December.

Kind of a "meh" month all around.  Lots of rain.  Quite a few holidays that don't seem to mean much at all.  It's been a long December.  Been a pretty long year.  Can't say I'll be too unhappy to see any of it go...

It's been about 14 years since I moved to California, now.  I think I ended up in San Francisco the second week of December in '96.  If I recall correctly, that was a pretty wet year, too.   That winter was the highest recorded rainfall in San Francisco.  It was quite an introduction to the city.

I got off the bus at 4th and Market, checked into the first hotel I saw.  Decided to take a walk.  And promptly got lost in the Tenderloin.  It was a bit of an eye-opener for a 20 year old from Pennsylvania.

I'd spent a couple of weeks before moving to San Francisco crashing out on a friend's floor at his dorm at George Washington University in D.C.  Don't really recall much of those two weeks.Sitting at a Barnes & Noble and being exposed to Jean Genet for the first time (another eye-opener).  Hanging in Rich's dorm room and reading his syllabus for his Russian Lit. class.  Being dumbfounded that a city as large as D.C. effectively became a ghost town at 8pm.  Wandering through Georgetown and watching a small windstorm hold a plastic bag aloft in a flurry of leaves for five minutes and just watching in awe as it spun around and around.

It's been an odd decade and a half, to say the least.

One thing I do remember about that two weeks...  The Counting Crows had just released their second album, Recovering the Satellites, a month or two before.  We listened to that disc endlessly.  Can't say I've spent much time revisiting that in the past ten years.  At the time, it was a perfect fit.

I was recently tagged in one of those FaceBook notes, asking to list my 50 favorite tracks from 2010.  I'm not sure I could list five and know that they're from this year.  Music doesn't seem nearly as vital as it once did.  A lot of things don't.  I've been looking through a lot of the year end lists since then.  It seems that I'm not as far out of the loop as I'd assumed.  It just doesn't seem that any of it particularly resonated.

As I said, it's been "A Long December."

Maybe next year will be better than the last.