I’ts not a Sunday today and I’ve still almost let the evening go by without sitting down to share some thoughts. I really need to get more organized. More organized? Or rather organized at all? I don’t remember being this scatter brained years ago. I definitely spend more time sharing (personal) stuff on the internet. I need to bring that derailed train of thought back on track, so let’s start again.
Yesterday I went to a gig of a German singer (he mostly sings in English) – Sasha – on his sort of celebratory / anniversary tour. I don’t know exactly. Even though I like him fine I don’t consider myself a fan. He had his first hit in 1998! And he’s still doing this, 26 years – half a lifetime – later. More to the point he’s still so good. His music is proper pop, catchy tunes, easy to sing a long. Fun!
And he has always been an amazing entertainer. Very funny, down-to-earth, all around nice guy, I think. He could have tried to distance himself from the pop world and look back on his huge success from 26 years ago with some irony or depreciation, because it was and is “just” radio-friendly main-stream pop music. But he didn’t. He ended the show with his first big hit and lead into it by saying how grateful he still is for this song, because it allowed him to travel all over the world -literally – to perfom this song back in the day.
But he still managed to make it sound amazing 26 years later in a big band arrangement.
We went to his gig at the same venue in 2019 as well and last night tried to work out where and when we had seen him play shows before. I tried to look it up on setlist.fm, but I’m not sure that’s all that reliable for a German artist. I remembered a gig in airport hangar in Düsseldorf, but had to google it to find that this was part of the “Jazz festival” (?!?!?) in 2006! 18 years ago. That kid is old enough to drive and vote. j/k.
I didn’t find any photos of my own, but in the process of moving my data from one computer to the next a few years ago I lost a few month / years of photos and 2006 is among them. I then remembered to have a look at my downloaded blog archives from the “Pre-Wordpress / self hosting” days. And there was indeed a short gig recap – back then still in German. I scrolled through the months of posts and OMG did I post a lot back then. About everything. Books. TV. Life. Politics. Just short vignettes sometimes, but also sometimes multiple times a day. I clearly hadn’t been working fulltime back then.
The downloaded file also included a “blog roll” Anyone still remember what that was? Links to other blogs I had been reading / following at the time. 70% of the links ended in 404 (or something similar”) nirvana.
20% were still online but hadn’t been updated for over a decade. 10% were still going and only one of them was a blog I still read. I don’t even remember why I once read those other ones or that I did read them at all. I once again felt old as fuck. Sasha had a great line about that last night though, more or less translates to “I’ve been 40 for 12 years now”.
Work is still super busy and I’m doing my best to keep my imposter syndrome in check. Not everything that causes some complications is my fault even if I’m the project manager. There is only so much managing you can do before you venture over into dangerous micro-managing / burn out territory.
Today I’ve started looking at the timeline for the next big project milestone which is scheduled for the end of 2025. I started working back from then: which steps have to happen when, how long will those take and what will the deadlines will be for all those. It doesn’t seem like such a long time to go till December 2025 when you look at it that way. A bit scary but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there. At least it felt good to have some idea of the necessary timeframe for everything.
I’ve got a few more notes jotted down on a piece of paper, but right now can’t be bothered to elaborate on all of those. I’d rather keep up some more with my weekend newspapers and less news bits on social media.
And at least share a new artsy / doodling project I did last week. Inspired by Pet Needs singer Johnny Marriott, who does something similar on canvas with a piece of their lyrics. I ordered it! And I thought I give it a try myself. I kind of like it, but I already know where / how to do it differently with the next piece I’m going to work on. Whenever…
