Songs From Dreams, New Year Here, And What Else Is New?

Hello all, we’re officially out of the holiday season and back to the grind. I’m not terribly excited about getting back to the grind, but what are you gonna do? Nothing, that’s it.

It was a lovely time off. Seeing all the kids in one place was great. Christmas Eve, our oldest and their partner arrived early in the day. Along with my parents, my wife, our 22-year old and the grand pooch Celeste we all hung out during the day, ate snack foods and enjoyed each other’s company. Our son and his girlfriend couldn’t make it as my son had to work till 5:30. They drove up late that evening and stayed with his girlfriend’s family.

Christmas Eve “Eve” we watched The Black Phone, then The Naked Gun with Liam Neeson. It was a great way to end the day, with horror AND humor.

Christmas Day we had homemade cinnamon rolls and coffee. The boy and his girlfriend showed up around noon. We all gathered in the living room and did our Secret Santa gifts. Then around 2:30 we headed to my parents house for the holiday ham and all the sides. It was a really nice get together. My sister-in-law, niece and my niece’s husband came over, but my brother stayed home. He was only three days out from his kidney surgery and wasn’t feeling very well. He was also fever-ish, and that’s always scary just a few days out of surgery. The next day he ended up in the ER and found out he was dehydrated(after a couple days he was much better.)

New Year’s Eve we spent at home, watching movies and not doing much else. We did stay up past midnight, which was the first time I’ve done that in a few years. Finished the night watching the finale of Stranger Things.

Work has been kind of a bummer for awhile now, so heading back after being off for a week and a half feels heavy. Between working for a major corporation for a quarter century, watching our government let insurance costs double and triple for Americans while they spend millions invading countries we have no beef with, and just the general consensus among middle and upper class Americans that billionaires and trillionaires are people too, I just don’t see this country the same way anymore. People voting against their best interests in the hopes the billionaire class is going to see them has human(they never will) and share their wealth(they won’t) and create jobs here in the America for Americans(not going to happen.) Meanwhile the biggest pedophile/child trafficking ring we’ve yet to see(besides Catholicism) is still being left in the dark/ignored/hidden, while wars are being created to distract us from it.

And while a lot of people that voted for all of this are wishing they’d saved their receipts so they could return this dumpster fire to the polls, they’re being quiet about it. Like quiet quitting, except this is quiet regretting. It’s going to take years, maybe decades, to fix everything this administration and it’s leading rotting corpse has done in just the last several months. Between watching the doc Cover-Up, about investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, and rewatching the Adam McKay film The Big Short, I know we as a people and nation are fucked and have been fucked far longer than just since Trump’s authoritarian grift.

To get my mind off of all the big bummers I’ve been tweaking some songs and will be releasing a full-on new album of music very shortly. A month or so ago I found a CD-R in my desk drawer with nothing written on it. When I put it in the CD player it had 8 original songs on it, songs I had apparently wrote and recorded several years ago. It was weird hearing them, as they did sound like something I would have come up with, but I had no recollection of making them. It was like hearing songs that you came up with in a dream, but by the time you woke up they had already disappeared into the ether.

Except, apparently I had a recorder going and recorded them before they were completely gone.

I’m actually pretty excited about these songs. There are two that I had used as part of a 18-minute “suite” of sorts I put out back in early 2020 called ‘Drones’. It was three songs I’d put together as one long piece. But the rest have never seen the light of day. They will be new to you…as well as being kind of new to me.

I was already in the process of putting a release together, so 2026 will at least be fruitful musically. And I’ve been working on art the last couple of weeks, too. The creativity is here at least.

Well, I hope everyone had a nice holiday season. For those heading back to the 9 to 5, I feel you. For those retired, well, keep enjoying it folks.

Ready or not, 2026 has entered the building.