I just finished compiling my 2021 playlist for The Infinite Playlist Project.
This collection of songs was the soundtrack for:
- blogging for 100 days in a row
- sending my best friend and his wife flowers to celebrate the birth of their kids
- getting drunk and praying during an assault on the US Capitol
- finishing a draft of a new play, hosting a table read, and deciding to scrap the project
- kissing a girl I’ve had a crush on for half my life
- laying low at my parent’s house
- leaving my childhood home for the last time
- moving into a one bedroom apartment to live alone for the first time in my life
- recording another Christmas card album
- starting therapy (yet again…)
- getting stoned at a Bayside concert and knowing exactly who I was
- receiving fashion advice from the drummer of The Strokes
- getting the Covid vaccine
- starting preproduction on a short film I wrote
- watching my little sister get engaged
- taking photos atop the ferris wheel on Navy Pier
- taking a boat ride on the Chicago river
- seeing Green Day, Fall Out Boy, and Weezer play Dodger Stadium
- dancing at a Patti Smith concert
- buying my parents dinner at Jon & Vinny’s
- starting work for an indie book publisher
- teaching ten-year-olds about World War I, biomes, and the government
- applied for a grant for my first play
- getting rejected fro Ivy League graduate schools
- starting to go to a new church
- finally giving up writing a book I’d spent six years on
- buying a first edition copy of On The Road
- making brunch to celebrate a Presidential Inauguration
- drawing pictures at the Cincinnati Art Museum
- packing meal kits with chefs in a professional kitchen
- hanging out in the Sheats-Goldstein House in Beverly Hills
- listening to a panel of art critics talk about Basquiat and Warhol
- overhearing Hollywood execs and agents talk shop about “the business”
- hanging out with a rocket scientist from SpaceX
- going on a walking murder tour of downtown Los Angeles
- getting an American Idiot tattoo
- taking up painting
- seeing Andrew McMahon play the Chicago Theater
- mourning the first wave of my peers to die
- turning thirty
Cheers, 2021. It’s been a ride.
Show me whatcha got, 2022…
joshua chamberlain 