Well, u can’t really get any more forthright than that, David.  Sorry you felt you had to.

It is easy to hear the screams, an old and dear friend said to me, ...but to “listen to the screams” is something else altogether. 

& if people didn’t actually think...in some twisted-puerile way that they DO own a piece of an admired or disapproved-of artist, then the paparazzi would be long out of bidness; & treated like the real criminals that probably too many of them are.  Peeping-toms with cameras and a fckd-up way to make a living.  I’ve heard both sides of the argument for years, ...& NO, it’s NOT the public’s right.  & to buy a ticket is NOT to take out a lease....

[...once I played a set of original acoustic ditties, back in a little town called Frazier Park while set-up on a dinky corner display-window stage, with this one raven-faced woman at the table right in the front ~~ like nose to nose really.  She stared through me, all-the-way-through she was likely thinking, with curled aluminum shavings of mock distain for what I was trying to deliver in a not-nearly-finished-but-well-intended song.  Unreal arctic church-lady busybody with an “amiable” pitted torch sneer on her face that I believe I had not earned as yet that night ~~ but, hey the ladies in the other corner table who shared the antithesis of her feelings...began to assist in my recovery not long after the set, so....   

Anyway, performing really lost it’s joy, if it ever had any, for a long time after that; except for the living room with family or around a fireside lake.  Most every gig setting has been a confined & overcast claustrophobic cube from then on.  Perhaps I’ve given too much credence to one defining moment, but crowds are plainly infantile/adolescent in nature, I think.  Terribly-two or something, whereas one-on-one or whatever core-group of kindreds in an intimate setting or the like better lends itself to what the notion of writing a ditty is from the beginning...to the finish.  I suppose when a big room comes together, it must be a rush; even spiritual.

But I've witnessed when the blunt mediocrity of “play your stuff” renders it’s verdict, ...& it’s often really no more than shallow at best.  I can sit in a pub audience and maze at the lack of attention span of the folks around me;  ...while an artist with a voice and guitar is splayed on a plank...and intimate with visceral public masturbation-of-a-sort/laid-wide-open-at-the-least deep in the heart of the presentation state of something that has been worked-on for countless days in the wee hours before sunrise.  ...& the important energies of the spectators ARE being spent more on consumption of food & booze and self-gratification than on this once in a lifetime, likely never to be duplicated, coming together act of beings with instruments in the night....   Something that transcends all things ordinary for just that one aesthetic moment in time...being relegated to a mere service-for-hire.  “Tip your waitresses...and such....”  ...........digressed, whoops....]

THIS is a good site, Dan/David, ...even if a meaningful query gets nada but mock pizz-&-vinegar in reply. 

& TRIAGE is a fckn good little movie/video/monolog/essay.  Should be a required course study somewhere, ...perhaps it is.  Simple apathy in the face of the eager use of lives and livelihood rules the roost primarily, I believe.  Perhaps that’s how such a cabinet can seemingly own the planet with certain impunity.  Comes with the turf.  The good stuff is in the living rooms....  TRIAGE is a beat-down like rarely has ever been shared.  A bullet in the brain of reason and remorse, commentary on that which is grounds to swim out to sea...or to be amassed with outrage over the movers-&-shakers and this dirty little calamity of overpopulation relief and the well-heeled & their mockingly commercialized vitriol; at its sources and within its oppressor contentions. 

WE have to face the facts, you acknowledged, & the fact is we’d better get on with something...or go off the deep end.  So we get on with something, &...somehow “we the people” have little recourse...even in the voting booths.  

TRIAGE [imo] screens like an essay; ...rock & roll and a poignant personal journey on a street of placards and ire, or a sickening lack of ire, depending on one’s point-of-view at any given instant in time. I’m oversimplifying, dumbing it way down for me ~~ more a modest interpretation for sake of clarity or to greater enable the perplexity of it all...or something.  Interpretation schminterpretation.  It’s just high-end gritty art; ...rock & roll...with a kick-in-th’head.  ...There are other relative kicks-in-th’head in music and film and literature (Ca Ira is an example & Amused to Death & Radio K.A.O.S. are perhaps others, ...although I can already hear the retorts....)

so yours is not the cornerstone...

BUT, sure as anything has ever been, It IS one of the vital endeavors. 

It’s appreciated.  & rest assured...YOUR space IS yours.  That’s not in question, as far as mine & I are concerned.  Yours by birthright & whole energy.  Those persons who visit this board who do not participate with any vital energy have that option.  I’m particularly glad of it’s present state...and that I stumbled upon it.  FWIW, you’re alright man.  & that’s not some critique or presumption, ...just a tip o’ the hat...from one cat to another.

Frankly, if you chose never to share another thing and just take it to the country and have barbeques from now until the culmination of whatever course of human effect, you will already have brought more of-earnest to the table than most have, or will, in this lifetime. 

& so be it.

So be it....