AND THEN THE EXPENSES STARTED KICKING IN:
September was a pretty decent month in terms of income. Bela Koe-Krompecher paid me $100 for my remaining stock of Jenny Mae and Jerry Wick comic and record sets, which I immediately applied to my past due Kiva Loan. So… yeah… those are out of print. I had a couple of unexpected sales through the Poopsheet Foundation Mini-Mart which is now set up to take a standing 20% off each sale to help keep that site running. (It’s pretty much taken a “pay what you want” format. 20% is still cheaper than I was paying for the old Wix site.) Brian Dalton from Page by Page Copies sent me an invoice for my Kickstarter books, but has started running into supply chain issues for printing supplies as he tries to dig out of the hole that his stroke created for him. I went ahead and paid him and expect the books as soon as he is able to get them done. I’m getting regular updates from him and I realize it’s a tough deal he’s going through, so I’m sympathetic. In the mean time I’m putting a hold on new Nix Comics projects until I can fulfill the Kickstarter backers.

I listened to 171 records in September, which is an average of 5.7 per day. It dawned on me that keeping track of the records I listen to has created some weird self constraints. I was initially inspired by a January tweet from writer Scott Woods where he estimated how many albums he listened to in 2020. I don’t remember the context that he tweeted that info within, but I do remember being fascinated by the idea of tracking which records I listened to so I could give an “accurate” report, maybe in the form of a zine at the end of 2021. Here’s what I noticed about the rules I unconsciously set for this project:

Somehow the idea turned into a “how many records can I listen to in a year” challenge instead of merely a counting exercise. This made me consciously avoid duplicate listening sessions if I could avoid it. (I’ve doubled up a few times, mostly by accident) I’ve adopted a “Seymour Skinner” method of listening to records, where I see how many I can listen to in a month and then try to beat that record. I count anytime I pull a record from the shelf as “one listen” even if I play it more than once in that sitting. I only count a record again if I reshelf it and then pull it again. I’ll probably not count the dupes in the final year total. I dunno if I like the weird rules that come from my brain.

Anyways, here’s what I pulled and listened to last month: