Consuming the Tangible

Last weekend I dropped my son off for his sophomore year at college. For the past month I’ve been trying to play guitar around my pinkie, which still won’t work right since being broken back in July, snapping and clicking when I slide up the neck, or even something as mundane as catching it in my own pocket.

Learning to live again without parts of myself. Still feeling the pain. Ghost limbs.

So much of what’s here are things I discovered I needed at key moments in my life, whether it was pretending I was Ritchie Blackmore with Rainbow as a young teen to helping my wife yesterday figure out whether The Womack Sisters and “If I Let You” was new (it was) and could she set it on repeat – for my sanity I said I would show her after the four hour drive back home.

There’s a vitality to the early recording from The Cramps that stretches from me to my son and nephews; somewhere Rollins’s ear perked up, a wolf hearing its history passed to the next pup in the howl of a twangy guitar. Speaking of cathartic howling, the new Chat Pile keeps pushing more melody into even more noisy sludge and the results might be their strongest statement yet, while my man Ty Segall gets back to the band with his best full-blown rock set in a decade in Chrome,

Am I now part of the Beyhive? I saw the anniversary edition of B’Day and immediately pre-ordered the deluxe edition, Which means I now own¹ more Beyoncé box sets than any other band?

Be safe, be good to each other. See you next week.

¹What do you call it when two words next to each other are different words but use the same letters in a different order? Is that a thing?