Vance’sMondayAcousticPajamaParty #92 - HAPPY NEW YEARS LOVE SONGS

Or something like that. I kinda stick to themes. Sometimes.

When: Monday nite 1/3, 7:30pm EDT.
(“doors” open at 7 for community hang) -

Where: https://youtu.be/7u7GENqbwgo

Who gets 10%: Tufts Cummings Veterinary Medical Center https://alumniandfriends.tufts.edu/news/pet-care-all Through a partnership between Cummings School and the city of Worcester, subsidized quality pet care; services are offered well below the market rate—for less than a quarter of the national average fee.

http://paypal.me/vancevancevance or
https://venmo.com/vancevancevance or
a check to VanceFunder P.O.. Box 17,
Arlington, MA 02476 for this web-groovery.
Pay or not. Up to you. Let’s stay connected.

This week’s pajamas = pilled-up over-washed sweat bottoms, hoodie top.

I teach and coach stuff.

Good Good Man - the CD - streaming all over, even get one from me.

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WHEN LOVE IS HARDEST

I had some friends lovingly accuse me of “falafel-sizing”. Here goes.

I think love means the most when it is hardest to give. I’m sure someone has said it better than I have. This is mine and how I’m trying to get there.

Rather than sweats, today I'll put on a decent pair of pants, a warm flannel shirt with a tie that can be seen beneath an open coat, and I meet neighbors at a graveyard for the burial of a younger than me, healthy, unvaccinated neighbor that died this week of Covid. It’s my second funeral in as many months for an unvaccinated someone. And like many of us, I have had the marching swirl of emotions - fear, disbelief, sadness, and that sinful-feeling angry faux-nonchalance that comes with the shrug and the “Well, what did they expect?” under my breath, to myself. I’ve even heard others say it out loud, first looking this way then that, fearing being overheard, taking me into some sort of social distancing confidence.

I get it. We are frightened, righteous, protecting our own. This disease has drawn lines.

I know where I stand. I’ll quote a friend who said “I’d get vaccinated even if I didn’t fully believe it was good for me, if it meant I was keeping someone else, like my older parents, from being ill”. I'll lose followers, likes, and friends standing on this hill, for some feel musicians need to stick to music and stay out of opinion and politics. Yeah, that’ll happen. I’ll have to go with “so be it”.

But I can surely do this; I will love as best I can. I will find a way to love. My friends, my enemies, disbelievers, conspiracy theorists, righteous shruggers. This here right now is when it is hardest to love someone else. When they have hurt you. When they are actively hurting you. When you believe they may hurt you. With the needle. By being without the needle. Hard. I think I’m finally starting to get what the Christians and the Buddhists are on about. The love no matter what thing. It’s all that remains. And it’s hard.

Some see these times as a test to see who will live, who will die. It is certainly a test of if we can love. That part I can do. It’s the only thing I can completely control if given the chance to wake up tomorrow and select a tie. Again.

Happy New Year
Xovg