Pithy Title Here

To put it mildly, this has been a weird year. That'll be for another blog post. The music year, though, has followed suit. There were some good things to be sure, but, unlike last year when great music was falling form the sky , 2016 was pretty uneven. And we'll get into some of that. Let's go...

In 2007, I had just about had enough. North Carolina (which still fancied itself as the progressive spot of the South before it went and got crazy and Nashville and Austin were all "about that..." BUT I DIGRESS... where was I? Oh yes, North Carolina) local radio had stations switching to all-day Christmas music on November 1. Also, it was a year or two before that that awful flipping "Christmas Shoes" song was big. I wanted something better. Maybe something irreverent. And I succeeded!

Focus is coming in spurts this morning. I'm finding myself typing, then suddenly just staring, overwhelmed by thoughts. I've been something of a fatalist the past few years and have been bolstered by the occasional affirmations that, at their core, most people are good. I don't have that feeling this morning. If I leave my west coast and/or social media bubbles, what I read and hear is anger... and a desire to punish. That punishment ranges from (in a "best" case, if it can be called that) enacting policies that one side sees as retribution for policies they've felt imposed upon them to (at worst) smearing entire demographic groups. This rightward swing is a global trend and, I'm not going to lecture about how the rise of nationalism has never ended in anything good. It's all in the history books. I can only look at how the results affect me. Primarily, I now have to worry about what it will mean to have any federal funding stripped away from my

I'm not as good as I used to be at keeping this blog up. Part of that is social media. Some of my rants don't even warrant the full 140-character allotment Twitter affords us. Perhaps it's because of the microblog tools like Twitter, or the picture/caption ability of (my personal favorite channel) Instagram, that I tend to only use the blog for longer bits. It's interesting, though: over the course of the past 10 years, our online lives have shifted. Some people are basically live-tweeting their lives. Others use social channels purely to troll, getting a rise out of getting a rise in others. None of the social media channels we use regularly even existed on 9/11. I'm not even sure I had a texting plan on 9/11. Imagine that. That said, it also means while there is a large media archive of events from the day, we lack a passive archive of individual accounts of the day. If something happens today, there's a hashtag to search and you're suddenly at ground

It looks and sounds perfect. For a novice-backpacker-yet-seasoned-hiker like me, it seemed like the perfect place to not only stretch my own abilities, but also take a first time backpacker who wanted to touch the Pacific Crest Trail. Then, I started to read the trip reports: overgrown trails, a bad road in... all with the spectre of mountain thunderstorms. What was I getting into here?

In June 1994, my teenybopper self headed on down to Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia to see Pink Floyd. It was a last-minute thing. The show was sold out, but a late cancellation meant three tickets ended up in the hands of a friend's mother who was a fan. Friend's mom obviously took her daughter and, as luck would have it, daughter called me to take ticket #3. I don't need to expound on the experience of seeing Pink Floyd live as any number of superlatives you could use apply. What I will note is walking out of the stadium, when I overheard a few fans go "now, we just have to wait five years to see them again." We're on year 22 now. From the sound of it, David Gilmour has plenty of money and no desire to cash in by doing some manner of abbreviated tour reuniting with Roger Waters. The point is, I had the chance to go and I did. If I hadn't, plain and simple: Pink Floyd would be in the "wish I had seen" category. This fact seems particularl