(This is the first part of a five-part countdown by DGR of his 2024 year-end list, with each selection accompanied by his very extensive thoughts about the releases. Our plan is to roll out the rest of the installments on successive days until this week ends or falls into a sinkhole under the weight of his words.)
It feels like I blinked and suddenly a whole year had passed. Maybe it’s just the flow of life finally catching back up to me but this year moved in extreme fits and extreme starts and somewhere along the way I lost track of it among the deluge and wreckage that seems to be a daily existence. Among the piles of charred wood and still yet burning cars is another three hundred and sixty-five days of existence slowly signing its final paperwork and preparing itself to move on from the mortal coil.
At the very least, there was some sort of notification that this was coming. It feels like every year I open with some variation of ‘hey, this previous year sucked shit,’ and I’m pretty sure I’ve taken a similar tack to open up a few of the previous year-end posts – if only some sort of dipshit had done an anniversary post whereby he might have easy access to all his previous years’ transgressions upon the internet and the collective heavy metal world at large – so I’ll dispense with the usual landfill avalanche of thoughts pertaining to world events and the previous days gone by because, shock of all shocks, this year sucked.
Next year is likely going to suck too and the year after that will probably suck even worse. We’ll make the word ‘suck’ mundane through repetition, as if an ever-present shadow haunting our lives, by the time we’re done with this. Eventually, we will all lose all sense of what the word actually means and we will be permanently trapped in some sort of constant suck-vortex powerful enough that we’ll get dragged into court for infringement by Dyson and we’ll be numb to the common sense of suck surrounding us. We’ll have finally ascended into the boring dystopia I’ve bitched about that is coming for years. Just my luck I can’t even get one with decent Blade Runner lighting. Continue reading »
I’ve never been to the Bronx Zoo, though I have been to The Bronx. Did you know that in addition to being one of New York City’s five boroughs, The Bronx is also a separate county, with its own flag (shown to the right) and its own Latin motto, which translates to “Do not give way to evil”? Did you know that The Bronx was named after The Bronx River, which was itself named after