Shit!! I made it through another year!! Barely, on fumes, with my low fuel warning light flashing on my figurative dashboard. But, I’m here at the end of another romp through the Gregorian 12-step.

I’m edging closer to pulling up alongside yet another sad anniversary of losing my only son, maybe the best person I’ve ever known or ever will know. I don’t expect to meet anyone like him again and that’s something impossible to ignore.

Riding shotgun on a two-member team that’s managed to make it through the worst of stretches a life can parcel out, I’ve also weathered abandonment, lies, and the usual failings that humans are genetically predisposed to deliver. Fuck it, though! There’s something celebratory in all this darkness and mourning. At least approaching it in the spirit of the age-old wisdom that co-worker Wilma Delay dispensed back in my Westville Correctional Center days: she told me, “Baumer, sometimes you gotta’ laugh to keep from crying.” I sometimes wonder what became of ole’ Wilma. She always made more work for me with her predisposition to never moving off her sit-stool and more-often-than-not assigning herself the task of setting up the evening’s prisoner’s meds, which meant she had to do little else. Her co-workers picked up the slack. But I believe her heart was in the right place.

I remain flummoxed by the speed that grief allows a grieving person to spiral downward. One minute, you are coping with the shitty stick you’ve been handed and the next, you are contemplating a painless way to end it all. I’m not messing with you. It’s that fucked-up at times. I don’t anticipate it will ever get too much better than that in all honesty.

But again, here we are—another new year goading us into resolutions and pronouncements, sent out into the great unknown. What’s one to do, save for going along, with some remote hope of getting along.

Wrapping up 2018, here are the things and people that helped bring the year to a tolerable close:

• Books and writers
• Music
• A new understanding of family
• A few true/blue friends
• Better physical health and the return of some measure of fitness
• A sense that despite all of the brokenness and tears, Mark’s parents are doing the best we can be doing in terms of honoring his memory.

Books and Writers:

The old adage, “so many books, so little time” seems apropos whenever the subject of books and reading comes up for me. Having large swaths of time to do nothing but luxuriate in a flow of words from a talented and gifted writer is something everyone should have more of. But there’s life, forever getting in the way.

I’ve done the extensive end-of-year reading rundown in the past. I’ll dispense with that in 2018. Here are a handful of books and writers that are worth mentioning from a year where I read 58 books.

A year ago, navigating the first season of “sad anniversaries” related to losing Mark, I wanted to know more about the vortex of grief I was in the midst of. Therese Rando became that writer who “opened a door” to a much deeper understanding of all the elements related to death and grieving an especially significant loved one for me.

Rando’s How To Go On Living When Someone You Love Dies provides key insights making it possible to begin fathoming the depths you’ve been plunged while experiencing the spigots of loss being opened full force. Her book pushes past all the psycho-babble of “thoughts and prayers” and for me, it allowed an honest “seeker” his first solace that yes, Mark’s death was significant for a host of reasons. It helped me begin to grasp the enormity of it all, plus also recognizing that my own loss had been magnified by the callous actions of others, especially so-called loved ones in my extended family.

I continued reading related books. Megan Devine’s It’s Ok That You’re Not Ok: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand, much like Rando’s book, helps deconstruct all the BS that gets heaped on those passing through the middle of grief and loss.

Where Rando took a more clinical approach (without getting lost in the weeds of science and psychology), Devine offers anecdotes and her own personal story and approach to help the grieving person realize that no, it’s not them, but the people around you who are fucked-up. If you are facing your loss head-on, then you won’t be happy, or ready to “get over it,” or willing to accept religious platitudes and other advice designed to make the person offering it feel better—the person on the receiving end will still remain feeling like shit!

Devine maintains an active social media presence. When I was still on Facebook, I found her updates worth reading in a way that countered 99 percent of the other garbage being posted on Z-berg’s bulldozer. She’s on “the ‘gram,” which is where I follow her with my shrunken digital footprint.

I never read a ton of fiction. This summer—perhaps because my SI joint was messed-up and I was on my back for long stretches (there’s that time to “luxuriate” in books and reading), I indulged in some fiction, including short stories and even, crime novels (Michael Connelly and Dennis Lehane).

Ottessa Moshfegh’s had the kind of run as a writer in 2018 that most of us can only dream about. If you are a reader with any sense of the year’s literary zeitgeist, then you know she was “a thing” last year. That’s because Moshfegh is an incredibly gifted writer worth anyone’s time with any one of her books.

I actually “found her” and her writing because she wrote this about Mark in an article for Vulture. that appeared in July.

We lost this brave genius last year, and the books he gifted us while he lived are so wonderfully strange and honest and beautiful, I can’t believe he even existed. He was more than a poet or performance artist — Baumer’s life itself was a work of art. He was truly radical, and the most openhearted, unjaded human I’ve ever met.

I read it and thought, ”who is this?” Then, I had another one of my reactions that went something like this: “Yeah, motherfucker! See, Mark was somebody, and this person just validated it.” I have that reaction quite often because I know the wounds are still raw, knowing that people who should have loved Mark and respected him, didn’t. Well fuck them!

Moshfegh’s book of short stories, Homesick for Another World, was one of the year’s top reads for me. Her characters felt human, not like cardboard cutouts. There’s something in the way she details each story and each character’s complexity that rang true to me in a way that too many other fiction writers who try to hard regularly miss. I loved her writing so much, I searched out her first novel, Eileen, the one prior to the “big one” that came out in 2018. My Year of Rest and Relaxation sits on my pile of books for 2019. Don’t be surprised when I’m raving about it during my reading wrap next year.

I hate it when I hit a patch books that just don’t “do it” for me. That happened in the fall. I was in the midst of Medicare’s open enrollment period, and tutoring was consuming my evenings, also. I bought a highly-touted work of history reviewed by the New York Times in their weekend supplement on books. It’s a very long book and it sits half-read on my headboard. I’ll finish it at some point, but books shouldn’t require that much work.

Luckily for me, I heard about a book by Frye Gaillard. It’s the kind of book about history that brings the past vividly into the present. As a writer, Gaillard’s gifted that way, and A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope, Possibility and Innocence Lost reminded me of the decade I was born in and spent my formative years going through. It reminded me of the import of that period and the chaos that was omnipresent in America.

We are living at a time when the past has been hijacked by ideologues: most of them on the right. We also have an idiot and ahistorical president occupying the White House. During times like these, I think it’s important to revisit the past and make sure we see it as clearly as we can. It’s too bad that others can’t or won’t do the same.

Reading is terribly subjective (like preferences in music). However, my “best” reading in 2018 might have happened during the past two months.

I have been serving as a substitute teacher for a neighboring school district. I especially enjoy filling-in for the English teachers on days when they’re out and I can work.

During one of these assignments at the high school, I stumbled upon a delightful book that was sitting on one of the overflowing book shelves. When Boomers bemoan Millennials, they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. At least the Millennials attending this school. Perhaps teachers really do make a difference and all the crap my former best man used to offer about schools is simply dreck. Interestingly (and not surprising) is that both of these opinions are held by ideologically-constipated types.

I picked up Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America With Einstein’s Brain. The book is exactly as the title offers. It’s a story about the writer, and the pathologist who autopsied Albert Einstein, one of the great American minds, and their road trip together as they cross the country with Einstein’s brain floating in formaldehyde in the trunk. The writer, Michael Paterniti, lives in Maine.

As I scanned the introduction and first few pages of the first chapter during the afternoon study period, I knew this was a book I had to pick-up and read. I was not disappointed.

Paterniti is a compelling writer. The narrative—one I knew nothing about—informs readers that Einstein’s brain was actually “stolen” by pathologist Thomas Stolz Harvey, the man who conducted the postmortem autopsy on Einstein in 1955.

Harvey kept the brain until his own death in 2007, with the hope of having studies conducted and the scientist’s intelligence studied and quantified. The latter never happened to the extent that Harvey hoped for.

As simply a story, Paterniti’s treatment of the Einstein saga is one of the best I’ve read in a long time. Equal parts travelogue and myth-buster, we come to sympathize with Harvey and yet, also recognize that the man was a “bit off,” I think.

December came and so did the arrival of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. I blogged about how I ended up glomming onto this book: it was due to a podcast Coates was a guest on, with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. Please go back and read that post if you want to understand why this book resonated with me. But you won’t, so I’ll do the heavy lifting for you and post what I wrote about Coates and Eight Years, from that prior post:

The book consists of a series of collected essays Coates wrote during the two terms of President Barack Obama. It includes what is arguably the book’s tour-de-force, “The Case for Reparations,” an essay he wrote while he was still blogging/writing regularly for The Atlantic. The essay actually first appeared online and then ran as a feature in the print magazine in June, 2014. It was probably the piece of writing that finally put Coates “on the map” as a writer. He shares a bit about how each of the book’s essays came to be written, and I was fascinated with the back story on this essay in particular, but all the personal details included with the other essays in his book are welcome.

America is a racist nation. Our founding and our entire system of government, as well as our dysfunctional culture is built-upon a systematic program designed to maintain blacks as an inferior caste of citizens. If you read Coates, you’ll see that if you’re still capable of considering ideas that might not be comfortable or even convenient. Most Americans are not.

I’m going to come back to the final book I read in 2018, Jeff Tweedy’s wonderful memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back). There’s far too much to cover here in this mishmash serving as my end-of-the-year ruminations. Tweedy is an amazing musician and fronts a band I’ve followed since their inception, Wilco. This followed the crash-and-burn of his previous band, Uncle Tupelo, one of the musical bellwethers of my mid-1990s alt-country fixation. Tweedy touches on that period, but the book offers so much more. Stay tuned for that.

Honorable mentions (all damn fine books):

Steve Almond, Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country, Daniel Borzutzky, Lake Michigan, Matthew Zapruder, Come On All You Ghosts, Witold Szablowski, Dancing Bears: True Stories of People Nostalgic for Life Under Tyranny, Bob Mehr, Trouble Boys: The True Story Of The Replacements,
Sam Anderson, Boom Town.

 Music:

With the advent of streaming services, following music requires even less effort and investigation than ever. The flipside of this is that there is more music worth seeking out than ever before.

Tweedy in his book delved into growing up in Belleville, IL, a place that was only 30 minutes from St. Louis, but it could have been 300. It was a cultural wasteland, what elites like to call “flyover country,” especially stacked against the arbiters of what’s “proper” for entertainment, who happen to dwell on the east and west coasts.

What really resonated with me was when he wrote about being nine or ten and gong to the grocery store with his mother.

Tweedy wrote that if complained enough about being “bored” to her, she’d let him “hang out by the magazine stand and flip through copies of Rolling Stone and Creem while she shopped.” He mentions reading them from “cover to cover,” and was especially enamored with record reviews. His experience could easily have been my own, tagging along with my mother during her weekly grocery run to Lewiston, and being allowed to flip through the “bargain bin” at Bradlee’s or run into De’Orsey’s at the Lewiston Mall.

He’s five years younger than I am, yet there’s certainly parallels with his own discovery of The Clash and Replacements, much like when I came across a Dead Kennedy’s album at Manassas Ltd. in Brunswick in 1978. I appreciated Tweedy’s incite about how punk and indie music “democratized” rock and roll. No longer was the genre about bloated arena rock shows and album-oriented radio’s narrow confines any longer. Bands and artists were now booking their own tours, rolling across the country in vans (versus tour buses), sleeping on a network of friends’ couches. They were also fully in control of their own creative capital.

2018 has been a year when I managed to “find” new artists, snatched from amid the white noise. I hate to keep harping on a common source, but so much of it came by way of WFMU, but also stations like WMBR (MIT’s college station) and Seattle’s KEXP, all accessible because I can stream them from hundreds (if not, thousands) of miles away. And unlike Spotify, ‘FMU and these other stations are freeform throwbacks similar to my own musical coming-of-age period, listening to WBLM in the early 1970s and flipping through issues of Creem and Hit Parader at Robert’s Pharmacy in Lisbon Falls.

This old-school methodology of rooting around musical “darkened corners” along the road less traveled like I did in pre-internet days helped deliver someone Matt Valentine and his partner, Erika Elder, who have released a slew of music as MV & EE. It was on ‘FMU’s Avant Ghetto show with Jeff Conklin that I first learned of Valentine. Later, I’d hear another outlet for his hippie psyche jamming, Wet Tuna.

Valentine and Elder have their own boutique imprint, Child of Microtones, where they release what to me is the aural equivalent of small batch brews and distilled spirits. Corporate music this is not.

Prior to the holidays, I ordered Wet Tuna’s “Mountain Busted,” a 7-CD set of recordings from the band’s run out from Brattleboro (where Valentine’s been based for more than a decade) to the middle of America and back. The discs were pulled directly from the multi-track soundboard reels, so the sound quality is epic.

Likening them to jam-buddies like the Dead, or other 60s hippie music does Wet Tuna a disservice. While there is a Dead vibe present, Valentine’s guitar playing (along with band partner and longtime collaborator, PG Six) also echoes Neil Young, Dinosaur Jr., and a host of other psych-folk forays.

Any rundown of my 2018 music would be incomplete without mentioning Will Toledo and his musical vehicle, Car Seat Headrest. I picked up “Twin Fantasy” and “Teens of Style.” I’ll be seeing them live in Boston in February, too.

Toledo in many ways is a throwback to someone like Robert Pollard and his lo-fi fecundity from the mid-1990s. I can hear Guided by Voices (a WBOR staple of mine) at times in Toledo and CSHR’s material, especially the original 2011 recording of “Twin Fantasy” (Toledo re-recorded it in 2016, and the two-CD set I have allows you to stack song versions against one another.

I’ve had a long affinity for amplified guitar in the music I’ve listened to dating back as far back as I can remember. That’s not changed. But in 2018, I found beauty in the harp, at least the harp as played by LA-based harpist, Mary Lattimore. “Hundreds of Days” might be one of the most beautiful collections of songs I own. This album (I bought it on vinyl) first came to my attention when Jeffrey Davison first played a cut on his Saturday morning show, again on ‘FMU.

A classically-trained musician, Lattimore creates sonic landscapes of beauty, interspersed with pervasive sadness. Given my state of mourning throughout the year, “Hundreds of Days” made for a soundtrack of sorts for the latter half of 2018, as I ordered it just prior to leaving on my Father’s Day road trip.

During my 2,100+ miles of driving completed over the week I was gone, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks’ “Sparkle Hard” spent considerable time in my Honda Accord’s CD player. I ended up in Carrboro, NC, at Cat’s Cradle, seeing Malkmus and band, live.

Malkmus has been a musical hero of mine dating back to his Pavement days in the early 1990s. He’s now 52 and has certainly evolved as a songwriter and musician. But if indie rock still has guitar gods, Malkmus would be one of them.

Spending so much time behind the wheel afforded me unbroken stretches of blacktop and the chance to loop whatever soundtrack I wanted. Yes, Spotify is always an option these days and I had some playlists. However, a good portion of the trip was spent blasting CDs from my box behind the passenger seat.

A week prior to leaving on a father’s sad journey, I got to hear old friend Jose Ayerve and Spouse during their brief New England (and NYC) centered reunion swing. I’ve written about Spouse lovingly before. There was nothing that night to disavow me of anything I’ve ever thought, said, or wrote about Jose and his band. If anything, they sounded better than ever back in June.

Jose’s drummer, J.J. O’Connell had a major part in culling and then creating a live disc that was available for sale at the Apohadion in Portland after the show. “There Goes The Road (Live 2003-2010)” is an amazing live compendium of sets from the band spanning what I’d consider their most active and “high-water” period. This “gift” made possible from O’Connell to their fans is surely one we’ll all continue to treasure.

Much of my favorite music for the year is centered during the middle of 2018. Once more, Davison’s Saturday morning program is where I first heard Caitin Pasko. She’s a pianist and “Glass Period” is an amazing collection of songs that she characterizes on Bandcamp as a “small chapel to personal grief,” in her case, the loss of her dad.

What’s been most interesting in 2018 is that I found out that cassettes have made a comeback, at least in the indie corner of the music world where I live. Pasko’s collection came via cassette. Since I still have my Onkyo cassette player that’s coming up on 30 years, I have been playing her tape a lot over the past six months.

Not only is Pasko a talented songwriter and musician, but she’s also a kind and caring human. I included a short note with my Bandcamp order. She emailed me during my road trip with a kind and empathetic note. We’ve traded emails since.

I ended up mentioning Pasko to Claire Donato, Mark’s MFA colleague and friend and she ended up interviewing Pasko (both live in NYC) and writing a beautiful feature for Fanzine.

It’s hard to know what Mary and I would have done without Claire (an amazing writer in her own right) in the weeks following Mark’s death. I don’t think anyone did more for us in terms of helping us navigate an impossibly difficult two-week period, planning and figuring out the logistics of Mark’s celebration of life at Brown. We’ve remained in-touch over the past two years. I’m so pleased that Claire and Caitlin got to speak and that Claire introduced Pasko’s music to a wider group of people.

Pasko’s music, along with Lattimore’s, the music of Stephen Malkmus, and in a different way, the music of Matt Valentine, have been important touchstones in 2018 for me. They’ve helped mitigate some of the overwhelming sadness that loss and grieving visits on those living without their loved one. It also offers me something that feels grounding during a time that in addition to grief and loss, it feels like the world we’re living in is coming apart.

Twelve months (and even 12 minutes) can seem interminable in terms of grief and loss. So much of the year’s music I’ve written about sits in the middle of the year’s passing. I’d be remiss not to mention Bipolar Explorer. I wrote about them back in March.

The band is really one man’s refusal to turn away from his own grief, loss, and the attendant mourning that follows, forever. Michael Serafin-Wells has channeled his pain into a beautiful and haunting paean to his lost-love, Summer Serafin, on “Sometimes in Dreams,” the band’s 2018 release. They’ve just released a brand new Christmas record, “Til Morning Is Nigh: A Dream Of Christmas” in December. I plan to pick this one up, soon.

To soldier on and continue making music is a testament to Michael’s devotion for and to Serafin, the love of his life. Some might find it morbid, like I’m sure some do when I write frequently about my son, Mark. But it’s not. We remain forever affected (and afflicted) and art like Bipolar Explorer’s is a profound exploration of grief and loss in musical form.

I’ve briefly touched on some of the books and music that held significance for me in 2018. I’m grateful that I have access to something more than the schlock that we’re constantly being fed by our corporate overlords. I hope 2019 delivers new surprises and offers up a way to remain human in an inhuman (and inhumane) place.