They say life is a marathon, not a sprint. I do not know who this “they” is – perhaps Big Marathon – and I do not know what they have against sprints, but it seems not quite right. It feels to me like life is more like the Indianapolis 500 – every year or so you find yourself back where you started, and every so often, there’s a pit stop, and the last fifteen months have been the longest pit stop in recent memory. There are apparently these videos out on the Intertubes of fantastic pit stop crews changing all four tires in, like, three seconds, and all I can say is that the folks who have been changing society’s tires recently are not them.

So there’s this thing that many of you probably know about, called February Album Writing Month (FAWM). And, like they say, it’s all right there on the label: write an album in February. And here we are, in the middle of a pandemic, and given that there ain’t much else to do, I thought to myself, what the hey, let’s give this a shot. Now, because the Internet needs to take everything and ruin it by turning it from a thing to a Thing, and so there’s a Web site, http://fawm.org, and you can sign up and do the social media thing and meet all the other FAWMers, as I’m sure they call themselves, and trade songs and get feedback and do all the Internetty things that gives introverts like me a case of hives. 

My wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, is not a sentimental woman. This is a fact that I, with a heart as soft as cotton, find almost completely mysterious, but contrasts are what make the world turn, so there. However, there are some things for which my wife is a bit of a sucker, and one of them is Christmas. Not in a “flood the house with tinsel” sort of way, but in that New England way that’s quiet as snow but just as imposing. Read more »

There are very few things in life that I enjoy more than a good laugh. I mean, well, ice cream, sure, but a good laugh comes in a close second. OK, well, my wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, better than ice cream, so maybe a good laugh comes in a close third. I can live with that. Read more »

I’d like to share with you an amusing tale that has nothing whatsoever to do with international pandemics. Nope, just kidding. It’s pandemic all day, every day, all the time. Fun for the whole family! Read more »

I’m gonna do a little house concert thingy! Read more »

Write what you know, they say. Read more »

Last night, my wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, encountered someone she knows saying something regrettable on the Twitter machine. Read more »

A few nights back, I got a email from the mailing list of one of my faves, Kristen Ford. Kristen used to host the open mike at Bloc 11 in Somerville, quite a while ago, and she’s living in Nashville now, spending a lot of time on the road, touring, and she passes through Boston relatively often. Kristen does the sort of thing I love – high energy performance, eclectic power folk/pop, just a pleasure to hear and see. And on that very night, her email said, she was playing at the Lizard Lounge with two other acts, and lo, I just happened to have the evening free. Kismet! Read more »