It's fascinating to see yourself and your work through other people's eyes.

I had a great discussion last week with Ben Arthur, the main teacher at the songwriting summer program where I've been working. He was asking me some pointed but friendly questions about the nature of song a day as it relates to my overall goals as a songwriter. 

Ben is a songwriter and performer and all around creative dude. He's about 10 years older than me. He has a similar career to me in that he hustles and brings together a bunch of disparate but related avenues to make his living. 

He spoke about Song A Day as performance art - akin to David Blaine holding his breathe for an ungodly amount of time, or locking himself in a cube above London for a week. It's not that I've never thought about Song A Day this way, but to hear him lay it out so clearly was interesting. It was crazy to hear how clearly he saw what I do as being in that light - this kind of superhero marathon type thing.

One of his questions was: Where does it go? I never really know how to answer this. As I've talked about so much in the past - I follow my nose more than anything else. Concrete plans? I have few.

Ben has a great quote that he keeps telling our students: “I’ll do something I love for free, something I hate for money, but I don't do something I hate for free.” In our conversation, he talked about keeping his "art" separate from his “business”. The songs he writes for money - the work that brings in the dough - is totally separate from the albums he makes for himself. He seemed interested - maybe even a little concerned or confused - by what he perceived as Song A Day being this amalgam of what I do for money and what I do for myself. Like it’s too mixed. Which is largely true. It's definitely got layers of both going on.

I asked Ben - when he puts out a record and it doesn't do super well (in terms of copies sold - as has happened to both of us), does he ever doubt the quality of the record? The quality of the work? In other words - if HE likes what he's made, does other people's lack of interest negatively affect his perception of what he's made? And his answer was no, absolutely not. He had this great idea about "scratching an itch". The idea being that any creative endeavor begins with an itch - a weird sense inside yourself that you've got an idea, a feeling for a thing you've got to make. If what he's made successfully scratches that itch, then nothing else matters - he knows he was successful. 

I really like this idea!! I suppose to a great degree Song A Day started as a way to consistently scratch an itch that's just kind of ongoing for me.

When I put out an album, when I go back and really focus on a set of songs, mixing, mastering, releasing on iTunes and Spotify and all that - that's DEFINITELY me scratching an itch. But I guess for me, I have a hard time with the itch scratching being the end all and be all of the purpose. If not as many people hear or respond to the thing that scratched my itch, there's this big part of me that doubts whether or not it's "good" - EVEN if I still like it and think it's good work. EVEN if the itch was thoroughly scratched. 

I think, once again, it’s a confidence thing. Always back to those damn insecurities. I want to learn to trust myself more, and the instincts that lead me to scratch the itches in the first place.

Memories are weird, but I’m pretty sure I remember the moment I understood what death meant. I have a distinct memory of the feeling, that first realization hitting me hard and then the overwhelming fear in seeing clearly that someday my mom and dad would die. That fear got stronger as I got older, to the point where I would keep myself up nights thinking about them dying. I’d be at home with a babysitter, and I’d be sure that they’d get into a car crash on the way home. I still entertain these thoughts with some regularity, and I’m definitely the kind of person who, if you’re more than 10 minutes late, is convinced that you are dead in a ditch somewhere, full stop. So please be on time if we’re meeting up.

These days, every time I get a phone call from my folks, I’m convinced it’s to say that one or the other of them has died or is in the hospital. Does this make me crazy? I don’t feel crazy. Granted, in the last 15 years I’ve gotten maybe three? four? of these phone calls, out of thousands.

I’m fascinated and horrified by all the different ways somebody can die. A few years ago I was at a dance performance and one of the dance companies was performing in honor of their choreographer, who had died a few weeks prior. He was in his 40s, healthy as can be, and then he had a brain aneurysm. Just like that, he was gone.

(I wrote this song in response to that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6WJWegizHo)

When people have near death experiences, one of the things you always hear about is how much it makes them appreciate life. Getting close to death gives them a new clarity to see all the things they took for granted.

When I think about all the time we spend distracting ourselves - with TV, with mindless internet browsing, with songs, with…stuff - I see it all as a way to ultimately distract ourselves from the reality of death. Put another way - when are we just distracting ourselves from our fears and when are we actually, you know, living? I dunno. But it seems like if one were able to really confront, in a given moment, the very real fact that you or anyone you love could drop dead from an brain aneurysm right now, then maybe you could be enlightened and totally appreciate everything you have. Maybe I’m supposed to embrace mortality instead of fear it.

Now that I have a son, I’ve piled new fears of death on top of old fears. For most of my life, since that first moment of understanding, I’ve feared the death of the people I care about. Now I fear my own death in a way that I didn’t before. I look Jupiter in the eye and think, “Fuck, I can’t leave this boy. I want to be around for his whole life.” My dad’s dad died when he was 18 and it fucked him up. My whole life my dad has said, “Morty would have loved you. You would have really loved my dad.” and since I never knew him, all I could do was sort of imagine what that meant. I wish I could have known him, but I never really felt the loss of him. Since my grandma died before Jupiter was born, I finally understand why my dad used to say that to me al the time. This loss I feel. In my gut. There’s nothing that makes me sadder than thinking about Jupiter will never get to meet Natasha, my bubby. She would have loved him. And he really would have loved her.

https://youtu.be/nM4fGsyyWF0?t=21m20s

Once the GamerGate crowd got ahold of my "You Are Not A Content Creator" video, there was a lot of asinine, hateful comments to wade through, but there was one totally fair critique that popped up a few times:  That I didn't really offer up an alternative. I pointed to Patreon and Kickstarter as tech companies that seemed to respect artists, but ultimately didn't offer give a true vision of what I'd like to see in place of our "content-driven" online culture.

To quickly recap, I see the word content as meaning, to again paraphrase Tim Bray,

"Shit we don't actually care about but will drive traffic and get people to click on ads." 

We are at once the worker bees for giant tech companies and the product that they sell (by invading our privacy and selling ad space against us based on what they find.) Their first and last priority will always be their bottom line, and as artists we are little more than the dupes that create the fuel that drives that engine.

ANYWAY.

I keep thinking about this article in the Atlantic about the very first pop-up ad, which appeared in the mid-90s. The article is written by the man who wrote the actual code for the very first pop-up. He worked for Tripod.com, a sort of ur-tumblr, early social network. Read the article, it's fantastic. And it very clearly lays out what I think would be a much better path for the internet: Paying for stuff. People seem to think that our current model, with all of it's lack of privacy and the abundance of advertising, was inevitable. But it wasn't inevitable (as that article points out). It arose from a a very specific set of conditions. And it doesn't have to be this way. 

If Patreon had been around in 2009 when I started Song A Day, I very likely would have started the project on this platform rather than YouTube. On YouTube, you have to watch ads, and I get paid less than a penny for you watching that ad. It's dumb for both of us. Here on Patreon, you support me directly and not only is your support nourishing for me psychically, it also literally helps me pay the bills.

The web has always held the promise of making these kinds of direct connections. But because of the forces laid out in that article (specifically, the difficulty of selling a user-supported website to venture capital funds and the ease of selling them a site based on advertising), the web went down the wrong path. We're only recently seeing the great one-to-one connections that have long been the promise of the internet. 

I'm pretty hopeful though that with new payment technologies and more and more people clamoring for it, we're approaching a time when the word "content" just means the body of the work and artists of all kinds are celebrated and respected and compensated for the work they make that people love.

Even though it feels like it’s a ways off, I’ve been thinking a lot about Jupiter going to school. Yeah - it’s a ways off, but I also know that the time is going to come REALLY FAST. Because time. It’s weird.

Anyway, I don’t want Jupiter to go to school. I’m fervently anti-school. I don’t know if this is a controversial position to take, but there is a bit to unpack here.

First, I don’t want to seem like I’m judging anyone for sending their kids to school. We all make the choices we think are best for our kids, and no one has any right to say anything about it. So please don't feel like I'm judging. 

Furthermore, the vast majority of us went to school, be it public or otherwise, and we all turned out great. It’s impossible to look at our own experiences and say definitively how our lives would have changed had we had a different schooling experience. Because time. It only goes in one direction.

My school memories and experiences aren’t so much wholly negative as they are tainted by this sense that much of it was a waste of time and potential. I think back to 3rd-8th grade and it just kind of makes me cringe. The thought of having to sit quietly and still and follow arbitrary rules while trying to memorize things that I had absolutely no interest in - it makes me want to curl up into a little ball. 

It’s well known that our public schools were originally set up to churn out factory workers. The system was put in place over a hundred years ago, when the world was a much different place, and it simply has not been overhauled, much less updated or even really changed. Standardized tests have only made things worse and worse. 

There’s a now-famous TED from Ken Robinson on the ways that school kills creativity.

“My contention is: All kids have tremendous talents and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.”

“The whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not. Because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued or was actually stigmatized.”

That’s two quotes. The whole damn thing is quotable, go watch it, or re-watch it, it’s extraordinary. It resonates with me so deeply. I became a musician despite the ways in which my public school didn't value what I had to offer. I wonder what could have been had this impulse been nurtured. 

I want to do everything I can to nurture whatever creativity & talent Jupiter has in him. The idea of sending him to school feels like it would be the opposite of that.

I'd love to hear what you all think about this subject.

Derek Sivers is best known as the founder of CDBaby, the first easy to use store for musicians who wanted to sell their music online. He’s also just an incredibly nice, smart guy who writes and speaks and makes occasional videos about entrepreneurship and other interesting subjects.

I was thinking about one of his video’s recently. In it, he lays out what he says is the importance of finding the reason *WHY* you do what you do. Most people, he says, never really bother to figure it out. They go with the flow, or even worse go down a path laid out by some external expectation, be it parental or societal.

Lots of people will tell you to find the *WHY*, but I really like Derek’s take on it. In this video he puts up a list on the screen:

MONEY

PRESTIGE

FAME

LEGACY

FREEDOM

His thought is that you should pick one or two of these (I would add ARTISTIC PURSUIT) and focus on that exclusively, to the exclusion of all the others. I think this is great advice. An example he gives is that movie stars are often not as wealthy as producers, who are, in turn, not as well known as the movie stars. If you want to make money, if that makes you happy - focus on that. If fame is what you’re after, you may turn down things that would lead to more money in favor of trying to accrue fame. He uses Donald Trump as an example of someone who cherishes legacy above all else. He puts his name on EVERYTHING.

Well, as I was laying in bed the other night, it occurred to me that I’ve thought a TON about the *WHY*. I think about it all the time. And the conclusion that I come to over and over is that I have multiple why’s. Many overlapping why’s. I cannot choose just one or two of those things. Bits of each are tightly wrapped up into everything I do.

This is a very similar conclusion/discussion as another blog post I wrote a while back about “picking the basket”. Focusing is not my strong suit. I want it all. I can see why it would be good to focus. I can imagine what it would be like to focus. But I just can’t bring myself to do it.

On other other hand, I’ve wanted to be a musician, to be a songwriter, since I was 12 years old. So in some ways, I have focused on that and I have always been singularly focused on that pursuit. But in that pursuit, I’ve definitely lead myself down a whole variety of paths, some that make me happier than others. I feel like some of my why’s are in conflict with one another. The need to make a living and support my family is in conflict with my desire to try new things and feel like I’m moving ahead creatively.

My main source of income is writing songs for companies. I don’t hate it - there are aspects of it that I really love. I think there is actually something romantic about practicing songwriting as a literal craft. Like being a shoe cobbler. Someone tells me their idea and I make it into a song. It’s not magic, it’s just that I’ve practiced my craft.

But as you all know, I would much rather be able to make a living solely from a direct relationship with fans of my music. That continues to elude me.

Is that because I'm not focused enough on fame, at the expense of everything else?

Oh! I’m on a podcast this week called Mac Power Users. When they have guests, they talk about workflows. So I go into some excruciating detail about how I make a song a day. A lot of gear and software talk. Some nitty gritty stuff. Give a listen, I think it’ll be interesting!

It got me thinking about how cool it would be if I was able to continue my “How I Write A Song A Day” tutorial series. Which, weirdly, was watched by almost no one when I first made it, but has had a serious “long tail”.

If I do this, what would be the aspects of Song A Day that you would like me to talk about in detail?

I was thinking I could  take you through using Logic, the recording program I use, and Premiere, which I use to make videos. I could detail and walkthrough each of the different “styles” of song a day: 

1. The acoustic song with iPhone, 

2. The acoustic song with 2 microphones and a nice camera, 

3. The produced song with nice camera, 

4. The produced song with a produced video.

I have a lot of other ideas for updates to my older videos like: 

How to beat writer's block, 

Where to find ideas for songs,

All the branding mistakes I've made over the years (and how to avoid them)

I was thinking that I could make this series of videos and then offer it up for a small fee. You all, as my Patreon supporters, would of course have instant access! Let me know if this is interesting! I wonder if people would pay for such a thing.

Anyway, It’s 6am and I’m sitting at the table next to Jupiter trying to get him to eat his breakfast. He’s been up since 5. Juliana and I take turns on who watches him in the morning. It always sucks when he decides to wake up extra early on my morning. Why, Jupiter, why?! I’m so tired. It was one of those mornings too where it’s like, wow, I’m really extra tired, I hope Jupiter doesn’t wake up early. And boom! Like clockwork.

Right before he woke me up, I was having a series of nightmares that bad things were happening to him. In one he was just standing in the middle of the road. It was the road I grew up on. I was terrified a car was going to hit him. In another, my mom had spent the day with him and was showing me pictures she had taken. There was a picture of him standing on some ice that seemed really thin. (You’re on thin ice, mister!). In another, and this was the really freaky one, she played me a video of the two of them white river rafting. My 15 month old son and my 60 something (sorry mom) year old mother white river rafting! In the video, she fell out of the raft (as you do) and there was Jupi just left alone in this raft. My mom can’t even swim that well. I woke up really panicked for a second.

Sorry! I’m talking about my dreams - that’s like the most boring thing ever. And I’ve got new Patreon subscribers this week! Oi, I am sorry. Usually I’m a lot more interesting than this, I promise. I’m just really tired and it’s just way too early.

There's two amazing pieces on Medium by a dude named Sharky Laguana about how to fix streaming music. You know the problem: Artists are paid fractions of pennies per stream through services like Spotify and Apple Music, but at the same time, these platforms are an amazing way to discover new music and be discovered by new fans. I HIGHLY recommend reading Sharky's pieces, but first, read what I wrote as a script for an upcoming vlog on the subject! Please!

Sharky does a great job of simplifying a complex subject, and I tried to go even further so that the message can reach as far and wide as possible. Tell me what you think!

______________________________________________________________________

DISCLAIMER!

This video is about the royalties generated by online streaming services. It’s a really complicated topic. Sharky Laguana, a musician and writer, wrote a series of posts on Medium which I’m using as the basis for everything that I’m about to say. His piece simplifies and illuminates this complex subject and I’m going to be simplifying it even further. There’s lots of data to back all of it up, though, so click the links in the description and look out for more posts by Sharky.

The question at the heart of all of this is: Is there a way to make streaming services be more fair to musicians? Let’s get into it.

Spotify makes the vast majority of it’s money from the over 10 million people that send them $10 a month to listen ad free. When you pay that $10 a month, almost none of it goes to the actual artists you listen to. Lately on Spotify I’ve been listening to a ton of Eef Barzelay, who strangely enough I discovered from a yogurt commercial. Anyway, I’d love it if a huge chunk of my recent subscription fees went straight to him. I’m a big fan. Unfortunately though, that’s just not how it works.

What Spotify does is they put all my subscription money, and yours and everybody else’s into a big pool, they take a 30 percent cut, and then earmark the rest for royalties. How is the rest divvied up? This bag of royalties is divided by the total number of streams across the entire service in the given period and this gets us a number called the “per-stream royalty rate”. Multiply my # of streams in a month by this per-stream royalty rate, and you have the amount I’m paying out to artists.

This big pool system has a bunch of problems, but I’m going to focus on my perspective as both a fan and a musician. Not only does this method of royalty distribution mean that I have absolutely no control over who gets a piece of my hard earned $10 a month, it also means that if you’re a “typical listener” like me, who streams around 300 tracks a month, I actually end up subsidizing a “heavy listener” who’s streaming 1000 or more tracks a month. I end up paying for someone else’s musical taste. Let’s look at how this works.

Out of my $10 subscription fee, $3 goes to Spotify and that leaves $7 to go to royalties. Let’s say I listen to 200 tracks this month. Based on the per-stream royalty rate we established above that means I’ve generated a cool $1.40 to be paid out to artists. But wait - $7 out of my original $10 was earmarked for royalties, I generated $1.40 with my 200 streamed tracks, so that leaves $5.60 hanging in the balance. Where does that money go?

It goes to subsidize a heavy listener, who’s streaming, say, 1800 tracks that month. They pay the same $10 subscription fee as everyone else but they’ve generate $12.60 in royalties, which leaves them $5.60 short. Oh look, I have $5.60 left over. Boom - I just paid for someone else to listen to Nickelback.

I wanted my money to go to an semi-obscure indie artist I’m currently obsessed with, who I’ve listened to almost exclusively this month, and instead my money went to Nickelback, and god knows who else. Probably, based on nothing else than sheer number of streams, a bunch of artists in the top 40. The system is broken.

Often these heavy listeners aren’t even individuals, but offices and yoga studios and restaurants who just have music as background 24/7. They pay the sam 10 dollar sub fee, but because they’re such heavy listeners they dictate, in a very real way, how the money gets divvied up. I don’t want to be paying for the artists these companies put on their playlists.

There is a better way. In his multiple Medium posts, Sharky calls it the Subscriber Share Model. It’s pretty simple: Spotify should just divide up my $7 based on who I specifically listen to that month. So if I listen to Eef 100% of the time in a given month, he’ll get my entire $7. If I listen to The Spinto Band 25% of the time, they’ll get $1.75. Compare that to the big pool: If I listen to 200 tracks in a month, and 50 of those streams are The Spinto Band (25% of 200 is 50), based on the per stream royalty rate, they stand to make only $.35.

The Subscriber Share Model is a fantastic idea. As Sharky says in his Medium post: It honors the intent of the listener, and incentivizes getting more fans, bringing the goals of everyone (services, labels, artists and fans) into alignment.

Spotify isn’t likely to do this anytime soon. But Sharky has an answer for that, too. He’s come up with the idea for a protest called Silent September. Normally, it’s impossibly for a typical listener to keep up with the heavies - the business that keep the music pumping all day. So the idea for the protest is this: For the month of September, turn your volume down really low, and keep your streaming service of choice going 24/7 with a playlist of indie artists you love on repeat. Streaming services can’t tell when your volume is down, and if you have a big playlist of artists on repeat, it won’t trigger any alarm bells. There’s nothing they can do to stop you. If you’re a typical listener and you do this for even just a day, it will double your monthly listening. Doing it for a week will result in more streams than a typical listener does in a year! If enough of us do this and we we focus on the indie artists we love, the major labels will start to worry about their piece of the big pool pie decreasing. That’s when they’d really take notice at just how unfair the current system for distributing royalties is.

I’ve made a playlist in both Spotify and Apple Music of the artists I’m going to be streaming for the month of Sept. Let’s make this happen!!

I’m on vacation! We’re at the beach in Rhode Island. My parents came and met us down here for a day and night, and now we're spending 2 more nights here. Juliana is really good about saving money, especially for specific purposes. She’s set us up a vacation fund. So here we are!

This is a “no work allowed” vacation, but as I pointed out to J, it’s hard for me because my work is just so integrated into my life. There is no vacation from Song A Day. I still have to sit down and eek something out. I wonder if it’s like that for other freelancers? Sometimes I think it would be nice to have a proper job where I could leave it behind and not think about it at all for a whole week. Then I could come back fresh.

Alas, that’s not the life I’ve chosen.

I was talking to my dad and he said he’s always found vacations to be really stressful. I understand where he’s coming from. When I was younger, I used to try to control and plan everything. I drove myself and everyone around me crazy with it. STICK TO THE PLAN! I still have a bit of that in me, though I’ve gotten a lot better.

Nowadays, what’s exhausting is: Jupiter. He’s nonstop. Running into the ocean (he’s 16 months, can’t swim and has no conception of the danger of the waves that are bigger than he is), sitting in his high chair, throwing everything onto the floor, over and over again. He’s learned to open doors, so he just opens the hotel room door and goes running off down the hallway. Absolutely no fear. 

Earlier this morning Juliana and Jupi were next door in my parent’s room and I was laying on the bed trying to think of something to write about. I was listening to the ocean. I was thinking about how the ocean has been making that sound for so, so, SO much longer than humans have even existed. Before dinosaurs. Before life, even. That’s crazy. And then I came into myself for a second, and my thoughts went to my body, like you do during meditation. I felt myself lying on the bed. I felt the weight of my body just lying there. I heard all the sounds anew, the ocean but also the hum of AC units and little kids laughing.

I rarely find time to mediate anymore, but the most profound thing about doing it at all was that every once in a while, I find myself coming into myself like that. It’s such a peculiar feeling. It really is what I described above: I just sort of leave everything behind. You can do that at any point. It’s the idea that whatever you are doing right now, at this very moment, is what you are doing.  Duh, right? But rarely is that where my attention is actually pointed. 

There is no work, until you’re working. There is no driving until you’re driving.  When I'm chasing Jupiter down the hall, that's all I'm doing, really. In reality. There’s actually nothing to stress out about. So just chill, OK?

Thanks so much for your feedback on last week's post. Josh Woodward put it this way: 

"Nobody has it all. The best you can do is to use your strengths to muscle your way around the weaknesses."

That's something that it's hard to remember. The other aspect of that equation is that you have to find people to collaborate with who have the strengths that you lack. Finding collaborators like that can be hard. There's a lot of obstacles. For one thing, everyone has their own stuff going on. I'm happy to spend a certain amount of time giving my expertise to friends and colleagues, but ultimately their thing is THEIR thing and my thing is MY thing. Casual collaboration only goes so far. I think all parties have to have skin in the game in order for collaboration to really take off.

I'm trying to get better at this, and find folks to work with who have the time and interest in throwing their lots in with me on a variety of projects. One of those projects is a Song A Day Navigator. The first step on my end was putting together the spreadsheet of every single song (which I had) with every single YouTube link (which I hadn't done before, duh). This gives us a very basic song a day data set that he can work with. Future data points in that spreadsheet would be: lyrics, links to buy, # of views, etc. But the next step for me is to figure out some interesting ways to NAVIGATE that data. I've come up with three so far. One of them is the image above: The Pick A Number system. I'm also attaching images for how I image a "Timehopper" version would look and one that's based on words.

My question to you: Are any of these three ways of looking at Song A Day particularly interesting to you? Can you think of other ways that would be more interesting to interact with this massive catalog of songs?

The person I'm working with is working on his own project that I don't TOTALLY understand, but it has to do with APIs. I think he's trying to make a thing that makes it super easy for anyone to make an API to go with a data set. The idea being, in the case of Song A Day, that he's going to create this API for interacting with all 2400+++ songs that other people can just take and run with. So if you had an idea of how you'd like to organize my catalog, and you just wanted to do it, you could. 

I'm really excited about it.

I was a good kid. I followed the rules and I got good grades. I took standardized tests seriously. So seriously that I’d get anxiety attacks beforehand.

But I remember a moment, some random day on my long, harsh road from little-kid-ness through puberty, I was maybe 11 years old. I was sitting in the back of the school bus having this revelation that, like, I didn’t have to follow the rules. Before that exact moment, it had seemed like all the things adults were telling me to do were somehow the only way. Their words were bedrock truth. And suddenly I realized that it was all bullshit. It was a weird, frightening and exciting moment.

I started to get into trouble. Nothing too horrible, but enough for me to be able to mark that moment as “before trouble” and “after trouble”.

Here’s the story of the “Worst Thing” I ever did as a kid. It’s actually not that bad, especially compared to stories I’ve been told by friends over the years of their worst things. But it’s pretty awful. For a pre-teen living in the backwoods of Vermont who’d never been in “serious” trouble before, this was top of the line, I think.

It was a slow weekend day, I was probably 12 years old. I have no idea where my parents were. Maybe they were working? Anyway, I had a group of 3 or 4 friends over. We were bored out of our minds. We decided to go for a walk. The town where I grew up is all dirt roads and forest. We used to just walk around for hours.

On this particular day, our first stop was a construction site - a house that was being built not far down the road from where I lived. The frame of the house was complete. It was all just concrete and two by fours. We trashed the place. We knocked stuff over. We broke some wood. We etched things into a metal tool chest. We spread nails out everywhere.

We left the construction site in search of something else to vandalize. At some point we got off the road and just started wandering through the woods. We came upon a sugar shack. This is where you turn maple sap into syrup. We broke all the windows. There were these little glass jars of syrup samples, grade A through D. We took turns throwing them at the side of the shack, syrup splattering everywhere. We broke some of the equipment.

Having gotten our pre-teen, testosterone boredom fueled jollies, we headed back to my house. Not long after, a police car rolled into my driveway. We freaked out. The cop rang the doorbell. We all hid, in closest and under beds. Still just little kids.

The cop came back that night when my parents were home. He said it was easy to figure out who was responsible because there were footprints leading all the way from where we had exited the woods straight back to my house. Dirt roads, after all. We were such idiots.

In my memory, I was being admonished by the cop and my parents for least two hours. I can’t imagine he actually stayed for more than 15 minutes. But my parents were predictably livid.

My friends and I had to collectively pay for the repairs and all the samples we destroyed. I don’t remember how much it was per person, but it was a lot for a 12 year old.All my weekly allowance went towards it for at least half a year. Finally, I saved enough money to pay, and I walked the few miles down to the house of the guy who owned the sugar shack. He wasn’t home, but his wife invited me in and gave me a brownie. She was so sweet. She said we were lucky we didn’t hang out much longer around the shack because her husband had heard us breaking stuff and had gone out to investigate with his hunting rifle. She sent me on my way with a little baggie full of baked goods.

This incident stands out so strongly in my mind partly because it felt so dramatic, but also partly because as I’ve gotten older and older, I find it harder and harder to understand why we acted the way we did. When you’re a teenager like that, you feel like no one understands you. And that’s actually true. I’m at the point now, near 2 decades later, where I’m just completely baffled.