The holidays have been busy, but I wanted to share some life updates and some of my favorite books, movies, and music of the last year.

First of all, I’m getting married! My partner and I got engaged in September and we finally have enough plans together to start sharing the news. Many friends and family subscribe, and this is my only real social media account, so I need to announce it here. We are having a very small actual wedding this summer—just immediate family—but we will also be having a larger, more informal, party in the city a little after that to celebrate with more people.

In other personal news, I’ve had a pretty healthy year making some big strides. I came out as bisexual, a process I will write about at some point. I started lifting last March and it became a solid habit for a long time I got in good shape, I’m proud of this work, and that I put some preconceptions aside about the type of people who lift and found this for myself. I had knee surgery a few months back and although my recovery period is long over, I’ve been struggling with a little seasonal/job depression and haven’t quite got back at it, but I’m sure I will in the new year, as it brings a lot to my day-to-day wellness. I’ve decided once and for all to leave academia and I will be pursuing a new career with much more focus in the new year.

I’ve also stopped drinking entirely. Like many, I’ve been struggling with this habit and health issues around it since the pandemic. I’ve taken some long breaks before, and I think I built a healthier relationship with it overall, mostly drinking in moderation and only 2-3 times a week. But I was still winding up in a once-a-month cycle of bingeing to deal with the stress and loneliness of adult life on my weekends without my son. I’d stay out late getting very drunk, go to random afterparties with groups of people I barely knew, take other risks, and have to waste a day in bed afterward. I could drink without doing this, but I would wind up here eventually. I’m a father, I’m nearly 40, I need healthier ways to let off steam and I have been struggling to find them. I’m two months alcohol sober now (I still use cannabis, but I have a completely different, non-dependent, relationship with that substance) and I got through the holidays without a drink. I’m still learning how to be fun and social without it. Social life is hard after COVID and as a parent, anyway. But I’m getting there and I know it’s the right choice. I don’t know if this is a forever thing, but I need to stick with it until I feel like I’m regularly having fun and enjoying life without it. I’m proud of making this decision and sticking to it.

I haven’t been writing on here as much as I would like, but I have been very active on Letterboxd having watched a good number of movies over the break from teaching. If anyone wants to follow me there and see what I’ve been writing, here’s my account:

https://boxd.it/1a9hb

The new album I’ve listened to the most this year has undoubtedly been Hooray for the Riff Raff’s The Past is Still Alive. I don’t know if it’s my favorite new release, sometimes I feel a little like I’m growing out of this type of indie folk, but it has marvelous songwriting from a great singer on issues that matter without being preachy. I think the album (and concert) I was most wowed by was Kim Gordon’s new one. It’s almost unbelievable how creative, vital, and genre-spanning The Collective is for an artist of her age and extensive career, but it is that good.

I’m also enjoying the great metal albums of the year. Blood Incantation’s Absolute Elsewhere is death metal Pink Floyd and is as pleasurable as that sounds (if that sounds pleasurable to you!) It’s a hyped album that has crossed over (it’s the only metal album of the Pitchfork albums of the year list that I saw) and metalheads tend to respond to albums that break out like that by denigrating them as hipster metal, but I enjoy it regardless and recommend it! It is a little slick though, and if you prefer something raw-er, Thou’s Umbilical is some great sludge. Speaking of sludge, I was thrilled to finally see the mighty High on Fire down in Richmond this year (complete with an after-show pilgrimage to Gwar Bar). Matt Pike will never disappoint; he’s the closest thing we have to an heir to Lemmy. Everyone with even a passing interest in metal should see them if they can.

I haven’t seen that many new films this year, but I thought Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist was vital filmmaking—a slow burn of environmental destruction and corporate relentlessness told on the smallest and most intimate scale. Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is probably going to be remembered as a major aesthetic breakthrough in both queer cinema (it is about gender dysphoria) and in A24/Neon elevated horror (if we can name that genre at this point).

I don’t read hardcover books almost ever, so I can’t offer up any best book of the year, but I enjoyed many older books. The great Marxist (and one-time teacher of mine) Fredric Jameson passed, and I enjoyed digging back into some of his essays (which I wrote about in a previous newsletter). I finally got around to reading Viet Tan Nyugen’s The Sympathizer, which I thought was incredible and well worth the acclaim and miniseries adaptation it has received. Before I started this newsletter, I read a bunch of classic queer theory—a necessary catch-up for this late-in-life bisexual—and while I didn’t agree with its complete closure around pessimism, Lee Edelman’s No Future felt like a prophetic guide to why we have seen such a retrenchment of queerphobia in U.S. culture and politics around the folk devil that’s been made out of trans people and trans rights. I think it has a bit of a bad reputation these days, but I found it quite compelling in its Lacanian analysis of the sentimentalized figure of the child in the public imagination of queer threat. And Edelman’s call for radicalism against nation-state-based rights and futurism remains relevant.

Okay that’s it! Happy New Year! More soon!