It’s December, and that means we’re deep in the middle of List Season. All the professional knowers and taste arbiters compile lists of 25 Somethings You Should Something and try to out-cool each other by namechecking cultural touchpoints nobody has heard of. The big ones never fail to disappoint; reading Stereogum’s 50 Album list isn’t quite as pretentious as Pitchfork, but the vast majority of artists are unknown to me. Happy to see Drug Church, Beach House, Soccer Mommy, and Spiritualized(!!) on this list; he ratio of bands I’ve listend to this year to bands I’ve heard of to who is this? is about 5:15:35 in the list of 50. Get Off My Lawn, etc.

One good thing these lists provide is isolating some new music worth checking out, which I will do after triangulating across several of them.

We went to Finn’s chorus recital last night, which was quite lovely and mercifully short; spending more than an hour in a gymnasium with 400+ people in winter coats can get pretty close pretty quickly. They did well; there were only a few off-key notes across three grades, which was a blessing. Watching young gawky middle-schoolers file on and off the bleachers and giggle with each other reminded me of a time when the music program at school was my lifeline; all of my new friends were part of the band, orchestra or chorus. Our high school had a serious music program, something I was invited to early—I played upright bass for the high school orchestra in 8th grade, when I was technically still in junior high. The concerts were always fun but what I remember the most was that incredible time after the concerts, when my friends and I would go and hang out at the diner, jamming ten people in a 4-top booth to share a plate of fries and nurse a coffee under the watchful glares of the waitresses, laughing and killing time together until curfew hit. That feeling of finally finding a place to fit in was huge, and perhaps because I’ve been jammed in the house for so long, afraid of what the the world has become around us, crashing against the early 50’s question of what have I been doing for 30 years of my life and what does it mean, and thinking about my daughter’s future in all of this, I was feeling giant blue waves of nostalgia for those days of innocent, wide-open freedom.

I’ve had a dozen or so sales on my storefront so far, mainly variants of the Scout II grille designs, which totals out to a pretty depressing amount of money. That’s mostly because I pushed the store during a holiday sale, where the cost of T-shirts (and thus my percentage) was dramatically reduced. And, as you might expect, likes and shares do not equate to sales. I think I have to keep feeding the store with new merch; I hve an idea for a holiday-themed shirt but it’s going to take a couple of days to put together, and I’ll most likely run out of time before the holidays.