This New Year's Eve, my friend Billy introduced me, Ms. Fretboard and a few other folks to a ritual called The Log Of Regret. It's a bit of a misnomer, because it's only half regret, really.
It requires a working fire of some sort, and some slivers of wood. You take a Sharpie and write your regrets on one side of your wood sliver, and then your goals on the flip side, before putting the whole thing on the
fire.
Even "regrets" is somewhat limiting; the house rules run to anything you'd like to be rid of from the past year, and naturally the sky's the limit as far as your thoughts about the future go.
That's about as dramatic as my New Year's got, although we did also play music together most of the night, took in a pretty bitchin' sunset over the Texas hill country, and played Monikers somewhere in there as well.
Earlier that
afternoon, I jotted down the following haiku, just after choosing what music to put on for the drive:
Road trip New Year's Eve
No one else wants to hear "The
Shape Of Jazz To Come"
It's true. But we wound up taking more than one car, so I could listen to Ornette Coleman as loud as I wanted, and did.
The
other thing no one else really wants to hear, at least through New Year's, is a bunch of hype. I make a point of lying low around the holidays, both for my own sanity and because I assume everyone else, like me, would appreciate a little peace and quiet in their inbox as well.
But as January starts to get under way, I do find myself thinking about the coming year, especially in terms of what I'd like to get better at, musically, and how I'm going to work on
it.
If you're thinking about that too, I'll be live streaming a free master class on the channel tomorrow. It's called "Five Ways To Get Better In 2025," and it's open to anyone who would like to attend: