A New Year, And A New Beginning?

It has been almost one year since I last posted any new content to this blog. On January 21, 2017, I posted my review of a then-new release from Felix Peikli and Joe Doubleday called, “It’s Showtime!” (In case you missed it, you can find that review here.)

In the time that has passed since I wrote that article, a lot has happened, both for the country as a whole and for me, personally.

When I retired in November of 2016, my plan was to take a sort of extended vacation through the Winter months and take a few classes at Mt. Hood Community College. Then, refreshed and invigorated from the break, I would start looking for another job in the Spring of 2017.

None of that happened, thanks largely to my then-still-untreated Sleep Apnea and a couple of other unexpected situations that came up. The Sleep Apnea is being dealt with, with varying degrees of success. So has one of the other issues. There is still one ongoing situation that I hope to resolve in the upcoming months, but until it is dealt with, there is no sense for me to even think about looking for a job.

The day I published that last review here, there were 10 other CD’s sitting on my desk waiting for me to write about them, not to mention the hundreds of others in my collection. Today, those 10 disks are still sitting there on my desk, waiting. I have lost track of the number of times that I have sat down and popped one of those albums into the external CD/DVD drive connected to my laptop. And then done nothing. Absolutely nothing.

The problem is not that I no longer like jazz. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t have jazz playing in the background.

The problem is not that I no longer enjoy writing. I have written several pieces in the last year, some longer than others. Some were fiction, some were non-fiction. Some of them, I even published, but on Facebook rather than on this blog.

It seems that combining the two major interests of my life into writing about jazz no longer holds the appeal for me that it once did.

At the moment, I have no clue when, or even if, that will change. All I can suggest is, if you are interested in this blog at all, and are not already following it, please click the “Follow” button. That way, WordPress will notify you via email whenever there is an update here.

You are also invited to follow me on Twitter and/or Facebook.

Thanks for reading this.

Al Evans
Wood Village, Oregon