2010

Well, it's just past five in the morning and I'm awake and relatively clear-headed for some awful reason, so I might as well.

This, then, is 2010, the year when everything changes. (I've just made that up. Or, more likely, someone else made that up and I've just made it up again.) From the perspective of about an hour and a half of consciousness: it's not bad. The eggs are quite good, and going back to sleep will be lovely. I feel hopeful for the rest of the year.

And it's not hard to being feeling a bit of hope right now, not least because 2009 is, to slip into the parlance of the times, finally fucking dead in the ground, and we can get on with it. The 'it' is, I believe, living and growing and loving and pushing ourselves to do more and better.

2009! It wasn't the best year for me, but it certainly wasn't the worst. I've had major accomplishments and fuck-ups, but a lot of my friends have had it really bad. Things haven't gone right, and people and institutions were, and still are in some cases, collapsing all around us. There is fear and unease in the air, and the change promised us seems less real every day.

Winter showed up late this year, or maybe never left at all: if you think of centuries as having seasons, of hundred year cycles of growth, abundance, harvest and decay, or perhaps sleep, then we''re somewhere in February of the new century, marching on through the slush and ice.

On this scale, I've been in winter for my entire adult life. The whole world has. We've just come through the coldest, hardest part of winter: January into February, when trees explode and every living thing barely clings to life, when your breath freezes in your lungs and your face goes numb the second you step outside.

We're tired, but we aren't exhausted. And ahead--past the groaning ice--is the coming Spring. It's not quite here yet, and we're going to have to work hard to make it through, but on this day especially, you can feel that it might be true, that we are perched at the beginning of a new century, waiting to rise up out of the snow.

There is, of course, no reason to think about centuries having seasons. I've just been playing the oldest trick in the book on you, and myself: telling you a pretty story about how the sun is going to come back and there will be deer and blackberries and warm summer light again, here, in the dark and the cold and the ice. It's the oldest holiday tradition. Singing to keep the dark at bay.

But the sun does come back, and the world can get better. Spring is the sweetest season. Let's bring it.

December Wolves: Whys and Wherefores

Title is stolen from the final trade paperback of Y: The Last Man. The ending caught me by surprise, but it was sweet nonetheless. I'm going over everything I did and didn't do with the December Wolves project. Consider it the pre-post-mortem.

The fact that I'm even doing this shows just how disorganized and uncommitted to the project I am when it was easy to be organized and committed to the project. I have 14 updates in the hole by 10:16 and I'm pumping out the final one less than 100 minutes before time is up. It's disappointing. But. We're here, so let's go over what went well and what went so horrifyingly wrong.

The comic book reviews/deconstructions/thoughts went well, I think. I'm no stranger to criticism, so that was a little bit in my comfort zone, but having to push myself to be critical of something completely different is a good exercise, intellectually. I had to think differently about how I looked at a piece of consumable media. Also, the YouTube experiment was fun.

With that, I also had to think differently about how my language needed work but also how to keep the viewer's attention. Without putting too much effort into video-blogging, putting together the YouTube clips sucked away a whole bunch of my time. My skills are very rudimentary, but thanks to intuitive and user-friendly software, I dived in and put something together. Ideally, I'd like them to be shorter, since six minutes plus is a long time to stare at anything without it being broken up somehow, but again that's a matter of time.

Time, not surprisingly, is something I didn't use well. Whether it was starting at eight or nine on the second day with a germ of an idea or completely missing a foundational aspect of the hate for Twilight's vampire resurgences, in a lot of cases, I didn't marshal my time effectively. I spent hours staring at the screen whether it was watching YouTube or other videos, but by the end of the night, felt like I was a good two thirds done, but too tired to continue, so I put up the update, promising I'll swing harder next time.

Usually, I didn't. Going back to that Twilight post, I felt like I should have been a lot more specific in my judgment about it and wasn't. And yes, I know with the internet I can go and change it and no one's gonna know, but it's cheating. I wrote what I wrote and published what I published. Maybe I'll add some clearly labeled edit markers. But that's in the future. The Phonogram video feels like I was just going DUDE A COMIC ABOUT MUSIC THAT'S TOTALLY AWESOMESAUCE. But then again, it's been 6, 7 days since I published it, so I hope history is kinder to it than I am now.

There was also some difficulty with the software, specifically in how it warped photos. One day it worked on a sliding scale so that I could perfectly scale it down to the pixel, how big I wanted the image to be. One day, (you can guess which one by the size and placement of the images) it just plopped the image down in the window with no ability to control size whatsoever. That can also be changed in the future.

I'm taking away from this project that I need to invest more time at the front end and stop, cold turkey, putting things off until I have a night clear. Maybe if it's as simple as 15 minutes, every 2 hours, write something in the box and see what happens, the posts will improve. But, I need to learn and master that discipline.

I don't think December Wolves failed, as a concept. As a project, I know it didn't, because there's 15 updates on the 31st. But only under a limited view did it succeed. I did put up 15 original posts in 31 days. And it was grueling, but only in spots and it could have been easier on me. My choices led me to do the December Wolves project. But I also made the choices of dicking around on YouTube or Giant Bomb when I could have been synthesizing my ideas better, writing, or editing what I already written.

We'll see what launches in 2010. I'm thinking one post every three days, but that's only a thought, I can't be held to it and the usual. Perhaps 2010 will be the year of discipline. But now, I'm going to ring in 2010 by going to sleep. May your intoxication be long and your hangovers brief. I'm out.

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.

December Wolves: All I Know Is I Hope That We're Better Than That

The title comes from an ALL song called Better Than That. This post is obviously based on the fact that I'm not.

Okay. Jersey Shore.

First. I'm not Italian in any kind of meaningful quantity, so the use of guido as a term of endearment and solidarity is intriguing. I mean, the people (who are only a little bit older than me) are dumb enough to have no idea of the history of the word, but hey. It's their history and not mine.

Second. Seriously, these kids are dumb and self-absorbed.

Third. If I was being plied with vaguely attractive women, literally gallons of alcohol and a boring job (working at a tshirt store) with my crazy roomates, would I act that stupid? I've done really dumb shit when I was drinking. This is the time for them to do idiotic things. I did very dumb things this year and the difference between them and me is that I didn't have an MTV camera crew following me, I didn't spend an hour on my hair, I don't work out an eighth as much as they do. If i was there, what would I do? I'm not sure. I would probably have a complete mental break within two weeks after I realize that I am being watched as I urinate.

I mean, I read Hellboy books (the Library editions of them, anyway). I could fill a row of shelves with the books I own. My life would not be terribly interesting to film. But hell. These kids doesn't seem so bad. No, wait, I take that back. they do. They seem kind of stir-crazy, honestly. And when you add stir-craziness to a group of kids that never really grew up, it's not a good scene.

There's the Real World staples:
+The haughty, bitchy alpha girl that thrives on discord and assault.
+Dumb mooks of guys who make up for brains with brawn and chiseled bodies.
+One slightly self-aware girl.
+One completely pants-on-head crazy guy who gives himself a nickname.

Yeah, I'm going to have to back away from this now on the idea that I read books. Pretty much obsessively. All of that said, though. I'm scared of falling into the "well, thank God I'm not like them" trap. But really, I'm not quite as self-absorbed as those people, I hope, but I can sink to the same levels as them. I'm not as shallow, I hope, but then again, I've looked down girl's shirts and stared at butts. They're just being more straightforward and honest about it.

I just hope there's a difference between them and me that is more than one of degree, but that hope doesn't make it so.

Okay. Karl Rove.

I was excited when I heard that Karl Rove got a divorce. I shouldn't be. He hasn't done anything to me personally. He's good at what he does and what he does isn't nice. Okay, I'm being glib

again. But mostly, I disagree with the policies he proposed and the way he went about his business. Outing a CIA agent because her husband hammered the administration in a New York Times op-ed crosses the line.

But which line? I don't wish him dead. I just wish him out of his comfortable job. I wish him stop being so smug. I wish his life is harder, but intruding into his personal life seems like I'm going a bit far, even for a person whose actions I despise. And if I hate him this much then what's wrong with hoping his personal life disintegrates for everything he's done? I know the answer to that question, of course, because for whatever reason, I view the personal sphere as something sacred.

Then, he puts out a statement saying that he wants other people to respect his privacy. A call for privacy from a guy who sold out an undercover agent's identity for payback. Man, I want the jackals to hound him. I want some CNN 3 ring circus shit around his home and personal sphere. But no matter how poetic the justice sounds, it still doesn't feel like justice. It doesn't feel right. I want some blood from Rove for all he's done, but like this, it isn't justice. It's revenge. Justice is that the trail of evidence clearly and unambiguously catches up to Rove in a way that buries his political career.

I'll say this: Karl Rove, if you read this, I'm sorry for being happy that you got divorced. And I don't hope that there's a media circus around your divorce, but if there is, I'm not going to move to stop it or defend you, even with the slim patina of humanity.

What kills me is that it's probably more than you deserve.

December Wolves: This Is What You Wanted

I came home exhausted from work and I want nothing more than to fall face first onto the bed 3 feet from me. It was mostly because I stayed up way too late last night to get different done. I made a statement, though, that I ought to stand by. Then again, I made it on Twitter, so I have to live up to it.

This is what I want. I want to write. But to get there, I have to do it for free. Often. So here I am. It's more the often. Without a deadline, I can pick endlessly at what I've already written instead of actually writing. So this one is about Christmas. It's a big enterprise (but not too big) in the household I'm in. And every year, it's the same deal. Christmas comes and I know that I have ironclad obligations to my parents.

And after a couple decades, that gets repetitive. I get annoyed, because it's so same-y. Year in, year out. Big dinner at home Christmas Eve, big dinner elsewhere Christmas Day. The Good Clothes. The Tree. The Stockings. Oh, God, The Presents. So, How Are You Doing This Year? The Tradition.

It's grating. But then, I hear that a couple friends of mine have lived without it and they actually find it cool that my family has traditions. And, since my parents are never gonna read this, I can say it: After hearing this, I almost kind of agree with them. Okay, yes, tradition and I have a pretty fractured relationship these days. And yes, it's inconvenient around the Christmas holiday to set a certain amount of daily real estate aside for something that only happens once a year and for a select group of people. But hey: This thing has been happening for more than two decades now so the fact that it goes on by its own inertia is pretty cool. On some level, that's what this website set out to be.

But the tradition in this case isn't cool because it's still around. There are plenty of things that are still around that are terrible. It allows friends to have something ironclad to gather around that's positive and is a safe space. And as I'm getting older (it being relative), I realize I want that more and more. Gifts or toys (books excepted, of course, because they're manna from heaven) are nice, but that's what I want more than anything: A chance to see my friends.

It's taken me a lot of nights of troubled sleep to realize that. And tomorrow, I will go to sleep in the same building as my grandparents and extended family. Yes, New Year's Eve will not be exciting, but it will be with the ones I love and now, I realize how valuable of a gift that is.

December Wolves: The Everything Else List Round 2

More lists. I don't know if this is my price for lazing about on this stuff, but ending the wolves with lists feels somewhat defeating. Never fear, though. There's at least four more posts left and there's one non-list post in the can. Fifteen was the number I said I'd make and fifteen will be the number by 31st, whether by hook or crook.

I'll push the fear out of the way.

6. The way Kristian from Crime In Stereo's eyes lit up when he talked about his new record, I Was Describing You To Someone. Every band says their new record is their best before its been released, but the way Kristian seemed stoked about it (outside of the Metro) is something it's hard to find a parallel for. They clearly want these songs to be heard, blasted and compared explicitly to their previous material. That's rare and frankly magical.

7. Hearing and believing I'm an inspiration to other people. Hearing that those people believe my writing is "inspiring, interesting and intelligent" is very, very flattering, but even more flattering is that my writing inspired other people to write. Those words still make me blush a unflattering red.

8. Auto-Tune the News. I'm of a single mind on Auto-Tune the News. It has the emotional weight of a carrot, the depth of a dog's water dish and the nutritional value of a Slurpee. Then again, it's a full pop song about the month's news, fed through a vocoder and even had T-Pain guest on a song. From that perspective, it's a neat snippet of 2009. Yes, people mistake it for saying something politically, but you shouldn't hold that against the show.

9. Beating the final mission of Starcraft: Brood War without cheat codes. I've said repeatedly that Starcraft is a defining moment in my childhood and continuing growth, so putting the entire single player campaign to rest is a real accomplishment. I probably sunk an entire day into beating this mission with all the re-starts and save states, but frankly, I just ended up outlasting the computer and using the cheats of a walkthrough and constantly saving my progress.

It went like this: Take out the nuclear Terrans (with their fucking siege tanks) as fast as humanly possible, assimilate their base. Defend my base. Build up my force. Break off pieces of Battlecruiser/Valkyrie Terrans. Defend my base. Build up my force. Break off another piece of B/V Terran territory. Assimilate base. Defend my base. Rinse, repeat.

By the time I got around to the Protoss that had unfettered access to the bottom half of the map (and attacked me throughout the mission), it had run out of resources in its own base and it hadn't expanded. It's not quite the same as beating a human player, but the payoff of destroying three forces dead set on my destruction, that started off with nuclear weapons, Battlecruisers and a half-started 'Toss tech tree is still sweet.

10. Obama being sworn in. I cried and nearly ran out of my Oral Presentation class to make sure I caught whatever was left of the swearing in. Our long national nightmare was over, I texted. Finally, the feckless, thuggish era of Bush was done. And it hasn't been sunshine, gumdrops, rainbows and Candyland since, but that day, I felt hopeful and inspired. Yes, I would rather be lead by a President that got out of college and chose to do community organizing instead of a guy who coasted around on Daddy's money and ran businesses into the ground. I would rather have my country lead by a guy who taught Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago for a decade than a guy who couldn't be bothered to look into the details of his decisions.

Let me hedge my bets just a little. He's continuing some of the Bush policies that I find repugnant. Then again, Al-Qai'da tried to attack us Christmas Day and should have succeeded. Oddly enough, the reason why they didn't succeed was because what they got on the plane was incendiary than explosive and the passengers (!!) put it out. But then again, Al-Qai'da attacks are usually redundant, so there should have been someone else on that plane that had a bomb, but apparently, there wasn't. Strange. Suicide terror is crazy.

The short version is this: I sleep better knowing Obama is at the desk and not Bush and that inauguration was the day when it first felt real.

December Wolves: the Everything Else List

For my other website, every year I do an end of year recap which includes a list of the CDs I enjoyed the most. In 2006 and 2007, it was a huge, sprawling, all-consuming thing that took up a couple weeks of my free time since I had to put everything down that I thought was important in there.

It ended up being 20+ pages on Word. 2008, I stepped back from that, but it was still a pretty long document and involved a week or so of prep and writing. This year, my list was done in sporadic, quixotic bursts, avoiding a numerical list while maintaining a year-end favorite (in this case, P.O.S.' Never Better) that I think is roughly 2,000 words and not nearly as many pages in a word doc. I think it communicates everything essential.

The list itself is little more than a time-capsule and a specific imprint of what I was listening to this year, warts and "terrible choices" and all. The music list hasn't gone up yet and I'm jonesing to get a year-end something out before 2010 hits. An idea struck me walking outside and suddenly another member of the pack is ready for it's close up. Here's a different time capsule for Eleven Names: The Everything Else list.

Since pastepunk is awesome and I already covered the recorded music I listened to, I had other, non-musical experiences that were great, but didn't fit the bill of the first list, the Everything Else list is a list of everything else I enjoyed, or a list of cool experiences, media and so on. It will continue through the 31st.

1. Batman and Robin. Grant Morrison doing Batman is one way I described it to the ARGO kids, but the title of the comic tells you exactly what it's about, even if it requires a little bit of deconstruction. The comic is about legacies of Batman and Robin and the people behind the cowl. The current Batman was previously a Robin. He is training a new Robin, the test-tube baby of Batman, while fighting another former Robin who

has turned into a villain.

All of this is happening while the upcoming plotline is that the new Batman is trying to revive the old Batman. It's about growing up, coming to grips with the new responsibilities with the hope that the actual Batman comes back soon. The new Robin (the test-tube baby) is precocious enough to believe that he ought to be Batman, so the current Batman (former Robin) is trying to hold it all together.

2. Graduating college. I have a nice plaque. Okay, but no seriously, it's an accomplishment that I'm proud of. At the very least, it's provided the spark of creativity for a good third of my posts here.

3. The ARGO column. I wrote a sweet column about growing out of college gracefully. It's one of the things that I go back to and sometimes think I'm a good writer or I'm at least making something universal personal and location specific. The fact that it resonated with people who weren't in the club was something that I worked very hard on and to have the audience recognize that was and is very reassuring.

4. Meeting Jordan. After three or four years of helping Jordan out with it, I managed to hop on a drive to D.C. for the sole and express purpose of meeting up with him. I've never met Adam or Aubin or Brian from punknews, so I've always felt like there was something missing from the last three, four years of our collaborations, so finally meeting him felt awesome and a capstone on an incredible academic ride.

5. End of college radio show. It's an excuse to play all my favorite songs that don't have vulgarities and giving two endings. This two endings part is incredibly important.

The first being the appropriate "things change, it's scary but we move on" song, sung by Vienna Teng, an attractive woman, playing the piano. It's a lullaby for a child being scared by the rain. Note perfect. The actual ending, a little more...ragged.

The first track was John Coulton's Still Alive, a little ARGO hoorah, which I'm sure you know and if you don't know it, learn.

The second was Thunder In the Night Forever by Planes Mistaken For Stars. It is the sonic embodiment of this picture. It is about taking the fight of your expression to the billboards and ideologies that have gouged your eyes and ruined your friends lives with velvet-lined promises of fame, purity and higher callings. The subtitle is We Ride to Fight! and it reflects its performers, a dirty, beautiful song. I think I like women like Planes songs, breathtakingly intelligent, frighteningly powerful and with a pretty edge and this song is one of Planes' defining works.

The third was Bane's Ante Up, a song with an opening drum tattoo made for the purpose of engender stage dives. It is a song about understanding that you have made mistakes and bad things have happened, but you have to get up and put yourself forward in a way that leaves you totally vulnerable and with all your chips in the balance.

Heavy-hearted hymns are my thing, and it's Bane that finds the light at the end of the tunnel without neglecting the fact that it's dark in that tunnel. What's the point of writing about overcoming if the hurdles aren't that high and you aren't stabbed during the marathon?