I’m feeling guilty about neglecting the blog, which isâ?¦very me, somehow. Part of it is that things always seem to get so busy this time of year, even nowadays when you can do the bulk of your Christmas/Chanuka shopping just by calling up people’s Amazon wishlists. (I have mixed feelings about that; it makes life easy, for sure, but it also takes away the surprise factor that’s half the fun of giving and receiving gifts. Me, I get around that problem by having such an enormous wishlist that I could never possibly get everything on it, which makes the eventual gifts at least a semi-surprise. :-) ) Part of it is that all I seem to want to do lately when I get home at night is knit; I have four different projects on the needles at the moment, which is a personal record for me to say the least. Part of it is inertia; I wouldn’t say I’m depressed at the moment, but I am feeling a tad unenthused about things, let’s say. Maybe the winter darkness does get to me after all. And part of it is that I haven’t had a lot to blog about lately, I guess.

But I’m still feeling guilty, and as of tomorrow I’ll be in a frantically busy cycle at work again, so before I pick up the knitting needles tonight, I figured I might as well make a second attempt at getting the rest of my Replacements saga finished, finally and finally. I might not get it all into one installment; we’ll have to see how long it takes before my typing fingers start itching to knit instead.

Part of my Replacements thing, as those of you who know me already know, was a girl thing, a little fling with one of the boys. I’m not going to write about it here, because it’s fundamentally kind of irrelevant. I wasn’t exactly the only one; hell, there was practically a network of us. So it’s not all that interesting, really. Ask me by e-mail or something if you really want to hear the girl parts.

Anyway. So our story resumes on October 15, 1985, which was the day that the band’s major label debut, “Tim,” was released.* Back in those pre-Web days, I don’t think I’d ever bothered to make sure I bought a record on the exact day it was releasedâ?¦but I bought that one on release day, boy howdy, at the old Record Exchange on the Drag in Austin. It killed me on first listen; how could it not? It starts out with “Hold My Life,” one of the most devastating songs Paul ever wrote. I’m powerless to resist Paul’s heartbreaker songs, from “Within Your Reach” to “Answering Machine” and even “Go.” And the hook line in “Hold My Life”—”hold my life/because I just might lose it”—was simultaneously like nothing I had ever heard or imagined and immediately right on target, immediately relevant to me and everything I felt. That’s part of what I mean when I talk about sometimes not being completely sure that Paul and I weren’t the same person—and as I’ve said before, I know I’m far from the only person, male or female, who felt that way.

Most days, I’ll tell you that objectively, “Let It Be” is the better record of the two (partly because of the production), and of course it’s particularly important to me because it’s the record that made me a Replacements fanatic. But “Let It Be” grabbed me by surprise; I eagerly anticipated “Tim” (and the tour that I expected would accompany it) for months and months, so in some ways, it’s the Mats album that’s closest to my heart.

And because I’m secure in my fandom :-) I’ll just go ahead and state something that some fans and many critics (especially those critics who were a little late to the party when it came to the Mats and became excessively adulatory to compensate) often skirt: every Replacements record has a few filler tracks, and some of the filler tracks, well, kinda suck. “Suck” is a relative term, of course; I’d rather listen to “Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out” than plenty of other bands’ “best” songs. But let’s face it, “Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out” is not a classic, and neither is “Lay It Down Clown.” They’re okay as filler, and they’re better than the few songs from later albums that really do suck, like “Asking Me Lies” andâ?¦okay, that’s actually the only example of serious suckage from the later records that I can come up with, but that’s not the point.

Erâ?¦what was the point again? Oh yes. For a long time, I argued that the filler songs on “Tim” were better than the filler songs on “Let It Be,” but I’m not so sure I feel that way anymore. In any case, it’s a rare record that doesn’t have a single weak moment (I can think of some, but not many), and “Tim” is no exception. But oh, the high points of that record. It starts with “Hold My Life” and ends with “Here Comes a Regular,” and really, not very many albums can claim a beginning and ending with that much power and eloquence and heartache. (“Let It Be” can make that claim too, though.) And the one-two punch of “Left of the Dial” and “Little Mascara” is also pretty hard to top. I’d bet big money that I’m not the only sort-of-guitar-playing girl (“Oh, do you pretend to play an instrument?” Paul once asked me in his inimitable, is-he-teasing-me-or-insulting-me style, when we were getting to know each otherâ?¦but I’ll get to that later) who ever half-wished, half-pretended that “Left of the Dial” could be about me, despite the fact that I knew even back then that the song was about Lynne Blakey. And “Swingin’ Party” was another lyric that seemed so completely right that it was hard to believe no one had ever thought of it before. It’s quite a record, that “Tim.” (Too bad about the production. And the artwork.)

Geez, I haven’t gotten very far and I’m already tired of typing this. I’ll try to get the next installment done soonish. But no promisesâ?¦after all, I still need time to obsess over my best-of list.

*I remember the release date exactly because my beloved and constantly mourned cat Tim, who was named after the record—though I used to tell him that the record was really named after him—came into my life as a five-month-old kitten in March 1986. I figured that since that meant he was born in October 1985, he should have the same “birthday” as his namesake album, and though I am not nearly enough of a cat weirdo to actually celebrate cats’ birthdays or give them birthday presents or anything, it did help me remember the release date for the record.