The Big Five Oh

Hey.

The White Stripes post was post number 50 on this blog, which seems to me to be a respectable number, considering that December 3 was the one year anniversary of the first post, and that I went on writer's block hiatus for four months.

50 posts in 54 weeks. I'll take it. And I think that, instead of that two posts per week lunacy that I used as a goal and as a benchmark when I started the site, I'll move forward with this blog using a post more or less every week as my goal.

And that's because I love music and when I can nail the feel of a song, I love the results, but boy, oh boy, writing about music is hard.

When I ran The Crawfish Boxes, I posted ten times a week during the season, and a lot of it managed some quality, too. The baseball writing came easier, somehow.

Maybe because in baseball, there're always facts to fall back on. Roy Oswalt is 23 - 1 lifetime vs Cincinnati; Humberto Quintero has never hit a home run in April. When you're not feeling particularly creative, but still have a 7:05 first pitch you have to beat, you can always lash together a few raw facts, as Bill Murray once said onscreen, and get yourself to the end of a fairly well-constructed post.

The only facts you can appeal to in music writing are the irrelevant and boring ones, like this band is from here, or that band is from over there, and they each played gigs coming up with Band X, and I just do not want to write in that fashion.

So that's why I make it hard for myself, and that's why it IS hard. But I like the results and I'm going to stay with it. I believe in the work I've done here. Even when I was in the midst of my hiatus, even when I couldn't for the fucking life of me think of anything meaningful to say about just about anything musical, I still knew that I would eventually come back here.

Sadly, it was Alex' death that finally kicked me in the ass, finally got me going again. I wasn't Alex' closest friend, far from it, but trying to codify my thoughts on that horrible tragedy congealed the slippery goo that my thoughts had become. Something had happened that put my terror of not being able to write anything worthwhile in focus.

I might as well say it now: I'm going to slip again. At some point I'm gonna go a month or two moving forward without being able to write. Might as well say it now, so whoever's reading if anyone will know. So I never have to think I'm letting anyone down, I'll be upfront right now.

But any such lapse seems far off right now. I've got a head full of ideas just now, not to jinx things, but maybe the way a word galaxy might filter some good lyrics that could then be rearranged, or how how you might be able to approach two songs by combining and shuffling the words in their lyrics. Or maybe a poem about Soft Machine's Third: Lord knows I've been unable to approach it in any other way, despite wanting very badly to write about that uncanny masterwork.

More like that Procol Harum piece. I *loved* that. And more fake interviews, like the one I invented with Pelle Almqvist.

I sincerely hope to bring those things to this site, and I hope that there will be readers for them, and commenters, too. If you have been either, I thank you, and hope you soon have company as I continue to work here.