Now is the Winter of Our Discontent

With the end of the year careening toward us like a Ford Explorer driven by that really old guy you work with, we all look to the skies in hopes that Quetzalcoatl, the mighty King of the Mayan Gods (maybe, I don't know, who cares?) is going to come swooping down on his fiery chariot to finally take sweet, sweet retribution for his people against the White Scourge, who conquered the continent on which I now reside.  2012 is going to be glorious.  With the rapture predictions all dried up, our last mortal hurdle before we can just go back to high-fiving each other and watching Jersey Shore reruns alone in the dark is the terminus of the Mayan calendar, which spells our doom.

Isn't it fun to think about?

Now that winter is finally upon us (not in Texas, mind you; it's like 75 degrees here), we all know that now is the time when we start making plans to avoid our families for the holiday season (I have to fly out to California to avoid mine, and even then I have to spend it with my wife's family instead).  But if you're a blogger/blog enthusiast/nerd loner like me, you also know that now is the time to start constructing your yearly "Top (number) (whatever category you're talking about) of (whatever year it's almost done being)" lists!  Oh, the glorious fun of judging people's best efforts to express themselves artistically by way of putting their efforts in numerical order.

In fact, the act of putting things in numerical order from best to worst is my favorite thing to do, especially when the subject of my rankings are something perfectly subjective.

Actually that's not true.  I mean, I do totally love giving things rankings.  I'm still trying to nail down the military ranking system so that I can make my favorite album of the year Rear Admiral or General of an army of albums which would be the best album's subordinates, so that Cephalic Carnage's Mislead by Certainty could command, with cool decisiveness, to send Bison B.C.'s Dark Ages to it's certain death for the good of the nation.  What glorious discipline they have, and a willingness to sacrifice!  But since I'm lazy and I don't actually care that much about enacting my stupid military ranking system, I prefer to just whittle my time away when things are slow at work by constructing complicated flow charts of albums that I've listened to this year of Post-It notes with crudely drawn penises next to the artist's name to indicate how much I like the album (bigger is better in this case.  Ladies, am I right, or am I right?)

I guess that what I'm really trying to get at in all of this is that I haven't been doing much lately.  Between bouts of combing my hair and playing Batman: Arkham City and watching Law and Order: SVU on Netflix, all I've really been doing is making lists.  Listing my favorite songs of the year, favorite albums, biggest surprises, biggest disappointments, best demos, best shows, and so forth, turning my desk into a hot pink (yes, that's my favorite color of Post-It) mess of band names and penises all pointing to the vertex of the diagram, which is a drawing of me with my mouth wide open, ready for whatever is going to fly in so I can consume it.  But what is most enticing?

I feel like Dwayne Hoover; my head swims.

I should mention that I've been reading lots of Kurt Vonnegut books lately, too.

What I'm really trying to say is that I'm putting together a festival for the end of the year.  I guess that's the announcement right there!  But since I don't know anybody, it's going to be at my apartment, and the musical guests will appear courtesy of Spotify and iTunes and my CD collection.  Come on down!  Admission is only $600 per person, and the music won't be played loud because I'm a good neighbor and I don't want to upset the Eastern European cab driver who lives next door to me because I imagine he's a really bad motherfucker.  You should hear his accent!  And if you need a place to crash, you can sleep on the floor next to my chinchillas.  They might like to make a lot of noise at night because their main source of entertainment is an old air horn I stole from some police boat, but they're also adorable.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that I need some suggestions for things to listen to before the end of the year.  I don't trust other blogs anymore because of my increasing paranoia, and because I've taken to breaking into other people's apartments to primp myself in the mornings, leaving my computer too far away to find out what the guys at Metalsucks think of what the dudes in Ratt have been up to.

What an odd post; I'm going to put it up anyway, but I blame the fact that, while I write this bizarre string of nonsense for the Interhole to politely ignore, I'm listening to a Made Out of Babies album that I'm actually enjoying a great deal.

Suggestions for music to hear in the comments, please.