December Wolves: I Ain't Thinking Of Slowing Down

Well, the year is almost up and I was concerned that I wasn't going to be able to make it to an internet portal to make good on my 15 by the 31st promise. With just one more to go and two hours to complete a look back, I think I can do it.

The title comes from the new Defeater record called Lost Ground. It's about a young African American soldier, before during and after World War II. It comes from the first song, called the Red, White and Blues. The narrator is spending his last night in town before deployment, goes to the cemetery to say goodbye to his mother, who was recently laid to rest and spends the rest of the time in the tavern drinking whiskey. He tells the bartender to keep pouring him shots, he's not slowing down.

So, five more things below. Happy New Year.

11. Having Seventy Times Seven sung for me in GFC. It felt really good to have a song played for me, at random. Seventy Times Seven being a Brand New song I never thought I'd hear live feels even better. It felt like a reward. In a strange way, from a group of people that I realized I intersected with but didn't know I made that kind of impact on. That realization, coupled with live music just made me smile at the end of the final semester. I felt satisfied.

12. Penny Bar. Despite my fear/avoidance around alcohol, it's nice to settle into a local bar and for 2009, the Penny Bar was it. Less a place than the people and the experiences inside it, the Penny Bar was an oasis of intoxication, available at a bargain basement price. Much of the rest is noise, blurs of Yuengling and generic, well-intentioned tomfoolery. One can't curse, which sounds bad, until you realize it weeds out the bad apples. Best drawback ever.

13. The End of a Year interview. The End of a Year Self Defense Family Force Five Iron Frenzy Band (okay, it's just End of a Year and they're changing their name to Self Defense Family, but work with me here...) is a group I only recently got into. They do some pretty hilarious youtube videos that I saw got almost no hits. I liked the cut of their jib, and finally sent some questions over to the band. I was expecting it to be in text format, but it turned out the guys went ahead and did it in the YouTube format. Hilariously, I was expected to be a chick, have Daisy Dukes and be attractive. That didn't work out well.

The questions were answered with unflinching honesty, with the self-deprecation and oddly specific answers. Also, they said nice things about me. There's nothing like hearing people you respect say good things about you to make you feel like you've made a couple good decisions in your life.

14. Joining Issue Oriented, the Millionaires post. I've been a fan of Ronen Kauffman's former band Zombie Apocalypse for a long time and I've also enjoyed the podcast he runs, Issue Oriented. So, when I got the text message saying "would you be interested in doing some blogging for us" I said yes before I could stop to say no. That's pretty cool. But what's even cooler is seeing something on the internet you know is wrong, saying it's wrong and actually realizing that after you wrote it you're still right and on the moral high ground.

Punk rock has seen worse than Millionaires and it will see worse than them in short order, I promise.

15. Gen Con. And internet on the megabus to GenCon. There aren't that many times when I feel like I'm in the definitive future. One time this year, stood out and that was going to Gen Con. Gen Con itself was three days, four nights of nerdery and alcohol, so that was pretty cool, but I really felt like I was in the future when I was getting internet access on my laptop while I was on the bus, in the middle of Indiana.

I'll repeat that. I had reliable internet access on a moving bus in the middle of Indiana. That's a huge step forward. Throw that in with finding out there was a cover of Bad Religion's 21st Century Digital Boy by Groove Coverage (oddly appropriate, right?) and by the end of the trip, I had a new song on my iPod, downloaded while I was on a moving bus just felt too cool for words.