Forces (Of Nature)
In order for me to make my dear readers fully understand the significance of finding myself in the same room at the same time as someone as legendary as musician (and Freedom Fighter) Tom Morello, you're going to have to travel back in time with me for a moment or two. Rewind approximately 25 years and you will find me living in a basement apartment with a guy I ended up marrying and then divorcing, unfortunately. I haven't exactly sailed through the experience so much as picked my way down a very steep slope, metaphorically speaking. Nevertheless, there is one memory of my time in that basement apartment when I felt that still, small voice The Holy Bible talks about. I felt it, or rather heard it, while I was on a short walk outside that basement apartment, following the railroad tracks from one street to the next, as they pass through the heart of the neighbourhood. I remember something saying to me to remember this moment. So, I tucked it away in the backrooms of my mind and went on to live an otherwise very restless and, at times, very unhappy life. There were many reasons as to why I was so unhappy, but in hindsight, I see I could have made the choice to be a little less unhappy as it all worked out rather well (for me, at least) in the end. But it is that unhappiness that fuelled my fire. As I think about it, in fact, I would say I wasn't exactly unhappy. I was unsettled, more accurately. I don't know if you will believe me when I say I was brim-full of the proverbial piss and vinegar, back then. I had many things I wanted to do with my life and I had many things I felt I needed to prove to the world. My little life in that tiny apartment seemed to be all wrong, like I was meant to be elsewhere. I struggled so hard against myself.
Fast forward with me now to the mid 2000s. By this time we were married and had two WONDERFUL children. So wonderful, in fact, my entire life, as well as my heart, stalled-out to a comfortable hum for a few years. I revelled in being a mother, but I also found the isolation of motherhood (as well as marriage) (something people don't talk about, but it is very real nonetheless) to be almost more than I could bear. I was accustomed to having my own set of wheels and freedom to come and go as I pleased. Marriage and motherhood brought all of that to a screeching halt. Maybe it shouldn't have, but it did. I came out the other side of this experience a changed human being. I spent copious amounts of time alone, immersed in nature and motherhood. I became more reverent to the natural world and more solitary in my thinking and I often drifted off inside my mind, to the detriment of my family's well-being, I am sure, but I had my demons, as they say, and sometimes, they would not let me rest. I doubted everything, all the time.
By the time my youngest child was four years old, I was sure I was going to go completely insane from the droning, mundane repetition of being isolated and without adult companionship throughout the day. My husband used our vehicle for work and for 8 to 10 hours a day, or more, I spent the time at home, with nowhere to go and no means to travel. Knowing myself as well as I do now, I see that was a recipe for disaster, kind of like opening a can of beer that has been well-shaken. Given the slightest opportunity, that liquid is going to blow-up. I felt like I was going to blow up.
And then one very fine day, I noticed a little newspaper appear on the shelves at the grocery store. It was free. I grabbed a copy. When I was a high school student, I ran the high school newspaper for a while. I was pulled from class, as a matter of fact, and I thought I was in trouble for something (could have been anything) but instead was asked directly by the high school principal if I would take on the project of starting a school newspaper due to my superior ability as a writer. I got surprisingly good marks on my provincial exams and I guess they wanted to encourage me to go into journalism. I was very flattered and excited. I said yes. I called it The Huskey Headliner (the husky was our mascot). It ran for about six months and at the end of that time, my more intelligent and academically disciplined classmates took it over, giving me the distinct impression they thought I was not able to handle the task, but I was. What I was not able to handle was the jealousy I felt emanating from them to me for being asked to start it up in the first place. Patterns develop and over the course of my life, I look back at times like these and see that it is the jealousy of others which has been the greatest bane of my existence, throwing me well off my game, at times. But I am older now and wiser and I know jealousy when I see it. I chose to ignore it and carry on. But, back then, I didn't know how to fight that stuff, so I just threw my hands in the air and gave up.
I don't give up anymore. I keep going (wink wink).
So when I saw the ad in the little newspaper, which was called The Carleton FreePress, seeking a reporter, I JUMPED at the chance and I mean I JUMPED. I moved heaven and earth to get that job. I wrote a very bold letter to the editor, basically telling him I would be the best fit he will ever find anywhere, for this job, and though I was confident he would make the unfortunate choice of NOT hiring based on my lack of formal education, I remained the best candidate for the job, degree or no degree. Well, just like it does in the movies, this stunt worked. It totally worked. In fact, when it comes to my dear friend, and editor (Bob Rupert) there could not possibly have been any better way to get his attention. Being a seasoned and well-respected journalist, editor, and professor, he had earned every ounce of it over the years. This man, in my view as well as many others, was the personification of truth, justice, and integrity. He fought for human rights in one way or another, all his life, and he fought for and was a staunch proponent of THE TRUTH. So, when I came along? I am pretty sure it was a dream come true. His very own little Spitfire. Ha! And spit fire, I did. Often. I think it must be that Scottish heritage.
Bob and I had a very good time feeding off each other's intellect and voracity for the success of our endeavours. What I loved about him the most was his passion for people. He saw the good in others, he fought hard for that paper to succeed, knowing we faced an insurmountable force. He was in his early 70s when he took on the job of editor. He biked to work every day in the warmer months. He stuck out like a sore thumb in the community. He sacrificed time with his family for this task set before him in order to help us. He gave us his extremely precious time though he could have just as easily chose to go into retirement. What is the value of a man willing to set all else aside in the pursuit of the truth? Now that is a good question, isn't it?
The insurmountable force we faced existed in the form of an oil company which owns most of the province's natural resources on some level. There are those who revere this company (family-owned) and there are those who revile this company. I will let you decide which side of that particular fence I am on. Being at the top of the ladder in the millionaire/billionaire class in my home province of New Brunswick, Canada, this company is known to be ruthless, vicious, and unafraid to silence people. When it came to silencing the media, they went to great lengths to do so. They bought up all the local newspapers and either took over the control of the content, or they shut them down completely. As for me, a die-hard fan of newspapers, I found this to be a devastating thing. Other folks didn't seem to understand the ramifications of the choke-hold on our print media (pre-internet days) but I knew what it meant. It meant this company could get away with murder (so as to speak) and no one would be any the wiser because the story would never break. They've been known to evade paying taxes, they have compromised natural resources and caused great harm to the wildlife, not to mention the forests, and they have dumped utterly sinful amounts of pollution into the waters at Reversing Falls (where the Bay of Fundy meets the Wolastoq River), to name a few things, but don't get me started.
The Carleton FreePress stood like a sentinel for our province, fighting like hell to wake people up to the dangers of this concentration of ownership of our print media, but it was a genuine David-and-Goliath situation, I threw many many many stones at that giant and a few of them landed pretty hard, but we ultimately succumbed to their bullying. Our newspaper was forced out of print. I ended up with no job. At the time, it was a huge financial blow as well. My salary was $23, 000 per year and that was a lot of money to me. It was then that I realized how small I am in the world (or so I thought) and how men with money and power will literally steal the food out of a child's mouth if it served their selfish interests. I stopped trusting ANYONE with money, back then, and I took it extremely personally that this company would attack me and my colleagues as they did. But when it came to taking food out of the mouths of children? This time it was very very personal because this time, the children in question were MINE.
I can't explain how angry I was when I lost my job due to the bullying tactics of this oil company. I know I have explained the circumstances that gave me this job, but what you may not realize is the fact that I had to approach very serious and difficult situations as a reporter and prove myself worthy of the task (well-written articles, in other words), with absolutely nothing to fuel me but said formerly mentioned piss and vinegar. Bob and I shared a certain synergy but he never babied me. There was no room for huge mistakes. The only thing I could do to calm my nerves on my way to work each morning was blast Leonard Cohen's Take This Waltz as loudly as I could on the stereo of my Dodge Neon (silver) and head out into the fray. It gave me courage, but I don't know why. There was just something about it that made me feel like I could conquer the whole damned world. I am not making that up, at all, by the way. I would say to ask my ex-husband, but he ain't speaking to me. Oh well.
My (ex)husband had stepped away from his job to stay home with our children during this experience and it was all up to me to earn the money. No pressure, eh? No, none whatsoever.
I fulfilled my duties each and every day, sometimes so overwhelmed I would cry my eyes out as I went from one assignment to the next, and after enduring being spit at (read about that incident HERE) and so on. So, when the millionaires took all of this away from me, with no warning, I became angry, very very angry. The day I lost that job, I remember driving around by myself, seething. I also had an art show that same day and the crowd at the gallery were laughing about the paper shutting down, and one man even came right up to me and mocked me to my face. I left the art show, got in my car, and started to drive. I felt like a caged animal, all of a sudden. Even the artists in my community didn't seem to realize the loss they suffered that day. They were utterly oblivious to the dangers of no free press, but they were all, en masse, too (insert curse word) stupid to realize it. This is when I realized I was all alone in this battle. I had nowhere to turn to with my rage, Bob moved away to Newfoundland and everything and everyone dispersed. I was the only one left in the community who seemed to care. So, on that night, there was only one thing in the whole word that soothed my very broken spirit and it was the music of the one and only Tom Morello. It was his music project called The Nightwatchman and the song The Lights Are On In Spider Town, specially, that I suddenly became obsessed with because there was something in the sound of that music that resonated with everything I tried my best to stand for. I listened to it, driving around the town of Woodstock, New Brunswick, windows down, blasting it as loudly as I could. That was my way of sticking it to the man. That was my F*ck YOU! to the oil men. I have no idea if anyone heard me that night, but I sure as hell felt a lot better by the time I got home. Believe it or not, at that time, I was not fully aware of the premise of Rage Against the Machine and never listened to them much until 2019, but in hindsight, that may be a good thing.
It was then that I realized music has a resonance of intention behind every single note and the intentions of this band aligned perfectly with the resonance of my own heart and it released some of the pressure I was feeling–just enough to keep me from throwing Molotov cocktails at the office of the rival newspaper, in fact. And I did consider doing that many times, to be perfectly honest. If it wasn't for the fact that I knew that would be a bad thing to do as a mother, I would have probably ended up in a lot of trouble if I had followed through with the feelings of seething injustice I was experiencing at that time. The only thing that could draw my focus away from that injustice was this music. It gave me a little glimmer of hope in a world that seemed utterly hopeless. I had worked so hard to get somewhere, only to have every single door slammed in my face. I had no idea what we were going to do, but I do recall my husband and I spent the winter of that year unemployed, broke, and using blankets in the windows and over the doors to stave off the drafts. Meanwhile, the millionaires continued making their millions.
Now I am going to ask you to come back to the present time with me and recall the railroad tracks outside that basement apartment I mentioned at the beginning of this post. I also want you to remember what I said about something telling me to pay attention to those tracks, which I did. Well, it was just a week ago that I found myself walking those same tracks, past that same old apartment building, on my way to the Capitol Theatre; Tom Morello's name on the marquis. Oh. My. Goodness.
I could go on at length about all the components and gears that have shifted and moved in my life to put me at the exact place and time, with someone who has meant so much to me, but I will let you use your imagination to fill in the blanks. The obvious thing is this; it seems to me my very footsteps were ordered for that exact purpose, like grace itself carried me from moment to moment in order to fulfill these desires of my heart. I don't know how to describe it, but I know an honest person when I hear them and I know in the realms of sound there is such a thing as a resonance of good and a resonance of evil. It is difficult to discern but I took the time to learn and know the difference over the course of my life. Music has always been that thing I run to when I feel I need to run at all and to be honest, I must admit I can see where I've spent most of my life running. Sometimes I run into the fray and sometimes I run as far from it as I can, but I am always cognizant of the battle between good and evil and it plays out before our very eyes (more accurately, our ears) again and again.
When I worked for the aforementioned newspaper, I worked my guts out. My editor was the type who gleefully squeezed everything he could get out of his reporters. He never coddled anyone, but he did encourage people. When he found I could draw, he gave me assignments which helped me to put my talent to use. He gave me a weekly column, which he said everyone loved, and he told me to provide an accompanying illustration. So, I did. One of the first illustrations to accompany my column was a portrait of Leonard Cohen, which may prove to be a significant detail for some of you. The portrait was of Cohen as he appears on the cover of the I'm Your Man album, with an accompanying smart-ass article about Danny Williams.
All I know is that Leonard Cohen's music has a resonance of truth that mirrors the resonance of Tom Morello's music and I know this because I can feel it, in my heart. Incidentally, a recent review of Morello's show, which he played in Moncton as well as Fredericton and Saint John, was compared to that of Leonard Cohen's, much to my absolute delight. In the intricate web of life, the connections that have been made from point a to b to c, in my own life, not to mention the entire grande scheme of things, reveals an interconnectedness that I am becoming viscerally aware of more and more each day. And as time goes on and events unfold, I know I can't possibly be the only one seeing these correlations.
To put it in simple terms, if there is a God (and I believe there is) then God himself looked down into my heart and saw all the broken parts there-in (of which there were many) and step-by-step, literally, mended each and every crack and fissure. Healing is painful, but it is also miraculously dreamy.
A divinely ordained, full-circle moment presented itself in an epic way when Morello came to town (and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for coming to town, Tom!!). Incidentally, my old basement apartment in Moncton is positioned directly under the steeple of a cathedral where a cross stands tall, lit from within, right above the place where I lived before my children were born. It was under that same cross I walked on my way to see Morello's show and at that same show, I had the absolutely wonderful experience of singing my guts out to Killing in the Name, which serves to provide commentary in a world that prides itself on fighting its Holy Wars, but again, don't get me started.
At any rate, what a time was had. I drove four hours to get to the show and four hours back (in the dark November rain). I've never gone that far from home by myself before in my entire life. To give you something to compare this to, let me tell you that there was a time when I barely left the house, for weeks on end. I was afraid of my own shadow and in a relationship so toxic, it seemed to be slowly killing me. I've made a lot of changes since then and here I am, telling you all about it.
I am not sure if I've hit the target exactly right here, but I've come pretty close, I think. I hope this explains the significance of the events of the last week, but it may take a hearty imagination to really comprehend all that it means to me; a woman who has been to hell and back in these last five years especially, but it's been worth it because I've come back with a story to tell. A very big story, as a matter of fact, called The Acchite Project.
So, what does Tom Morello's music mean to me? Well, what it really means, at the end of the day, is this; it kept me out of jail. It kept me hungry for the truth and it gives me an excellent excuse to swear in public. What more can I say? I don't know what the future holds, but I sincerely hope that pattern continues. It must be some sort of strange and bizarre force of nature.
It is Remembrance Day in Canada, by the way.
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