Last month was the first time in forever that I didn’t finish at least one mix. I suppose it was a busy month what with the holidays, but in truth I was probably just listening to classic rock. Ever since I moved to Omaha, I’ve fallen back to bad old nostalgic habits. But this January mix is solid. The new Charlie Martin and Weyes Blood albums are terrific, mellow recordings, and I was even pleased to hear a Yo La Tengo song that didn’t bore me.

“Guthrie” by Julien Baker sounds like it could have come from her first album, Sprained Ankle, and it’s marvelous. I was napping with a cold yesterday and it came on. I was still dreaming but I could hear it in my earphones somehow, and my mind was charging me to listen to it, really hear it and nothing else, and I started sobbing in my dream, just moaning and wailing because it was so beautiful and I haven’t wept in many, many months. My old four-square house in Chicago was perfect acoustically for filling with music. I used to blast Sprained Ankle and pretend I was an oversensitive twenty year-old stumbling through life instead of an oversensitive forty year-old. I woke up from the dream and I hadn’t cried but something good shifted in my mind.

In writing news, Lost Balloon nominated Moses in the Chevy for a Pushcart Prize and Longleaf Review Sundays with Carolyn for Best American Short Stories. A nice confidence boost since all the short fiction I sent out this fall didn’t land anywhere. I’m combing through my novel manuscript and it’s taking forever, but I’m much happier with how it reads now. Halfway done. I still like it, phew.

The picture above is of the bizarre ice formations that form on our bathroom window every year when the temperature falls to single digits. Old glass, river deltas, sandbars, the mighty Platte.