1. A few days back, I noticed that my shoulders, neck and arms were really sore, even though I couldn’t think of anything that could or should have caused that to be the case. Last night, while we were watching a movie (I’m Totally Fine, featuring a bunch of Workaholics alums), I started to get a sore throat, which had gotten a lot worse when I woke up around 3am last night. I got up this morning, still feeling crummy, and, well, probably obvious where this is going . . .

Dadgummit!! To the best of our knowledge, Marcia and I have both dodged the myriad coronaviruses swirling about the world over the past couple of years, and we’re both fully vaccinated and boosted on top of that. I suspect that the teeming broth of wheezing humanity that we were exposed to while staying in a hotel in Las Vegas 10ish days ago exposed us to enough crud that whatever resistance we had to the bug was futile. We had three Christmas-type party events on the social calendar over the next five days, so those are all obviously off. Here’s hoping that by that five-day post-positive-test point that we’re both symptom free and (ideally) testing negative. Fingers crossed.

2. It’s been a rough week for drummers in the musical spheres in which I orbit. New Zealand legend Hamish Kilgour of The Clean went missing a week or so ago, and his body was found on Tuesday in Christchurch. The Clean (which Hamish founded in 1978 with his brother, David) provided the motive force behind New Zealand’s hugely influential Flying Nun Records scene, and served as a hub around which a variety of deeply-talented players revolved in the decades since. Hamish also provided a key component of the label’s visual identity, providing cover art for a variety of very important singles and albums. He was 65 years old, and no cause of death has been reported. Here’s a favorite song of mine by The Clean, culled from their last studio album, 2009’s Mister Pop:

Then today, I learned that The Stranglers’ Jet Black (born Brian Duffy) had died at the age of 84, a year older than my father would have been, were he still with us. Black had been an accomplished jazz drummer and successful businessman in the ’60s and early ’70s, before founding The Stranglers with a trio of players some dozen years younger than him. He kept the beat going through a variety of lineups and incarnations until 2015, when his health finally forced him from the road. The Stranglers had many hits in many styles over the years, and while they were marketed as a punk or punk-adjacent band early in their career, they never really were. The Stranglers’ music was typically far more sophisticated (musically and lyrically) than the usual three-chord shouty oi-oi-oi trebly thunder offered by many of their late ’70s peers; Black’s deft touch on the skins and the wonderfully widdly keyboard stylings of Dave Greenfield (also deceased) were key to that difference. It’s hard to pick a fave Stranglers song, but right now, thinking about the drummer, I’d go with this one, anchored as it with such a monolithic and massive Jet Black groove:

3. I wrote elsewhere today how I’ve long found it vaguely funny how older dudes like Jet Black were marketed as nihilistic kids in the early punk era, with their interesting back stories mostly erased, lest they not appeal to the coveted English youth market of the time. I was thinking about this already recently, when I was listening to the very psychedelic ’60s Dantalion’s Chariot this week, featuring Andy Summers in his pre-Police days, wearing a white kaftan and playing a lot of sitar. (Summers also later played with decidedly non-punk/post-punk Soft Machine and The Animals). When the Police first hit as a hip and hot “young band,” I can’t recall any mention of his prior experience, nor of Stewart Copeland’s time in the very proggy Curved Air. “Let’s just dye their hair blonde and spike it,” shouted the marketeers. “Hey nonny, look, they’re young punks!” I watched the excellent Dio: Dreamers Never Die documentary this week, and he was sort of in the same boat: he started as a soul/R&B crooner, trumpeter and bass player in the late ’50s before founding Elf in the late ’60s. That history meant that he was older than the other members of bands he later fronted to great acclaim (Rainbow, Black Sabbath and Dio), with his back catalog rarely if ever mentioned among the metal-heads in pre-Internet-research days. I suppose that’s one thing that’s nicer (maybe?) about living in a world where you can have all of the information you want about all of the music you like, right here, right now. It’s harder for marketeers to gloss over inconvenient truths in pursuit of false narratives, for sure.

4. We’ve been having damp and foggy weather here of late, which isn’t all that nice, but which does serve to remind me of just how grateful I am to not be living in the snow and ice belt anymore. A couple of mornings ago, I was up well before dawn (as I normally am), and went to the grocery store when it opened (as I often do), to get my shopping done before the tourist crowds wake up from their hangovers. The fog was as thick as I’ve ever seen it here while driving at a crawl to and from the store, and when the sun began to peek up over the mesas east of us, the world turned a series of most bizarre colors and textures. Photos don’t really do it justice, but I tried:

5. Yesterday, after the rain abated a bit, I went out for a quick hike up to a summit near our house that I have done many times. I got to a ledge point about two-thirds of the way up, after which the balance of the trip is pretty strenuously steep with a lot of hand work, and I was feeling far more fatigued than I normally am at that point, which I know know was likely because of the stupid virus doing its thing. So I decided to go down a back way that was longer, but easier. As I turned away from the edge, I snapped a photo with my phone, and stuffed it in my pocket. When I got home, I realized that I had several apps and windows opened, apparently having pocket dialed and posted and touched the phone’s screen while I was scrambling, and before it had locked. As I was closing everything out, I got to the photo app last, and somehow without meaning to, I had done this to the last picture I had taken . . .

I think that might be one of the coolest looking photos I’ve taken here, even though I have no idea what filters or effects produced it. So let’s hear it for the happy, pleasing accidents that happen when things aren’t going quite the way we want them to go!