I realize this blog functions as something of a barometer of how my life is going at the moment. When things are great, you get fun travel blogs and reviews of Taylor Swift’s newest releases. When things are not so great…well, that’s this post, sadly.
I feel like I’m sending a letter in a bottle to whoever is willing to listen. My life has been on a solid downhill track since Charlie Kirk had to get shot and ruin my entire plans for the future. Did you know my wife was the Office Depot girl? We were in the process of buying a house when the controversy went down and she lost her job over it, tanking my credit score and requiring us to drain my wife’s entire life savings to survive. Now I never liked Kirk, but I don’t think he deserved to die, and I’m especially pissed his smarmy ass got capped now because it literally avalanched into fucking with my well-being. Every time I walk by the house we were supposed to buy for our future family, I die a little inside.
A while back, I wrote this song. It’s called “Grandma.”
Now when I wrote this song, I wrote it as a personal manifesto — I will reach old age, and I will become a grandma someday. Even though it hasn’t been very long since I wrote it, with each passing day, it gets harder to sing it with my full chest. Because truth be told, I don’t know if I’ll ever reach senescence. I can’t help but feel either that either I’ll be gone in the next few years, or the entire world as we know it will be gone.
My entire life, I’ve wanted to follow in the footsteps of the rock stars I’ve looked up to growing up. Now, we barely have rock stars. We’ve got Taylor Swift, a shit ton of political talking heads, and a smattering of microinfluencers that like two people actually care about. That’s it. Those are your “rock stars.” If you’re lucky, you’ll have a song blow up on TikTok for a second, but then what? There’s no gaining fame and fortune from music anymore, especially with the advent of AI. Why would anyone seek out new music when you can just beep-boop three thousand pirate metal songs about kanagaroos? I probably sound like “old man shouts at cloud,” but having played with fire and seeing how destructive it is firsthand, I think I’m justified in feeling a little paranoid.
Now, I don’t even know if I want to go public with my music, or anything for that matter. I’ve seen how quickly things can go south. You can get cancelled over the slightest transgressions, and I don’t know if I could handle that kind of scrutiny. Not to mention the litigious nature of the music industry as it stands today. Music is and has always been a derivative art form — musicians are constantly aping other artists they look up to. But in a post-“Blurred Lines” world, you can get slapped with a lawsuit over songs that share a similar vibe, regardless of whether or not they have any commonalities on a theory level. It’s enough to sue over a song that’s inspired by someone else’s. That’s right— you can’t even have inspirations anymore. Why the fuck would I want to keep writing music when there’s a chance my heroes can slap me with a suit? I’d put down my guitar forever if that happened to me. I’d rue the day I picked it up in the first place, in fact.
And not to mention that a bisexual white woman who was near my age was just fucking murdered by the state, and what is the general public’s response? Instant character assassination. I can’t even share some of the shit I saw people post about the late Renee Good, who was, by all accounts, a great person. But according to the shitheads online, she was a terrible mother who had it coming. Never mind the fact that she could have been like, Casey Anthony levels of “terrible mother” and she’d still deserve a fair trial. How the hell are we letting these armed thugs wander the streets acting as judge, jury, and executioner. This is America. Where the fuck was her due process?
I don’t know where I’m going with this. I’m just scared. The political violence is ramping up and I don’t know if I’ll be the next victim. And if I am the next victim, what will the world write about me? Will they say I’m a slut who deserved it? Will they bring up my divorce and say I was a bad wife? Will they make up even worse for me in order to justify my murder? I sincerely don’t want to be a martyr. I always dreamed I’d be the next Ann Wilson, not Anne Frank. I wanted to change the world through my music, not be slain with such casual cruelty and thrown away like garbage. I always dreamed of better for myself. I sound like I’m suicidal, and I promise I’m not, if only because the only thing that scares me more than this life is the thought of what could come afterwards.
I don’t like the direction the world is going, and I sincerely wish I could get off this ride. I don’t want to die, but I don’t want to keep living like this.
JESSA JOYCE 