no one will guide you

This is my 100th post on Armagideon Time.

I began this blog in an attempt to actually do something remotely productive with my time, instead of just coming home from work and playing videogames until I passed out. There were no great ambitions behind my starting it. It just seemed like the easiest of several contemplated projects to do; posting and commenting about various tracks from my collection beats trying to come up with well reasoned commentary about comic books and/or politics on a regular basis. If my writing is shit, at least there’s the music as a consolation prize for the reader. It sure beats a case of Turtle Wax and a copy of Armagideon Time: The Home Game. (“Here’s a random song! You have thirty seconds to come up with a tangential, yet somehow relevant soundbite! Go!”)

I have zero pretensions about my role here. I’m not a bona fide music critic in the commonly understood sense, nor do I aspire to be one. The tenets of that particular mystery religion are incomprehensible to me and, I suspect, most of its current practitioners – a consensual mass deception carried out by scores of would-be Lester Bangs and Greil Marcuses too wrapped up in self-importance to admit they have no fucking idea what they or any of their peers are rambling on about.

Outside the gates of the old North Woburn dump was an old concrete foundation, a relic of the old tanneries, where unscrupulous sorts would dump their junk to avoid dealing with the sanitation authorities. The trash that ended up in there wasn’t of the household dustbin variety. Most of it was shit cleaned out of attics, basements, or gutted and abandoned houses. It was a paradise for a ten year old boy, providing he didn’t poison himself messing around with the sacks of arsenic that occasionally popped up in pile. Old magazines (yes, including porn rags), beat-up toys and games from previous decades, and sleds (plastic and wooden – there were a lot of these in there, for some reason) were the most common finds. Once I found two albums of postcards, used and unused, some with rare stamps attached, dating back to the 1910’s that had once belonged to a family of wealthy world travelers. My mother’s jaw dropped when she saw them.

My intent for this site has been to carry on that childhood work. Think of it as dumpster diving for a digital age. I hope you’ve enjoyed it so far.