The Bearded Life: "Maybe This Year Will Be Better Than The Last"

December marks an entire year spent writing my “humor”column for the Southern Minnesota Scene magazine, “The Bearded Life.”

From the get go, my instinct was to be way too real, something that my editor, bless his heart, had to reel in very early on. I eventually hit my stride, and found the pacing for each month’s piece, attempting to stay on the “theme” to the issue that the piece would be published in, but also attempting to put a lot of myself and my ability to make jokes when necessary in a well.

I think mostly, though, it just comes off like I’m complaining for 1000-ish words about something, every month.

But maybe that’s just who I am deep down—a big jerk with opinions.

As the year has been winding down, some of that “realness” has been slowly creeping back into the columns I’ve been writing. I’ve been trying my hardest to balance that out with humor, with the last piece I wrote in October, sliding more into the humor side of things.

But for December I Just decided to write from the heart, and worry less about if what came out was funny, and more about the point of what I needed to say.

And so I’m very pleased to present my “Bearded Life” columnfor December.

This seems like it’s also a fine time to provide and update on things involving this blog, which you may or may not enjoy reading.

I’ve been doing this for two years now—and man, where does the time go? I’ve probably mentioned it early on, and I’m sure you who are reading these very words, remember EVERYTHING I have ever written on this site—but I started this site in 2013 as a creative outlet after I chose to walk away from the daily radio show I had been doing.

The radio show started in March of 2010, and came to an end in December of 2012. I chose to end it partially because I felt it had maybe run its course, but also for a lot of other, slightly more serious reasons, involving my crippling depression and growing total lack of interest in having to prepare for the show, and then actually having to go and do the show itself.

The blog, for the most part, has been good to me. It’s not like I have a ton of followers and I never set out to do this with any delusions that I would become famous. Sometimes the musicians I write about will interact with me on Twitter after I post a review. Sometimes certain entries receive a lot of criticism.

Churning out regular content can be difficult, however. Occasionally I run out of albums to review. Occasionally I struggle to find something to say about said albums. And since I started back to work in August, writing for the paper, I’ve had exponentially less time to sit and listen to music—for leisure even, let alone for writing a stupid review.

Fun fact—in the newsroom, it’s discouraged to listen to music with headphones on, although, like, everyone does it. Sometimes I leave to go to a coffee shop so I can get writing done and listen to something (with the intent of reviewing it later.) But that doesn’t happen all the time.

I was so bored at my last job, I use to actually write some of these reviews at work, simply because I had the time, and because no one was paying attention to anything I was doing.

Since October, the stream of new releases that I’ve been interested in writing about has practically dried up. And because my time is so limited for this right now, I can’t even make the effort to listen to things that I halfway care about.

It’s been a struggle actually, to try to balance this all out—to generate content somewhat regularly so that this place stays marginally relevant in the landscape of music “criticism” on the Internet.

I guess what I’m saying here is I don’t want to not do this, but I’m saying that it’s getting harder to do, so in 2015, I may become more selective about what I write reviews of, and how often there are updates.

Somehow, this stupid blog was “award nominated” over the summer, so I guess I’m doing something that people like. Or at least that people will tolerate. And so I will continue to try, and we’ll see how that goes.

Thanks again for your continued support and for your interested—feigned or genuine.