One Year and Counting!!!

(Photo of EC as he once again realizes that he has dedicated much of his life to discussing fighting robots)

It’s celebration time!!! And everyone is getting a present! But you’ll have to read to the end of the post to find out what it is.

Beyond all belief and contrary to all predictions, the blog is still up and running one year after I made the first posting. Even I’m surprised about this. I’ve been chronically my misadventures in this world for a long time now and typically I will always hit a patch where I write nothing for about two months and somehow I have avoided it this time around. That is worth celebrating in and of itself.

A couple of days ago I went back and looked at my first post because I remembered that I listed some goals for this site as the ground rules of what I wanted to accomplish. Here’s what I hoped to achieve a year ago.

1) Daily updates composed of whatever interests me at the moment
2) Have people actually read this
3) Have people I don’t know actually read this
4) Finally do something significant so that I’m not lying when I say that I’m a writer

Amazingly, I went four for four. I really want to thank everyone who has read the postings and commented on them. Especially those people who have never met me, it really is a thrill to realize that someone has stumbled across your page and felt compelled to enter a comment. I have some new goals in mind for the next year but I am going to wait a little bit before I post them. Have to make them actionable and measurable and all of those fun MBA terms. I will promise better grammar (an ever popular request) and thanks to my acquisition of one of those handy dandy picture phones, more pictures. The focus is still going to remain the same with equal doses of music reviews, pop culture analysis, philosophical musings, and making fun of Kansas. I mean, why fix what isn’t broken. As always, I am more than open to requests or ideas.

I really do want to thank everyone who has ever taken time to read this site. When I started this it truly was a lark and I doubted that I would be writing it past New Year’s. Now I wonder if I’ll ever be able to stop. So, since reading thanks doesn’t really carry much weight in the world I’ve been wondering how to best show my appreciation. While I still want to do t-shirts at some point in time I didn’t think that really tied to what this site has been about over the past year. If there has been one constant theme throughout it is how music shapes and defines my life. And as a result, I would like to offer everyone reading this “Battling the Current: Volume 1”.

If you enjoy my taste in music, this disc will be for you. If you ever wonder “who the hell are these bands that he keeps mentioning”, then this disc will definitely be for you. It is going to be a sampler of a lot of the songs and bands that have been referenced over the past year. A partial listing is The Frames, Josh Ritter, Neko Case, Uncle Tupelo, Jeff Buckley, Kelly Willis, Julie Delpy (yes, she actually has a CD), Ryan Adams, the Waco Brothers, and many more. I’ll post the full track listing on Sunday and hopefully the image of the cover art. Yes, this is going to be a full CD with cover art and liner notes and everything. Because if Battling the Current is anything, it is a high class organization.

All I need from anyone who is interested is an address. Send an email to kcgatsby@aol.com with your information and it’ll be on its merry way in the next week or so. For those of you who know me personally (or at least know my other email addresses) feel free to get in touch with me anyway you feel like. This is my way of celebrating and hopefully introducing people to a lot of great music to boot.

I’ll close with this. I’ve had a couple of people ask me why in the world I am writing a blog, that it seems like an awful lot of effort with no real purpose. As always, Kurt Vonnegut put it best:

“The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

That’s all I’m trying to do out here, create something. Maybe what I write is enlightening, hopefully the postings are at least funny, but the one thing that no one can take away from me is that they are mine. Thanks everybody and have a great weekend. I’m off to Harry’s for a toast…