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50 Before 50: Who Needs A Bucketlist Anyway?

My 43rd trip around the sun begins today. I feel old. Last year, I did a weird thing and tried to break this list out by categories, but that seemed stupid and clunky to me, so I'm throwing the whole damn thing out and starting over from scratch, y'all. 1. I have a control resolution for my yearly goals, so I figure: 'Make it to 50' should probably be the first on the list here-- I am anticipating no troubles on that front, never fear, but life is life and you never know what could happen. 2. I want to fix my diet. I don't want to be on GLP 1s forever and if/when I do come off then, I want to have locked in new habits to make sure I don't instantly gain all this weight back. 3. I would love to get out on the river and row. Or learn to kayak. That seems like it would be an amazing way to view the world, as rivers are present 4. Get into Yoga/Tai Chi to help with hip pain and general flexibility. (Get in = do it on a semi-regular basis to the point where it become...
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Albums2010 Revisited: Layla (Tedeschi Trucks Edition)

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I think I saw a preview of Learning to Live Together (one of the coolest-looking documentaries I can recall seeing, which is, of course, on some random streaming platform/app that I don't have), and that was the first time I heard about the Tedeschi Trucks Band. I don't know what brought me back to them on Spotify, but I saw their re-release/re-recording of Mad Dogs and Englishmen, and then I also saw another recording of Layla as well. Sign me up- not that I don't like the original album; on the contrary, I do-- but I just thought it was the coolest damn thing that a whole other band was revisiting an entire album and just releasing it out into the world. I thought it was even cooler when I discovered that they had Trey Anastasio joining them on it. In a weird coincidence, Disintegration was #17 according to The Archives and guess what dropped at #18? That's right, The Layla Sessions .  Okay, let's talk about why exactly I'm such a 'stan' as the kids ...
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10 for 2026 Q2 Update

   Here's the 2026 Edition, Quarter Two Update:  1. A completed, working draft of Book 4 by the end of the year. I've got 40K words and it's time to figure out what to do with them. It needs a restructure. I know how it ends. I sort of thought I knew how it begins, but that might be changing, and I need to figure out the rest in between.  I'm revising the forecast on this downward-- aiming to get at least a good chunk of Act 1 reworked by the end of the year-- but work and life are eating a lot of my writing time currently, so I'm trying to find time to get some work on this done. I know, I know, I've been promising and teasing Book 4 for a very long time. At the very least, I can say that I have 40K words written down and I'm going to want to do something with them-- that at least I can promise. 2. Built-in bookshelves! (Also: fix the gutter, fix the window, privacy strips for the fence, get new doors hung in the back hallway, fix the van bumper.) This has...
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Albums2010 Revisited: Disintegration

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You can blame early South Park for this one. There's that Mecha-Streisand episode where the only person who can save the day is Robert Smith, lead singer of The Cure, who transforms into like a goth moth/butterfly to defeat her. And as he goes away, Kyle and Stan say goodbye and add, 'Disintegration is the best album ever!' Which naturally begs the question: is it? Honestly, I think I have a copy of this floating around somewhere on CD mainly because of this South Park episode, which is kind of hilarious if you think about it. Best album ever? Ehhhh, I don't know-- I think you could have it in the conversation, that's for sure. If you're showing me a list of 'Best Albums Ever' and this doesn't appear on it, I'm going to have questions and judge your list. A lot.  A deep dive into the Wikipage of the album reveals more: Robert Smith had a lot of anxiety about turning 30 at the time and 'felt an increased pressure to follow up on th...
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Albums2010 Revisited: Exile On Main Street

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So, I did snag this on vinyl (finally), and my original plan was to listen to it on vinyl and then report back, but I put it on and immediately realized that it was time for new needles again, so I pivoted to Ye Olde Spotify (Web Browser) for the listen. (Needles have been ordered-- or possibly located, because I swear every time I get needles, I put them somewhere and always, without fail, forget where I put them.) Spotify says this is an hour and seven minutes, which doesn't seem right to me somehow. This album has eighteen tracks on it and sweeps you away in all the good ways, so that while it's not interminable, it doesn't drag, and it's not boring; it does, in fact, feel far longer than an hour and seven minutes. An original entry on the Albums2010 run, my original review appeared a couple of blogs ago, all the way back in December of 2010.  I've always been weirdly ambivalent about The Rolling Stones, and I'm honestly not sure why. I'll listen to them...
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The Gerrymandering Doomcourse

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This might wind up aging like milk, but I think I'm going to say it anyway: Calm down about the gerrymandering thing . Look, I'm not going to say that it's not bad, okay. It's bad. It's a parade of bad. It's another shower of shit in a rain showerhead of shit we've all been dealing with in this country for decades-- but... (and this is a big-ass but) we can't possibly predict what the ramifications are ultimately going to be. The problem with gerrymandering is that you can only do so much of it before it has the very real potential to backfire on you. Texas is going to be fascinating to watch this year, because its gerrymander is based on the 2024 election results and assumes that every electoral result after that would mirror those. Given, you know, all of this (gestures broadly to the world at large), that's not a bet I would have made, but I'm not the Texas GOP. Also, I do expect you're going to see more state GOPs taking a pass on furthe...
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Albums2010 Revisited: The Dream of The Blue Turtles

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I accidentally stumbled onto this album again, and honestly, this wasn't even on my radar. I think a few TikToks of Sting's awesomely 90s music video for 'If You Love Somebody Set Them Free' floated by me, and then I just kept tugging on the thread again and again, and soon I was sitting down to listen to this entire album. Seriously: look at this music video and tell me it's not awesome: The strange part is that when I went back to the Archives , I found that this one didn't even make the original run of Albums2010, which is bizarre. This was one of the albums I clearly remember listening to growing up-- back when my parents had the full late 80s stereo setup in the living room of our house. (Everyone my age probably has some version of this in their memories: it occupied a full cabinet, had CD, tape, record, surround sound, and those sound bars that moved in time to the music?) This was one of those albums-- (along with his third studio album, Not...
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