I hope you are well as you read this bog post.

Thank you for dropping by!

“Asleep At The Karmic Wheel” is a song I wrote many years ago after I stumbled upon a particularly satisfying chord progression on my ukulele.

My understanding of the concept of karma is that each of our actions has consequences.

Here’s a more detailed explanation from The Himalayan Institute if you are curious to learn what they think...

I love combining the idea of a karmic wheel with the idea of us all (or many of us…) being asleep at the wheel — which is, of course, an extremely dangerous situation both for the person who is driving and also for all the other beings who are on or near the road on which this drowsy person is driving!

Because I have set up my daily life to be walkable, bikeable and/or busable (as dictated by the weather), I almost never drive a car.

Every time I am able to walk or bike from point A to point B (such as from home to Music Together classes or from home to Trader Joe’s), I am happy that I am not adding to the ever-more-precarious imbalance of greenhouse gasses in our planet’s atmosphere.

But I do ride to gigs at retirement communities in either a hybrid car or a regular gasoline-burning car — depending upon which accompanist I am working with on that day — which can leave me feeling like I am part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

Deep breath in.

Deep breath out.

I remain aware that advertising agencies, the companies who hire them to inspire/hypnotize us into buying lots of things, and our various media who feed those messages (hundreds per day!) to us have created a completely misleading narrative about how to find happiness and meaning in our lives.

And now we are living in a period of reckoning — both politically and environmentally — for all of the untruths and PSYOPs to which we have been exposed.

Here’s a fascinating example of how maddeningly f–ked up things have become here in the 21st century.

Apple, a company which prides — and markets — itself on protecting its users’ privacy recently settled a lawsuit which alleged that it, in fact, was recording its users’ conversations and sharing them with advertisers.

What???!!!

I do not have an iPhone or iWatch, but I do own several Apple laptops (going back twenty years), a couple of iPods (also going back many years), and I continue to love Apple’s GarageBand musical composition program.

What a disappointment…

Here’s an AP article/explanation from 1/2/25 by tech writer Michael Liedtke:

“Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit accusing the privacy-minded company of deploying its virtual assistant Siri to eavesdrop on people using its iPhone and other trendy devices.

The alleged recordings occurred even when people didn’t seek to activate the virtual assistant with the trigger words, ‘Hey, Siri.’ Some of the recorded conversations were then shared with advertisers in an attempt to sell their products to consumers more likely to be interested in the goods and services, the lawsuit asserted.

The allegations about a snoopy Siri contradicted Apple’s long-running commitment to protect the privacy of its customers — a crusade that CEO Tim Cook has often framed as a fight to preserve ‘a fundamental human right.’

The proposed settlement filed in an Oakland, California federal court would resolve a 5-year-old lawsuit revolving around allegations that Apple surreptitiously activated Siri to record conversations through iPhones and other devices equipped with the virtual assistant for more than a decade.

Apple isn’t acknowledging any wrongdoing in the settlement, which still must be approved by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White. Lawyers in the case have proposed scheduling a Feb. 14 court hearing in Oakland to review the terms.”

Yowza!

I just checked online and learned from BloombergLaw.com that on 2/20/25, “A federal judge gave his preliminary approval to a $95 million settlement that would end a five-year class action over alleged privacy violations by Apple Inc.‘s Siri virtual assistant.”

It truly makes one wonder how one can trust any company whatsoever…

And it confirms what my brother-in-law Andrew had started noticing many summers ago when we were camping on Cape Cod — that conversations we were having within earshot of his iPhone were triggering uncannily specific ads (directly related to what we had been discussing) on his Facebook feed.

Another deep breath in.

And deep breath out.

G-d only knows what our individual — and shared — karmic reckonings will be in the hours, days, weeks, months and years ahead…

Thank you to Doug Hammer for playing so elegantly and engineering/mixing so patiently on this song.

Thank you to Stephen C. Fischer for his beautiful graphic design work.

Thank you to the talented and generous photographers at Pixabay.

And thank you to everyone who has been streaming my music on Pandora, Youtube, Spotify, Amazon, Apple Music, and other digital music platforms.

Slowly but surely, my total number of streams continues to rise.

And so do the tiny amounts of money I receive each month from my music distributor.

You can click here if you’d be willing to stream “Asleep at the Karmic Wheel” once or twice (and maybe even give it a thumbs up or add it to a playlist…)

One final THANK YOU for making it to the end of yet another one of my blog posts.

I will end with a deep breath of gratitude in.

And a deep breath of gratitude out.

I welcome any strategies about how YOU are not falling asleep at the karmic wheel in the comments below.