Sometimes it’s hard to recognize progress if you don’t record it along the way. Fortunately, this digital age makes pretty easy to look through your past photos by date, or past updates on social media, and find some highlights.
Here’s a list of some personal accomplishments and milestones for me from 2015, broken down into categories as best as I could.
- I turned 40 this year.
- In theory, there’s no reason why numbers that end in a “0” should get some special attention. I know some people smugly claim to be above all of that and see it as “just another number”, but come on. We measure and especially categorize all sorts of things in sets and multiples of powers of 10, whether it’s decades, money, ages, or anything else. There’s something psychologically going on when you realize that first digit of your age has increased and is never going back down again.
- This doesn’t mean I viewed turning 40 as a depressing thing. But I did view it as a sort of wake-up call. I have jokingly viewed 2015 as the year of the starting midlife crisis. But that’s a good thing. To quote Tony Robbins, getting to that point of ultimate frustration when you say “Ugh, that’s IT! I’ve HAD it!!!” is a good place to be. That’s when progress can really start rolling.
- Unlike my incredibly memorable 30th birthday which took place in Las Vegas, I kept my 40th birthday party pretty simple. Booked a dinner at a local restaurant with about a dozen local friends. Got some presents. Fun night.
- MUSIC, MUSIC, MUSIC!
- The biggest change for me musically was discovering the open mic nights at the local coffee house. I’ve had visions for a long time of doing my own thing. Too long, really. So here was the chance to do it. After attending a few nights as a guest, I finally got up there and did my thing. I’ve gone just about every week since then. It reached the point where the owner asked me to become the new host, which I gladly accepted.
- Recorded vocals for the closing epic track of the third Gyps Fulvus album.
- After my last Zep tribute band (Devil’s Blues Band) essentially broke up, our guitarist pointed me to an ad for another Led Zeppelin tribute band looking for a singer. So I joined them. Then they broke up. So I formed a third band with members from both.
- I also got in touch with a guy looking to do a virtual collaboration, where different musicians from around the country sent in individually recorded tracks, with his goal of doing a perfect recording of Led Zeppelin’s “Gallow’s Pole”. I sang it, and even added some bass and mandolin later. The recording was superb, but not finished. Unfortunately, the guy seemingly dropped off the face of the earth and stopped returning my calls. Oh well, I got a good partial recording! I should go upload it. It was a great experience while it lasted.
- Does the Zep end there? No! I joined an additional local Led Zeppelin tribute band, Tsunami. They came to the open mic I hosted, I knew they had no singer and had seemingly always been without a singer. I told them that I currently sing for and have sung for other Led Zeppelin tribute bands. We played the open mic the night we met, then had our first official gig the next night. It was the first of many gigs.
- Found two new places to do karaoke: one local, one not-so-local that my cousin invited me out to. The latter one had a contest. I made it to the first round. Unfortunately, I was unbelievably sick for a good 2 months around the time I had to go to round 2, and on top of that I had already bought tickets for a concert on the same night. So I said fuck it to the contest. Still, getting out there and singing in whatever way I can was a good thing. I even had one drop-dead beautiful Brazilian lady like my singing so much that she was doing the bump n’ grind with me at the bar. (And no, she didn’t steal my wallet.)
- And bringing this full circle: that open mic included playing with so many people, jumping in on different things with different instruments. And the recent Lemmy Tribute I did (with 4 Motörhead songs on the uke) stands out for me.
- There’s the “professional” accomplishment stuff which is worth mentioning. Though to be honest, part of this current midlife crisis has been working on a career change.
- Still, I’m proud of an end-to-end software suite I created which will have applications for government mandates in the medical industry.
- I worked for a second company where I toasted champagne with the CEO as we celebrated $8 million in revenue.
- Though I was glad to leave that and move to a third company with a wonderful commute. I won’t say what company it’s for. All I’ll say is that you’ve heard of it, and it’s really big. They were bought by a colossal company and need my expertise to see things transition smoothly.
- The REAL rewarding thing I was happy to do was get a job in between doing some math tutoring. It pays a fraction of what I make as an engineer, but it’s always good to have some mathematics going on in my life. It’s one of my life’s passions.
- MONEY!
- It turns out that the stocks I thought I had sold years ago for a company I used to work for, were never completely sold. Long story short, they had been accumulating all this time, and I ended up collecting a LOT of money. And with that, I...
- Paid off some credit card debt I had lingering for quite some time, along with a loan too, AND my car. Started a new IRA.
- SEX!
- I won’t name names, but there were more than just a couple, and 2015 was fun for me.
- CHURCH!
- Well OK, that word “Church” doesn't sound as exciting as "money" or "sex". But I belong to the sort that embraces those things. This year we celebrated Year 50. It included a secret conclave in Washington D.C., complete with a number of events like salon/lectures from various members. When you’re in a minority religion, it can be really invigorating to suddenly be in a huge room full of them. I finally met some people that I had been talking to online for over a decade. Best of all, when you see the accomplishments from some of these amazing people, it makes you realize, “I have to get off my ass and do more.”
- I flew down to Florida to catch the opening reception of The Devil’s Reign. Once again, great to be with “my people”, and meeting some face to face for the first time. I even managed to get in a little improvised ukulele tribute to Type O Negative.
- I’m honored to have my own section of essays on the COS Great Minds page. I similarly wrote a little commentary on the alleged Starbucks holiday cup controversy.
- I was interviewed for episode 15 of the Raising Hell podcast. Despite being fiercely childfree myself, I had some outside perspectives to share.
- 2015 also saw the release of Outbursts of Everett True, a collection of long-lost comic strips of a most wonderfully misanthropic nature. I used my professional software skills to help collect the appropriate material for the editor and brainchild of the project, who gave me a free copy of the final hardcover book in return. I was proud to have contributed to this immense project, however small it may have been in terms of work hours and to all of the other work that had to go into it.
- Every Halloween since 1989, I’ve done some kind of formal ritual. This year was no different.
- And hey, how about that Radio Free Satan?
- We hit our 15th anniversary this year, and I wanted to do something to mark it. To be perfectly blunt, I did almost all of the work for it, because nobody else really, really wanted to. But I was happy with the result.
- After 12 years, I’m still doing my podcast. This year I really scaled some things back, admittedly. I had already shortened the show from an hour to 45 minutes, and took an extended break for the first time. I also made use of reruns. Over those past 52 weeks, it was only 30 new episodes. Still, when I consider that over 90% of podcasts seemingly never reach a TOTAL of 30 episodes in their existence, I’m proud.
- I created a new holiday video with Satanbear:
- Also contributed an old track to an upcoming music project that RFS is doing! More details on that will come in the spring.
- Speaking of comedy…
- After being kicked out from an overly-sensitive grammar nazi humor site (go figure) on Facebook, I went ahead and made my own: Ridicule of Shitty Writing. I’m happy to say that it has accumulated over 100 members, and has purposely avoided the stuff that plagues some of its rivals (repeating posts, off-topic posts, in-fighting, etc.).
- I created a few other comedy clips for YouTube, including “Kim Davis: The Untold Story” and “McGyver: The Missing Lyrics”.
- I created a lot of memes and other pictures which I had hoped would go viral. So far, it hasn’t happened. Oh well. This is another one of those things I want to pursue. If not getting popular that way, then getting them published.
- Other Online projects:
- I finally broke down and created a Twitter account
- ...as well as a Facebook fan page.
- This very own blog got a much-needed revamp to stop it from looking like crap on a mobile device
- Ditto for GeorgeCarlin.net, though work on that should probably continue.
Yeah, I put more of the less exciting stuff at the bottom. Likewise I can rattle off some memorable parts of 2015 for me that weren’t really personal accomplishments per se. But as long as I’m sharing memories from 2015, here’s that list:
- Remembering people who passed this year whose work I admire (Lemmy Kilmister, A.J. Pero, Chris Squire, Taylor Negron. Notable mentions to Wes Craven, Christopher Lee, B.B. King, Leonard Nimoy, Dick Van Patten, Roddy Piper, and Phil Taylor. No, I don’t care about the guy from STP. )
- Great concerts (Blue Öyster Cult [twice], Alice Cooper with Mötley Crüe, Deep Purple, Whitesnake in support of the Purple album, AC/DC for the first time in over 20 years, Weird Al, the stand-up of Gilbert Gottfried, and probably some more I’m stupidly forgetting)
- The CD and Blu-Ray releases (the rest of the Zeppelin remasters, and finally “The Decline of Western Civilization”!)
- Films and TV shows (revisiting “Oz”, being introduced to “Black Mirror”, “Theory of Obscurity” which documented my favorite band, watching “Back to the Future” in October 2015, and the long awaited return of Bob & David)
I typed all of this out by the way on my new Google Chromebook. Boy, talk about getting the right tool. I've used this to do online stuff as well as be a tablet for my sheet music and chord charts. My best purchase of 2015.
