Starting Over at 50

 I was laid off recently by my Fortune 500 employer, and it knocked the grounding out from underneath me. I’d actually seen it coming. I had told a few friends around last Christmas that it might happen soon. But when it did, I was still dumbstruck. I was fortunate to get a severance package, and I have some savings in cash and stocks, but I still have a mortgage on a house in Chicago.

So here’s what I’m doing about it: after 20 years in IT, a mortgage, a wife, and two kids, I’m becoming a composer.

I know how that sounds. I’ve heard it my whole life:
- safe degrees
- safe jobs
- doing the smart thing.

So let me be clear about what this isn’t.

This is not another “I was a corporate C-suite exec, or I founded such-and-such, and had a sudden epiphany I need to share with the world” story. I was never a partner, director, or VP. At best, I managed 12 people spread across the globe for a couple of years, leading an Incident Response team for a Fortune 500 company. I’m not an internet founder who cashed out and gets to wander the world.

I’m a 50-plus former IT worker about to go in a completely different direction and I have no illusions of grandeur. I’m not hoping to be the next pop sensation. Honestly, I never aspired to that kind of life anyway.

How I got here

I’m not sure exactly when it started, but at some point I began to feel like the cubicle, even a nice one, was just a slow death. We had an open floor plan, and I’d worked from home since COVID, so it wasn’t the physical space. It was that being “the cog” in a large Fortune 500 machine had stopped giving me work I actually wanted to do. Most days, I spent more time tracking down the owner of some system, application, or process than I did doing any real work at all. Wash, rinse, repeat.

To be fair, this company rivaled a lot of startups in the quality of life it offered. And the steadiness was genuinely great when I first started; paying bills on time, finally getting a car, all of it. But the emptiness in the actual work kept growing, day by day, paycheck by paycheck, bonus cycle by bonus cycle. As time went on, I fit less and less into that life.

Going back to my roots

Growing up, I wanted to be John Williams. Then it was Danny Elfman and Thomas Newman. For most of my IT career, I quietly longed to write music like Heitor Pereira or Hans Zimmer. Lately it’s been Ludwig Göransson and the bass recorder. Along the way I’ve come to love plenty of others too: Howard Shore, Alan Silvestri, Vangelis, James Newton Howard, Tom Holkenborg, Steve Jablonsky, Trevor Rabin.

I’ve also grown to love and understand the classics; Max Steiner, Elmer Bernstein, Bernard Herrmann, Ennio Morricone. Honestly, I didn’t have a pretty girl on my wall growing up. I had a poster of the orchestra. Truthfully, yes, there was plenty of Star Wars stuff up there too.

That’s the direction I’m heading now: composing, and working as hard as I can in film, theater, dance, and any other form of mixed media that will have me.

If you’d like to know more about my background, you can find my resume and bio here: https://1bluebass.com/studio

I have no idea what the future holds. Maybe success. Maybe homelessness. Stay tuned to find out.

In the meantime, here’s a look at my composing desk, where all of this actually starts, and a video in what will become my portfolio. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you’ll come back for the next installment.

Until then — safe travels

The Gilded Pew: A View from the Street

Channeling the Spirit of Studs Terkel

The tape is rolling. It's 2026, and the air in Chicago is thick with the same old promises, just wrapped in newer, shinier digital foil.  We're talking about faith today folks.  Not the kind that moves mountains, but the kind that moves poll numbers. 

I'm sitting here thinking about the people I met over the years.  Some were bricklayers with hands like weathered leather.  I'd hear it often: "Studs, a building is only as good as its foundation.  If the bottom is rotten, the gold leaf at the top of the dome doesn't mean a lick." I watched the critters in Washington on Sunday.

Take Senator Tim Sheehy.  He's up there in our hallowed halls, clutching his chest because the nation's capital can't host a gala without a "threat of violence."  He calls it an "embarrassment" that we don't have a proper ballroom for the Dear Leader.  Now, you can walk down just about any street in this city and you'll see an embarrassment, if you listen and look.  You'll see a man who served in the Marines, sitting on a milk crate with his life in a plastic bag.  You might see someone's mother choosing between the light bill and the prayer she's whispering over her sick child.  But for our great Senator, the tragedy isn't the broken body of a veteran or the hunger of a neighbor, it's the lack of a chandelier-lit room where the powerful can clink glasses in peace.  

Then there's John Fetterman, the man who traded the picket line for the party line, or maybe just a different set of hoodies. Nobody's quite sure which party he's attending, but he is talking about "TDS", Trump Derangement Syndrome, for the few who haven't yet heard that particular piece of name-calling, as if questioning the morality of a movement is itself a kind of vanity. This great senator wants us to "drop the TDS" and just build that White House ballroom.

It's a new brand of name-calling, folks.  A digital stamp for "shut up and follow."  It's the same "snowflake" talk from the "but her emails" days, just polished up for the next election cycle.

The irony is as thick as the smog over the Dan Ryan.  These folks proclaim a "Christian" identity as if it's a membership at Mar-a-Lago.  They use the mythology of the Carpenter from Nazareth, to justify a culture of greed and exclusion.  They've turned "Love thy neighbor" into "Check thy neighbor's voter registration."  They've swapped the Beatitudes for a spreadsheet of corporate tax cuts.

It's a cultural identity, a jacket they put on to signal they're part of the "right" tribe, while the actual teachings, the ones about mercy and the "least of these," get left out in the cold like an unwanted guest.

The worker in the cubicle and the guy on the assembly line, they know when they're being sold a bill of goods.  Christianity, in its essence, is supposed to be a radical empathy.  What we're seeing now is a radical selfishness, dressed in Sunday best and demanding a ballroom while the world outside is shivering.

The Weaponization of Christianity

 How Charlie Kirk used Christianity to divide America

    In the landscape of American political discourse, few figures embody the marriage of Christian identity and partisan warfare quite like Charlie Kirk.  The founder of Turning Point USA has become a fixture in Republican circles, his influence extending from college campuses to the highest levels of GOP strategy, including close ties to Trump’s campaign operations.  But Kirk’s brand of Christianity, one that frames politics as existential combat and opponents as enemies of God and country, reveals something deeper and more troubling: the transformation of a once-radical faith into a weapon of control, division, and the preservation of power.

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The Golden Calf in the Radio Box

 I was once told by a man of the cloth, one of the old-fashioned kind who still believed the Red Letters were more than just a stylistic choice by the printer, that the quickest way to lose your soul is to find a way to sell it at a profit. Now, I’ve seen many a curious thing in my travels, but nothing quite so peculiar as the modern American spectacle where a man can be convinced that the path to the Pearly Gates is paved with high-interest newsletters and a healthy dose of loathing for his neighbor.

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The New Gospel of the Gilded Calf

 It has been remarked by men wiser than myself that the Good Book is like a mirror: if an ass looks in, you can’t expect an apostle to look out. These days, however, it seems a whole congregation of folks have looked into the Gospel and somehow mistaken the Beatitudes for a business prospectus.

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