The last post I wrote felt cringe (as the kids probably no longer say). Not the sentiment, just the one phrase, “if you can’t tell”.

Ugh gross. Who am I writing to? This is for me. Be honest. No need to be a ham.

I’ll leave it though. It’s a record of who I was and what I was feeling that day.

I wrote it a little hurried from the little barrel sauna we have in our sunroom. As I am now. Fingers dripping sweat, autocorrect on every word. I’m doing it again and it’s happening again. guess I’ll just watch YouTube instead.

This is so absurd. 2025. It’s so ridiculously far in the future. Maybe you have the same feeling? That the real year is about twenty-five years in the past, and that this reality is some sort of broken, out of control spiral of misery?

Maybe the Y2K glitch wasn’t a data storage bug. Maybe it was our inflection point of doom. DOOM. DOOooOoom!! If you can’t tell, I’ve been doing a descending slow burn into apathy ever since an Inconvenient Truth came out. Ever since Gore lost that election.

I still can’t embrace full nihilism yet though. There’s a stubborn piece of optimism that won’t die, despite the unrelenting progression of global temperatures and ecosystem decline.

It Jan 1st and it’s raining outside.

So, here I am, sitting in the sauna, post New Year’s resolution workout, once again mourning the seemingly inevitable demise of our species…. and I’m so tired of it.

Last night we watched two episodes of Star Trek The Next Generation followed by the animated movie Flow. We should have reversed the order. The futuristic show with earnest idealism should come after the beautiful crushing Dystopian story, not vice versa. (I can’t recommend Flow enough. Incredible animated film)

Happy New Year.

Yesterday I drove to Quebec and back. I needed to wire my Canadian house deposit to the real estate lawyer in person. The bank refused to do it remotely. So I woke up at 4am, drove to Coaticook 4.5 hours away (the nearest branch from Boston), did my business then drove right back. It was a small town. Quebec provincial flags flying in the absence of Canadian flags. That gave me pause, the people there might be begrudgingly Canadian, and my French skill is poor. The town also smelled like manure, not disparaging, just an observation. They were good people at the bank. They helped me send my wire and I was grateful. On the way back the US border guard was an asshole. I told him I was buying a house in Canada and he gave me a sarcastic “Why?”. Fuck you is why. Then he checked my back seat to see if I was smuggling someone into the country.

Today I drove to Cleveland. Part one of the Chicago then T-Bay Xmas road trip. Fuck that was a lot of driving. My neck is a rock. Driving is like a video game. Except it feels boring and mundane despite the fact that you could die at any moment. I don’t like how I speed so much. I was cruising down 90 west at mostly 84 mph. The only lunatic on the road doing this. When I drive why can’t I chill the fuck out?

In the hotel now, on the 29th floor. Bladerunner 2049 is on the TV. It was the least shitty option on the menu. I forgot how mesmerizing the visuals were in this movie. It suffers from volume issues though. I hate how dynamic range is maximized in movies so that you have to turn the volume way up to hear the dialogue, then in an action scene it blows your eardrums out. I need a hot shower and sleep. Go to bed Complain-o.

I successfully found and downloaded all the music from my Spotify like playlist. It took fucking forever. Curating and expanding the list, adding in forgotten bands and tracks. It’s my music now. Mine! I take it with me now. No corporate gatekeeping.

My wife flew to her hometown in the Chicago suburbs today leaving me alone in the house with the cats. I’ll join her in a few days. I did some chores, then holed myself up in the guest bedroom where my PC is and decided to continue my personal music renaissance. I had written down a bunch of bands to add to the master liked playlist of downloaded songs. This was stuff from mostly from the 1994-2000 era. The teenage high school stuff. The CDs I bought with scrounged money from gifts and those first (sometimes shitty) jobs. Dollar store cashier. Hockey linesman and referee. Utility man in the chemical recovery plant. The NIN era. Smashing Pumpkins. Alanis Morrissette, Garbage, Oasis, STP and Soundgarden. AC/DC and Metallica. White Zombie and Green Day. Weezer, Nirvana, Pearl Jam. The Soundtracks – The Crow, Dumb and Dumber (surprisingly awesome), Natural Born Killers, The Saint, Last Action Hero. Etc etc.

Tonight I moved on to my Pandora liked songs. For the last ten years or so, I’ve been mainly using Spotify, so opening my old Pandora main station was like a nostalgia dagger to the heart. I loved who I was when I was listening to this music. This was mainly the 2003-2010 era. Fuck the music was so good.

Belle and Sebastain, Tegan and Sara, The Stokes, The Hive, The Kooks. Talib Kweli and good Kanye. The New Pornographers, Broken Social Scene and Alexisonfire. Cadence Weapon, Immortal Technique and Buck 65. Camera Obscura and The Arcade Fire. The Weakerthans, Constantines, Sharon Jones, Magnolia Electric Co. Phoenix, Passion Pit, MGMT, The Unicorns.

2005 might be my favourite year of music ever. There are so many adorable catchy indie one-offs around this time. This is when I started listening to college radio religiously at Western. I have so much gratitude to those young DJs that exposed me to so much new music. It helped me bop and jam through such a chaotic time. I love that I am reintroducing these songs back into my life. It feels like reaching into the past and pulling my younger self into now. Help infuse this old hardened husk with joy, kid.

So the UHC CEO killer doesn’t appear to be a wounded crypto bro like I hypothesized. Instead, he shares some uncomfortable similarities with myself at that age. A bright computer science grad with some anti-capitalist ideology. But unlike myself, he had something different inside that propelled him to take bold action on those ideals. Its hard not to sympathize, especially knowing the misery that UHCs fuckery causes.

My music reclamation project is done, at least the first phase. I went through 361 albums, picking out 589 songs to build my “liked” list. Normalized the volume across all of them and put them on my phone. Feels good. It’s my music. Fuck you Spotify. Fuck your ads and subscriptions. I can play these on my phone or computer, skip as much as I want, no unwanted track insertions. I’m so happy with this. And as I was doing it, I was writing down long forgotten albums, bands and artists that I’m going to also add in the future. This project was so restorative. Music is important, personal and joyful. Make sure to keep it in your life.

I’ll be returning to my hometown. It’s happening.

The biggest differentiator between yourself in middle age and your younger self is the impact of scars and damage that twenty years of adult life inflict.

I’ve had a few traumatic shocks along the way. Out of the three that jump to mind, two were different career related setbacks, one early in my career, one at the end. Those two I can frame as character building life lessons, at least taking something positive out of the pain. The worst incident was family related. A completely unforeseen attack from my only sibling that likely irreparably destroyed our relationship and broke my parents hearts. I’m still working though the aftermath and emotional damage of that one. The people closest to you have the capacity to wound you the deepest.

I’ve always believed myself to be a resilient person. I really am, but I wonder how much these shocks have changed me. I think I am a better person for them, but carrying sadness tinged memories feels worse than the ignorant happiness that was there before. Is it worth it to be more seasoned and wise if you have to carry the scars?

The Beta Band released “The Three E.P.’s” in 1997. It’s such a smooth melancholy listen. I highly recommend. The restoration of my musicophile roots is in full swing.

I’m too connected to people I don’t know, and not connected enough to the people I know.

This feels like an uncomfortable thing to correct, but I know would enrich my life if I did so. I strongly suspect this has become true for many people besides myself. Friendships are like plants, if you don’t water them, they slowly wither and die. I’m going to be try and be more mindful. I’m good at watering a precious few of my plants, but I want some more. I wonder if T. Bay has a chess club.

The other side of this is the connectivity to strangers. The compulsion to waste time scrolling through the mind sludge of social media. Mildly amusing shit interspersed among ignorance, agenda, and vanity. I wish I had the discipline to just read a book instead of heading to reddit or youtube the moment my head is clear of thought. I know that would make me happier, so why do I always chose the lazier option? Is it as simple as I can never find my Kindle, and that my fucking phone is always on me? No. I think it’s deeper. “What if I deleted the reddit and youtube apps of my phone?” The instant rationalization and mental recoil that occurred in my head after that thought was horrifying.