Oh, Hello There!

Oh! Hi there. Seems like I've been gone for some time. How long has it been? Almost eight months? Whew. Time really flies, doesn't it?

Well, I know it has been quite some time, but I'm back now, and that's all that matters. I would like to promise you that I'll be back again tomorrow, or a week from now, but I can't promise that, so let's just focus on now and worry about later when it's later. OK?

Where have I been? Oh, I'm still here, where I've always been. I still work at New Deal University. It's fine. It's not perfect, but no job ever is. Honestly, I have a job doing what I enjoy doing, and more often than not it feels like I really help people. How many people can say that about their job. Right. So I've got no complaints really. We even started a blog, so you can say that I'm getting paid to blog. But not for this blog.

What's new with me? Well, I'm a father now. I used to think it was weird too, but I can't imagine it being any other way at this point. He's great. He's lots of fun to be around. He can sit up, but he can't crawl yet. I think he inherited his daddy's useless hair, so we'll call him Bedheaded Jr. Hopefully he'll take everything else after Mrs. Bedheaded.

Why did I come back? I missed this, I guess. It's a weird feeling. Sort of like standing in the doorway of this massive, darkened room, like a warehouse or something, and having a boring, one-sided conversation with someone who may or may not be standing on the other side of the room. Plus people I really respect are doing it, so there's a part of me that wants to keep up with people who inspire me. There are even some people who said they kind of liked it. Go figure.

And there's the music. Man, the music. I had to do something. I couldn't keep up with it any other way. I guess I blame the iPod. It seems anymore that my taste in music is defined by the need to get more new stuff in my iPod. It's sad because I only listen to most things once, and sometimes not even once, but I just have to hear it all, and at the very least to have it on my hard drive in case I want to listen to it at some point in the future. I'm really picky about my hard drive. All of the folders need to be named accurately, and I run all of the mp3s through a tagging database that automatically finds the correct track names and re-tags the files, and only after that's been done to I drag it into iTunes. I'd say it has less to do with being a librarian and more to do with OCD. And I want to have the entire album. I'm not interested in single tracks. I don't want to devote an entire folder to a single track. Do I feel guilty? Not really. I consider myself to be a "superconsumer" of music. I want to listen to darn near everything. If you could categorize the kind of music I like to listen to, which I said is just about everything, and consider the fact that I have an insatiable desire to listen to absolutely everything that interests me, then I think I would be in something like the 99.9th percentile of music listeners. If I could make up for it in any way, I guess it would be to write about what I'm listening to here on this blog. It would be hard to write a whole lot about everything, so I'll just write what I can about the stuff that makes a real impression on me. I wish I could say more about the music I liked in a way that made it sound really great and made everyone else want to listen to it, but it's hard for me to do that in a way that's really clever, so I'm going to do the best I can.

Lately I've enjoyed the hell out of the new Black Mountain album. I've listened to it twice, and you can tell I really enjoyed something if I listen to it twice. I know, it's not out yet. But watch for it--it's awesome. It's a shame it won't come out until January, because if it came out now, I think it would be on just about everybody's list of the year's best albums. I know, I can't believe we're already seeing those lists. It feels like Halloween was last week. Well anyway, here's a track from the new Black Mountain album. They said I could share it with you, so here it is.

Black Mountain - "Tyrants"
From In The Future [Jagjaguwar, 2008]

I know, there's so much to talk about. And I really do want to tell you everything. I'm going to do my best and be a good blogger and come back here and tell you everything that's going on with me. I guess the one thing I wanted to say more than anything is that, you know, it's not going to get much better than this. I've come to terms with that. I could say that this is going to make me a better writer, but I've come to realize that this is about as good a job as I'm ever going to do at writing. More than anything else, I've always wanted to be thought of as an "intellectual." I've given up on wanting that, or any kind of thing like that. To be honest with you, I'm not really much of an intellectual, and I'm not really what one could call a "smart person." I think I've sustained too many blows to the head to be really intelligent. I'm not kidding. I've been hit in the head so many times, hard enough to make my think my skull was going to cave in, that I think it's a matter of time before I start twitching and drooling on a regular basis. I wish I was kidding, I really do. It helps that I have a thick forehead, another thing the boy has seemingly inherited from his daddy, but honestly, how much can one person take as far as head trauma goes before that head stops working? I'm getting a headache just thinking about it.

See, now I've gone and said too much. And I haven't even asked how you were doing.