Phthursday Musings: 2025 Happened, 2026 Happenstances

About this time a year ago, I did something silly and pulled together quantitative data that “proved” how “busy” I was. I came up with the idea of “Happenings”:

Happenings are the sum total of five categories: Spiels, Books, Concerts, Contests, Races.

Well, guess what? I was even busier in 2025. It’s no wonder I’m so tired entering 2026.

I’ve actually been sitting on a lot of things I’ve intended to write about and I’m expecting this to be part of a jump-start for a lot of it. Ahh, but here are the numbers you couldn’t wait any longer for:

The numbers are actually pretty similar overall, with one exception: I wrote a lot more in 2025 than I had in 2024. I’ll get to that as I review the categories here and offer some other thoughts on the year past and the year forthcoming.

Books

Fun fact: I finished 30 books in 2025, but 8 of those were in December alone. This was aided by having recently brought some quick reads into the house but more so spoke to a cycle that has played out before. When baseball season ends, I don’t transition to watching something else on TV at night. Instead I start reading a little more at night, and then as it gets darker earlier, it ramps up. I might spend the last three hours of the waking night reading toward the end of the year.

Five of the books were about baseball, all somehow related to Joe Posnanski’s JoeBlogs or Molly Knight’s Long Game. The most recent was Jane Leavy’s Make Me Commissioner, which I would describe as an exploration into what it means for baseball to exist as it does today. I have a whole lot to say about this but it’ll be saved for a baseball-specific post which I’ve been meaning to write for months, but which I’m glad I saved until after reading this particular book.

In 2024, I read five works of fiction. In 2025, that number fell to two. This was not by design and I am not sure what to think of it.

I’d actually really like to have some kind of more regular book club sort of thing going on and to engage some of you all in some very different kinds of things. In the last month alone among other things I read:

• Patrick Condon, Broken City: Land Speculation, Inequality, and Urban Crisis, essentially arguing that excessive land valuation (to be clear: land, not property, valuation) is a huge and often overlooked problem explaining much of what’s wrong today.

• James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, a collection of essays from the famed novelist, most of which involved Baldwin discussing “the Negro problem” in a way which apparently nobody else was.

• Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross, The Longest Way to Eat a Melon, a collection of what I suppose are considered experimental short fictions, all of which was very unlike anything else I read all year.

All three of the above I found at People’s Co-Op Books in Vancouver, or as I’ve described it to people, “the communist bookstore”. It’s a fascinating place, so much so that it was the one place I specifically sought out when I went to Vancouver in November!

Would people be interested in some kind of book club after all? Would it depend on the content? What if I got authors to participate? What if you were one of the authors?

Concerts

My number was padded by seeing Silkworm four nights in a row, of course, and I also saw Mint Mile twice. Honestly, it’s funny how in 2025 so much of what I saw was stuff I would also very well have seen in 1997.

I’ve written about some of the legends I saw, like Patti Smith in November. I’ve somehow managed not to write about some others, like when I lucked into being able to see Jonathan Richman in Solana Beach, California because I was in Chula Vista for a work conference!

The Silkworm shows aside - which you will no doubt recall I wrote about at great length - I think the most exciting show of the year for me was seeing Bevis Frond in March. I simply thought that’s a band I would never ever see. When you think something will never happen, and then the opportunity comes around, and it turns out to be every bit as great as you could have hoped? Those are special things and you have to jump at those opportunities. Let nothing hold you back.

While I saw a lot of shows, I didn’t experiment much, and I wanted to. I wanted to see more jazz or even classical. But I saw so much! It’s an odd conundrum, feeling a sort of obligation to see certain bands when they come around, but that sort of squeezing out seeing more. Now if we could just do something about those late start times…

Contests

I somehow went to 27 sporting events this year. I have a separate long piece forthcoming about baseball - 16 games this year at 9 different stadiums, including 4 Major League stadiums. It was a lot and it was wonderful and I have a lot to share, but I’ll save that for now.

There were also 7 soccer matches, including the final Red Stars match in Bridgeview, a subject I’m going to write about at length in the near future.

The arithmetically inclined reader will note that this leaves 4 other games: 2 basketball, 1 hockey, and 1 volleyball.

Indeed, in November, I took my constantly growing child to the Pavilion where we saw UIC defeat ISU 3 sets to 1. I had never before been to a volleyball game above the high school level, and it was a very interesting experience. Any time UIC served, the screen would show the player’s name and where she was from, and from this I discovered that fully half the team is from overseas: Argentina, Brazil, Italy, Serbia. I never would have guessed that.

Later that month I also took him to his first NBA game, Blazers at Bucks. I was able to get cheap tickets but unfortunately Giannis was hurt and the Bucks without Giannis are kind of terrible.

I think that my kid was with me for all but one or two of these 27 games. It’s kind of just what we do at this point? And I anticipate a similar 2026. Top of his list for new experiences is a Blackhawks game. I’m thinking something else ambitious this year though: Cincinnati Open in August. And finally getting to a WNBA game.

Races

I sort of recapped the race year already so I won’t add much here. What I’ll say is that entering 2026 I’m giving a much harder thought to how to balance rest and recovery. I think I need to be more serious about yoga this year, for example.

I’m also fully intending to add to my county count. My current list is Boone, Cook, DeKalb, DuPage, Kane, Kankakee, Lake, McLean, Peoria, Will, Winnebago. The two closest to pick off would be Grundy and McHenry, but I’m really hoping to get farther out. Somehow it was only in 2025 that I got a subscription to the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society and with it came an unexpected bonus, a bimonthly magazine called Illinois Heritage, and I feel like there’s an opportunity there to do some deeper dives into local history with some more farflung travels.

Spiels

So I wrote a lot more in 2025. And I think that this happened in large part because of my first post of the year: the one where I came up with “happenings”.

It turns out that a lot of the numbers presented here are similar year over year, but there was an enhanced edge this year where I was thinking about the numeracy of things, and in multiple subtle ways this led to my writing more.

I have very little useful perspective on if the quality of the average piece has stayed consistent or not. I do tend to think that the length of the average piece is about the same, and I don’t know if that’s actually a good thing or not!

I’m going to investigate this a little more this year though. I’ve been kicking it around for a while and I’m finally going to show up for the writers group that meets twice a month at the library in town. One thing that’s occurred to me is that I’ve got a similar problem with both writing and reading. I read a lot of books but I avoid long books. And I write a lot of posts but then I tell myself I can’t write something different. I mean, why can’t I write a book? Why can’t I do something with a different kind of discipline to it?

And this is sort of a jumping off point for something I want to consider in yet another impending post… the ways in which we maintain self-discipline can be really outlandish. I’ve done at least one Duolingo lesson every day for over 300 consecutive days now. Surely this isn’t necessary, but… is it good? Is it bad? Does it crowd other things out and if so what are those other things?

And it makes me wonder about the writing exercise here. Do these posts crowd other things out and if so what are those things? Or is this providing me badly needed self-structure? Or can it be both?

Happenings… and Happenstances

I can objectively look back and say, yeah, that was a busy year. And you know, maybe it had to be. The political scene is wretched, the damage that’s been done to the country is vast, and the psychological damage this can inflict sort of compels staying active and able to rise above it all. (Maybe other things could be compelled as well, granted…)

What I have found in recent months is that my overall state of anxiety is quite high a lot of the time. And being so “busy” is kind of a double-edged sword. Staying in motion helps but then when I’m not in motion it can be worse.

What I expect in 2026 though is that happenstance will intrude. I’ve not made a whole lot of detailed plans for the year… and having entered the year when I’ll turn 50, I’ve got a weird complex about myself and not wanting to “be trapped” in whatever the hell it is I think I’m liable to be trapped in. I feel like something is going to happen and it will throw all of the happenings off.

Well, you know, one thing which is going to happen… the META-FIFTY. I teased it in November and you’ll finally start to see it in January. There’s a good chance I’ll write far more posts in 2026, but maybe I’ll also offset by writing less about other things while I’m writing more about music this year.

Alas, I’ve set myself up here to produce a lot in upcoming weeks: my long delayed piece on baseball in 2025, the piece I’ve been meaning to write about the Red Stars, all of the music stuff I “should” be working on. It’s a good thing I’ve got an entire year to work through all of this…