Ack Phhht!

Posting, obviously, has been on the slow side the past month or so.  I’ve been blaming it on computer problems — which is true, to a point (I finally reinstalled the OS over the weekend, and largely have things working again) — but the reality is, I’ve been in a bit of a music slump all month.  No big deal, it happens to me from time to time — it’s just that nothing’s really managed to get me excited for any sustained period of time, and so other than posting news about my favorite groups, and the occasional YouTube video, I haven’t really felt like I had much to say.

One thing that’s sort of come out of this is that I’ve — belatedly — discovered the joys of running my Zen on “shuffle all” and listening to whatever happens to pop up.  At the risk of sounding like an old man — like a slightly befuddled 55-year-old reporter trying desperately to grasp FaceBook — I never really saw the point of listening to everything in my library mushed together, even though I know several people who swear by it, because usually I like to listen to music from a single genre, or a couple similar genres (similarly, I’ve never liked the clichéd college radio approach of Beethoven followed by AC/DC — and I say that as someone who was a college radio DJ for several years).  But as it turns out, when I don’t really feel like listening to anything in particular, having fairly radical stylistic shifts and odd juxtapositions between songs isn’t a bad thing at all.  Sometimes you even pick up random facts you’d somehow failed to suss out up to that point (like just how many damn Replacements songs I have in my library, or that apparently I don’t know all the tracks on Nowhere backwards-and-forwards like I thought I did).

I seem to be mostly coming out of my slump now, so maybe posting will get back to “normal”, whatever the hell that means.  Or maybe not.  At least, with my computer fixed, I can get new music onto my Zen again (which reminds me, I’m overdue for a “new music” post).