Writing a book on the guitar solo in Pink Floyd's "Time," 1961's The Hustler, sports stats whose luster has lessened, and a couple of strange baseball exhibition games.  

Walking etiquette, Orson Welles, Beatles.

The state of the Red Sox and Bruins, Jimmy Blanton, Crosby vs. Ovechkin, and a quintessential work of New England art. 

"We’re much like Chekhov’s traveler now. We confer value on what we don’t have, or where we’re not yet at. We know others are present in this 'over there,' and we worry that we are innately lacking. The procession, the parade, matter much to us because they’re all but officially earmarked as the measuring sticks of consequence."

Cadbury Eggs, Messiah, Trane, Beatles, science fiction, and the most important commodity in the world. 

Talking about the difference between chemistry and connection and more. 

A piece for The Smart Set. "Blanton was the man who freed the Ellington sound, who made all future  sounds, it seemed, attainable. I’ll venture that no one in jazz history has played an instrument better than Blanton played the bass, but I almost hesitate to term what he did bass playing."

Walter Page, sonic liberator. "We’re talking music as elemental as the weather, a sea throwing itself against shore-rock again and again, the incessant “I’m not going anywhere” advance, and yet so orderly, controlled, both repeatable and always new. A daring empiricism, an improvised science of rhythm-making."

Don't Dorian Gray yourself. "But she didn’t know. She’ll probably never know. The point is the cliché. And it is the clichéd life that is a kind of death. Or, if you wish to be less macabre, we can just call it hardly a life at all. Not  the life of an individual."

Being plagiarised, new New York Daily News op-ed, the meaning of actual happiness. 

Why degrees are meaningless and more. 

Dating site dementia, hockey showdown, an insurance investigator, searching out West. 

Carter Family, Archie Bunker, sports ratings dip, Ambrose Bierce. 

"He wrote a huge amount of short stories — 250 — and 850 fables in a period when writers of imagination actually wrote; as in, wrote often and wrote well, rather than what they do now, which is talk about writing without actually creating anything and bragging about how they are off for another writer’s colony vacation funded by someone else."

Letterman. "Words can't express." "You can't make it up." Black coffee. Pitting the best player from each of the four major sports against each other. 

On 1981's My Bloody Valentine. 

Tom Brady and aging. 

Supermarket space eaters, some Hawks, some Yardbirds. 

Stop telling everyone--and yourself--that you're old. "The dad bod is not some necessity of being 50-years-old, or whatever age you are. You’re free to dispense with it, transform it. Those views  you’ve held for decades? They can evolve in six months, and then you have fresher, better views to work with, perhaps to transform again, as you journey forward. What often stops us is complacency enabled by a culture of complacency."

The imbecility of "I don't do drama," Voodoo Macbeth, some Beeb Animals, one of the funniest radio episodes ever. 

Hank Aaron, the 1980-81 Boston Bruins, Lord Byron's "When We Two Parted." 

The music surrounding Kind of Blue. "The seraphim vibe is in place, but also the smoky rhythm and blues flavor. “Two-Bass Hit” — a good test for how well a band meshes — is  indicative of how this unit could flat out steamroll you — in a good way  — when they wanted to."

The Hammer as the perfect ballplayer. "Hank Aaron must have come to spring training every year like he’d hit .247 the season before with 18 dingers and 63 driven in, rather than his  standard .300-plus, 40 bombs, 120 RBI. Players would get bigger, but you see Aaron on any of his beautiful late 1950s Topps baseball cards, and you think he’s some paragon of pliability. A human whip equipped with the strongest hands in the history of the sport."

Conversation about new fiction, Billie Holiday, the Celtics of forty years ago, the Troggs. 

A story called "It Was Night." "It was night in my brother’s brain for a long time. That was how he described it to me. 'Like a place where there’s no sun. But it’s hot, black beads of sweat pouring down you. And then eventually I died.’"