So. The preceding 890 words or so were written on Friday. That night, as the entire free world knows & is still getting drunk about, Mike Maroth really did get the monkey off his back, earning the right to scrawl a big ol’ nasty numero uno in the “W” column on his stats page. And what did I do? Confined myself to the inside of my house in the hopes of shaking the smoke-all-the-cigarettes-in-town habit that eight months of on-again, off-again touring seems to have instilled in me, and thought some more about Load Records, how they’re bringin’ the rock into a world that’d rather have the pretend-rock. (I’m not naming any names. I can’t even be bothered to learn the names of the pretend-rock haters & perpetrators any more.) Is this not a mitzvah? You bet your nonexistent tenth consecutive loss it is, bubeleh. Load could stand to spend a bit more on their packaging: the Lightning Bolt album would look way sweet in a matte digipak, and the Noxagt sleeve is practically unforgivable. But the bottom line here is that the somebody sittin’ behind that gold-ass LOAD RECORDS C.E.O. nameplate in them ritzy Load Records offices has heard Master of Reality enough times to feel certain that there was really something worth pursuing in there somewhere, and has had just enough Old Crow to know that there’s only one Black Sabbath, God damn every rotten law of nonduplication to Hell. I thought about trying to bust out the old-school track-by-track on some of these records - the Pink and Brown album, Shame Fantasy II, has one of my favorite album titles of the year and is as fierce as a wolverine - but what can I tell you? It’s been a busy time. I’m glad to be back. Baseball season is ministering to my spirit like them angels after the temptation in the wilderness an’ stuff. And good, hard, sweaty non-comm rock records are doing for me what I hadn’t thought they could do for me any more. They are filling me with the pure cynical all-affirming blood-spitting lust for existence that good rock music fills me with, sometimes.