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One of the things I miss the most about The Old Web: pages like this. One person or group of people curating a list of fan-submitted guitar tabs for a given band. So much love, passion and thoughtfulness in one place.
I’m working on building and tracking some small habits that will bring me joy and better mental health. One of the things I’m tracking is “play the guitar for at least ten minutes a day.” I’m up to 8 days in a row for the first times since… my 20s? my teens?
Please join me on the new Mastodon instance I just spun up, hejira.is, a place for like-minded individuals to beatifically discuss their appreciation of Joni Mitchell’s 1976 masterpiece.
Dropped into my local record store around lunchtime. Clerk saw me, walked over and said “Dude, I have a truckload of new, super clean 80s indie and alternative in, but that copy of ‘Green’ I posted on Insta last night just walked out the door.”
I feel very Seen. It feels good.
Listening to the audiobook of Insanely Simple, in which author Ken Segall relays a story about Steve Jobs proudly demoing a “with special offers” version of OS 9 that would ship with a 60-second startup commercial, along with other ads throughout the OS.
I’m going to maybe spend the rest of the day thinking about this alternate timeline.
Currently charging my son’s shoes via USB for his first day of school because that’s a thing you do in 2018.
Ben Gibbard’s been doing the rounds to promote Death Cab for Cutie’s quite good new record, Thank You For Today.
Gibbard was asked to force-rank all eight Death Cab albums, and his answers were somewhat controversial (The Photo Album is way too low for my liking). However, it’s this interview with Entertainment Weekly that stuck with me.
EW asks Gibbard about the 15-year anniversaries of both Transatlanticism and Give Up. His answer is very illuminating, and incredibly self-aware:
When I look back at 2003, it was the best year I’ve ever had creatively: having Transatlanctism and Give Up come out in the course of six months. I’ll never have another year like that.
I can’t imagine how difficult it is to admit that your best creative work occurred fifteen years ago as a working recording artist, promoting a new release with major label backing.
About 8 years ago, we received a coffee grinder as a Christmas gift. It was a very thoughtful gift, because my wife and I both love coffee. Except that after a pretty short while, it became a hassle. Grinding beans is just another step in the morning, I don’t notice much if any taste difference, and it’s almost impossible to make a cup in the morning with my son asleep.
Yet still, we bought bag after bag of whole bean coffee. Because we had a grinder, and we couldn’t let that go to waste, y’know?
Finally, I had a Moment of Clarity on the subject. I realized that this was silly, and that we should just buy ground coffee, and that we should ignore the “sunk cost” of already having a grinder. I felt enlightened as I went to grind beans for presumably the last time this morning.
The coffee grinder was dead.