Erika Angell, Dress of Stillness, Single (Constellation Records)

Snow is a wonderous thing.

Snow is chaos, crystalized. Little fractals that disappear right into your hands. Unlike sand, snow melts. But snow leaves traces — of footprints, wobbly wheels, and angels.

At first snowfall, it is tradition to help heave a car out of a snowbank, small armies of Good Samaritans rocking a vehicle back and forth while an eager driver generates that high-pitched whine of spinning hot rubber transforming snow into diamond-solid ice. And the satisfaction of the thing finally unfastening from its shackles, like freeing a loose tooth. In the wintertime, people look for clear parking spots like hermit crabs scavenge for empty mollusc shells. Snow is as notable in its absence.

The lesson of snow — I find, when it eventually arrives — is how the world looks the same and different at once, the appearance of ordinary homogeneity in the multitudes of unique singularity.

Rich Hinman, Slow Drip, Memorial (Colorfield Records)

There is a self-help book out there for smokers, a fairly famous title, seductively and flatly called The Easy Way to Quit Smoking. I don’t want to give away the ending, but the general easy-way gist is to tightly pack 200 Camels into your mouth as if you were a circus freak and light them all like a bomb fuse. Or essentially, smoke as much as humanly possible until the very idea of smoking becomes revolting. It apparently works, although I wouldn’t know. I quit smoking the hard way, which is to constantly stop putting cigarettes in your mouth and smoking them.

Dry January is increasing in popularity in recent years, and I toast — well, maybe congratulate is a better word — anyone who abstains from the devil’s water during one of the most depressing and longest-seeming months on the calendar.

It could prove far more dangerous, and I would never recommend this method, but I can report from experience that there is an easy way to quit drinking, and it, too, essentially is to marinate your very soul in alcohol until it is so saturated that it is made of booze. Once every bodily cell is pumping pure firewater, it becomes simple. It’s so difficult to quit anything when you want it. It gets easier when you drown the want.

MIZU, Pavane, Forest Scenes (NNA Tapes)

A fundamental flaw of good people is that they assume other people are also good. Good people don’t walk around thinking that other people can hurt them. Their brains don’t automatically go to that place; they don’t instinctively conclude that other people are malicious.

But bad people are real. There are good people and not so good people, the latter of which can sometimes fall into the bad people category. Bad people don’t operate properly. They are frequently composed of bad components. Bad people are bad friends, bad colleagues, bad neighbours. Bad people don’t want to be good. They enjoy wallowing in badness. They do bad things on purpose. They can’t be relied upon. Or worse, they can be — to be bad.

Good intentions are bad people’s pavement. Not only do they love themselves more; they hate you more, too.

A paradox: does it make you a bad person to assume that other people are bad?

Alexandra Stréliski, BORDERS, Neo-Romance (Sony Music)

When you have a system tuned to maximizing profit and minimizing input, and it has to expand every year, and you have a workforce that wants as much as feasible for doing as little as possible, then work degrades and disappears (so that) profit increases and consolidates.

David Bowie, The Heart’s Filthy Lesson, Outside (Virgin Records)

The first few weeks of January now carry with them the weight of two significant deaths: David Bowie and Mark Fisher. The pair have little overlap, but they are forever linked because they both disappeared at the bleakest time of year, when we are all supposed to be pondering new beginnings, not sad endings. Sadly end sometimes we must.

I feel fortunate to have lived during these two men’s times — as if their lifespans were of some significance — and embarrassed to have not achieved even a fraction of the mastery they both possessed of their respective crafts. Everyone thinks it’s easy to be a rock star, or a writer. But you have to churn out the hits, whether they’re for the dancefloor or the factory floor.

I was recently reading a New York Times profile about the downfall of the popular comedian-turned-podcaster, Russell Brand, and I noted with disappointment that someone in the comments section took it upon themselves to use the opportunity to trash Fisher’s work, presumably because Brand had once read and liked Capitalist Realism. This seemed to me to be an odd place to choose to beat up upon a dead man and made me wonder whether high-profile celebrity cancellations are built for maximum collateral damage. Only a steady diet of algorithmically recommended YouTube videos can tell.

I saw David Bowie perform twice, once in Vancouver in 1997, and again in Calgary in 2002, on his last world tour. It was like seeing lightning strike twice. Being David Bowie must have been a full-time job with no sleep since 1972. But as close as I felt to his voice, I didn’t know the man.

I didn’t know Mark Fisher either, although I had the honour of publishing two books on the imprint he co-founded. We never worked together, but literally some people have said things like “Mark Fisher would have liked your writing.” It’s flattering. But it’s also unnerving to be compared to a man whose personal story ended by his own hand. A man who concluded that death was the only way out of an era when it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism. It is easier than ever to imagine the end of the world because it ends every day, at every time, simultaneously, only to start again like a movie that just keeps spooling out. My bigger fear is that death is not the end.

The truth is that life is a death sentence. But it takes your whole life to serve it.◼︎