Rejecting Labels - Even the Nice Ones

For every "us," there is an equal and opposite "them."
 
Many people have been given a negative label at some point.  It is enticing to spin those labels into positives - rebranding the pejoratives, whether by asking people to use another, nicer word or by changing views toward that word, or by finding a community of nice people with the same label.

And it feels good because it makes us happy in a way that gives us a team while answering our detractors.  We've won them over by outnumbering them!  Look at us being better than that!  And it's no wonder Twitter profiles and ads love to accumulate labels, from the nauseating box-ticking of "You're a mother, daughter, wife, CEO, politician, and lover of bath salts" (for advertising a thing, possibly bath salts) to "Nerd.  Athlete.  Bacon.  Sarcasm.  Love.  Bath salts" (for advertising oneself).

But in so doing, we unwittingly (or wittingly) embrace the most common label of all time - "us."  And each new "us" makes a "them."

Identity politics, many strains of religion, and any subculture to which things can be marketed - whether for monetary or sociopolitical profit - encourage people to see themselves in several "us" circles.  Every one we draw says something about us - and them.

It's not that every circle comes with a fence.  But to collect loads of things to say that you are, even as it makes it easier for people to place you, makes it harder for you to place them.  The more country borders, the more times you're stopped at customs, and the more has to be translated to understand anybody other than yourself.

So my exhortation is to stop finding meaning in circles, in identities, in labels.  If you want to be more than the sum of your parts, celebrate your parts less and your sum more.  Granted, it hurts to refuse easily available labels.  It hurts to be skeptical of an "us" after being a "them" for so long.  But refusing offered labels gives the freedom to build bridges to anyone, anywhere.  I have done far more things in my life by not wasting resources proving my identity in those things.

We are humans, flawed beings, trying to live to the truth we're aware of so far.  We need grace, mercy, forgiveness, and love.  That is my identity and your identity and "them"'s identity.  Anything else unites some at the expense of others.

And if your "us" can't bring "them" in, because it's an attribute they can't possess or the barrier to entry is unrealistic, then you have chosen division and unity at the same time.  You may enjoy the benefits of an identity-based cloister, but make no mistake - it is a cloister, a circle around you and yours that implies a them and theirs who are in some way different.

The only way to avoid this is to refuse the benefits of labels.  The idea sounds foreign, but it liberates like few things can.  Let's just be people, putting our resources into doing things instead of declaring affiliations.

Why do you need to trumpet who you're standing with?  You're standing.  That's enough for me.  Is it enough for you?

BBC: Thank you from an American

I'm an American, and I wouldn't be where I am today without the wonderful content of the BBC.  While I'm insufficiently versed in UK politics to know all that's going on, I do know that the death of the BBC would be the death of a huge part of me.  And if there's any reason at all to save it, then the UK is insane not to save it.  I realise I don't pay the licence fee, but I've been willing for years to pay it.  I wish I could opt out of paying for US public television, which is currently rubbish, and pay for yours across the pond, which is excellent.

A Little Background

I was raised partly on British comedy, or at least what made it over here pre-Internet.  Various bits of Monty Python, Blackadder, Red Dwarf, and the perennially shown Are You Being Served? and Keeping Up Appearances.  These were a start, but they didn't influence me much at the time.  It wasn't until a family holiday in 2000, in a B&B where I got my own room with television, that I fell in love with UK television.  I saw what turned out to be the second-ever episode of Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned and a random episode of They Think It's All Over, and I was hooked.  Outside feeble attempts like an umpteenth revival of Hollywood Squares, the comedy panel show had disappeared from US television, and as a 14-year-old taking all this in, I was astounded at what the format (or in Baddiel and Skinner's case, the unformat) could do - just loads of funny people having fun.

6 years later, the guy who sat next to me in law school showed me Mitchell and Webb's "Are We the Baddies?" sketch.  A few months after that, I started finding more Mitchell and Webb clips and falling in love with their comedy.  What I didn't understand just then is how much I needed it.  Law school revealed a number of things about my 21-year-old self that I hadn't been ready to deal with, and law school's rough enough as it is, so huge parts of my life went grey or black.  I don't remember them too well, mainly because they're not worth remembering in comparison.

But the humour was there, and it gave me a world to explore and a satirical framework in which to throw away a lot of what I was going through.  Brits are excellent at taking the piss, and I frankly had a lot of it that needed to be taken away.  My life would have been so much darker without British comedy in particular, and I'm not sure I would have made it through law school without Mock the Week, That Mitchell and Webb Look, and other shows.

Phase 2

When I finally got a job, doing some law stuff online/from home, my health went weird and I couldn't control my sleep well.  This left me up at all odd hours with a major need for something stimulating to make it through the hours of darkness and dullness.  Enter Lauren Laverne, who informed me of the BBC IPlayer for the first time.  Now, at the very least, I could have BBC radio to get through the night (I'm in Seattle, so her show is on 2 to 5 AM here).

Normally I loathe radio, at least commercial radio.  But Lauren was and is different.  The range of songs played, her off-the-charts (pun intended) music knowledge, and her manner not only on the show but in tweeting with me, the Twitter-active, effusive listener from Seattle, drew me in deeper.  Within the first few months, I was on BBC 6Music twice, once for Biorhythms (Nemone read my stuff out) and once for Memory Tapes with Lauren.  I've saved that part of the broadcast and still listen to it occasionally, as it's one of the major highlights of my life.  And both on-air and off-air Lauren has been exceptionally kind to me.  There is absolutely no reason someone of her professional standing ought to be so kind, but she is anyway.  And my social media interactions with other BBC figures has been similar.

Giving Back

As I've said, I gladly would have paid a licence fee this whole time, broke as I've been throughout a lot of it, for the value I've gotten from the BBC.  So imagine my delight when, 2 years ago, Comic Relief had a #twittermillion grassroots fundraising campaign for Red Nose Day.  You could join a celebrity's team and they'd promote whatever it was you were doing in the hopes that people would give.

 I signed up for Lauren's team before she announced exactly what it was.  When I found out it was a charity thing, I decided to finally produce my comedy sketches that I'd been making at the nudging of Katherine Jakeways, writer of BBC 4's Sony-nominated North by Northamptonshire and star in things like Horrible Histories and The Armstrong and Miller Show and who, like Lauren, had been communicative and kind to me for no reason other than being a wonderful person.  So I put things together in a 15-minute programme that has me rapping, beatboxing, and namedropping Only Connect.

But Comic Relief rules said they "weren't allowed to solicit funds from abroad," which looked like it would nix my involvement.  But I, for all the UK had given me, wasn't going to take no for an answer, so I put a UK friend in my sketch show, not just because I needed a British person for one sketch but because he could be the address I used to post the show.  While I raised little outside my own family, Lauren tweeted my efforts often and Kirstie Allsopp retweeted once - efforts for which I am always thankful.  And again, what other country's stars do this sort of thing for random people?

The one donation outside people I already knew responded to Lauren's tweet.  She's from the UK but lived in Switzerland at the time.  She missed the UK as a physical home; I missed it as an emotional home.  So we became very close friends, and she is one of several friends I have made through love of BBC 6Music and UK programmes in general.  When I get the money, my first long vacation will be to the UK, where I hope to meet all the friends I've made and thank Lauren and her BBC crew in person for all they've done for me.  Yes, I'm willing to spend about 9 years of licence fees on the round trip across the pond to say "thank you" - because they deserve it.

All of This Is To Say...

I owe so many good things in my life - getting through hardships, making friends, and stretching myself into comedy writing - to the efforts of UK television and radio, most of which has been from the BBC.  The value I've received from you across the pond is immeasurable, and I don't want to imagine my life without it.  If you don't understand what BBC culture has done for your life, then you haven't engaged in it enough, because any one of you can get what I've had for much less effort.  The 6Music community in particular is the most welcoming social community I've ever been a part of, and now that I have a normal job I'm not up at 2 AM to be part of Lauren's show.  I miss it constantly, and to think even for a second that it could disappear gets me choked up.

The idea of "government programming" is usually a terrifying thought, but the BBC has been adept at commissioning comedies that satirise everything, including the BBC.  As a nation, please cherish what that means - a government that is willing to pay people to make fun of it.  Please understand, from a country whose federal government takes itself way too seriously, how valuable that is for preserving your country.  It's unthinkable in totalitarian states and suspicious in most others.  But the current is too strong in the UK to wipe that away completely, and having public broadcasting is key to preserving it.  Mock the Week wouldn't be as culturally relevant coming from Channel 4; the point is that it's on government funds while satirising government.  You need to hold on to that ethos, because if you let it go, I assure you it won't come back.

 I know this is a testimonial at heart.  I know I'm not in a position to see both sides.  But please, please, please consider very carefully what the BBC means for the UK when it's running right.  Maybe it needs some reforms; most organisations do.  But the BBC is as unique and irreplaceable as the wonderful people who have made years of vital programming.  From the bottom of my heart, I thank the BBC for its role in my life.  I hope it's had a role in yours too.

To My Law School Classmates

Hi, ye with whom I spent 1-3 years depending on your class.  I write this to you as a kind of apology - an apology for not being as invested in you as you wanted to be invested in me.  Looking back, it's clear all the chances at strong friendships I threw away for not knowing what I was doing as a human.  I missed out on the best of some amazing people because I was floundering in myself.  If I could substitute 2014 me for 2006-2009 me, I would love to, but time is not so kind.

I arrived at UA a confident 20-year-old and left a nervous, scared 23-year-old.  Several things factored in, most of which boiled down to being unprepared for marriage and life after college in general.  I discovered my Seasonal Affective Disorder in my second year and I was depressed most of my time in law school and its root cause wasn't discovered until late 2010.  These things didn't help.  But there was weird stuff too.  Despite being a lawyer, I'm still intimidated by anyone who looks like a lawyer - and as the bulk of my class was 3-6 years older than me, they looked far more like a lawyer than I did - and I let the curve, the image, the everything get to me.  You all looked like you were going to have great careers.  I looked like I had no idea how I got there, because by that point I had no idea how I got there.  In my mind I had become a failed prospect - the Brien Taylor of law school, I guess - and I look back in wonder as to how I scraped by, including passing the bar exam with the minimum score (as I did most non-seminar classes - I'm probably one of the few students to have a Best Paper and graduate in the bottom 10%).

It took a year to find a law job that would hire me full-time and that was only because it had gone full-time since the initial call and only 3 of the initial applicants were as available as I was.  I wound up liking antitrust/class action document review - from 2010-early 2014 undiagnosed allergies kept me from working outside my home consistently, so remote stuff was necessary.  But while they liked me, it wasn't steady work.  I worked about 7 months in 2011 and 6 in 2012; this year is my first over 1800 hours across jobs, and I have 3 of them right now to pay back taxes and student loans.  It looks like very good odds that I will be hired this week as a Legislation Editor for the City of Seattle based off my last 2 years of municipal codification lawyering; it's technically a paralegal position but is the same pay as my law work and virtually the same actual work (revising executive and legislative proposals to be worded correctly and training other departments to draft legislation right the first time).  It would be my first permanent job with benefits.

I see my friends' online profiles and they still look as lawyerly as I don't.  In general, their path seems to have been as straightforward as going to a Tier 1 law school implies - get in with a firm and do lawyer things for lawyer money.  And the others tend to have a heartwarming story about embracing what they love.  I love working with municipal legislation, but that's not heartwarming; I'll have attorneys for bosses, not colleagues. 

Maybe the law school would be embarrassed to know that they'd paid for my first year just to end up here.  Maybe the law school alumni would be embarrassed too.  It's the life I've got, and I enjoy it, but from the perspective of those 3 arduous years in the aughts I feel like I wasted so much.  Maybe I could have made your lives better in some way.  I don't know.

In any event, I miss you all, I hope you're doing splendidly, and I wish I could have been as wonderful to you as you deserve.  If I run into you now, I'll try to make up for lost time.

Brandon Isleib
University of Alabama Law School
Class of 2009
earthdyedred at gmail

What Am I Looking For?

What am I looking for?  If you know, please tell me.

Am I looking for health that enables a normal sleep schedule and the ability to be with people when they want, not just when I'm available?  Am I looking for enough concentration to be lucid most of the day, rather than hiding from people because I get strangely fatalistic missing even a couple hours of sleep, and because I'm sneezy from being underslept the first couple hours of most days?  Those things definitely would be nice, but I've managed to build a life around them, making friends in other countries and resulting in having friends who are awake whenever I'm awake.

Am I looking for more sex?  Quite possibly.  But when you spend ages 15-25 assuming you were a child molester based on something your parent said about you, it's difficult to feel the confidence to ask.  Rejection for any reason feels like a confirmation that I'm the creepy person I believed I was all those years, so I don't venture anything.  And I don't gain anything either.

Am I looking for a body I would be happy with?  Maybe, but these other issues showed up when I was lighter.

Am I looking for people in general liking me?  Maybe, but I already have several amazing friends.

Am I looking for specific people liking me?  That seems to be an issue.  There are some people who seem "major league" in their circles, and everybody seems to love them, and I want to be in on that.

Am I looking for approval?  It seems so, but that might be a cover for not having enough internal approval.  Whenever a writer talks about privilege, it tends to hurt because the topic frequently goes to excess and stereotyping.  In ranting moments, those articles tend to tell white Christian males like me that whatever you do isn't due to your effort, but the efforts of others who gamed the system for you.  And since privilege can't be fully quantified, it feels like a taint on whatever I do, an asterisk on anything I accomplish.  So I don't talk publicly about when I get promoted or when I win something or what I get for birthdays or Christmas, because no matter what it is there's that risk that somebody will say "yeah, you only got that because of your privilege."  It's impossible to disprove something like that, so it hovers.  I don't find minefields relaxing.  All this means that other people tweet things about something happy that occurred to them and they get congratulated, while I'm scared to talk about anything happy that occurs to me because shouty writers and people who publicize their opinions way too much might take those happy things from me with a word.

Am I looking for belonging and acceptance?  Probably.  But if it's that simple, why does it feel so complex, and why, given my amazing friends, do I feel like I don't have it?  Why do I feel perpetually locked out of what the cool kids are doing?  Am I still trying to answer those kids from 1990-97 who would tell me "You don't go to real school" because I was homeschooled?  I know they still sting me even as they've definitely forgotten me.  I try to be a real lawyer, a real musician, and a real writer, whatever those mean, and having gone to a Tier 1 law school and being published on major web sites makes me feel, however briefly, like I was real.  I've done a lot of stuff in part because my emotions want to disprove some 8-year-olds.  And saying that makes me feel awful in several ways.

I suspect a lot of what I'm looking for is an internal sense that I did something real and permanent, something whose praise is objectively deserved, something nobody can tear down for being privileged or tainted just because I did it.  Because of those kids saying I didn't go to real school, and because of the child molester accusation, I've felt an asterisk on my head most of my life.  I'm perpetually different, niche, outside.  I rarely feel fully accepted in a group and have no way to judge whether I am.  It's likely that I am accepted but can't feel it, but maybe it's egotistical to assume I am accepted.

This is not me whinging about my life; if it were, I wouldn't publish it for fear of people saying I'm privileged, so how dare I voice concerns.  Day to day, my life is pretty awesome.  But I don't know what I'm looking for in these moments of melancholy.  I don't know what's missing.  I can say that I want to find X, but since I don't know what X looks like, I wouldn't find it even if I saw it.

I'm desperate to know what I'm looking for.  Maybe it's obvious to you from knowing me; if so, tell me.  I can't feel more lost than this, so anything helps.

About Anna McDonald

As I compose this, I am not composed.  I've been choked up for the last hour and a half over the news that Anna McDonald likely has written her last regular article.  There are many of the same emotions I felt when Tim Wakefield retired - the strongest link to a chapter in my past is now broken, the chapter has ended, and I have to embrace a new reality.

Today I essentially finished revising my book draft on negligent communication before submitting it to my friend in book publishing to get advice on the next step.  There's a lot of emotion bound up in that effort, as it's a topic I feel strongly about and that I think needs more people exploring it.

You know who first said to me, unsolicited, that I should write a book?  Anna.  More or less after my stint at The Hardball Times ended due to looking for work, then finding work, then becoming a columnist in Magic: the Gathering, Anna e-mailed me saying she had read my archive and it, among other things, helped her start establishing enough confidence to write herself, as she had just started to do at The Hardball Times.  I was going through a lot of emotional stuff at the time, and she was willing to listen and care about me, and together we boosted each others' confidence enough to get ahead. 

For a long time, she beat herself up over an aborted attempt to interview Todd Worrell.  But even as I suspect there was always that bit of trepidation, she's interviewed tons of players and coaches since then: Bill DeWitt III; John Mozeliak; Joe Kelly; Adrian Beltre; Devin Hester; and others.  And she had a great interview style, being particularly adept at sculpting the interview into a narrative, which was aided largely by her asking thoughtful questions to begin with.  There was a fullness and a richness to her interviews, and her regular essays carried the same thoughtfulness and level of detail.  There was always a gracious balancing of opposing opinions, and you left the article feeling like you really had gained something.

That style served her extraordinarily well when she became a leading media presence on youth football concussions, spurred by her son's involvement in the sport.  She was part of a momference hosted by the NFL to help teach safety-conscious football techniques - a conference commissioner Roger Goodell spoke in.  If I had told the 2010 Anna McDonald that she'd hear the NFL commissioner speak to her on the NFL's invitation, and that her experience would get her an article on the front page of the New York Times, she wouldn't have believed me.  But that's how it ended up.

And this is the woman who put the bug in my head to write a book.  Admittedly, when I completed the first draft quickly in 2011 and she didn't have the time to read it, I was devastated - way more affected by it than I ought to have been - and didn't pick up the material for another 18 months.  I'm in my mid-20s; I'm not as mature as I would like to be.  But the point is that she believed in me in a way no one else had dreamt to believe in me.  And so on the day when the project she started in me came full circle, finding out her writing career has come full circle as well is incredibly emotional for me. 

Ultimately, Anna was the biggest fan of my baseball writing, and I wound up becoming one of her biggest fans in return.  Her sportswriting far eclipsed mine in quality and in popularity - ESPN and the New York Times are kinda big venues - and I was always kind of in the back as something of a proud parent, like maybe I had some sort of legacy.  It's a vain thought, I know, but friendships intertwine like that, where you're just honored to be a part of something special, no matter how small or large.

And that's why the news feels a lot like Tim Wakefield retiring.  As long as Anna was writing, I still had a stake, sort of, in current sportswriting, an anchor point for when other things were chaotic.  I went from a 9-year-old squirt to a baseball writer to a lawyer with Tim Wakefield still pitching for the Red Sox.  And I went from a confused twentysomething in Alabama to an arguably competent lawyer in Seattle with a mostly-completed book while Anna McDonald was writing for ESPN.  And I kinda rooted for Anna the same way I rooted for Wakefield; there was a personal investment beyond the basics.  (Wakefield is from my mom's hometown, and Anna and I had all these e-mails and times when we helped each other out.)

I'm out of words to describe the feeling.  When Anna's last article publishes on ESPN, it's going to be a bookend for something I never wanted to end.  As she tweeted to me on August 29, "I would have quit writing a LONG time ago without your encouragement."

And I wouldn't have accomplished what I have without your encouragement, Anna.  I'm going to miss your writing more than you know.  You mean a whole lot to me, and I hope that our next chapters are as fulfilling as this chapter has been.

-Brandon Isleib
September 26, 2013

On Harmonizing All the Various Bits of My Life That I'm Known For

I have a number of different roles and friend groups.  And by different, I mostly mean different from each other - distinct, discrete, or separate.  From what I've discerned, my Magic player/writer and baseball writer friends would be surprised at my level of what they would deem fundamentalist church involvement.  Meanwhile, my Christian friends would be surprised at who some of my other friends are.  I assume, anyway; I don't try to jab people with ideological sticks and find out who'd keep me around if they knew everything I did.  It's not like I'm lying about anything; I just don't go out of my way to shock people or bring all my groups together.

What this means is that, to each group I'm involved in, I hold a number of heterodox sociopolitical beliefs.  I left Facebook in early 2012 basically because of this; it felt like every day one group of people I cared about and respected would post a "people who believe X are what's wrong with society" statement that would back-door call me an idiot because they didn't guess that any of their friends would dream to believe X.  Every well I drank from was poisoned, so to speak, and the ensuing melancholy made it difficult to feel sufficiently good about myself to get anything done.

"Even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise; when he closes his lips, he is deemed intelligent." - Proverbs 17:28

So what ties all of me together?  Am I two-faced or cowardly in what I believe?  I don't think so at least.  The key for me is apparently rare but surprisingly simple:

I respect the viewpoint difference between me and God.

When I explain what I mean, I think you will agree that this is the single biggest reason (apart from hypocrisy) that some end up hating religion.  Buoyed by passages such as Matthew 7:1ff (you'll be judged as strictly/nicely as you judge people), Romans 14:5 (being convinced about something doesn't automatically mean everybody must agree with you), and James 4:11 (only God is the ultimate judge), here's what I'm talking about.

The Bible claims, as you would expect, that God made the universe and is over it.  What that means theologically is that God gets to set terms and conditions on the use of the universe in a way that would make no sense for me to do.  Being the lawyer that I am, I like to conceive of it as God having copyright control over the universe - He made it, so he gets to say what happens with it.  If Dr. Seuss's estate wants to be incredibly strict with fair use/parody/all that, I don't agree that they should care so much, but I don't hold the rights to their stuff.  If Disney wants to warp copyright law just to keep Mickey Mouse under wraps, I don't agree with that line, but why would I?  It's not my stuff.

So when the Bible says X behavior is offensive, I don't always see why that is, but it's not my universe, so why would I have found it offensive in the first place?  I don't care about X behavior personally one way or the other and I have no cause to.  Just as you might not care about certain racy jokes at work but you understand why there's a policy in place against them and could articulate that policy to somebody who asks, so I can be ambivalent about a bunch of things that God cares about and be fine with that while telling you what the Bible says about them.

And this is where the breakdown occurs in society, I think.  There are people who, understandably at the outset, try to conform their thinking to God's as outlined in the Bible.  But their version of it - feeling like they have to both ascertain every reason God cares about something and then care about the thing just as hard - makes them come across like they are God.  If you've ever been pulled over by a cop who seems way too happy to get you for speeding, that's exactly the type of Christianity I'm talking about.  Essentially, the cop agrees too much with the speeding law.  If the cop ran the universe, there'd be no speeders, so when there is a speeder, the cop acts like (s)he runs the universe.

People don't convert anyone; God does.  "What then is Apollos?  What is Paul?  Servants through whom you believed[.]"  (1 Corinthians 3:5)  My role in the universe isn't to get a piece of running it, or act like I run it, or even agree 100% with how it is run.  My goal is to be a servant and tell people what God says; what happens after that is basically none of my business.  So why go into my personal relationships looking for a "win" with them, like this was sports or politics?  I'm a servant and a messenger; neither job has a win-loss record.

And this is how, whether you are an atheist, a Christian, or something else, I keep some friends you might not expect.  I believe in a higher power, but it isn't me.  So while I can tell you some things He cares about as the One who runs the universe, I'm not in the same position as Him, so my interactions with you are different.  I'm supposed to love everyone and be a servant as best I can, and I can't do that if I'm the cop and everybody looks like they're speeding.  If I ran the universe, a lot of things would be different around here.  But I don't, so I'm not going to act like I do, and the goal of my religious activity isn't to ascertain every reason the universe might be run this way.  My goal is to follow, obey, and serve.

Maybe that sounds glib to you - a version of "I just work here" - but the truth is I do just work here, so I'm going to pour myself into my work rather than into being bossy.  A bunch of God's concerns don't make personal sense to me, but they don't need to, and I'm not going to apologize for believing He has those concerns even as I don't care about them myself.  I don't relish telling people certain things from the Bible, but as with the example cop, I don't think talking about right and wrong is a thing you're supposed to relish anyway.  You're supposed to figure it out, but there's no triumph or smugness available in it; it's just a thing.  It's a shame that modern western Christianity seems to have forgotten this (assuming it ever knew) in a culture that overly cares about publicly taking sides and identifying with groups.

So there's my answer.  Hopefully it's coherent.

My double album Hapax Legomenon is out. Would you like to buy it?

I finished my long-time-coming double album Hapax Legomenon yesterday. It's 1:41:25 of my kind-of life story, the song cycle of an INTP's adolescence and moving into adulthood. As it's my story, there are a lot of references and me/nerd-specific imagery. It's the personal album for people who don't like personal albums (like me, actually).

I was going to run a Kickstarter to secure a release on CDBaby and physical spaces, whereby preordering the album as a physical copy or as mp3s would get you the album and finance the release. But for right now, because it's a double album, physical production expenses, including the album art and so forth, is pricier than I like. This is because of the special casing necessary to make a 2-CD jewel case as well as the minimum amount you need to order at a lot of sites. So...

What I'm offering is a serial release of the album. Here's what you'd pay and what you'd get.

What you pay: $10. It's my production rather than professional production/mastering; I'd put my level of volume/recording quality and so on as something like a late '70s album before remastering. If you're into that, then you'll have no problem with this. If you're looking for gloss, I can't provide it. On the flipside, you're paying single-album prices for 1:41:25 of music.

What you get: I will e-mail you the album a song at a time every day for 20 days. Given file sizes, I anticipate these being 256 kbps mp3s, although for shorter songs I could do 320 with no difficulty. Each e-mail/song will come with all my annotations for the song - lyrics, subject matter, what all the references are, and so forth. It's like an Advent calendar but for songs. Not everyone likes long albums or digests them at once. I like long albums, but even this album is about the seventh-longest I own out of several hundred.

So $10 would get you the album and full discussion of each of its songs over three weeks.

If you are interested, e-mail me: earthdyedred at gmail dot com. You can also send me your e-mail address via Twitter (@earthdyedred). I am set up on Paypal as earthdyedred at yahoo dot com (as an e-mail address, not as those words spelled out). Once you pay me, you're added to my list of people to send the songs out to, and you'll get those songs once a day for 20 days.

I have many of the songs up at soundcloud.com/earth-dyed-red . If you have any other questions about it, tweet or e-mail me. I want to sell this in a way I have access to and in a way you would appreciate, so let me know if this works for you.