He's finally come stumbling home

I feel bad about neglecting you, blog.

But real life staged an intervention. That and, after downloading some Limp Bizkit for an ecstatic blast of sheer nostalgia, I discovered that someone had quite seriously tagged it as "post grunge" and I threw up all over my keyboard and lost about a week of my life.

That and, y'know, work and exams.

Sometimes I worry whether my quality in one pursuit or another is indicative of any actual talent, an unequivocably personal expression of skill, or just mimicy with varying degrees of accuracy. Other times I wish my mind had an RSS feeder that put into print all of the disparate tidbits of the absurd that make me question my own wholesomeness. There'd be something in it for everyone. The hilariously mundane (why did that person look at me just now oh god I hope they like me) to the outright offensive (I wonder what faces that person makes during orgasm) would all be presented in impersonally glorious monotype and the internet would be scarier for it. The thing is, I don't even really will these thoughts to percolate through my admittedly thick skull the way they do, they're just sort of there - mechanical responses to stimuli I have little control over. I'm like Pavlov's dogs blessed with the cornucopia of human experience that is wikipedia, eight AM classes, and a libido - shit like this is bound to happen.

I think that, when you get down to it, we're all like Pavlov's dogs.

I'm just throwing these out here because it's mid February and I just don't want to write about them anymore. Don't look at me like that Jams, I wrote like thirty other reviews you can read. After this embarassing little hiccough fades from memory (and my hackles cease to raise at the thought of picking up writing again after a five, six, seven week absence), I can finally get back to what's really important: unstructured mediocrity.

Best of '06, ten to one:

10 Inhuman Rampage - Dragonforce
9 Orphans - Tom Waits
8 Beast Moans - Swan Lake
7 Ships - Danielson
6 Roots & Crowns - Califone
5 Return to Cookie Mountain - TV On The Radio
4 He Poos Clouds - Final Fantasy
3 For Hero: For Fool - Subtle
2 Gulag Orkestar - Beirut
1 Six Demon Bag - Man Man

I really tried to give each of these albums a solid dissection, but it proved too much a task for even one such as myself. Of course I did express my exhaustive, semi-erotic love of nearly half these albums already, so what's the harm in a little cop out? It was agonizingly difficult to put these ten little albums in any semblance of just order, which - among the many other parts of my excuses - can explain my long absence, at least a little bit. Indeed, upon finally placing Beirut ahead of Subtle, and marking my most excrutiating decision down in words, I did suffer a stroke and very nearly swallowed my own tongue.

Mustering up the cajones to once and for all proclaim that Six Demon Bag was the uncontested best album of two thousand and six cost me the use of the right half of my body for nearly a fortnight.

I don't know how to explain what this terminal stretch of my latest, oddest project means, and I'll be damned if my meagre praise can accurately express the quality of workmanship, the veracity of art that each of my choices represent.

Just listen to the freaking things. I'm tired.