Did a classic rock set on #ds106radio last night. It started as an attempt to do the “My 9 Albums” thing that’s going around Facebook but that idea became this:

Between Love Shack and Would I Lie To You, you’re supposed to get Ordinary Man by The Swanky Modes (a.k.a. Junior Walker and Sam Moore in the movie Tapeheads). The fact this isn’t on Spotify is Gen X erasure and I won’t stand for it.

And then at the end, tipping my hand towards next week’s Halloween show, I played Bill McClintock’s latest mashup.

But the real reason for this post is that I wanted to share the monologue I wrote for the show, which sits between “Would I Lie To You” and “Hard Drive.”

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One of my favorite birthday greetings is “Happy trip around the sun.” (I have a clear memory of getting this phrase from Barron Koralesky, but lots of my friends have said it on Facebook so maybe not.) 

I like the way that it marries the very linear process of aging, the numbers clicking up like an odometer, with the solar sense of being right back where you started. This year I choose to think about liminality, the way this October 21st touches 56 others. Instead of thinking about last year and next year, maybe this is a good time to think about what T.S. Eliot meant when he said 

We shall not cease from exploration 
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started 
And know the place for the first time.

Autumn flipped the Eastern Kentucky weather like a switch, and it was a cold morning as I started thinking these thoughts. Walking the dog as the sun was just coming up, liberating the mist collected at the feet of the mountains. Remembering that it was just about a year ago, a year yesterday in fact, that I reached out about college housing at my new job, a year in 10 days that I was in the back of a car touring this housing development and thinking anyplace with this many big Halloween displays must be all right. And here I am, walking past those same fake graveyards, plastic skeletons, inflated Bluey and Stitch in their trick or treat costumes. Maybe it’s also the nearness of my birthday to Halloween that puts me in this liminal mindset. Nothing like a plastic witches’ cauldron to remind us of Faulkner saying “the past is never dead, it’s not even past.”

It’s been a rough year. Not the worst of 56, and frankly not close, but pretty well seeded in the bracket. And as I was walking the dog, the Oracle of the iPod picked Hard Drive by Cassandra Jenkins. It’s from an album, An Overview of Phenomenological Nature, that is viscerally about grief – so much so that I only listened through it once when it reached me in 2024, and thank you but I’m damn sure I don’t need the whole thing now. But I am in love with that song, these lyrics which are all about being seen, recognized, related to, by strangers and acquaintances and old friends. About how, as delicate as hope can be, it takes surprisingly small acts of care to flourish.

I finally went out to a purely social happy hour, for my birthday. I mentioned to one person, a new faculty member, that I was going to invite people out for a drink, and she asked if she could send out the invites for me. We got a very pleasant turnout, and even a second shift when another group of colleagues happened to come through after a different event.

“Purely social” being a matter of perspective when it’s all folks who work together, talking about work, descending on the College-owned hotel bar. But that’s also how an awful lot of good things started for me at Kenyon – walking through the Kenyon Inn and discovering I had friends trying to start a happy hour in that hotel bar. And as I sat in Boone Tavern on Wednesday, joking about the way that happy hour, pre-COVID, was the most productive hour of most weeks, I felt my Kenyon friends deeply. Missing them, and joyfully in touch with them again. It’s kind of comforting that our old ghosts can find us in new places.

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Featured image is my own photo of a neighbor’s Halloween display.