My blog post on The Cure’s Disintegration has prompted some great feedback via comments, Twitter, and email. One of those personal emails was from my good friend and musical confidant Jeff. I’m of the mind that if he had intended for the contents of the email to be shared with a wider audience, he would have sent it as a comment on the blog, but there are some sentiments in his email that I think are worth exploring a bit and using as a jumping off point.
Jeff agreed with my observations on the importance of specific albums being tied to the fervor of one’s fandom at the time of its release, as well as the ties between songs and memories. But to me, his most interesting observation was that “all of the really memorable and important albums [in his life] are from high school and college.”
This is an idea I have always maintained. I wear my sentimentality on my sleeve, and I have no problem looking backwards in order to understand my present. There is something to be said about that period in your life – college in particular, that carries immense weight in shaping who we become as adults.
Jeff and John and I all went to college together, and they, along with Jen and Erin, were my closest friends that freshman year at Bowling Green. John and I have talked at length about the importance of the first year of college. Never before or after in one’s life do we find ourselves away from home for the first time, thrown into a hyper-real mini-society that combines all the cliquishness of high school with the quasi-responsibility of young adulthood. Everything is dramatic. Every decision is the Most. Important. Decision. Ever.
Because of this, at least among my friends it seems, the music of that era is imparted with more significance than music from any other time in our lives. Meeting and dating my wife, getting married. All arguably more significant periods in my life, and music accompanied them all, but not in the way it did when I was 18 and 19 years-old. I have mentioned before how U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind is the only album I can think of that entered my adult consciousness with anywhere near the importance of the music from my youth.
Last year, I wrote about that significance this way in a blog post about Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine: “The closest any other album has ever come to being as fundamentally meaningful to a period in my life is U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind. Released just after my 30th birthday at the end of 2000, this collection of songs became the soundtrack to our return to Ohio after ten years away, our trip to Paris, the birth of our son, our friendship with Jeff and Anna, our post-9/11 trip to New York City in December 2001, and on and on. But it was different, in that this was a collective soundtrack for experiences Tracy and I shared. And if you’re lucky, your thirties inhabit a very different worldview from that of your 19-year-old self.”
From a practical perspective, I don’t think we consume music in the same way we once did. Listening to Disintegration over and over as I was writing about the album, I recognized that as each song was ending I knew instinctively the next song’s opening notes. I anticipated them, and took comfort in that familiarity. I think that comes from being a product of the last generation to listen to music on LPs and cassette tapes. There was no “shuffle” or downloaded singles. It wasn’t until compact discs that we had a random play option outside of mix tapes (which, of course, are set playlists anyway). And now with digital downloads we live in a singles driven, “album optional” world.
While the way music is consumed affects what is listened to (i.e., our downloadable world lends itself to singles versus whole albums), that doesn’t diminish the importance of the music to today’s youth. I’m sure they are hit just as hard by “their” music today as we were at the same age by “our” music.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Monday, January 10, 2011
Canadian Mash-Up
Sarah McLachlan
15 December 1997: UCF Arena, Orlando, Florida
The other week, there was a parking and traffic mess in trying to get the kiddo to and from his drum lessons on the campus of the University of Akron because there was an event across the street at EJ Thomas Hall that night. On the way off campus, I finally saw the marquee and realized Sarah McLachlan was performing that night, which immediately transported me back 13 years to a concert Tracy and I attended at the University of Central Florida.
We went through a stretch there in the late ’90s where Tracy was winning every flipping contest she entered! Didn’t matter if it was a radio call-in, or at our local CD store, or drawings, or whatever. If Tracy threw her name in the hat, it inevitable was the one selected. We had dinner and VIP tickets to see Duncan Sheik and Lisa Loeb at the Atlantic Dance Club at Disney’s Boardwalk; we saw the Wallflowers at the Hard Rock Café; we attended New Year’s Eve at Disney’s Pleasure Island with Joan Jett and Men at Work that included a night’s stay at the Contemporary resort and limo service to and from Pleasure Island. It was crazy how she scored over and over with these contests.
The particular contest tied to Sarah McLachlan was through Disc Go Round. I don’t know if they are still around, but they were a sort of used CD store franchise. “Ours” was on SR 50 in Colonial Plaza across from TooJay’s, one of our favorite eateries back in the day (and around the corner from Beefy King!). Tracy and I lived nearby in the Conway and Lake Underhill area of Orlando at the time. Because we had both worked at CD stores back in the day and have always been lovers of music, we would go to the store often and got to know the owner.
The cool thing about Disc Go Round (and, as I recall, CD Warehouse had a similar model but with less friendly staff) was that they were the first used CD store I had been to with listening stations. But unlike full booth style ones you used to have in old vinyl record stores, these were just multi-disc players set up on a kitchen bar type counter with barstools and headphones for each station. You could take the empty CD case to the staff and they would pull the corresponding disc and queue it up for you on the player. Tracy and I could waste all kinds of time there!
Tracy had entered the contest at the store because we wanted to see Barenaked Ladies. It’s rare for me to queue up the Barenaked Ladies anymore, but there was a time they were in heavy rotation. Tracy introduced me to their music, and we saw them perform numerous times around Orlando, including in the parking lot of the Hard Rock Café (they had a cool concert series at the time that was cheap and fun and took advantage of the weather). Tracy ended up winning the tickets, and we were treated to one of the most peculiar line-ups we’d ever come across. We joked it was an odd sort of Great White North bill, with Chicago’s Freddy Jones Band opening (who we had, admittedly, never heard of before that night), followed by Canada’s Barenaked Ladies, and headlined by their then-label mate and fellow countrywoman Sarah McLachlan. At the time, she was huge, touring behind the Surfacing album and riding high off the success of the inaugural Lilith Fair music festival she had organized earlier that summer.
Tracy had McLachlan’s Solace, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, and Surfacing, but we were clearly going to see Barenaked Ladies! We wanted jokey, goofy, Kraft Cheese throwing fun! We were definitely in it for a good time. It was a cold December night in Central Florida, and the university is nowhere near where we lived. I remember finally getting to the venue after a long line of traffic snaked its way through campus and finding our seats. We weathered the Freddy Jones Band, then had a rollicking good time with Barenaked Ladies touring on Born On a Pirate Ship, and they were amazing.
Eventually, though, they finished their set and soon McLachlan took the stage and the entire tone of the night changed. Melancholy, wistful, longing, and lovely. Decidedly not what we had come for with the Barenaked Ladies set. Soon, some of the girls near us began shouting “We love you, Sarah!” It was, well, odd. Tracy and I hardly knew what to make of it initially, then we began to realize that we were surrounded almost entirely by college girls. Crunchy, granola college girls so overwhelmed with emotion they had tears running down their cheeks as they screamed in adoration.
We quickly figured out that “gay college girls” were a key demographic of McLachlan’s at the time. (Maybe still?) The combination of overwrought emotion and cries of love seemed to only grow as the show continued. Tracy and I ended up leaving the show early, maybe halfway through McLachlan’s set. We were just too unnaturally amused by this clearly odd mix of acts, the completely different tones of both their sets, and their core audiences. It was a strange, strange night.
15 December 1997: UCF Arena, Orlando, Florida
The other week, there was a parking and traffic mess in trying to get the kiddo to and from his drum lessons on the campus of the University of Akron because there was an event across the street at EJ Thomas Hall that night. On the way off campus, I finally saw the marquee and realized Sarah McLachlan was performing that night, which immediately transported me back 13 years to a concert Tracy and I attended at the University of Central Florida.We went through a stretch there in the late ’90s where Tracy was winning every flipping contest she entered! Didn’t matter if it was a radio call-in, or at our local CD store, or drawings, or whatever. If Tracy threw her name in the hat, it inevitable was the one selected. We had dinner and VIP tickets to see Duncan Sheik and Lisa Loeb at the Atlantic Dance Club at Disney’s Boardwalk; we saw the Wallflowers at the Hard Rock Café; we attended New Year’s Eve at Disney’s Pleasure Island with Joan Jett and Men at Work that included a night’s stay at the Contemporary resort and limo service to and from Pleasure Island. It was crazy how she scored over and over with these contests.
The particular contest tied to Sarah McLachlan was through Disc Go Round. I don’t know if they are still around, but they were a sort of used CD store franchise. “Ours” was on SR 50 in Colonial Plaza across from TooJay’s, one of our favorite eateries back in the day (and around the corner from Beefy King!). Tracy and I lived nearby in the Conway and Lake Underhill area of Orlando at the time. Because we had both worked at CD stores back in the day and have always been lovers of music, we would go to the store often and got to know the owner.
The cool thing about Disc Go Round (and, as I recall, CD Warehouse had a similar model but with less friendly staff) was that they were the first used CD store I had been to with listening stations. But unlike full booth style ones you used to have in old vinyl record stores, these were just multi-disc players set up on a kitchen bar type counter with barstools and headphones for each station. You could take the empty CD case to the staff and they would pull the corresponding disc and queue it up for you on the player. Tracy and I could waste all kinds of time there!
Tracy had entered the contest at the store because we wanted to see Barenaked Ladies. It’s rare for me to queue up the Barenaked Ladies anymore, but there was a time they were in heavy rotation. Tracy introduced me to their music, and we saw them perform numerous times around Orlando, including in the parking lot of the Hard Rock Café (they had a cool concert series at the time that was cheap and fun and took advantage of the weather). Tracy ended up winning the tickets, and we were treated to one of the most peculiar line-ups we’d ever come across. We joked it was an odd sort of Great White North bill, with Chicago’s Freddy Jones Band opening (who we had, admittedly, never heard of before that night), followed by Canada’s Barenaked Ladies, and headlined by their then-label mate and fellow countrywoman Sarah McLachlan. At the time, she was huge, touring behind the Surfacing album and riding high off the success of the inaugural Lilith Fair music festival she had organized earlier that summer.
Tracy had McLachlan’s Solace, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, and Surfacing, but we were clearly going to see Barenaked Ladies! We wanted jokey, goofy, Kraft Cheese throwing fun! We were definitely in it for a good time. It was a cold December night in Central Florida, and the university is nowhere near where we lived. I remember finally getting to the venue after a long line of traffic snaked its way through campus and finding our seats. We weathered the Freddy Jones Band, then had a rollicking good time with Barenaked Ladies touring on Born On a Pirate Ship, and they were amazing.Eventually, though, they finished their set and soon McLachlan took the stage and the entire tone of the night changed. Melancholy, wistful, longing, and lovely. Decidedly not what we had come for with the Barenaked Ladies set. Soon, some of the girls near us began shouting “We love you, Sarah!” It was, well, odd. Tracy and I hardly knew what to make of it initially, then we began to realize that we were surrounded almost entirely by college girls. Crunchy, granola college girls so overwhelmed with emotion they had tears running down their cheeks as they screamed in adoration.
We quickly figured out that “gay college girls” were a key demographic of McLachlan’s at the time. (Maybe still?) The combination of overwrought emotion and cries of love seemed to only grow as the show continued. Tracy and I ended up leaving the show early, maybe halfway through McLachlan’s set. We were just too unnaturally amused by this clearly odd mix of acts, the completely different tones of both their sets, and their core audiences. It was a strange, strange night.
Friday, January 7, 2011
Another Time Undone
I finally got the deluxe edition of The Cure's Disintegration. It was a long time coming – both for the long-delayed album to finally be released last year and for me to actually get around to picking it up. As much as I love The Cure’s music up to that album, they peaked with Disintegration. Then everything changed after that: The ’80s were over, high school had ended, I left Ohio.Originally released in May 1989, this was the sole Cure album to come out while I was deep (deep!) in my punk phase. And while I can and do love their other work like “A Few Hours After This…” and Pornography and “The Caterpillar” and Head on the Door and (especially) Faith, there is something to be said for the album that is released when you are actively a fan of a group that makes it that much more personal. Similarly, for example, Nine Inch Nails will never be as good as they were with Pretty Hate Machine, or Depeche Mode with Violator, to my ears.
Disintegration was the soundtrack to the end of my senior year of high school and that turbulent summer immediately after. My girlfriend at the time, the one who pushed me to explore my creative side and expand my musical tastes and really helped set me on the path to becoming the person I ultimately grew into, left me and moved to San Francisco to be with her ex-boyfriend (I never said the relationship was healthy), and I was left alone to process the emotional void.
The album was both the background against and inspiration for the bulk of my first real attempts at creative writing and poetry. That summer, I would go to the lone punk bar in Akron with my friends Jen and Nancy and others. We’d close the place down at 2am, then head over to the Country Kitchen on Arlington Road for sustenance. I’d come rolling into my parents’ house usually sometime after 3, put Disintegration on my stereo in the family room, and write until I couldn’t keep my eyes open any more.
I wrote on unruled goldenrod yellow sheets of 8 ½ by 11 paper that came from I don’t know where. My weapon of choice was a fine tipped Sharpie. I had a manila folder that I had scrawled “Random Thoughts Escaping” across the cover (the masthead of this blog is a scan of that original folder turned into a negative). My first angst-y poetry collection. I wrote about all the things that were going on in my life, but primarily about the loss of love filtered through the dark and droning aesthetic of Disintegration.
Opening with the simultaneously crashing and swirling “Plainsong”, every last song on Disintegration is a masterpiece, epic in scope and often in length. From “Pictures of You” to “Last Dance” to “Prayers for Rain” to the thematically anachronistic “Lovesong” to “The Same Deep Water as You”, there isn’t a single song among the twelve that I wouldn’t consider brilliant, but “Closedown” and “Untitled” have always stood out for me.The liner notes on the original album say “THIS MUSIC HAS BEEN MIXED TO BE PLAYED LOUD SO TURN IT UP,” and the opening tribal drums of “Closedown” are relentless. You feel them thrumming in your chest with urgency at any volume. The immediacy of those four minutes of music – one of the shortest songs on the album – is underscored with a mere 11 lines of lyrics compacted into 40 seconds of song, making every turn of phrase, every word matter. The lyrics are well within lead singer Robert Smith’s doom and gloom wheelhouse, but the music feels uncharacteristically hard. While Cure songs of the era are typically dense, “Closedown” actually seems to apply pressure, actively pushing the air out of the listener’s lungs, suffocating them.
The final track is by far my favorite of the album. To my young man’s sensibilities, it seemed so brazen to not name the song at all and simply refer to it as “Untitled”. Four short verses. No chorus to speak of. “Untitled” never meanders but isn’t too terribly fond of rigid song structure either. The words Smith crafts matched the then-fresh emotional wreckage of my ended relationship. With the exception of Cowboy Junkies’ “Dreaming My Dreams With You”, no other song completely encapsulates that feeling of loss I was experiencing the summer before college when my girlfriend and muse left me. I leaned on this album, and “Untitled”, in particular, to fuel my fevered scribblings.My dad was a meat cutter for a local grocery store and worked horrible hours, either getting up at four in the morning or working the closing late shift. My parents and I were barely speaking at the time – they didn’t understand what I was going through, and I was an unyielding 18-year-old – but on those early morning days, we’d often pass on the stairs, both of us bleary-eyed as one was heading to bed and the other heading to work.
The Cure didn’t come to Northeast Ohio behind Disintegration until just after I had moved on to Bowling Green for college, but I ended up being able to come home for the Prayer Tour stop at the Richfield Coliseum in late August. I had worked at a local record store in high school and the summer before college, continuing there on breaks from school. I attended the Cure show with Jen and Nancy (who drove across the state to pick me up), along with my record store boss Ron and part-time co-worker Randy, whose full-time job was box office manager of the Coliseum. Thanks to him, we had front row, center floor seats, but it would have been an amazing show even if I’d had to watch from the rafters. The only downside was that although The Cure had The Pixies and Love and Rockets – two bands I love – opening for them on their west coast swing, we ended up with Shelleyan Orphan.Although I was moving on from the muse in San Francisco, the powerful connection between this album and those events wreaked havoc in me that night. I remember tearing up during “Untitled”, thrilled that they were playing such a deep album cut so important to me. It was a crazy night, and I remember being deposited afterwards in my dorm room on the other side of the state somewhat more worse for the wear, to be honest. I never saw The Cure live again.
The Cure never released another album as good as Disintegration. Wish swung far too much in the opposite direction, and the schizophrenic Wild Mood Swings was aptly named. The lone bright spot was the single “Wrong Number” off Galore, which hinted at late ’90s relevance.Ten years after Disintegration, in an attempt to link a new album to the glory days, Smith stated 2000’s Bloodflowers was the final part of a retrofitted trilogy that includes the band’s brilliant works of Pornography and Disintegration. Regardless of the manufactured trilogy concept, Bloodflowers was a return to form and hit me as I was turning 30 and returning to Ohio after a decade away. Succumbing to waves of nostalgia, I gave it a pass.
The Cure faded from relevance for good after that, both for me personally and, apparently, commercially with releases of The Cure and 4:13 Dream. I still love the old albums and listen to them regularly. I can reliably queue up a Cure playlist and enjoy the music for what it is, but Disintegration I can also appreciate as an aural marker for some of the messiest stumbles along my path to young adulthood. Without regret.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Youthful Resolve
The kiddo brought this home earlier this week for Tracy and me to sign. Thought it was a pretty awesome resolution, explaining both the problem and the consequences of not changing the behavior.
Plus, the drawing of the student crying because he’s getting bad grades is just priceless!
(click to enlarge)
Plus, the drawing of the student crying because he’s getting bad grades is just priceless!
(click to enlarge)Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Brothers In Arms
So, that circle of friends I mentioned I ran with back in high school? Here we are on graduation day nearly 22 years ago. A motley crew if ever there was.
We were the Kings of Inside Jokes. I don’t remember who suggested it, but we decided to take out a “senior ad” in the back of the yearbook and simply list as many of our in-jokes as we could fit.
Once we hatched the idea, I started a handwritten list. Then I typed it all up and printed it out on a dot-matrix printer and circulated it among the group again to add anything else we’d overlooked. We crammed everything in there from Monty Python quotes to movie lines to references to ex-girlfriends and teachers to stupid stuff we’d done that had entered into our personal lore. Ultimately, it fell to yearbook editor John to sneak as much past the faculty advisors as possible. And, frankly, I don’t recall anything being cut from the ad – even blatant stuff like “Freddie Uncle Charlie Kate” made it through.
I have no intention of explaining any of these, but here is the ad scanned from my yearbook.
We were the Kings of Inside Jokes. I don’t remember who suggested it, but we decided to take out a “senior ad” in the back of the yearbook and simply list as many of our in-jokes as we could fit.Once we hatched the idea, I started a handwritten list. Then I typed it all up and printed it out on a dot-matrix printer and circulated it among the group again to add anything else we’d overlooked. We crammed everything in there from Monty Python quotes to movie lines to references to ex-girlfriends and teachers to stupid stuff we’d done that had entered into our personal lore. Ultimately, it fell to yearbook editor John to sneak as much past the faculty advisors as possible. And, frankly, I don’t recall anything being cut from the ad – even blatant stuff like “Freddie Uncle Charlie Kate” made it through.
I have no intention of explaining any of these, but here is the ad scanned from my yearbook.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Storming the Fourth Estate
When I was in high school, I wasn’t super popular, but I was well-known, I suppose. That comes with the territory when your mom is a teacher in the district and your older sister was captain of the cheerleading squad. My circle of friends was an interesting bunch. Among the five of us were the yearbook editor (John), the president of NHS (Giac), a football stud (Larry), the most uniquely creative person in school (Gary), and the editor of the school newspaper (me).
Ethics weren’t high on my list of things to strive towards, and I leveraged the hell out of that newspaper editor position for personal gain, including giving my best friend his own column – Scribblings by John Booth. My favorite of his columns was one that chronicled our trip to the Akron-Canton Airport to cover then-Vice President George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign stop.
There was a lot going on around the whole rally. John and I used to play racquetball on a regular basis (The physical resiliency of youth is amazing. Consider this: at 18 I had a pack-a-day cigarette habit, but played racquetball weekly. Ah, to be young and stupid.), and on one particular outing we had either picked the press passes up just before playing or received them earlier in the day. We stopped at the mall after racquetball for smoothies as we sometimes did and had the passes with us. We were giddy and amazed that we, two high school kids, had been issued press credentials for a presidential rally. I stepped away from the table for something and when I returned, John informed me that the two girls at the next table were asking about me and for my name. John, inspired by the press passes in front of him, told them my name was “George.” And, according to John, their response was to coo “Georgie.”
More scheming went into just getting to go to the rally, let alone not have to ride with the band on their bus. The faculty newspaper advisor gave me a lot of leeway with things – to my ultimate detriment, I suppose – and I was able to sell her on the idea that both John and I needed to attend this event. I’m sure part of our reasoning was that our high school’s marching band was selected to perform at the rally. Of course, the only coverage we actually gave the band in the paper was some passing mentions in John’s column. There was also a lot of effort behind convincing the principal to let us take my car. I was initially surprised rereading John’s account of things to learn we didn’t pull that off until the day of the event. But in retrospect, I think we planned it that way to not give the administration much time to debate our reasoning – we were taking one of our parents’ good cameras and we certainly couldn’t take that on the bus with the band and risk it getting broken. (wink, wink!) I was also surprised at how much of our shenanigans John alluded to in his column that I allowed published. I mean, in theory we could have gotten into trouble for some of the scamming we did if the administration wanted to pursue it.
We froze our bits off in the hangar waiting for the Vice President, but I have very fond memories of everything about that day, including going over to John’s house immediately afterward to heat up leftover beef stroganoff and peas and watch those old episodes of Mission: Impossible and chatter away about how cool the whole experience was and that we had honest-to-goodness press passes and how about those Secret Service agents and, man, did you see how hot that national news chick was and can you believe we talked the principal into letting us take my car and it was your job to remember where we parked and, holy cow, was it ever cold!
A week later I voted for the first time in a presidential election, but that’s not what I remember about politics in the Fall of 1988. It was the heady experience of a high school senior and his best buddy at a presidential campaign stop posing as journalists; no matter how much of a sham it all was on our part.
And I can still corroborate John’s assessment of that national news chick. It may have been cold that fall Ohio day, but she was hot.
(click to enlarge)
Ethics weren’t high on my list of things to strive towards, and I leveraged the hell out of that newspaper editor position for personal gain, including giving my best friend his own column – Scribblings by John Booth. My favorite of his columns was one that chronicled our trip to the Akron-Canton Airport to cover then-Vice President George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign stop.
There was a lot going on around the whole rally. John and I used to play racquetball on a regular basis (The physical resiliency of youth is amazing. Consider this: at 18 I had a pack-a-day cigarette habit, but played racquetball weekly. Ah, to be young and stupid.), and on one particular outing we had either picked the press passes up just before playing or received them earlier in the day. We stopped at the mall after racquetball for smoothies as we sometimes did and had the passes with us. We were giddy and amazed that we, two high school kids, had been issued press credentials for a presidential rally. I stepped away from the table for something and when I returned, John informed me that the two girls at the next table were asking about me and for my name. John, inspired by the press passes in front of him, told them my name was “George.” And, according to John, their response was to coo “Georgie.”
More scheming went into just getting to go to the rally, let alone not have to ride with the band on their bus. The faculty newspaper advisor gave me a lot of leeway with things – to my ultimate detriment, I suppose – and I was able to sell her on the idea that both John and I needed to attend this event. I’m sure part of our reasoning was that our high school’s marching band was selected to perform at the rally. Of course, the only coverage we actually gave the band in the paper was some passing mentions in John’s column. There was also a lot of effort behind convincing the principal to let us take my car. I was initially surprised rereading John’s account of things to learn we didn’t pull that off until the day of the event. But in retrospect, I think we planned it that way to not give the administration much time to debate our reasoning – we were taking one of our parents’ good cameras and we certainly couldn’t take that on the bus with the band and risk it getting broken. (wink, wink!) I was also surprised at how much of our shenanigans John alluded to in his column that I allowed published. I mean, in theory we could have gotten into trouble for some of the scamming we did if the administration wanted to pursue it.
We froze our bits off in the hangar waiting for the Vice President, but I have very fond memories of everything about that day, including going over to John’s house immediately afterward to heat up leftover beef stroganoff and peas and watch those old episodes of Mission: Impossible and chatter away about how cool the whole experience was and that we had honest-to-goodness press passes and how about those Secret Service agents and, man, did you see how hot that national news chick was and can you believe we talked the principal into letting us take my car and it was your job to remember where we parked and, holy cow, was it ever cold!
A week later I voted for the first time in a presidential election, but that’s not what I remember about politics in the Fall of 1988. It was the heady experience of a high school senior and his best buddy at a presidential campaign stop posing as journalists; no matter how much of a sham it all was on our part.
And I can still corroborate John’s assessment of that national news chick. It may have been cold that fall Ohio day, but she was hot.
(click to enlarge)Monday, January 3, 2011
At the Turning of the Year...
I have no real complaints about how things went in 2010, but my lack of reflection on events or the significance of anniversaries is odd for me. This year I finally was able to really reconnect with my oldest son who grew up in Florida. It marked the 10th anniversary of Tracy’s and my move back to Ohio after a decade away. And we celebrated our 12th wedding anniversary and my 40th birthday. Yet, for some reason, I have struggled with writing – or even journaling – about these events and milestones. I have been out of sorts for months really. Freelance writing job deadlines sandwiched between a family vacation in August and a month of work travel in October threw me completely off my game.
There has been plenty to chronicle, but the last half of the year knocked me out of any sort of writing routine. If this were any other year I would have been reflecting on my blog and in my personal writing, talking endlessly about how much more of a milestone turning 30 felt like ten years ago than turning 40 did this past year. I’d be exploring my thirties and how they treated me and what I hope for from my forties. Our August trip included Star Wars Celebration V, and warrants a write-up that I have yet to find the motivation to tackle.
There was the piece I started to write about the tenth anniversary of the release of U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind and the importance of that album on me. My “End of the Eighties” track-by-track review was sidelined by my own distractions, and I never really recovered. There were book reviews and thoughts on comics and all other sorts of pop culture seeds that were planted but never really took root over the last half of the year.
The reconnection with my son Mikee has been amazingly rewarding, but the emotional experience for our family is incredibly personal. Not necessarily something appropriate for the wider audience. We are blessed to have him in our lives again and able to share this new chapter together. There are things to be recorded, but form and format are a curious animal I’ve yet to get my arms around.
I guess if I have a new year’s resolution, it’s to get back to writing regularly. Writing for me, for my family, for my friends and extended family. Finding my voice again and using it, whether it’s a personal journal entry, a blog post, a letter to a loved one, or organizing book ideas.
There has been plenty to chronicle, but the last half of the year knocked me out of any sort of writing routine. If this were any other year I would have been reflecting on my blog and in my personal writing, talking endlessly about how much more of a milestone turning 30 felt like ten years ago than turning 40 did this past year. I’d be exploring my thirties and how they treated me and what I hope for from my forties. Our August trip included Star Wars Celebration V, and warrants a write-up that I have yet to find the motivation to tackle.
There was the piece I started to write about the tenth anniversary of the release of U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind and the importance of that album on me. My “End of the Eighties” track-by-track review was sidelined by my own distractions, and I never really recovered. There were book reviews and thoughts on comics and all other sorts of pop culture seeds that were planted but never really took root over the last half of the year.
The reconnection with my son Mikee has been amazingly rewarding, but the emotional experience for our family is incredibly personal. Not necessarily something appropriate for the wider audience. We are blessed to have him in our lives again and able to share this new chapter together. There are things to be recorded, but form and format are a curious animal I’ve yet to get my arms around.
I guess if I have a new year’s resolution, it’s to get back to writing regularly. Writing for me, for my family, for my friends and extended family. Finding my voice again and using it, whether it’s a personal journal entry, a blog post, a letter to a loved one, or organizing book ideas.
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