When: Monday, Sept 1 [Labor Day], 7:30pm EST

Where: https://youtube.com/live/LBqYZGO1kyg?feature=share

Who gets 10%: Arlington Youth Counseling Center https://www.ayccma.org Guess what they do?

http://paypal.me/vancevancevance or https://venmo.com/vancevancevance or VanceFunder P.O. Box 17, Arlington, MA 02476

*PRIVATE COACHING AVAILABLE - Contact me (vance@vancegilbert.com) for songwriting, performance, and voice coaching.

***CUSTOM SONGS - Expensive, but sure, you want one about you or your family or something.

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HEADBUTT FORGIVENESS

This week marks the one year anniversary of being fired from a poorly run, staff-support-lacking collegiate language music program for ...my language. Details are everything, and I’ve run it down before, but I suppose I’m somewhere between PTSD and “bro, you need to let it go”. But yes it broke me.

I won’t call this pain PTSD as that, in my mind, is reserved for war, death, rape, torture and other things that sometimes nature does but surely other humans do to humans. My sense of fair play and general good personness also won’t let me and my memory be reduced to the “get over it bro”. So I’ll work my magic somewhere in-between.

So what do I do with such things? Head down and head butt my world with forgiveness.

~ Spoke up with kindly remembrance at a service for a man who was the most racist homophobic person I’d ever known

~ Forgive and hope the best for the student, raped by a world famous doctor, sporting PTSD and resultant physical attributes who got me fire when I tried to keep a funny back and forth funny after she laid her story on me. Good luck, kiddo.

~ Same for the administrator who wanted me gone anyway to keep *his* people in the fold. Play good tunes, sir.

~ I did not dig in the yard with the toy dump trucks. My friends did when I had gone in to pee. Dad, you're forgiven for the strapping. You dead anyway. Still matters. Really I guess I was foreman of the project, still...

~ Forgive people who can’t yet see that when it comes down to it nowadays, roll down the music and speech and just look at the videos, that war, occupation, seems to happen to the brownest of the people.

~ Head down, horns polished, and I’ll “take care of my own house” as an in-law who had treated me like dung said to me once.

Oh yeah, you can learn from perpetrators and the situations too.

You can blame me. But you’ll never shame me.

[art by Eric Boehm]