Although the stats say barely anybody reads this space anymore since I started inconveniencing electrons here two decades or so ago, I nonetheless feel compelled to tell the reader I’m fine.

I’ve just been scary busy since the November holiday break.

The holiday weekend was fine; quiet and disengaged on Thursday, and a pleasant, reasonably low-key weekend at the con; both my solo show and the band show went well, and people seemed to like what we were putting out. The drive home, all seven hours of it, however, wasn’t the greatest experience, but we survived.

The work week following, however, has been kind of the opposite. I’ve been fully engaged in all-day workshops with the folks from the PM center working to peer review and finalize business cases, and when I say that, I mean…all day.

As of right now, where I am on Friday morning, I’ve got thirty-three of my officially scheduled thirty-two hour four day work week on the books, and I bailed an hour or two early yesterday afternoon to spend some quality time in the periodontist’s chair. I logged thirteen hours on Tuesday, nearly all of it on the conference line staring at documents and scribbling notes, and getting relatively little time outside fitnessing, because of rain and 4:30pm sunsets.

As an extra bonus, after the lidocaine (or whatever they use these days) from yesterday’s quadrant scaling, I’ve got that familiar hung-over feeling I always get from that crap, so today, if it follows the pattern, is going to be an absolute joy.

Thankfully, I don’t have anything serious booked for the weekend; I can do laundry and line up set lists for next week’s bar gig.

Once I finish tonight, though, being a happy hour patron at the Kilt rather than the entertainment feels like the right plan. I’ve earned it. I think I’ll raise a glass to the memory of Rep. Donald McEachin, my congressional representative for the last half-decade or so, and a generally low-key and effective public servant, who passed away on Monday. Damn.

But anyway; here are some tunes this week; a few classics, and what could easily be an average afternoon’s playlist on wnrn:

1. “Believe” – Caamp
2. “Paddle to the Stars” – The Dip
3. “Barefoot and Pregnant” – Joan Armatrading
4. “Gold Past Life” – Fruit Bats
5. “This Will Be Our Year” – The Zombies
6. “You’re The Reason Our Kids Are ugly” – Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty
7. “Kangaroo” – The Big Wu
8. “Harvest Moon” – Sunflower Bean
9. “Only Songs” – The Wild Reeds
10. “Money (live in Hamburg 1964)” – Jerry Lee Lewis
11. “Jesus on the Telephone” – Machinery of the Human Heart
12. “The Last Dance” – St. Paul & The Broken Bones
13. “Sexy After Dark” – Joshua Ray Walker
14. “The Only Home I’ve Ever Known” – The California Honeydrops

For those keeping track of my crashing mental state, Tuesday was…better.

Sure, I worked eleven hours, thanks to annual ethics training, some interesting contract communication issues, and everybody trying to squeeze a whole week into two and a half days’ worth of desk time, but I got a ton done, had a nice sunset walk along the river, and a pleasant pint at the brewery afterwards with the lovely spouse, so that helped..

Today will be a short one, largely buttoning things up until I get to hand a bunch of folks work when they get back on Monday. I aim to be off the clock by lunchtime, after which the weather looks gorgeous, so I’m going to get some outside time before working through some tunes for the weekend gigs.

Speaking of those gigs, the published con schedule is still in flux, though here’s where I *know* I’ll be this weekend:

• Saturday, 1:30pm, Salon A – Chuck solo show
• Saturday, 9pm, Valley Room – Blibbering Humdingers show
• Saturday, 11pm, Valley Room – Turkey Awards Presentation (I’ll be reading samples of the “winners”)

Otherwise, I’ll be bumming around, schmoozing, taking it all in, and generally not thinking about the holiday business, because frankly, it’s not where my mind needs to be.

As indicated and alluded to previously, it’s my intention to be aggressively offline this weekend; just warnin’ y’all.

Anyway, for some tunes that aren’t mine or mine-adjacent, here’s the weekly offering of the algorithms a few days early. Pretty mellow, generally, which is fine. #2 is a nice deep cut from the indie radio playlists, and I’m never opposed to covers of one my favorite Springsteen songs, as represented by #8:

1. “I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight” – Richard & Linda Thompson
2. “Squid Tattoo” – Sean Rowe
3. “Stay Forever” – Ween
4. “Almost Home” – Gary Louris
5. “Babydoll” – Laurie Anderson
6. “Ain’t Killed Me Yet” – Adia Victoria
7. “Hypnotized” – Watkins Family Hour
8. “Atlantic City” – River Kittens w/ G Love & Special Sauce
9. “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” – JC Brooks & The Uptown Sound
10. “Magnetic Moves” – Katie Toupin
11. “A Case of You” – Tristan
12. “Go Through You” – Rhett Miller
13. “El Camino” – Elizabeth Cook

This weekend was something of a struggle; I know you all know this – if you’ve been reading, you’ve been watching my downfall in real-time. Friday’s work wasn’t terrible, though I was just kind of numb. They dropped one of those Friday bombshells in the morning; a new agency manual for my corner of the world, and it’s even kind of good news; they’ve raised review thresholds to the point that the tedious approval briefings every month will pretty much cease. Work for the folks I support (and for me) is about to get a bit easier.

Of course, my brain immediately went to the fact that I’m going to have to build the new process for the rest of the program management group from the ground up, and that since the last package I submitted to the board passed with basically a 100%, of course they’ll change the system now that I’ve finally beaten it.

See, this is where my brain is.

That, along with more frustration with the rest of humanity out there being annoying twits, some low-key social circle drama I’m adjacent to, stress about not wanting to suck for my upcoming gigs, usual holiday season malaise, and the fact that the sun sets before 5pm…I’ve just kind of had it.

After doing the necessary adult things on Saturday, I spent the evening looking for the bottom of a bottle of Irish whisky in front of the tv, wallowing and all. Somebody write me a ballad.

Sunday morning, the sun was actually out, so I went and walked the park like I do, and halfway through my circuit, I just started crying. Blubbering ugly crying. Luckily the park was empty except for the pickup soccer league people, so no one had to avoid me, or perhaps even more horrifying, feel like they should offer help.

Oh well. I’m staring down just a couple of days of business cases and mandated ethics training, and expect to be mostly unplugged the rest of the time into the long weekend (particularly Thursday, because reasons), when I’m playing a few shows out of town at Chessiecon, where the Humdingers are music Guests of Honor, and they were nice enough to book me for a solo set as well.

I really hope traffic doesn’t suck.

Oh well; if I run into a skill check, I can at least use these things to stack the deck in my favor:

The feelings inherent in yesterday’s post persisted throughout the day, though at least a few of us got to laugh a bit during the last meeting of a busy ten hour day; sure at least some of it waslaugh(ing) to keep from crying, but it was still laughing, which I guess is, if not a win, not a loss.

After work, I got my bare minimum fitness time in, because it was cold, and also because the sun was setting an hour after I logged off (never mind I started working at 5am). Still, it was nice to be outside and not looking at a screen. Of course, when I stopped by the grocery store bar, which was supposed to have a nice smoked bock on, their CO2 system was borked, so there was no beer. Damn.

After that, I came home, scavenged something from the meager pickings in the kitchen, checked my email (and found that I won some tickets to a Suzanne Vega show in April, more than earning back my annual wnrn donation), started and soon aborted a couple of CIV VI sessions, then climbed into bed with a book around 7pm, and had my lovely spouse wake me up and tell me to take the book off my face and turn off the light at around 7:45.

Today will likely be a short day as I started within spitting distance of my 40 and my bosses are all off, and I have no meetings scheduled, though I am their out-of-office contact, so if things go crazy somewhere, I’m on the hook. I hope things don’t go crazy.

After that, and through the weekend, I currently have nothing scheduled, which is welcome. If my spoons hold out, I should probably start making sure I remember how to play some music for the shows next weekend, huh?

Anyway; here are some tunes scattered all over the map (but mostly kinda cool) which is kind of appropriate:

1. “Felicidade” – Jason Vieaux
2. “This Time It’s Different” – Heart Bones
3. “Right Moves” – Josh Ritter
4. “Persephone” – Allison Russell
5. “Wires and Waves” – Rilo Kiley
6. “Oh Boredom (Schmaltz City, USA)” – Star Parks
7. “Drown” – The Smashing Pumpkins
8. “Not Dead Yet” – Lord Huron
9. “Linger” – Lake Street Dive
10. “All My Love Is Coming Back To Me” – S.G. Goodman
11. “Strange Girl” – Laura Marling
12. “Papaya” – Twisted Pine
13. “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” – Waxahatchee

I’ll be honest, I’ve been struggling this week. My boss has been out a couple of days for a well-deserved break, and as her designated emergency out-of-office reply contact, I’ve been putting out a few fires in between all the business case review meetings and getting awfully frustrated with the way that our re-alignment of work and priorities in our organization isn’t sticking with the rank-and-file.

I know this because I’ve got a foot each in leadership and grunt work, and I’m hearing all the bitching and moaning about stuff from the folks on the floor about stuff that I had a hand in shaping in the rarefied air of the office suite. Not that my fellow grunts are blaming me, necessarily; but it’s frustrating that our message isn’t getting through that this stuff we’re doing now is going to make future work so much damned less complicated. That they can’t see that is just kind of making me angry, or did for a while this week.

Mostly, I’m just sick of these business analysis memos: writing them, editing them, having meetings talking about them, tracking status on them, dreaming about them…ugh.

I’ve hit that wall…again. It’s kind of a different wall than the six month wall stuff I was on about last year around this time, but they certainly share some basic characteristics.

It’s that point in the year where I can see the relief of the holiday slow-down/break on the horizon, but can also see the piles of work that need to get done before that two switches to a three at the top of the calendar, and know from my quarter-century of experience that by this time next week, the people whose brains I need to pick to ensure that stuff gets done will start disappearing on use-or-lose leave.

About halfway through yesterday afternoon’s discussion of <<insert business topic here because I can’t remember and it doesn’t matter>>, I kind of hit my limit; my ability to summon the enthusiasm to carry on. I was done.

…an I’m not that much better this morning, but I shall do my best to carry on because I’m a goddamn professional, and I need to do the work to get the paycheck to ensure that the family can eat and stuff. That said, I’m probably not going to find much fulfillment in it.

When I started this post this morning, I thought I was going to close it out with a link to my dealing-with-the-pandemic song, “Walls,”, but it’s already there in the post I linked to a few paragraphs back (and I just ordered some fresh stock of the Blanket Fort Demos on physical CD, because I was out and y’know, marketing synergy), but I think I’m going to go with another one instead that better expresses my frustration, and also happens to be on the physical copies of Blanket Fort, but that I released as a quickie angry single back in 2020:

None of us want to be here, at least some of the time.

Objectively, this weekend was largely successful and productive. I addressed a lot of regular #adulting responsibilities, stayed in line with my fitness objectives (weather permitting), managed a relatively successful family outing, did some preparatory work for my previously mentioned brewery gig in a couple of weeks, and even managed to book two more music gigs in the coming months, which I’ll mention more specifically once the hosts release the details to the public.

That said, the actual human feelings I experienced this weekend were honestly rather unpleasant, in large part due to the rest of humanity consistently being assholes.

For example, with my day off on Friday, I did the shopping in the morning, which while less populous than my usual Saturday morning timeslot, the people that were out there in the retail world were, individually and collectively, more problematic and difficult than usual. This held true for any expedition into a establishment involved in the sale of goods or services; the people were awful, the environment was awful, and it seriously brought me down. I want to blame it on the Christmas stuff starting to invade retail spaces; that crap always hits me the wrong way.

On Saturday, a majority of the family ventured out to the drive-in to catch Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which was, I guess…fine. I really enjoyed the reinterpretation of Namor and his people through the lens of ancient Meso-American culture, but nothing else really spoke to me, and the whole thing was almost an hour too long.

My perception of the film may have been colored by external events, including the technical details of timed auto-off functionality on push-button start cars, the rain that hit three quarters of the way through the screening, and, to no one’s surprise, the other humans at the venue, who insisted on sitting on the roof of the car in front of us, talking loudly through the movie (so I could still hear them through closed car windows), and the wondrous folks smoking, against specific posted instruction, some particularly dank strain of weed nearby that gave me a blistering headache and seriously aggravated my sinuses and my general attitude.

Leading from that was the insomnia likely resulting from the allergy and headache meds I took when we got home Saturday – maybe one in every forty of fifty times I take benadryl for allergy issues, instead of knocking me out, it gets me wired. I was up well past 2am, and slept fitfully for a handful of hours after that, with obvious negative effects on my Sunday morning mood.

The only good thing I can say about the experience is that I was able to nail a solid victory on a higher-than-my-usual difficulty level on Civilization VI.

Sunday was mostly about fighting with a sticky dryer door and a couple of trips to the hardware store for bits and bobs to repair things, and only managing to kick the can down the road, because I’ve got a bunch of other things in line before buying a new one comes up on the priority list.

The one bright spot I can point to is stumbling upon a particular song on the radio while running errands during the weekend, which just hit me in exactly the right spot for momentary pleasure in a nicely meta way. I share it here in the hope it brings readers the same:

Putting this one up today because it’s Veteran’s Day (due respect, folks…) tomorrow and I have the day off, and plan on not staring at a computer all day if I can help it.

This week’s been, well, not bad, but eventful. Been a little foggy after Tuesday’s dental stuff (no lingering pain, but less-than-awesome hanger-on side effects from the local anaesthetic), but I did manage to get a bunch of work done for the office, and even book a real life, paying music gig in a couple of weeks, doing the acoustic solo thing at my local, Dancing Kilt Brewery, on December 8th. It should be cool. More details as I get them.

Otherwise, today I’m staring down a most-of-the-day virtual program management workshop that I’m not really leading, per se, but definitely backing up the leader, and I only got a very general agenda in my inbox this morning.

This is why I was having the “oh no, I final exam I didn’t know about or study for!” dream last night. But, I’ll muddle through, as I always do, then maybe go to the local taproom (where I’m playing in a couple of weeks) for a beer.

Nothing serious on the agenda for the weekend apart from hitting the drive-in for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and being amazed that I’m getting a movie with Namor the Submariner in it.

Anyway; tunes. All over the place, like my brain today. Yay:

1. “A Lesson In Leavin'” – Dottie West
2. “McKenzie” – Houndmouth
3. “Willin'” Linda Rondstadt
4. “Adeline” – Fever Dolls
5. “I’m On Your Side” – Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats
6. “How Low” – Heartless Bastards
7. “Positive Friction” – Donna the Buffalo
8. “Annie, Heart Thief of the Sea” – Kishi Bashi
9. “Five More Minutes” – The War and Treaty
10. “Keep Your Head Up” – Preservation Hall Jazz Band
11. “Bernadette” – Reina del Cid
12. “America” – Simon & Garfunkel
13. “Divine Intervention” – Matthew Sweet
14. “Midnight Rider” – Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings

Listen to the late Georgia Congressman and American Hero John Lewis, who I had the privilege of meeting oh-so-briefly at DragonCon in Atlanta (where he was cosplaying as himself from the era chronicled in March!) a few years back, and exercise your right and responsibility to vote today!

I post something like this pretty much every year, and I will continue to do so as long as I’m able to put fingers to keyboard, because it is one of the most important things you can do as a citizen; one of the most important, in fact. It’s you having your say on how the this country moves forward, and frankly, right now, there’s some real danger that this “grand experiment” in democracy might run into some trouble.

In every precinct in all fifty states, your congressional representative is on the ballot; that vote plays a *huge* role in what the next two years look like. Additionally, in states where I have potential readers like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Ohio, and North Carolina, there are hugely important Senate races, which may play an even bigger role. The balance of power in both houses of Congress is delicate right now, and depending on how things go, we could get more cool stuff like the infrastructure bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, and student debt relief (a hell of a lot to accomplish with such narrow majorities), or we could get nothing but gridlock, tax cuts for the rich, and attempts to impeach President Biden over bullshit.

Also, I shouldn’t have to remind you of what happened this summer regarding Roe v. Wade, and the impact of having Republicans in charge of the legislature on that.

There, I went ahead and made it explicitly partisan this year; I usually try to remain agnostic and just encourage folks to vote, but I’m not going to do that this time. Vote Blue, because the Democratic party’s got plans to lift all the boats, restore people’s rights, and improve people’s lives.

And yeah, make sure you take a look at your local races as well; remember, Critical Race Theory and kids shitting in litter boxes is all bullshit to distract you from what’s important. Also, there’s likely other less sexy things like the bond initiative that was on my ballot, which is all about improving infrastructure, libraries, and parks in my county, which will lead to immediate, tangible improvements in my community. There’s probably something like that for you as well.

But, yeah, if you haven’t already (like I did), go vote. It’s the least you can do.

First of all, I have gotten an imperial assload (much larger than a metric assload) of work done this week in the office, which is good and necessary.

However, said productivity has basically sapped all ambition for Friday morning. Oh, I’ll get a few things done on this last-minute acquisition package (the one I joke about in casual conversation, where I hire the world’s last three COBOL programmers for another year) that I thought I’d managed to finally pass on to someone else so I can ascend to the strategic leadership position I’m supposed to reside in, but progress is slow on my successor, and I’m too damned good at getting these things done quickly.

I am, it seems, irreplaceable. And it’s exhausting.

For the weekend, as mentioned previously, I’m doing the Bikes and Beers ride Saturday morning in the city, which I’m hoping is fun; I’ve not done one of their events before, but I know the host brewery is a good one.

Otherwise, I don’t many other plans – there are couple of interesting things popping up on streaming services this weekend, and I have some laundry to get through.

As for tunes this week, pretty jazzy overall, including my (not really) namesake at #3, and a cover of a CSN&Y tune at #5 whose simple but rock-solid bass line hit me just right.

It’s Hallowe’en. Enjoy, celebrate, do your thing. Get silly, get scary, indulge your inner cosplayer. I don’t advocate vandalism or that sort of thing, but if you’re gonna do that, TP and chalk graffiti don’t do any permanent damage, and it’s supposed to rain late tonight around here anyway.

Me? I’m probably not going to engage in any particular shenanigans; the youngest is going to dress up zombie-style and hand out candy; I’ll probably go for my Monday after-work hike and call it an early night; the gnomes are hammering on the inside of my forehead right now and it’s less than pleasant.

The weekend was a little more pleasant overall. Friday evening we went over to the ‘Kilt for drinks and music, and found ourselves in a bit of a Hallowe’en party. Saturday after taking care of the shopping, we went out to Williamsburg and had a wonderful time catching up with folks and listening to Griff’s Room Band’s reunion show; they guys sounded great, and were pleasant and friendly as always. Sunday I did a cold, early morning 25 mile bike ride starting on the west terminus of the VCT to get the hills in, watched a couple of scary movies, went shopping for last minute school project supplies, and closed things out watching 1922’s Nosferatu with Valentine Wolfe scoring it live over the internets.

The rest of the week was pretty standard; work, life stuff, and a final prep for the Bikes and Beers event ride in RVA on Saturday morning.

Oh, and congrats to the winners in the 2022 Pegasus Awards, in particular, my friend Summer Russell who won for “Best Filk Song.”. I seriously need to make plans to attend OVFF next year – so many great people I don’t get to see all that often.