I am not a fan of fast-food banks.  I distrust a company that sounds like it manufactures chewing gum with a financial transaction of any kind.  I'm looking at you, "Stripe."  How many flavors does your money come in?  I don't really want to know.  "Stripe" is a dog's name, not suitable for a bank.  Maybe I'm thinking of Spike.  What other dog and/or chewing gum names would look good on the letterhead of a bank statement?  Fido?  Spot?  Wrigley Doublemint?  I would be happy to open an account with Wrigley Doublemint Bank.  It sounds both legitimate and refreshing.  "Trident" could be a bank.  Even "Nicorette" sounds more like a financial institution than "Stripe."  Stripe.  What, you mean like "Fruit Stripe?"

I'm afraid to see the ATM machines.

Looking at it, it occurs to me that Mexican cash resembles candy wrappers.  It's mostly plastic, and comes in many different colors.  I wonder if Mexico is where they make Fruit Roll-Ups.  One half of the Mexican Fiat Candy Factory produces confections, the other half produces currency.  As you can see, the most popular flavors are strawberry, grape, and lime.

In spite of my distaste for artificially-valued and flavored money, I'm at the point where I'm going to have to try to figure these fruit-flavored financial institutions out.  April will mark my 5th year as a member of this platform, and in fact I like it very much.  But I don't understand Crypto, which seems to me like the fiat perfume of the financial world, an insubstantial fragrant mist compared to the hard-copy sugar printouts melting in my wallet, and am frankly unsure about my ability to continue to write for tips.

So I've logged back into my Substack, with the intention of turning the articles into "subscribable content."  While I genuinely appreciate everyone who even glances sideways at these articles, it's not unlike the music, in a way.  I have 21 albums of homemade recordings of varying quality, many of which were made under assorted forms of dramatic duress.  The production value on a few of them is downright abysmal, but I did my best with whatever resources were on hand at the time.  All The Diamonds You Can Eat, for example, was recorded on a broken 4-track with cassette tapes purchased exclusively at the dollar store.  It is a bumpy ride through the lo-fi part of town.  In spite of these ostensible limitations, "Diamonds" remains a highlight of my discography.

But I'm not making it again.

I'm not saying anything definite one way or the other, but I think I'm coming to a similar place with these articles.  If you're still reading, you're the kind of person who might be interested in actually subscribing to my Substack.  Unfortunately, Substack is a limited platform.  It only uses one electronic gumball processor, which happens to be "Stripe."  I hate it.  The sugarheads in their "customer deflection department...," well, nevermind.  I already wrote about it in "Fast-Food Bank p.s."  I wouldn't touch it if I didn't have to.

The point about the music is to say that all the birds have escaped from the shoebox, the same shoebox sitting on the sidewalk of my heart beside the tip jar full of chewing gum and crumpled Mexican Fruit Roll-Ups.  The birds were very loud and poorly behaved before I let them go.  They insisted on being released.  It took many years, but I finally was able to set them free.  It is a relief to see them flying on their own.  Sometimes they come and visit me, but they never get back inside the shoebox in my heart.  They couldn't if they wanted to.  I threw it away ages ago.

Though, I suppose, the cage liners still exist.  

(The red star on my song folder is from a Macy's bag, incidentally.  It has nothing to do with Communism.  That kind of unwitting paradox amuses me greatly).

These articles are like that.  They're what I do these days in lieu of writing songs.  But I don't want to get on any heavy tangents.  I am blessed.  I am grateful.  I have been delivered from much.  My lack of income does not affect my outcome.  I am viscerally grateful for every moment of "boredom" God blesses me with.  Boredom is a gift.

Maybe, it is peace.

As you can see, I have a show at the Palacio de la Musica on Monday the 24th.  It doesn't matter if there's a Monday the 24th anytime soon; I'm playing it regardless.  At the Palacio de la Musica, in Franco's Spain.  That's my patron, walking out of the Wrigley Doublemint Bank with a fresh pack of fruit-flavored Mexican currency, with which to purchase me a living.  Note the futuristic ATM machine next to the door.  And the fact that the bank is made of sandbags.  An architectural decision that tells us everything.

Let it be understood that I appreciate everyone who has subscribed to this blog, my YouTube channels, or any of the Pandora platforms that open like a trapdoor under the feet of our furious society.  I appreciate every crypto-savvy centavo that this blog has ever received, and I enjoy writing these articles very much.  But it's no small amount of work, and like the songs, the need to convert my efforts into gumballs and stacks of cherry-flavored pesos has perhaps reached its event horizon.  At the event horizon, the escape velocity is equal to the speed of birds, falling to the ground. 

How long does it take a bird to hit the ground, before people realize all the sunsets have gone silent?

A month?  A year?  20 years?  Which do you prefer?  Another Superbowl halftime show performed by demonic sellouts, or a nonexistent show performed by nonexistent singers, in Franco's nonexistent Spain?

I'm not particularly fond of Substack; it's a byzantine, smoke-filled platform I don't understand.  And "Stripe" is made of sand.  How to link the two is a mystery that both transcends and trivializes the concepts of efficiency and reason.  Or maybe I'm just old.  I do disable the comments for old-school reasons; I figure anyone who can't visit my website and send me a regular email doesn't care about what they say enough to make even the slightest effort to say it.  Which means that I don't need to hear it.  I never met a girl or booked a tour through a comment section.  And since, unlike anything on my YouTube channel, these articles are what I do in lieu of writing songs these days, I disable the comments.  It's like touching the wings of a butterfly.  I would never do that to my songs.  They need to learn to fly on their own, so they can escape the greasy fingers of any destructive idiots that may be lingering at the door of their cage.  Once they fly away, of course, they can always fly away.  But I'm going to chip away at the Substack puzzle piece-by-piece, and will perhaps migrate over thataway in the coming nanoweeks and hours.

Thank you in advance, for all the retro things you do.

Saludos,