Times like these I wish I were one of those mp3 bloggers who wrote about the weather outside. And then posted all twenty-seven mp3s in my iTunes with the word "Snow" in the title.

Times like these I wish I followed baseball or something. As a child I always loved sports statistics... probably my only affinity towards anything vaguely mathematical. I even had this simulator for my Atari 130XE where I could manage a baseball team... and watch them play games as stats compiled. Yes, that's right. Watch.

The NY Mets were my favourite squadron, and I did some great things with them one summer seventeen years ago (lord). I won the World Series, and there was much rejoicing; Darryl Strawberry wept tears of joy onto his mountain of cocaine.

Actually, I do recall that I created my own custom team based on Peanuts. Charlie Brown as pitcher, Rerun as slugger... even Charlotte Braun as a seagull Dave Winfield killed. But alas, I've said too much, though a pleasurable digression it was.

The Catherine Wheel - Heal

I didn't really want to write about The Catherine Wheel here. They remain so intensely personal to me, there's not much I can say, even though I'm so detached from those feelings.

I'm just trying very hard to distract myself, and the best way to do it (without intoxicating myself) is focusing on the ephemera that surface behind my eyes, like the answers in a magic 8-ball. Often these are snippets of pop-songs, and not always radio bullshit like the hook from that Collective Soul song. Which song? I don't know, they were all just hooks, weren't they?

The Catherine Wheel are a band that I can never forget, no matter how far buried they are in the canon of shoegaze (sub-Chapterhouse, even) or brit-alt-pop (lacking in mainstream-cred, somehow, maybe because they didn't go all Ashcroft on us... well, they still got a little boring come "Wishville", but not radio-friendly boring). For me, they always rise up exactly when I need that comfort and contemplation.

Oh, and the first few bars of many of their songs are more powerful than many bands' entire catalogues.

You should all buy The Catherine Wheel's "Happy Days", and not just because you must have "Eat My Dust, You Insensitive Fuck" in your libraries.

-kam