“In the long run, the survivors would still have been not the most ferocious strugglers but the most efficient fisherfolk.” – Kurt Vonnegut, ‘Galápagos’
As someone who likes the idea of a diary but has never kept one, it’s nice to use this blog to track my thinking. For the past two years, I’ve pretty consciously used the January books to set a kind of theme for the year. In 2024, I read A People’s History Of The United States, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, and Four Hundred Souls in the month of January. That ended up being a continual reference point for me, thinking about the USian project in these different ways during the year in which it slid into We’re Not Fascists But Don’t You Dare Question This Genocide We’re Funding Or Your Life Is Over, followed by The Secret Police Are Coming To Your House Fascism. This past January, I read all five books of the Hitchhiker’s Guide Trilogy in January, because I spent the year working on a sci-fi-adjacent collection of short stories, but not before I began the year with The Book of Delights by Ross Gay and Anarcho-Indigenism: Conversations on Land and Freedom edited by Francis Depuis-Déri and Benjamin Pillet.
Joy and delight are things I’m sort of relentless about wrenching into my life no matter what’s going on. I have a seven-year-old, and I refuse to be Grumpy Dad. I also have a loving wife who works hard at a job that ensures I can cook whatever we want for dinner. I also have a lot of friends, loving parents, smoke a ton of weed, and live in Chicago. Joy fucking abounds, my dudes. We’ll get to it a little more in the last section of this column.
The majority of the column, though, is gonna be about anarchy and horror.
ANARCHO-CURIOUS
What am I trying to say? Reading about Anarchism feels like going to a different domination for Sunday service—I’m still a Socialist, but there are a lot of overlapping characteristics. To be specific, I believe in a big federal government and a planned economy (I just happen to think it should run by the opposite of the people who have run it my whole life). That’s the Socialist part. The Anarchist part is believing in the power of bottom-up organizing. Believing in the power of the people. Believing that your own local community is the only place you can really worry about. To be clear, I always felt those things. This year did a pretty good job forcing me to cut through the noise there, though.
It does no good to sit scrolling Bluesky all day, watching ICE abductions unfold. I jumped at my first chance to go to a community defense training, yes. But my personal risk assessment did not include “go out looking for trouble.” Then, like Harry Stables, trouble found me. This has been detailed in, well, the previous hyperlink, but I feel a lot more like a Part Of My Community than I did three months ago. The people I’ve met on ICE patrols, the parents I’ve gotten to know at my kids’ school—it’s nice to have my suspicions confirmed that the people all around me were Basically Good. Politically speaking, I think 2026 is going to be worse than 2025. We need to stay agile, stay ready. Figuring out ways we can protect each other, figuring out ways we can fight for The Least Of These, Whomever That May Be Because It’s 99% Of Us—that stuff has to continue.
COSMIC HORROR
This is the year I officially started thinking that cosmic horror governs our actual world.
Now, a recent Defector review of The Chair Company—which I still haven’t watched, despite largely existing for the zipline and complaining that there’s too much shit on me when I wear a winter coat—has made me realize that I want to be careful when I talk about “unseen, barely-knowable evil forces.” The sentence in question, from Israel Daramola, reads: “Ron finds the same appeal in his conspiracy that many cranks cherish: the ability to glamorize an ordinary life and chalk its shortcomings up to the work of an unseen, powerful force. Ron’s only desire is to validate his own life, which hasn’t gone the way he originally hoped.” A dude never wants to see themselves in a Tim Robinson character, but here we are.
Still, in a time of climate crisis, when huge swaths of California or wherever burn every other year and Miami has sunny day floods so often they barely register it and the people of Tuvalu are migrating because their homeland will sink soon, in the time of this crisis that we have understood to be caused be fossil fuel burning since before I was born, the oil business is booming so much that Saudi Arabia can buy up half the sports leagues and most of the standup comics and nobody thinks twice. What else am I supposed to think of oil, except that it is a dark god causing world-ending madness in people? Speaking of world-ending madness, 2025 was the year “AI psychosis” became a common term.
One thing about cosmic horror seems to be that you don’t defeat the grand evil. In vampire/werewolf stories, there is always a stake to the heart/silver bullet. In slashers, the killer is vanquished if not killed. There’s no return to status quo in a cosmic horror, not in No Gods For Drowning, not in Extended Stay, not in Twin Peaks. Yet if you watch Twin Peaks S3, you see people have continued on living. The status quo has certainly been upended, but there is still a Sheriff Truman, you know? Lucy had a kid who had a loving father, no matter who the actual father might’ve been. Again we tie back to bottom-up organizing, to being a good member of your community, to living your values. If the big evil—capitalism, the climate crisis, the latest variant of USian racism—is too powerful to really be defeated, but you can’t live with yourself if you sit on the sidelines? Well, then you fight in smaller ways. You go on living how you can.
A NOTE ABOUT MUSIC
Apparently, I listened to 73% more music this year than last. Apple Replay (the Spotify Wrapped of Tim Apple’s company) isn’t my favorite thing in the world, because I’m not the kind of person who cares about personal stats. Especially when it comes to enjoying art. Still, I am a person who can get stuck in musical ruts. It takes work for me to sample the wider world, especially when so much of my music listening is about vibe-setting. This year, though, I made a commitment to listening to a bunch of stuff. Had a hell of a lot of help from Brendan, as always, plus various things like “Adrian invited me to a Charlie Hunter show” or “one of the dads at school pickup told me to listen to Big L.” It helped, too, when this year got difficult. Various new-to-me artists (Wavves, Meat Wave, and Madlib most especially) really carried me at times. I dove deeper on acts I already liked (Vince Staples and Noname come to mind) and discovered or re-discovered others (Cloakroom, Clipse, The Beaches, Okonski, the first D’Angelo record) that are now rotation fixtures.
It’s all made me feel, as I guess I need reminding from time to time, that music is something that is within me in a way I can’t ignore. There will always be new bands to check out, new songs to write. Even if “writer” is both how I’d like to be thought of and how I pay (my share of) the bills, “musician” is something I’ll always be. I’m glad to have listened to so much more music this year than last, because that means my brain was that much more stretched, challenged, and transported.
There wasn’t much songwriting this year—Burgers Or Tacos? was recorded in 20241. I did spend a lot of time thinking about new songs, and things I’d like to do in them. Behind With Knife featured characters who loved music, as did that aforementioned collection of vaguely sci-fi stories, as do other writing projects I’m working on in 2026. This is also a “music” year for Lazy & Entitled. Hopefully that includes the new B & The Shipwrecked Sailor record, possibly a Shipwrecked Sailor acoustic record, and potentially some B & The Nothingness songs. Whatever comes, I am glad music is such a part of my life. Yes, I wish I had a four-piece band and a practice space I could go to regularly. Hell, I wouldn’t mind playing some shows. But at this stage in my life, I’m happy with what and where music is.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
- have you listened to Burgers Or Tacos? yet? ↩︎