Shyness is nice, and shyness can stop you from doing all the things in life you'd like to. Still, one wants to be polite. So let's be coy for a moment, shall we?

Conflicted feelings this week; I have something to say, but I avoid cynicism whenever possible. Can you bewail distressing general trends without sounding like a cynic? Can you do so without actually becoming one?

My relationship with year-end wrapups is thorny at best. I love reading them; I've loved reading them since I was nine or ten years old. Back then, I took it on faith that these lists were as weighty as they seemed to think they were; around December, I'd begin to think hard - not to say "worry," or even "fret" - about which records would make the list, and which wouldn't, and whether the critics who'd made the lists were certain that they'd given ample consideration to (for example) Lynyrd Skynyrd's Street Survivors or Heatwave's Too Hot to Handle.

I had a Dan Gibson parabolic mic rigged atop a garbage dumpster nearby so that's how I know. I myself was several blocks away at a liquor store arguing about the middleweights again. I came back to the parking lot a little after eleven, retrieved the equipment and popped the tape in my Alpine. Driving down the highway. I pieced it together. It's not Big Brother that gets you in the end. It's your little cousin.