There’s one aspect of making a career out of a hobby that is rarely discussed. Sometimes life gets in the way of your hobbies. We’ve all been there. But unless you’re independently wealthy, a trust-fund baby, or retired, life can’t get in the way of your income. So what happens during those periods when pastimes are a luxury, work is a necessity, and you’re stuck in a paradox because your pastime is your work?
I’ve found myself grappling with that question recently because life has become . . . a lot. My dad has been in and out of the hospital for months. At the same time, my wife and I have found ourselves at the center of organizing a local resistance/mutual-aid organization in an attempt to mitigate some of the damage done by the fascist regimes in power at the state and federal levels.
Oh, and just for kicks, I recently launched a free regional publication focused on hyper-local economic concerns of the working class.
In other words, free time is something I simply don’t have right now, which has had me worried that my relationship with my stereo system would become, for lack of a better word, an obligation instead of a passion. Gone are the nights when my wife crawls into bed early with a book after supper and I retreat to my two-channel listening room to spin some platters or stream some tunes for hours on end. We’re far more likely to be on a steering-committee Zoom meeting until an hour after bedtime, or folding and stapling zines, or coordinating donation pick-up points, or revising drafted bylaws, or making late-night runs to Walmart because we’ve burned through yet another drum of laser-printer toner.
All of my pastimes are being neglected to one degree or another. I can’t remember the last time I played No Man’s Sky. The last book I read that wasn’t about organizing or movement-building was a collection of short stories that took me two months to get through, 15 minutes at a time. I’ve been knitting the same scarf for over a month now, when it should have taken me three days at most to knock it out.
I know that once life calms down a bit, all of those passions will be there waiting for me. But hi-fi? I’ve been tying myself in knots, worried that my love of dedicated listening would be diminished somewhat by my inability to carve out time for it outside of work hours. In recent weeks, though, life has found more than one way to force me to see what a silly concern that was.
It was a Saturday like any other contemporary weekend day: I’d just gotten back from my morning swim at the Y, and I was about to start work on some fliers for an upcoming school-supply donation drive when our mutual-aid group’s private chat channel started dinging like a pachinko parlor. One of our comrades had gone to the office of her reproductive-justice non-profit, only to find the place trashed. Windows were broken, the HVAC was sabotaged, the electrical breaker box had been gutted, and just to demonstrate that this was an act of terrorism, not a robbery, the perpetrators had left alone a lot of the valuable supplies inside. And the cops couldn’t have cared less.
At any rate, an entire office worth of stuff—some of it medical in nature and sensitive to the brutal Alabama heat—needed to be relocated to climate-controlled storage immediately. In short order, a gaggle of pickup trucks covered in radical window stickers swarmed the office and we got to work, hauling and stacking and lifting and moving furniture, boxes, medical supplies, office supplies, literature, and cartons whose contents are a mystery to me, all from one location to another in 100-plus-degree heat and something on the order of a bazillion-percent relative humidity, with our only respite being our trucks’ air conditioners on the two-block drive between locations. Two people succumbed to the heat and lack of climate control and had to nope out. By the end of it all, the rest of us looked like we’d run the Barkley Marathons.
But we did it. We got the job done and took care of our comrade. And as we were driving home, I turned to my wife and rapped: “The revolution will not go better with Coke! The revolution will not fight germs that may cause bad breath! The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat!”
To which she replied, “Huh?”
“Oh,” I said. “I think I finally get that song. Like, really get it.” By that, I explained, I didn’t mean that I fully understood what it meant to Gil Scott-Heron, necessarily. There’s only so much a 50-something hillbilly radical living in Alabama in 2025 can understand about the lived experience of a 20-something African-American radical living in Chelsea in 1971. But I finally got why “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” resonates with me so hard. I finally got the universal value of these words, across time and space and creed and race.
The revolution won’t be some passive experience that starts somewhere else and sweeps you up. It won’t be a wave you can sit and wait to ride. It’s a wave we have to create ourselves. This is the revolution: being there for people in need. Using our bodies to undo some of the damage done by the violence of capitalist oppression. Building communities that can’t be torn apart from the outside.
Caring for one another is the most radical thing we can do. But that means you’ve gotta show up when people need you. And if that’s not also the spirit of much of the music we all love, I don’t know what is.
“You will not be able to stay home, brother . . .”
She made a hmm noise and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever really listened to the words of that song. Crank it up.”
Right then, though, I didn’t want to hear Gil Scott-Heron, Brian Jackson, Ron Carter, and Hubert Laws cranking out of the admittedly decent aftermarket stereo system in my battered old F‑150. I wanted to really hear it, in all its glory, spinning at 45 rpm and sauntering out of my Paradigm towers. And that’s how I wanted my wife to hear it, too, if she was really going to pay attention to it for the first time.
So once we got home and showered and nommed a bit of lunch, we sat down together in my listening room and I spun the entirety of Pieces of a Man for her, unbothered for once by the calisthenics of getting up three times to flip sides. (45‑rpm LPs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, y’all, but I don’t see much need to buy this one again in 33⅓ rpm unless I find a good original pressing.)
Once the album was over, we got back to work trying to make our little corner of the world a better place. But that brief interlude was worth more than words can convey. Free time is honestly so precious right now that I cherished those moments of just sitting, quietly, listening without talking, enjoying the moment with my sweetie and absorbing this album with fresh ears, vicariously through hers.
My truck’s audio system wouldn’t have given me a fraction of that experience, much as I love it and much as I spend way more time listening to it than I do my home system right now.
That was far from the most poignant personal encounter with my stereo in recent months, though, and far from the only sign that my hi-fi system means even more to me than I would have suspected.
Fast-forward a few weeks, and the moment we’d all been dreading finally arrived: the Trump regime’s neo-Gestapo—aka ICE—finally descended on the River Region of Alabama in full force, which may seem odd given that Alabama is a red state, but makes more sense when you consider that we live in a very blue island within it. Ostensibly, this was an FBI raid involving lawyers, guns, and money, springing from an investigation into some unforgiven PPP loans that weren’t paid back after the worst of the pandemic.
That, though, provided the pretense for ICE to tag along and terrorize our immigrant neighbors, and by chance two of my comrades showed up at one of the restaurants being raided, merely to show working-class solidarity and to document what was going on, in the event that the remaining families of any abducted people could at least have certainty that they were, indeed, nabbed.
Somehow, in the heat of the moment, one of our comrades got shoved into the back of a black van and carted away, and that’s all we knew at the other end of our chat channel. Given that his complexion resembles White Lily flour and his accent sounds like Moon Pies and RC Cola, we were all hoping he’d been arrested by local PD and taken down to the station. But nobody in our little org was fully convinced that he hadn’t been black-bagged, disappeared by the regime, and shipped off to Alligator Auschwitz, one state to the south. He was, in that moment, Schrödinger’s Prisoner for the rest of us.
I know it wasn’t happening to me. I know that my physiological response was silly. But I felt a full-blown panic attack coming on. I started spiraling, and I could feel my pulse cranking to 11. And in that moment, my mind did what it always does: it turned to music. The words that started filtering through my mind were, predictably, understandably, that haunting refrain from Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth”:
Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
Step out of line, the man come and take you away
They say that sometimes you need the lyrics and sometimes you need the music. In that moment, I needed both, so I pulled up the song on Apple Music and let it waft out of my near-field desktop system while I typed away furiously in three different chat backchannels, trying to figure out what the hell was going on and what I could do.
But even the combination of the music and the lyrics wasn’t enough right then. I didn’t just need to hear the waveforms; I needed to feel them. So I switched off my little SVS Prime Wireless speakers and found the song again in the BluOS app so I could broadcast it to my NAD integrated amp.
That did the trick. The cure for what ailed me in that moment was to be inside the music, swaddled by it, surrounded by it, part of it.
It was purely a coincidence that as the track was ending, we got the word that our comrade had, indeed, been taken to county jail and not black-bagged and disappeared. And, look, I don’t believe in libertarian free will, so if I tried to tell you that I know for certain how I would have reacted if I hadn’t taken a few minutes first to settle my mind in front of my stereo system, that would be a fib. But in the moment, it certainly felt like those peaceful two minutes and 34 seconds of respite gave me the fortitude I needed to spring into action and do my part in raising the funds to pay his bond and get him out of the clink.
That’s just the way brains work, though, right? Post-hoc rationalization and all that. I know this for sure, though: I’m realizing that it’s not merely a lack of time that’s making my other hobbies take a backseat. I can’t really read the sorts of books I’m typically drawn to right now, because who has the energy for imaginary technocratic dystopian sci-fi hellscapes when we’re all living in one? I kinda don’t want to knit, since it’s hard to start something creative that I have no idea when or if I’ll be able to finish.
And I’m sure a lot of you feel the same at this moment in history. Pastimes just sort of feel superfluous, don’t they? All pleasures feel a little guilty. But let’s remember that this is a marathon, not a sprint.
“You will not be able to stay home!” as Gil said. But when you are home, don’t overlook how crucial leisure time can be to your mental health. The simple act of shutting off screens, ignoring the noise of life, sitting quietly, alone or with someone you love, giving your full attention to the art or entertainment that moves you most—even if for only a few minutes—might be the act of self-care that gives you the strength to stay in the fight.
I thought I wouldn’t have the luxury of making time for my stereo system, and that fact would change my relationship with it. What I’ve learned is that I don’t have the luxury of ignoring it, even if that means pushing bedtime off a little longer or delegating some tasks or just leaving some work to be done tomorrow. It’s one of the things keeping me going. And if I don’t take care of myself, I won’t be in any position to do my part in taking care of my community in these dark days, living as we all are through the violent fit-pitching death rattle of a failed empire crumbling under the weight of its own contradictions.
For any of my fellow Americans reading this right now, I’d encourage you to do the same. Cherish your hi-fi systems at every opportunity. Open yourself up to the physiological benefits of just sitting and listening. Give yourself the grace to stop doom-scrolling, take a break from the resistance, and feed your soul, even if only for a few minutes at a time.
And if you find yourself drawing strength from your listening, drop me a line and let me know, if only to counterbalance the torrent of emails I’ll get demanding that I stop talking about politics. As if there were any corner of our shared existence untouched by the taint of politics right now. Trust me: I look forward to nothing more in this world than the day when I have the luxury of never writing or talking about the capricious cruelty of this regime ever again. But that’s going to be a long time coming, and it’s going to take a lot of good music to get us there.
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
