Tag Archives: music

2026, Day Book, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, prose, the no-scape, winter, Working Class Literature

Daybook 2026 // Winter 2.2.26

from: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/feb/07/

“I’m betting he’s gonna swerve first.” – Phil Connors, Groundhog’s Day (1993)

Listening to my brother talk about major and minor keys in music, Seattle grunge, and the Beach Boys Death Cult (my term). What made the Beach Boys songs work wasn’t so much the song writing but the compositions around their voices. The actual songs, most of them, were dark, sad songs. What we’re living now is the decline of a Post-War Death Cult fueled by Beach Boys-style nostalgia. I was always fond of “Sloop John B,” a cute little ditty about a terrible boat ride. Then there’s the existential angst of “God Only Knows,” which, in a different key and composition, could sound like a Nirvana cover band. “I may not always love you / but as long as there are stars above you / you never need to doubt it” is a proclamation of love wrapped in the belief that there’s nothing after we die and if the speaker were to die in some war or a drag race or something, the beloved would then have to find some other starry-eyed lover who could write a different song in the same key about the temporary nature of love in the nuclear age.

Today, of course, is Groundhog Day, when the small cult that protects the inheritor rodent of Punxsutawney Phil gets all gussied up and prognosticates the entrance of Spring; I think of the movie, with Bill Murray and Andi McDowell and someone asks Phil Connor, Murray’s character about whether it will be six more weeks of winter and he says something about March 20… which is generally the Spring Equinox. People act like The Big Lebowski (1998) is a super zen movie, but if I had to think of a movie that might be an extended koan, it would be Groundhog’s Day.


When you wake up to the same day, day after day, written by the same death cult that gave us “Barbara Ann,” the only possible reaction is to eat as many pancakes as you can, kidnap a sacred rat, and drive headlong into the long light at the end of a tunnel. Embracing the fun may be the most zen moment you will ever have, over and over again.

re
peat
rep
eat
sew
so 
show
shovel
snow
go
sail
ing
go
leave
go
re
peat


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2026, Day Book, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, prose, the no-scape, winter

Daybook 2026 // Winter 1.27.26

I am trying to break the habit of allowing the algorithm to know what music I will want to listen to. This is challenging, not so much because I feel dependent on the tech, but because the algorithms do the work that FM program directors and DJs did when I was a kid. When I listen to the radio lately, I’m almost more intrigued by the songs I don’t expect and don’t especially like. It’s too easy to cater our realities. Now, and I am far less interested in a catered reality than in one that sometimes asks me to look up and see something organically new. This is a relative term, of course. The old sage sorrowed, “There is nothing new under the sun” but the old sage was also a bored monarch and hadn’t the advantage of centuries of scientific exploration. There is nothing new because everything carries the echo of something else, but over time the key signature, the tempo, and the tune changes. What is it to live in an echoless world? To be a baby. Knowledge is the acceptance of echoes, applied to every facet of living. But one must always leave a few beats open for the extraordinary improvisation. For craft and art.

it’s all a blues rift
all a deep howling
against the cold,
against the dark,
against the light,
against too little
against too much
against and for 
blues and banjo
man, blues and 
that mad jazz music
that made 
all the bigots worry 
where their wives 
got off to
while they were out
with the boys
hunting strange fruit
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2026, Day Book, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, winter

Daybook 2026 // Winter 1.22.26

Early morning, but maybe not too early. Once again, the dog knows where I belong.

Give me my pencil and a space of unused paper, a reheated cup of yesterday evening’s coffee, some music, a simple radio: listening to Muddy Waters on cassette. The sound of callouses strong enough to break glass and make those wound strings bleed a little. This is the lesson. We must practice, so we can make our tools bleed.

Bleed, ye! This is the Thursday Blues.

Try to push out of frame, for a while, the battles collecting themselves at my door, crowded next to the same old Truth. All I want is to write and be left to it, and maybe have a few small comforts. Love. Warmth. Decent coffee. I need to feel like I’ve earned my morning apple. I’d like this to include finding a way to pay bills that doesn’t suck my soul out through my nose. 

If possible, I would prefer the world not be perpetually burning. But that is an institutional obstacle.

Go back to bed, love. 
It just the house, burning.
Do not fret, love. 
Do not fret.
It will only hurt
this very little
very tiny bit.

The cassette plays stretchy and tired, especially on the bridge and guitar solo. There is a particular sound to fingers that find electric pickups amusingly quaint and unnecessary to the singing of the strings. A sound sung by calloused fingers that learned to make heavy brass wound strings cry and sing the blood songs of centuries. The cassette, it still plays, all tired and stretchy, until at some point, it will need a pencil to put it right.

In the winter of America
I am tired of the feedback loop
echoes of dead algorithms
programmed to sound like machines
running lights that themselves lie
and claim to be
long burnt out stars
still shining


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