except in the context of outrage, because rage-baiting is a huge source of engagement, of course). More to the point, if I am randomly tossed an opinion piece that discusses a political issue vehemently at odds with my own, I tend to move past it and try to tell the platform not to do that again.

But if you apply the same examination to other highly divisive trends, you will often discover that the information is considerably less deterministic. Strangely, if you ask me, given that I know people for whom hating the Star Wars sequels is every bit as monumental as hating on a political idea. And yet, I am just as likely to see articles agreeing with my rather unpopular admiration of Episode VIII as I am those who feel like the entire franchise effectively ceased to exist after Disney took the helm (often with a few choice epithets to round out their opinion). All the algorithm seems to care about is “the dude digs Star Wars.”

Consider, for example, that I hold some very divisive opinions regarding my favorite hobby, and I frequently get to read articles or watch videos that dismiss my perspective entirely as if only an idiot or inexperienced noob could possibly feel that way. It’s discouraging at times, to say the least.

But one divisive, very high profile field of study continues to provide me with a host of interesting opinions in my daily discourse: A.I., or Artificial Intelligence. So much so, in fact, that I would find it unrealistic to try and address the topic in any meaningful way in just one post. It’s particularly notable that AI invasively touches on most (if not all) of my other hobbies and interests in ways that strike me very differently in context. And as usual, my own opinions, while dare-I-say thoughtfully considered, educated opinions, tend to be varied and kind of jarring.

And since this is my little corner of the Internet, where almost no one ever ruminates, I’d like to discuss it. Over the next several days, I’m going to explore several facets of the massive topic of AI and how it affects my life, how it is likely to affect my life in the future, and why I feel that’s important enough to explore.

Almost A Thing

I’ve recently realized that much of my adult like has meandered just below the level at which I would prefer to operate. While I get that that’s a dubious descriptor with zero context, it takes a bit of mental gymnastics to examine the shape from enough sides to give it definition. Less an examination of my life from a new filter and more an exploration of patterns that have emerged in my career, my personal pursuits, and my relationships with friends and family.

One of the eternal curses of creatives in modern America is the understanding that success is a moving target with little regard for individual contribution. For many, the process of searching for success is as much a process of failing upward as reaching for something profound or inspirational. For particularly enterprising creators, there is a scientific approach to success, a way of barraging the system with a flood of content knowing that statistics are ultimately in your favor. But now the system is the moving target…

Let me regress a tad.

When I was just out of high school, I had an overwhelming passion for writing music. I picked up the guitar when I was 16 and started penning original songs, heavily inspired by such a dizzying array of genres and styles that I struggled to describe my ambitions in any coherent way. I found collaborators, expanded and refined my craft over the next several years, and had nebulous dreams of finding a way to leverage my art into a life of plenty.

Clearly, that didn’t work out. Was this a fail point? By conventional definitions, I don’t think so. But I also have become acquainted with persons over the course of my life who took their ambitions and cranked them up by applying a little bit of the scientific process… more specifically, it’s rare to become a rock star in a Kansas town with no meaningful connections. So could I have tried harder? Was there a significant deterrent beyond my own anxiety that kept me from pulling up stakes and finding a community that supported my craft and gave me better access to those connections?

We know from the movies that it occasionally happens, but also that the odds of success are transitory. Not singular, as one might suspect, if only because our definitions will vary. My framework for success – what it means to have achieved a given goal – is likely very different from the next guy’s. And this relative ambiguity, combined with a certain natural risk aversion, has become the compression that limits my life at a lot of potential fail points, depending on how you view them.

Sure, I have achieved some pretty cool milestones with my creative passions. I have published a novel and I’m working on the follow-up, recorded an original album and have several songs in the can for my next one, produced a long-running podcast with designs on moving from our classic audio format to YouTube… But these achievements also come with a big asterisk. While I have fans and lovely people who support me, all of these efforts are produced start to finish by yours truly. I am my own publisher. Pointedly, no one has ever invested in me beyond the scope of my own purview.

Does that diminish the value of my work? I don’t think I’m particularly narcistic, but I feel like it speaks for itself. You could make the argument that I could have tried harder – made the move to Los Angeles or Nashville when I was younger and tried to find a profitable outlet for my songwriting skills, or spent a few years shopping my book around and collecting rejection letters in hopes of garnering the support of a traditional publishing house – but that moving target I was talking about? Part of that’s the shift in the traditional models where companies scouted and developed talent. That model barely exists and is hardly recognizable today. Publishing houses and record companies still keep an eye out for talent, but now the talent has to come to them largely developed – completed manuscripts or recordings, a strong social media presence with significant influence, and the means to leverage much of that influence independently.

In other words, rather that getting your big break, you have to do the work yourself and decide whether kicking things up to the next level is worth sacrificing control of the product to someone else’s whim.

It’s harsh. And it’s still only tangentially related to my point.

Let’s glance at my career. When I started in radio, I was 21 years old and looking for a fun and fulfilling way to pay the rent and support my guitar habit. I found that I had a great head for production – an organizational mindset, a sense of what works and what doesn’t, and a love for collaboration – and a work ethic that provided me with ready opportunities for advancement. In a few short years I was the Operations Manager for a group of stations out in Dodge City, and about half my job was administrative. I managed the on-air and production staff, scheduled remote broadcasts and events, monitored our transmitters and technical equipment, liaised with the business and sales departments, and maintained our files for federal compliance. I was on call 24/7, and I was generally the last word in dealing with anything that happened on the air at our stations.

It was exactly the job I was best suited for. And it weas impossible to hold on to forever. I had ambition to keep climbing the ladder, but I’d reached the highest rung within my comfort zone. I didn’t want to endanger that, but life had other plans for me.

I moved to Wichita in 2007, hooking one of my closest friends up with the opportunity to sidle into my old position. It launched his career for him, and I am extremely gratified at his success in life and the role that I played. After a few more years in radio, I found my way to the post office and once again started looking for opportunities for advancement. I was an acting supervisor at the call center in Wichita. I saw real potential for moving up. But then… once again, life intervened. I got sick. Missed six months of work while doctors tried to figure it out. By the time I’d gone under the knife and had the problem addressed, I had used every bit of my FMLA leave, so the very next time my gout flared up on me (which happened a lot when I worked in very stressful environs) the job went away.

I later leveraged all that management experience into an assistant branch manager position at a credit union in rural Colorado. The experience was invigorating; I rarely even saw my boss, so I had all the responsibilities of managing the branch. We had to move after about a year, and I’ve interviewed for similar jobs in the time since, but no opportunities have emerged. I’m getting old, and I suspect that younger, more attractive talent is picking up a lot of those jobs.

In much of my life, I have been almost a thing. As a self-published writer, I could have done so much more to promote myself, setting up booths at events, finding book stores and communities that like to promote independent writers, and figuring out how to really engage with my audience via social media. The same with my music… I recorded a fantastic album in 2011, then found myself in a job schedule that prevented me from playing out to support it locally, much less booking shows and hitting the road. In my career, I was almost a supervisor at the post office, almost a manager at the credit union.

This is the pattern that has captured my imagination of late. Maybe I should write a song about it.

For those following along at home, I’m at 73,000 words (out of 110,000) in Veil of Shadows. It’s creeping along.

Pivotal Moments

With the long-awaited arrival of 2026, the usual sense of renewal feels somewhat hollow this time around. I mean, don’t get me wrong – last year was a shit year for me and mine. We lost a dear friend, Jonikka lost a job, money’s beyond tight, our health insurance is about to go away… it’s not been easy. The holidays have largely passed without comment in my household. And that probably contributes to the malaise.

So I don’t feel ready to make any resolutions, brook any big announcements or predictions for the new year, or even wax philosophical about our hopes for the future. For now, I’ve decided upon a different tack: I’d like to revisit some of the moments in my life that have proven truly pivotal. Many of them aren’t large productions at all; we all understand how marriage and divorce, the death of friends and family, the arrival of new children in our lives – how all of these things herald change. But what about the moments you didn’t see coming. The decisions that were easy in the moment, but had lasting repercussions.

For example… I was an imaginative child, but I remember being a little trepidatious when my friend’s older brother – who was generally very sarcastic and kinda mean – decided he wanted to run some D&D for his sister and her friends. I agreed to sit down and play, and that afternoon was so instrumental in how it affected the course of my life that it’s one of the very few real memories I have from my elementary school years. I can draw a fairly straight line from that afternoon to running TsunamiCon.

About a year prior to that, when I was 7 years old, we had a landlady who taught violin in a little studio over her garage just across the street, and I would sit on the steps outside and listen to them play. I can similarly draw an only slightly crooked line from that experience to cranking out music with my blues band all these years later.

Of course, childhood holds all kinds of wonders that often shape the direction of our lives in one fashion or another, so it’s kind of a cheat. It’s just as easy to look at decisions I made as an adult that had far-reaching implications, but they are often more complex. Less crooked lines and more spiderwebs hoping to catch a tasty nibble. That job I took because it sounded like a cool experience, leading to a career that spanned well more than a decade. Or the decision to send my podcast crew to local events, where they secured guests with whom I would later start a business.

I think that’s what I’d like to do in 2026: find opportunities to create pivotal moments. Do the thing, whatever it is. Finish projects and start new ones. Reach out to people who can enrich my life, and find ways to be of service. I’m 50 years young now, and it’s a good time to keep moving forward.

So.

How ’bout that Stranger Things finale, yo? Dude!

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Pain

I fell this morning.

It’s mind-boggling to realize how much the livelihood and wellbeing of my family is in constant flux. A few short months ago, I landed a job. In the year prior, I had worked primarily contract work, balancing deliveries and substitute teaching gigs with the full-time caregiving job required by Miss Julie. When summer came, the subbing stopped (of course) and then Julie passed away, at which point most of the money dried up. We were heavily reliant on Miss Jonikka’s salary, complimented by Miss Julie’s decision to pay the rent and some of the bills months in advance.

At the start of the school year, I took a full-time position at the high school, and it’s fairly undemanding work. I sit with students much of the day and can focus a modicum of attention on my schoolwork and game prep. For about a month, we were in a good place. Then Jonikka’s job went away.

My job isn’t sufficient to pay the bills. My family won’t even have any kind of Christmas much beyond the gift of keeping the heat on (I wish that were hyperbole). I don’t have the time and energy to pick up too many hours doing deliveries on the side, and it doesn’t pay much anyway.

All of which is to say… when I fell this morning, my first thought was: “I have to get to work.” Not because of a general sense of obligation, but because I’m deathly afraid of losing a day’s salary. (This position didn’t afford me any paid leave until after the first of the year.) And when I say I fell… I mean, I tripped on a dog chain while going down the steps and my entire body landed face first on the concrete.

I am injured, but unsure of the extent. As a diabetic I am acutely aware of the dangers of infection, particularly in my extremities, so after I managed to catch my breath and get to my feet (fortunately Gabriel heard me shout and came running outside to assist), I ventured back inside to assess the damage to my legs, which felt well and truly scraped up.

And they were. Fortunately we also inherited Julie’s stash of first aid paraphernalia, and Jonikka helped me use gauze and bandaging to cover the worst of it. Then I quickly departed.

I was late to work, but I still made it in before the bell so no one is really concerned about that. I sit here now, two hours later, and I am ill at ease. Breathing hurts a bit. I could see no bruising when I looked at my ribs earlier, but it feels like one big bruise on the inside. I don’t think any ribs are cracked, but I admit that I can’t be sure.

But I feel helpless, and I’m not used to that. And I know so many struggle with less. I still have a job, and we will still have our heat on at Christmas, and while I will definitely have to sacrifice paying some of the bills to ensure that we are fed, my household will not starve.

We’re also unlikely to catch Avatar in the theater this month… so if anyone wants to get us the gift of movie passes, I won’t so no.

I would love to be pithy with my closing here – particularly as I’m not sure I said anything terribly profound – but I think pithiness is on a higher level of the pyramid. If you know, you know.

Modernity and the Open Road

I’ve been thinking a lot about travel in recent months. I always thought is was passing strange that so many retirees took to the road in their golden years, as if they couldn’t wait to put home and croft in the rear view mirror and motor around the country in their dotage. As the years roll by, however, I understand it more and more. It’s like an itch to explore the life that has always eluded me; it’s not a matter of regret, necessarily – though I suppose that’s in the mix – but of recognizing that the years slide by somewhat faster as we age, and that the waiting for new experiences to just fall into your lap is a young person’s game after all.

Of course, there’s no denying that I’ve harbored a desire to see more of the world for many years. But the ultimate arbiter of windshield time in the midst of middle class poverty is not time, but money. My wife and I have been together for nearly 20 years, and in that time we’ve taken only one real vacation. We’ve never been on a plane together and barely crossed state lines, but for the effort of relocation between Kansas and Colorado a time or two.

The one time we had the resources to take off for a couple weeks, we made the most of it. We drove to Colorado to see my mom, then made a two-day journey to Portland to spend a week with my brother. We visited beautiful locations around the Colombia River Gorge and visited the Japanese Gardens. We ran out to Seaside and checked out Cannon Beach, where the scene in The Goonies with the very cool rock formation was shot, then drove up into Astoria where much of the movie was filmed.

We did the food thing. We had amazing seafood in Seaside and shopped at a very cool jerky store and a place that sells tons of salt water taffy. We found some lovely eateries in Portland and visited an upscale tea shop. And we always looked for mom-and-pop places to dine while on the road.

We hit Yellowstone on the way back, which was itself an amazing adventure. And we grabbed the occasional souvenir.

The point of all this is that it was so remarkable an experience at least in part because we never go anywhere. And we talk about going places all the time! We’re even working on getting our passports this year because Jonikka has a friend who lives in New Zealand and we are determined to try and visit. One of these days.

But when your financial hurdles aren’t how-to-save so much as how-to-pay-the-bills, seeing anything beyond your own front yard feels like an insurmountable challenge.

To be fair, all of this is really just to vent my frustration over not having the money to see the new Wicked movie in the theater this weekend. And honestly, though I would love them for it from the bottom of my musical-obsessed heart, if my friends started offering me the cash to go, I would still be riddled with concerns over spending money on a movie when the utility bills are piling up.

Hey. Maybe there are cheaper ways to travel…

Sin City Excursion Day 2

My only regret about the first day in Vegas is that we didn’t head over to Fremont after dark. There’s a section of the original downtown Las Vegas area that we’ve seen on television, with street performers and a large, colorful, light-up canopy overhead, that I would love to experience. Given that we were pretty exhausted by then – remember, Vegas is two hours earlier than we are in Kansas – we didn’t make it over there until the next morning.

Fremont was still pretty cool. Plenty of folks haunting the stretch of road, and we found a decent breakfast (I had chicken and waffles, and it was damned filling). Stopped at a souvenir shop and picked up some LV merch for me and my lady wife back home. After we’d had enough, we caught an uber to the north end of the strip to check out the Mandalay and the Luxor.

I had it in mind to locate the shark aquarium at the Mandalay, but I didn’t find any signage for it by the time we transitioned over to the next hotel. The Luxor was a marvel: built inside a pyramid structure, the guest rooms lined the inner walls with 30 stories of balconies overlooking the interior, which housed some pretty cool exhibits. And of course, there was a fun Egyptian theme throughout, with some very big statues.

After cruising outside and past the front doors of Excalibur, I proposed that we check out the local Meow Wolf exhibit, Omega Mart. I’d read a bunch about their Convergence Station installation in Denver when we lived close enough to check it out, but I’d never had the cash to take the family up to see it. But this was the perfect opportunity to see what the fuss was all about, and my brother had talked up Omega Mart quite a bit.

It was… I mean… wow.

Omega Mart is a bizarre. otherworldly supermarket full of items some futuristic extradimensional scientists developed to emulate similar markets of our modern society. And it was weird, in all the right ways. The level of detail was absolutely bonkers, from items like Mammoth Chunks and Emergency Clams to P-2000 Cracker Spackle, complete with ingredient lists and existential peril. But the fund doesn’t stop there! Through the freezers you find a tunnel to a whole factory of strange machines and a miasma of interdimensional mishaps. Much of the exhibit is interactive, and as VIPs we were provided an employee scan card that laid out some of the strange mystery at the heart of the operation.

It was crazy, and we had a fantastic time.

Lunch was at a German place called Hofbrauhaus. It was pricey, but let’s just say it was kind of a religious experience. And of course, I bought a huge ass beer mug with the logo on the side.

That evening we prepped ourselves for the main event: Penn & Teller at the Rio. It was hard not to be almost giddy about it, and when planning the trip I had purchased us tickets in the fourth row almost dead center. Not only were they ridiculously good seats, but I wanted Joe to have a chance at being pulled up for a trick or something (he wasn’t, but they did pull a lot of folks from the audience so it felt like a solid move). On the way in they had a jazz duo over on the side stage, and I grabbed a pretty awesome shot of the bass player…

No regrets, my friends. No regrets.

Penn and Teller are definitely aging. This is their 50th year performing together, and their on-stage chemistry and dedication to putting on an excellent, energetic show have not wavered in the slightest. The time just flew by, and I’d been sitting in that seat for about two hours when the house lights went up. And of course, I grabbed a souvenir on the way out.

Sleep that night did not come easy. The next morning was the flight home, and I was amused to find that the Vegas airport is virtually its own little casino. We had to walk by a score of restaurants, shops, pubs, and snack vendors on our way to the plane, and I even grabbed a quick bite from a Nathan’s Hot Dog vendor.

Happy to be home, but nothing but great memories from this adventure.

Sin City Excursion Day 1

There is much to say about my recent vacay. I’m home now, having elected not to write about it while on the trip, and I’m completely wrung out.

On Wednesday morning, my friend Joe and I boarded a direct flight from Wichita to the shiny city of Las Vegas, Nevada. While I had lived in a desert for a while a few years back, I knew that life in the San Luis Valley at around 7,000 feet would do nothing to prepare me for suddenly disembarking into the dry Vegas heat. I wore a hat. Despite suspicious looks from TSA agents, it was a good plan.

Day One began as an exploration of our immediate environs. The purpose of our journey was to spend an evening with Penn & Teller – a new experience for us both! But more about that later. The show was slated for the following evening, so we had all of Wednesday to soak up a little bit of Vegas. While Joe had visited the city a few time with his family when he was younger, I got the impression this was his first time as an independent adult with money to burn. And this was my very first sojourn to Sin City. I wanted to experience it a little.

I’ve often thought about how easy it is to be jaded by travel in the 21st century. My generation grew up with huge colorful representation of nearly every nook and cranny of our planet shoveled our way through screens at the cinema, on television, and so on and so forth – particularly cities that function as characters of their own in a lot of places. While I’ve had precious little opportunity to visit any major metropolitan culture centers more than a few hours from home over the course of my life, I’ve spent hours and hours of my life in New York, LA, Miama, Boston, Paris, Tokyo, London, Chicago, Washington D.C,. Seattle, New Orleans, San Francisco – and yes, Las Vegas! Fighting crime, setting the record straight, pulling off clever heists, saving the day, falling in love, winning one for the underdogs, getting rich, making poor real estate decisions, avenging loved ones… so many of these stories are drenched with life on the streets of a distant city, often interspersed with aerial shots of familiar skylines.

But if you travel a lot, you probably get it… being there, boots on the ground, breathing the air, hearing the sounds of the city, really experiencing it is a whole different thing. And it’s a powerful reminder that what we have experienced through media, while pretty freaking amazing, is not the same experience. I’m a sensate at heart – knowing our world requires us to live in it, to be part of it.

And yes, I’m aware that the same argument exists for everything outside of the city, and believe it or not I feel largely the same way about everything else. But for now, we’re talking about Vegas.

The view down at the other tower from our room on the 31st floor.

We checked in at the Rio (because that’s the hotel P&T have called their home for more than 20 years), and then we hit the strip. But not like you’d think. We decided to hoof it over to the strip, which was nearly a mile from the hotel. Everything looks bigger in Vegas, by the way, so be aware of distances before you head anywhere on foot. We figured out the illusion during the Uber ride from the airport, but we still wanted to try the hike over and see what we could see. Also, I’d asked our driver for a lunch recommendation, so we had kind of a destination in mind.

We trotted around the south end of Caesar’s Palace and headed north on Las Vegas Blvd. Every twist and turn on our path yielded yet another eye-catching wonder, and I was absolutely drawn in. I tried not to shout that I was a tourist by taking pictures every seven or eight steps, but I got quite a few. And to be honest, I don’t think I recognized a single thing I saw all weekend from TV… not that I could remember, anyway. There were a few places I wanted to see in person and didn’t – like the fountains at the Bellagio – but I wasn’t too torn up about it since that wasn’t the point of the excursion.

Canal Shoppes at the Venetian. The “sky” is painted.

Our lunch destination was the Grand Lux Cafe at the Canal Shoppes at the Venetian, a charming stroll through an old world shopping center complete with bridges, balconies, and gondola rides. Lunch was lovely; I had a roast turkey and brie on a hard roll with cranberries, arugula, and a dressing I don’t quite recall the name of.

After lunch, we caught a Lyft back to the hotel and took a breather, after which we hit the casino. This was only the second time in my life I’ve actually set foot in a casino, and the first, of course, in Las Vegas. The games at the Rio stretch throughout much the length of the hotel, where you will also find numerous shops, eateries, bars, and theaters. While I did not win big, I did fly back with a little house money in my pocket, and my compatriot for the weekend more than doubled his money (and pretty much paid for his half of the trip, I daresay). I watched him play craps for a while, winning other people ridiculous chunks of change with his rolls (thus adding to his own winnings when they tossed him $100 chips to stay in and keep rolling). Not having that kind of money to blow, I stuck to slot machines.

I learned something there. I had never actually had an interest in slot machines, and often mused at the weird obsession I’ve witnessed in folks who do. Last December, I had my first abbreviated casino experience when my brother took me to the one in Dodge City for dinner, and I was mesmerized by the energy of the place. The lights, the mild cacophony, and just the vibe of it was kind of thrilling. It didn’t make me want to feed cash into the machines around me or anything, but it definitely reoriented some of my perspective on the phenomenon. So now, hanging out in Vegas with time to kill and at least a little money I could afford to lose, it seemed almost irresponsible not to try it out.

Um. Now I get it.

I didn’t feel particularly brainwashed or anything, but I suddenly understood how the experience could be compelling. How sitting down at a machine, feeding $20 into the slot, and hitting a button for 20 minutes full of small wins and losses is just, well… fun. In a way I hadn’t anticipated, it really wasn’t a waste of my time or money because I was enjoying all the little dopamine hits from the way the machine responds and strings you along. Later that evening, after we’d grabbed some authentic cheesesteak sandwiches (complete with cheese whiz – and wow! who’d have expected that to be so good!?), Joe sat next to me and lost $20 of his own. But he wasn’t exactly hurtin’ at this point, yo?

It wasn’t even hard to fall asleep that night, which isn’t always easy on a hotel bed.

Savage Space

A couple months back, when the world was young and new, I had occasion – at my brother’s behest – to start a backup campaign for weeks when a couple of my players were unavailable. With her fibro, Kansas is something of a plague for Miss Jonikka, which makes her frequently unequal to sitting at her computer in an upright position for any period of time after work. And Brian is pretty much living at the epicenter of chaos with his job and recent move. So… yeah. Seemed like a reasonable request.

When I first started running Savage Worlds games back in the days of yore, before the Mayans tried to kill us all with diminishing numeration, I allowed my players to select our first adventure from a collection of available scenarios. Perhaps they were just in tune with my predilections, but they picked the space horror game. And that’s what we did.

With 3 of my 4 players now being fairly new to the game outside of some convention one-shots, I thought I’d go back to that well and pick something with a similar vibe. I sifted through my published adventures from the PEG Kickstarters and found Moon at the Edge of Oblivion. While I had to find ways to play up the horror element, the tense sci-fi adventure had a pretty solid premise that I felt would be easy to knock out in a couple of sessions. Which they did.

As always, I looked for opportunities to tie the episodic scenario into a big picture development, and the answer essentially fell into my lap. The principal foil in the scenario was an AI that was malingering in a derelict cruise ship. And my brother had been canny enough to provide us with a robotic PC. So naturally, when he happened to be the last person to interact with the ship’s systems, I had the AI jump into his system.

Last week we had a chance to revisit these characters, and I selected yet another published scenario – a one-sheet for The Last Parsec setting called Ghosts in the Machine – and parted it out a bit to fit my theme. We finished it up last night, and toward the end of the mission the AI made itself known to the PC who had been kind enough to bring it along and helped them – with strong encouragement, as it happens – escape the mine. And of course, it copied itself to the local system so it could hack into the alien tech that was taking the facility apart and use it for undisclosed chicanery.

While the horror elements were still pretty light, the players are now starting to imagine the possibilities of setting this rogue AI loose with a bunch of powerful new toys. At this point, it pretty much writes itself.

What I find intriguing is that this wasn’t the direction I had intended to go with game at the outset. The first scenario took place near a black hole, and I was going to introduce some seemingly supernatural BS to make everyone jumpy… but the vibe of that mission wasn’t really lending itself to that effect, and so I followed my players’ lead. Now I’m working with a far less mysterious villain, but I’ll go with the alien technology angle to give it some terrifying twists and turns.

I honestly haven’t put a ton of thought into it. It is, after all, a backup game that will only hit the table on occasion. Which is why I’ve used published scenarios thus far. But I, too, am starting to imagine the possibilities… and my imagination is informed by decades of scaring the pants off of players.

At this point, I have quite a collection.

Sojourn

I’m a smidge on the exhausted side. The good kind of exhausted, where you feel like the languishment is validated. Where you feel accomplished.

I took my daughter to Dodge with me yesterday to get her first tattoo. There was no question that we’d be making the trip to see her Uncle Brendon, and I think it was his recent move back to Kansas that cemented the plan in her mind. It wasn’t a big hairy deal – a small piece of art on her arm representing her bond with her kitty cat, who is pretty much the closest thing to a grandchild Jonikka and I are ever likely to have. And it was fun.

It’s a four-hour drive from Manhattan, so I wanted to make the trip worth it. After we got the ink, we stopped at the brewery for a bite to eat and then made our way back to my brother’s place to try setting up my new recording rig for his drum kit. We were just dialing in mics and testing the system, seeing how things sounded in the room, and getting some presets saved in my software… but it was worth the trip. Next time I go down – hopefully here in just a couple weeks – it’ll be to lay down some tracks on a couple of songs.

The journey to which I allude in my title, however, is not the trip to Dodge City, but rather the work on the current album.

Fans of the Tuesday Nite Blues Band know that we released our debut album in 2011, played a few shows to support it, and then kinda disappeared. It was a difficult time, and letting go wasn’t easy… I continue to be so very proud of that album. Between the composition, the performances, and the production work, it is easily the best-sounding musical project I’ve had the pleasure of being involved with. And it still sounds great today.

Over the years that followed, my focus shifted away from writing songs. I penned my first novel, which I published in 2018. I focused on work and family and education, dealt with a medical event that consumed the better part of a year, and then the world ground to a halt for a bit in 2020. You probably know why. And it was in that space that I finally found the drive to start writing music again.

The new album currently has 13 tracks in various phases of production. A couple of them are songs dating back to earlier years in my musical journey, but most of them were penned in the last five years. I’ve explored life in the wake of the pandemic, love, loss, the trials of getting older… it’s all in there. And once again, calling it a “blues” album would be disingenuous. We’re likely to indulge in some rebranding before we start sharing anything.

So here’s a funny thing. In the old days, when you recorded a band, you started with drums. Everything else needed to be laid on that foundation so the rhythm and timing elements could be matched up while layering other instruments. And many drummers, while excellently expressive and full of the right energy, are not necessarily the most reliable timekeepers. Songs might speed up and slow down as the energy of the song changes. Which, by the way, is fine.

As a matter of fact, a goodly number of classic compositions in rock ‘n roll history will defy a metronome more adamantly than you would guess.

My brother, however, has damned near perfect timing and rarely pushes or drags the tempo. This gives me the opportunity to lay down other parts first, recorded to a click. It’s a very liberating process, in that I can layer instruments and work on arrangements on my own time, and we were able to work on arrangements while we still lived 1500 miles apart. I have several arrangements with some scratch percussion recorded on his electric kit, but now its time for the real enchilada.

So this month we start laying down real drums on the album, coinciding with Bonnie’s vocal sessions and some additional piano and strings. It’s been nearly five years since I penned the bluesy rock track Nobody’s Home. In the years that followed, I laid down guitars and sent it to Drew for some quality BASS, shared it with Bonnie so we could workshop vocal arrangements, Anne to help me find the soul of the song with the piano in their parlor, and Brendon to lay down some rudimentary percussion. Now it’ll be one of the very first songs we wrap.

And then to Bullet Ride to see what we need to do to actually make it sound like it deserves.

And still I hesitate
Afraid to break the silence of my soul.
I know, this conversation’s getting old.
But if I take these reins
And break these chains
And make a change
My story will be told…

Yeah. It’s good.