We live in such an interconnected world, that somewhere along the line, we're going to extend the hand of friendship and creative collaboration with some people... and months down the line, testimonies will emerge about these people doing horrible, reprehensible things.

And when — not if, when — that happens, hindsight is our only friend.

I've had several things happen to my friends and I this week, re: outing some pretty reprehensible actions. Most notably, you'll notice that three of my 2019 audio submissions have been unpublished. It has emerged from multiple sources that the person who sang on all three of those tracks allegedly manipulated and sexually groomed several, and at least one was known to be a minor. Said person also made repeated unwanted advances towards a couple of my close friends. (I have little, if any reason at all, to believe the allegations to be false.)

I have had overt sexual harassment happen to me in the audio forum, which was swiftly dealt with.

Boy, this week we seem to be quite prolific in uncovering snakes in the tall grass, don't we? Those of you who have been interacting with me of late know that I have a fair bit of post-traumatic depression to navigate; everything I have described above is just making it worse.

Sincerely, what do we do in cases like these? I struggle to bear the thought that people can be this horrible — even if it's a sad fact of life. And then there's the question of the art on NG. I would be hard-pressed to remove something tainted by someone whose actions are found out later, if there are multiple NG contributors. On NG there is a culture of "appreciate the art if you can't appreciate the artist," something many of us have had to grapple with when hearing about greats from the distant past and what they did, for example. But I find that action the realistic thing to do: talk about the art as well as the events that have transpired. There is one piece that still has the offender's voice, for example: it's still up, and here I am talking about it and recent events at length. A lot of this stuff was allegedly coming to a head without my knowledge back when I was composing the piece that had the offender's voice. The offender in question isn't mentioned by name, mind you, but here we are.

Now, if I were the only NG contributor — as was the case with those three removed tracks — then the course of action is simple.

At some point some of us have to come face-to-face with demons, whether they be our own or others'. For the few of us who have been through things like what I described above, it's been an incredibly taxing week.