I’m back from my 3 day sports hiatus (Caps game Tuesday, World Series the previous 2) and I’m here to share some neurotic fun.

For most of this decade, I have reveled in making a year-end “Best of CD” for my own joy and amusement. I’m actually pretty sure that I care more about the tiresome and never ending thought that goes into making each CD. One year, I made a CD (and yes, I make actual physical CDs, not iPod playlists. Real and tangible) with 12 tracks, each track representing the overarching feeling and mood of the corresponding month during that year. I titled that CD, “It Is What It Is and Everything Else I Learned in the Year 2006.” Another year, I made a “Best Of” CD in ternary form. I don’t recall at the moment what that title was. It was probably long and overwrought.

I put a lot of time and effort into these projects, which is what they were. One year, I had a notebook, which became the subject of much tomfoolery amongst my friends, where I kept notes about songs and song placement and possible titles. I started that project in July of that year.

Well, last year I didn’t make a CD or a list or take notes. I didn’t have the time to. As fun as making these CDs was, it was also a time killer. Once college was done, I didn’t have time. Living on my own got in the way of spending hours working on a glorified mix tape.

As this decade reaches its astonishing close, I know that I need to make a “Best of the Decade” CD. It’s only right. Something that had been so important to me needs to be done at least one last time. Overwrought title and all. Right now, I’m stuck in between a rock and a hard place, such as a rock. I don’t know what path to take with the CD and it is kind of stressing me out. I know that I only want to do one CD, rather than a series of mixes. I want this to be one statement about the decade. But, alas, what do I want to state?

Is this CD the best songs of the decade? Is it the musical story of my decade? Is it the most important bands of the decade (to me)? Is it the coolest piece of music I can make to impress people with? WHAT IS IT? In my heart-of-hearts, I think I want it to be the first two, but with a sprinkling of the third. But how do I go about making this? The only scenario I’ve come up with is listing every album I bought in the last decade (a few hundred) and eliminating the easy-to-eliminate stuff first. The next step would be to look at individual songs on the remaining 100 or so albums and eliminate those easy-to-eliminate. But that seems far too formulaic for me and also the biggest monopolizer of my time. And picking one song from the 15 or 16 most important bands and trying to make that sound coherent is frankly too easy and not the truest piece of music I can create. And even after all of that, how do I find that balance between those bands whose music meant so much to 15 year old Jason and those bands whose music 25 year old Jason enjoys. Do I just make a CD for the Jason in the middle at age 20?

So here I sit, pulling my hair out, two months left in this 10 year period with a theoretical blank sheet of paper in front of me and not a whole heck of a lot of direction. And really, no resolution to this rant.

(Be safe Trick or Treating this weekend. Make sure to only eat unwrapped candy because it’s a a lot easier that way.)