My Music Journal 2025 - January 16, 2025

 

Thursday, January 16, 2025

Time: 3:43 PM
Song: Psalm for the Elks Lodge Last Call
Artist: The Weakerthans
Mode of Consumption: Spotify – List of possible songs from the year 2003 for Mixtape Challenge.

Line to song: https://open.spotify.com/track/50fBHxSJMSvCdQITydVLc2?si=e86212d8890d4882

This is the fourth post in my Mixtape Challenge for the songs from the years 2000-2004. 

Today has been a blitz of emails. Requests for this, meetings for that. The sort of day where you blink, and it’s gone from 8 AM and suddenly it’s 3:30 PM. Most days don’t go that fast here at ASE. There is usually a flurry of activity here and some more there, and in between you work on this or that. Listen to some music. Sometimes I scan Facebook quickly. That sort of thing.

Back in the journalism days, things were different. Every night was a sprint with the deadline approaching like a train in a tunnel. It required a master juggler when I was in the sports editing chair, balancing page design, copy editing, answering the occasional phone, and maybe typing a few roundup blurbs and box scores. That’s just scratching the surface, and doesn’t even take into account staff management, public relations, planning, and probably writing a column or a feature either for that night or the day’s to come.

We were a tight crew of journalists, even though the faces changed every couple of years. Often, we’d head to the local watering hole after putting the section to bed to get a beer or two in before the last call at 1 AM. Sometimes it was to one of the bachelor’s apartments for drinks and to watch some television.

There are years when that hour between midnight and 1 PM was the only normal thing I was able to do in a day. We got to share some laughs, blow off some steam, and talk shop. How can we get better? What should we be covering? What’s happening in the local scene?  

It was our little club, a group of night lifers with no real life other than local sports and computer screens. I miss that camaraderie, that feeling of belonging to something, but I don’t miss the hours, the low dollars, and the stress.  

But there was something both sad and satisfying about being the last person seated at a bar, taking that last gulp, and walking out the door to the world.

My picks for 2003

1. Happy Alone by Kings of Leon
2. Such Great Heights by The Postal Service
3. Heartbeats by Jose Gonzalez
4. Keep Me In Your Heart by Warren Zevon
5. Psalm for the Elks Lodge Last Call by The Weakerthans