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At the end of the year 2003 my friends at the Department of Safety (beloved art venue building in Anacortes which maybe I’ll write about more someday) compiled “best of the year” lists to post on their website. I didn’t live/work there but they invited me to contribute anyway. Since 2003 was a particularly monumental year for me personally, once I started writing the list I couldn’t stop. It got really long.

Here’s that list.

Of course it’s not a “best” actually of anything. There’s no such thing. I freeze up always whenever a “what’s your favorite…” question gets fired at me. (As a parent of a 7 year old, that’s all the time.) There’s no favorite, there’s no best. So this 2003 list was a joke on the idea of lists and it was actually just a lightning challenge memory-writing project that let me dwell on the previous 12 months and commemorate whatever moments arose. I loved it. And now I love to re-read that list, all the details of that one particular year, knowing that each year is actually packed as densely whether we write it down or not.

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Nineteen years later, it seems to me that this is a good writing/thinking practice to do all the time. Best of the moment. Good of the whenever. Memory of the future.

Here’s my scrambled chaos of an attempt at a list in no order for right now:

best of 2022

• today walking outside during the ice storm and hearing exploding or crumbling trees collapse higher up from us on the mountain, big booms in the forest

• I.I.F.

• I.I.F.’s very good paintings and the ones yet to be made

• Human Futures by Dear Nora

• riding weird little tech-bro scooters around in Austin in the weird night heat with Jay

• planned power outages

• unplanned power outages

• starting the year in our new house but with no bathroom or kitchen or anything, construction site life with a little kid

• washing dishes by headlamp and garden hose in the freeze

• sledding down the hill en route to school

• being stranded in Madrid with covid

• sushi restaurant in Austin, accidentally screaming with joy at the food

• taking the 2 families on tour of California

• Bolinas farm stand show

• trying SO hard to get an Ashland show but failing, forced night off instead

• the escalating noise of collaborating with Ragana each night

• Arrington appearing on stage through the fog, audible?

• porkchop fat cocktail

• Microphones box set assembly party in Anacortes

• mega shipping event of the box set, moving cardboad and vinyl around forever

• having to bathe at the public pool showers for months because of no bathroom

• dinners at Ken and Serena and Scout and Marty’s where we also bathed because of no bathroom

• tiny rental house downstairs bathroom electric sauna because of no bathroom

• Mattias & Riley’s sweet movie about us coming out

• Papa’s Ear by Tenniscoats (2022 edition)

• seeing Bosch paintings in Madrid

• Crane Hotsprings in OR, waking up at like 5 am and soaking alone in the freezing air, body half submerged, half out, in a drainage culvert, watching the sky slowly get light, noticing the birds do their thing, working through the whole Microphones in 2020 song in my mind silently, this being the only “band practice” in preparation for the tour

• weird little espresso hut on the SE Oregon/Nevada border

• Yellow Aster Butte backpacking in by myself, extremely empty mind time

• going to Maine to visit my brother and accidentally setting up a few shows around it

• Living Torch by Kali Malone

• weekly attempt at cold water swimming with Annie

• actually doing it, especially the very cold insane ones

• Hogstone maybe maybe approaching actually getting done, reincarnating

• Agathe National Stubbed Toe Day, May 12th

• throwing a fit when the amp the festival provided in Austion was pathetically insufficient for my very very loud distorted bass needs

• weeklong meditation breakthrough on Waldron

• Cora & Forrest’s bonkers wedding, the best funniest one possible

• Florist by Florist

• doing the bookfair table at Fantagraphics and driving down with Bret & Denise

• hanging out afterward with Heather and gabbing/eavesdropping on Beat Happening lore

• easter in idyllic deepest rural Humbolt, way deeper than even imaginable

• another successful backpacking summer with the kid, taking her way up above the treeline, Railroad Grade

• I saw a new doctor. No big deal. Wasn’t a “best”. Just normal.

• finally getting into a regular routine of waking up before everyone to meditate

• espresso machine

• teaching my School Of Song songwriting class

• talking to Tom Power at CBC for the show Q and him reminding me we’d hung out in a livingroom in Newfoundland many years ago, Judd’s house

• Scandinavian Shave Ice

• snorkeling with Agathe way out and way down deep in Hawaii, a dream

• Sonata Mix Dwarf Cosmos by Susanna coming out on vinyl

• the smell when you get off the plane in Hawaii of salt air and lava rock in the sun and flowers

• the gas station south of Eugene that’s super countercultural, getting a smoothie there and the baked good called Nipple Of Venus or whatever

• did I already say shredding with Ragana? That was major.

• ordered some really good Elevator and Eric’s Trip represses from Blue Fog

• that time I almost sunk the boat in 600 feet of water on the way to Waldron, alone, they would’ve never found me, so scary

• trying out amps at the Guitar Center in outer Minneapolis with Jay, buying 2

• returning them not very long later at the Guitar Center in outer DC

• lunch at Gofio in Madrid that one time

• that weird remote roadside restaurant in Spain where the whole village was completely dead, like Noto in the movie l’Avventura, but then we went in to the one place and it was popping, a sunday village routine, had to wait a while for a seat

• less forest fire smoke this year but still tons

• talking to the judge on a conference call to get off jury duty

• all the very excellent bonfires

• EMILY A SPRAGUE

• setting up a long table outside and having many friends over for long evening meals, fire blowing smoke

• grill boss

• meeting Nich and Ragana at the beach to put a huge gong on a little boat

• Washington Baths in Portland, Maine, the best

• In Night’s Meadow by Precious Bane

• White Lotus s02

• Room To Dream by David Lynch and Kristine McKenna

• every meal that got cooked at home, holy moly

• my family coming out to camp at my house, setting up in the clearing

• getting to play all those Microphones shows with Jay

• listening to Cave of Forgotten Dreams soundtrack while driving alone in the mountains, the perfect thing

• while stuck in Spain with covid, going on long solo walks in the empty huge park all day and into the night, like a ghost

• that very old settler cabin on the hill by Fletcher’s in Big Sur, the way the light hit the wall

• rental minivan, turning on Siri and the weirdness of living with her for a few days

• swimming in the glacial melt pools

• the guy who came up to me at the show at the Somerville Theatre (where they were also playing actual movies in some of the theatres) and pretended to be confused that my show wasn’t Batman, and the long joke we did together about it, and then seeing him a few months later at a different show and continuing the joke

• summer river swimming in deepest of deep rural Humbolt, all the secret spots

• daily It’s It

• the Dairy Queen somewhere in Ontario where it seemed like maybe it was just this one old lady’s house and maybe she was the actual dairy queen?

• breaking language down and remaking a new way of talking, always

• Geneviève’s monograph finally coming out, a huge deal

• going to Vancouver finally and seeing Nick Krgovich for the first time in years

• Jim Harrison: Complete Poems

• 100 gecs

• when it was 5 degrees on the winter solstice and we went outside and made a giant fire that burned down into the snow and is still a black circle on the ground

• cleaning fish heads and crab chunks off the boat after the otters had partied there

• walking in the rain around Waldron, post retreat, clearest mind of life, total razor vision of what matters and what to do with the rest of life, collecting useful sticks

• saying “of” in awkward ways, like “too long of hair”

• getting to play my big nostalgic Microphones song at the Capitol Theatre in Olympia, thick in a web of my own associations

• disneyland was OK but I hope I never go again

• easing up

• night hawks making their sound

• insane hoagie omakase in Philadelphia with Jay and Emily and V, we did way too much

• “lives for new years eve”

• communicating in ITYSL vocabulary

• that shopping cart that someone threw way up on top of the humongous snow drift in the parking lot of the mall outside Minneapolis

• having the weirdest interaction with a cashier at a coffeeshop in DC and then spilling yogurt and accidentally scootching my chair too loud and feeling like “3 strikes, I’m out, they’re calling the cops”

• I didn’t mind when the rental car broke down in the middle of nowhere on the Spain/Portugal border.

• I liked the difference in “crowd vibe” between the “Microphones” shows I played in the spring vs. the “Mount Eerie” shows I played in June. More mellow, smaller, more considered or something

• living a whole year in this house where I hope to spend the rest of my life

• a bat flew in

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Good end of the year everyone. Peace fingers and eye wink and thumbs up and love to all. Coffee tomorrow morning.

Phil