I'm hanging out at Java Hutt in Ferndale tonight, partly because the drinks are good (mmm mocha) and partly because, after being home all day by myself, I needed to see some people and not pixels for a while. It turned out that I ran into one of the proprietors of Dead Letter Office, a Detroit record label founded this year to promote local musicians he (and I, to some extent) know. We discussed Leonard Cohen and William S. Burroughs — sequentially, not together, let me say for the preservation of Mr. Cohen's reputation.

Of everything one might be thankful for, I'm thankful that the Thanksgiving holiday has always meant a four-day weekend for me. But today, the uncommitted "free day," was kind of challenging because of the lack of agenda. I probably would've liked to do a little shopping, if this was a normal shopping day, but "Black Friday" is far from normal, so new bathroom rugs will have to wait. The weather, having been unseasonably warm for over a week, collapsed into late autumn over the course of the day, so an outdoor excursion (say, to a park or the zoo) was contraindicated. So I did what I rarely do: spend the day in the house, puttering around.

The puttering included an attempt to de-clutter my spare room, and that's really hard. I'm glad that I can keep myself from buying a lot of things to bring into the house, because if I didn't, I would have a far worse clutter problem. As it is, I have collections of magazines and comics I don't look at and boxes of paperwork that I can't quite manage to file or dispose of. I can't watch the TV show Hoarders: Buried Alive, because I start identifying with the poor subjects quivering as someone else takes their precious stuff and throws it into a Dumpster. It's unbelievable to me how it makes me feel to think "Just throw it out!" and then sit there going "ba ba ba" before putting stuff back in a box.

Having said that, I did combine two boxes and make one full garbage bag of stuff I can toss, so I don't think I need an intervention (yet). This allowed me to create a spot in the spare room for the roll-around air conditioner, so that won't be in the middle of the bedroom floor all winter, at least.

Now that I've made it through the unscheduled day, I have a musical project to work on — I mean, besides the tape archive project. I hope to have something to say further about that later this weekend.