Year End Playlist 2016

January - Phantogram - 10,000 Claps
February - Robyn - Fembot
March - Moderat - Sick With It
April - Discovery - Slang Tang
May - Bell - It's Oh So Quiet (Bjork cover)
June - Great Dane - Alpha Dog
July - Moderat - Porc 1
August - DJ Shadow - Mutual Slump
September - Unkle - Restless
October - Dan Deacon - Meme Generator
November - Philip Selway - Coming Up For Air
December - Miracle Fortress - Raw Spectacle

The honorable mentions in very particular order.  The higher up, the closer to the final cut.

Chvrches - Strong Hand
Santigold - L.E.S. Artistes
Lou Reed - Perfect Day
The Cure - Close To Me
Kanye West - Waves

This was a year that was supposed to be a statement of capabilities that flamed out midway and became a statement of resilience.  If you want to find the honorable mentions, they are out there in the woods with their own little fires to gather 'round, each one with different mothmen circling just outside their fire's light.  If you want to talk to them, you can find them.  A little place where we keep half ideas.  Things we fear.  Say it three times and they'll appear.  The body you thought stayed buried is floating behind your ear at the edge of peripheral vision.  Next time, do not wear sunglasses at night.  You can sense them by the flex of ember light.

I cannot remember the last time I saw every detail of a year coming before it happened.  This past year was close until I realized my map was flat and the Earth was a sphere.  With the year end look and this, the bookend to 2016, the only thing to do is look ahead to two thousand oh one and seven.






///the year is written.  let it go.  thank you for loving me.  thank you for being there.  one of these days we may be eating at the same table.  in the meantime, you know you have a place at mine where the reeds are just high enough and the shade just thick enough for no one to notice we're there by a fire together.

Supermarkets

I know shopping is not supposed to be difficult.  You park, you go in, you get what you need, you get in line, you get out.  Simple.  Easy.  Everything is different again.  The boxes of toasters were fine where they were.  What does a cube of pillows next to a cube of mingled tupperware and stamped artisanal pepper shakers supposed to mean?  I should buy some hats.  The jeans are just as good, if not better at Goodwill.  If the mouse pads are in the photography department I will cry inside for a few minutes.  There has to be a way to predict market fluctuations on the price of Nerf assault weapons.  I cannot play Cribbage on a sheet of paper again, I'm better than that, you're better than that!  Grow up!  Let's build one.  That's a lot of holes to drill.  Not too many.  I love customer service, but the air is impossibly dry.  Uniforms and no tinted glasses and no facial hair and no headphones or earplugs or even earmuffs to help abate the halls echoing and that idle siren public address system.  I was bound to be fired, and then quit, and then quit, and then simply stop going, and then be fired the final time I gave it a run.  Breathing it sounds like a gale through a mesa canyon.  The taste is hospital and hostile with so many confused and irritated and little kid lungs sucking and blowing.  Draped cobwebs full of ants.  I do not understand why the lights have to be so.  The air pressure is all wrong.  Leaving is expulsion from a mouth of a fossil, still throbbing with life, and ages dead.  I head home with a few bags of things I've torn off of its sides and tips and joints, maybe a truck bed's worth now and then to help me survive in my wilderness and it's over.  Bang, boom, piece of cake.  I hate shopping.  It is incredibly difficult and staying calm is key.  Throw in too many people and the math begins "do I really, absolutely, need?"




///Moderat - "Sick With It"

A Bad Case of the Quits

Think about all the things you can't do.  Body lock.  Sleeping fourteen hours a day to avoid the giant shadows in my head.  Long sleeps and short breaths because there is no way you can get yourself into trouble if you're not there.  It's great to imagine a world where everyone is not all home upstairs to feel a little more comfortable around you and less self conscious or conscious of the world around here.  Impossible to dodge or sidestep.  Autofold.

Or maybe I'm just mapping out new ways to find a path to talk about depressed.  Nothing is immediately wrong, but long term is up in the air and the stress of the attempt to figure out where things might land is flat-lining my ability to comprehend channels that run outside of mathematic doubt?  I am in a funk.  I've seen the rise of the range to climb and am set out with gear and guide and 300 miles and ten days later we are what feels like no closer in the range's foothills.  Still, hand cupped to eye, tall grass marched, toward the snowy summit's bouldered base.

It is always difficult thinking about what the point is.  To map uncharted territories?  To have a point of reference?  To exercise the brain and verify its function?  To cope?  To record history?  Attack?  Report?  Defuse?  Modify?  Survive?  You're bumming me out, man!  What is the point?  You could simplify things greatly by eliminating yourself from the equation.  Speedometer, bruh.  Yeah, yeah.  There are many and a several reasons to be alive.  Number one being that the planet is a phenomenal place all its own.

Number two being that the planet's weather, moods, and neighbors are just as magical.  How could you not want to see what happens next?  To hell with purpose.  Have pleasure in you and your own adventure.  To what end?  For what purpose?  For what reason?  Dunno.  Just thought it'd be fun.  Just thought it'd be a sight.  Just thought life alone is not all cupcakes and daydreaming and that's quite alright.  Bad hands, bad turns, bad lands... I'm rhyming again.  Bad hands and bad turns are just facts of being alive.  No reason to quit.  No reason to think about disappearing.  No matter how absurd the turns get, how unfair the hands go out, stick with it.  Don't quit.  You never know if the next sunrises colors will be like anything you've ever seen before.

///Moderat - "A New Error"