Looks like these guys in Austin, Texas have a time machine and travelled back to the 80s to bring this one back. Hello Bauhaus. Hello Sisters of Mercy. Hello ALTAR OF EDEN. This COLD WAVE thing has always been with us, it seems. You can pull it up for any give year in the last forty, and find credible bands with credible albums. Altar of Eden is more than credible. This release is from about a week ago, by the way, and it really does sound like it’s been pulled from some tape archive from 1985. Not that it’s dated in any way. It’s just along the same strand of DNA.

Cold Wave indeed. This one crunches along like the sound of an icy sidewalk beneath my boots. That’s a sound I could live in forever. It’s expansive. It’s dark. It’s cold. It’s perfect.

Writing is not going to be my strongpoint today. There is no discernible path between thoughts and the capacity to express them. It could be that I’ve not been reading enough, or that I haven’t had enough intelligent conversation in recent weeks. That’s the downside of the semi-quarantine lockdown. Extended threads of text messaging are barely enough to keep things warm. Texts and tweets and punchlines don’t provide enough fuel to keep the furnace hot. It is really a lot like muscle memory. What would happen now if I went to a social gathering? Would I be able to participate in conversation or would I sit there, dull and grinning? It would be akin to the first time in the gym in months. It would hurt in a way that could be felt for days.

It’s not that I’ve made no efforts to spark real conversations. Everyone seems to be in hibernation mode. To be fair, I belong to a network of hermits anyway. None of us are exactly social animals. But can we still even communicate without memes and emojis? Is that even a thing anymore? If it is, you wouldn’t know it from reading back any of my messages from the last few months. I’ve complained bitterly to a couple people with no change. One person told me that if I wrote a letter and mailed it, she would write one in return. That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, and I don’t truly believe she would. She would think about it. She may even start it, but it would never be finished, and then if it were finally finished there would be some other excuse like no stamps. I know my people.

I suppose what I’m expressing here is loneliness. It happens to me too. It’s not high up on my repertoire of feelings and my own company is usually more than sufficient, but everything has its limits. This has gotten a little silly.

At the same time, who really wants to be part of the current brunch bunch packing into Saturday shanties around space heaters? Talking about.. what? Maybe the topics don’t matter and it really is just about the proximity to other fleshy beings. If that’s the case, and I suspect it often is, I could just talk to my dog. And I don’t love avocado toast enough to eat it outside in February.

I’m such a fucking cynic. Lordy!

I’ve still no clue as to who sent the wee notebook with the message, “YOU’VE TOTALLY GOT THIS, MACGREGOR.” I’ve mentioned before that the people that I thought it might be have denied it. There are one or two more whom I won’t ask for fear that it is. There are a couple that I really don’t want it to be. Is that terrible? It’s honest but few people are going to accuse me of being nice. Honest and nice are often not even distant cousins.

It’s time for some fresh air, though. Very cold fresh air. We’re under a Cold Wave.