Wah

I'm listening to Howard Stern right now. I can't wait for his move to Sirius and I'm even more psyched that Kelly got me Sirius for Christmas. That was the best gift I've received in years.

I got a cool e-mail from Ian Christie, who wrote "Sound of the Beast" which is a history of heavy metal. He's also got a weekly show on Sirius's Hard Attack channel called "Bloody Roots."

Anyway, Ian was saying he used to read my zine Yakuza back in the day.

It got me thinking about the zine and how in recent years I've given serious thought to doing another zine.

That said, I always come to the same conclusion - that I don't need or want to take on another endeavor like that.

Don't get me wrong. Doing a zine is great fun, you meet a lot of cool and like-minded people, get turned on to all kinds of cool music, help support a network of independent and progressive artists and thinkers and support a culture that I've believed in for years.

You also end up spending 80 hours a week working on a project like that, get punk rock credibility that has no currency in the "real" working world and not much else that I can think of at the moment.

It's important to keep in perspective that doing Yakuza helped me make the leap to a real job at CDNOW that paid well, allowed me to write about music and interview artists and paved the way for my current gig where I'm an entertainment editor, have plenty of opportunities to write about whatever suits my fancy and get paid well.

Doing a zine wouldn't offer anything remotely similar in terms of sustaining my life at this point.

I do miss it. But I don't want to go back to it either.