- Wondering, how did wooden ships of antiquity prevent water from getting in between the boards? Finding the simple answer: shipbuilders tarred the boards or overlapped them.
- Mavis’s raucous, fun show at Fitzgerald’s in Berwyn. A small club for her!
- Learning that the United States spent roughly $100 billion preparing for the Y2K bug.
- Playing with Kelly Hogan (with Nora O’Connor and Joel Paterson!), opening for Mavis Staples, at Thalia Hall.
- Mavis was so energetic and so hilarious on stage, even more than usual.
- The respect I have for venues’ in-house lighting directors, who pay attention and instantly adapt to music they’ve never heard before.
- Noticing that I’ve started using my pinkies when I type, the proper way, after years of childhood World of Warcraft-adapted improper speed-typing.
- Cooking a tomato rice bake thingy.
- Fiery Furnaces at Thalia Hall! Eleanor Friedberger, one of the greatest frontpeople.
- Sipping Mom’s chicken soup; ascending.
- Buying a bandsaw from a very friend-hungry-seeming macho securities trader.
- Inspired by 2021-11-09 and 2020-12-20: How shocking it can be when someone assumes you have bad intentions.
- Marginalia Search, a search engine that helps you discover “cool little websites made by people.”
- Craig Damrauer’s sweet zine of advice for his 18-year-old daughter, Stella (via Austin Kleon).
- Almost getting t-boned by a red-light-running pickup truck while I listened to the climax of Ornette Coleman and Pat Metheny’s “Endangered Species.”
- Seeing Finneas at the Vic. The screams of his fans, louder than screams I’ve ever heard in a theater.
- Playing drums harder than I can remember playing them in a long time, scaring myself a little. (They sound completely different at those velocities.)
- Buck Meek and Kidi Band at Lincoln Hall. Nearly crying at Adam Brisbin’s tuned-in guitar-playing.
- The spectrum of believing the world is full of assholes out to get you or sweethearts out to help you.
- That where you sit on that spectrum affects how you treat others. Believe there are assholes, preemptively be an asshole. Believe there are sweethearts, be a sweetheart. Roughly.
- How, in that way, your belief is self-fulfilling, since you too are part of the world.
- That some people claim to know the true nature of humans, so they present their asshole-sweetheart belief as scientific fact.
- How damaging that can be, when they influence other people with their beliefs, making the world a little bit more like the vision they claim is already reality.
- The recent (preliminary) discovery that some birds navigate by seeing the Earth’s magnetic field. That is, their eyes contain magnetic material that makes the planet’s magnetism visible, sorta, to them.
- Tailgating in the Costco Niles parking lot with a lox bagel from New York Bagel and Bialy.
- Resting post COVID vaccine booster.
- Casey’s baller fall stew.
- Getting a booster COVID shot! And a flu shot!
- Seamlessly replacing the missing slats from our 1968 wooden feature wall at the studio, using a slab of poplar we milled down and a stain-match from Benjamin Moore.
- Imagining the Agent Cody Banks-esque lab where Dyson [2020-09-30] invents new air-moving products.
- Lane Beckstrom’s Elements of Style (Lane, Jeremy Cunningham, and Dustin Laurenzi)’s badass show at Whistler.
- Organizing the leftover floorboards, loosely by length, at the studio.
- My first visit to Owl Hardwood. Walking through the aisles with wide eyes.
- Pancakes with Halloween candy in them, cooked by Casey.
- Walking with Mom and the rest of the Team Susan Miller Tweedy at the annual Light the Night Walk for leukemia and lymphoma research.
- Another joyous night of Cosmic Country Showcase / Lavender Country.
- Playing drums for the Cosmic Country Showcase headlined by Patrick Haggerty, AKA Lavender Country, creator of the first explicitly gay country album ever (in 1973). Patrick’s amazing stories about training and working in Cuba, getting kicked out of the Peace Corps, raising children, everything.
- A blip of self-doubt lately, about my music ideas, about my craftsmanship, about my long-delayed and under-executed personal projects.
- Treating my nightstand like a library: if I haven’t picked up a book in over a month, it has to go back to the shelf.
- The horse with cow-spot fur.
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