At times it feels like I can't do a damn thing right, so the following list of "oh fuck, it's the end of another year" regrets skews a bit sideways at times--regard for chronological significance is splattered out the window, and alongside the length of a 15-passenger van as it hurtles back home for the holidays after a particularly hellish tour.

Like this one: This pains me to no end--I truly regret finding it physically impossible to put the new Strokes album into my stereo and press Play before deciding I'd rather listen to something else instead. After much soul-searching I have to admit this is due less to snobbery than to latent guilt over not having paid enough attention to follow-up records issued by bands in the past. Right now I'm kicking myself for only just now realizing Echo & the Bunnymen's Porcupine was not the difficult first step of a great band's downslide, as I've always assessed it to be. "Heads Will Roll" never sounded as good to me as it has since hearing British Sea Power's opulent debut, Decline of British Sea Power. And hey, what do you know about that?! Echo's first three albums have just been rereleased in a remastery, added-bonus-trackery kind of way--and I am now another $65 in arrears this Christmas, thank you very, very much.

Here's another: I regret that the seven or eight hundred complaints I've made to sympathetic Chop Suey employees have resulted in no action whatsoever on the club's part when it comes to doing something about those perilous steppy things tripping up unsuspecting showgoers as they attempt to mind their own freaking beeswax and watch a show. And if no one's going to fix the seemingly litigable problem, then may I request that a hidden camera be installed near the drop-off to the restrooms so that I and my meanest cronies can have a hoot-fest as we watch hour after hour of stumblebum promenade? Call it Hop Suey.

More and more each day, I regret the concept of the "cover night." However, I'd regret for life my failure to mention here how electrifying the Turn-ons were during the recent Shoegazer's Ball at Chop Fooey. First of all, they showed such utter brilliance by covering the Boo Radleys, but it was the band's gloriously spasmodic presentation of Spiritualized's "Medication" that made my fucking year.

I regret that Sub Pop's Jonathan Poneman missed his own damn boat when his company Christmas party--held on a chartered cruise vessel--sailed away without him. Honestly, that's just the saddest, most unfortunate irony I've ever heard.

I regret that my obsession with public restrooms has become even more paralyzing after paying witness last Monday to the piss-puddle left just outside the Cha Cha unisex by a fatso frat boy who'd grown tired of waiting in line and had, I shit you not, just whipped it out and flooded the floor directly under the pay phone as a stunned audience looked on, agog.

I regret this column's early deadline because it means I can't talk about the always-mentioned Cha Cha holiday party and the super surprise guest bartender (besides the obvious just-guest bartender Sam Jayne--any idiot could guess he'll spend a shift behind the well, given his well-timed show and stay in his hometown), the identity of whom I've been holding under a locked lip since I was taken into confidence by the unofficial mayor of Pine Street, Kevin Willis. I've been sitting on this for weeks in an attempt to prove once and for all that though my job may be to mine and report gossip, I am capable of keeping a secret, however much pain it causes me to do so. And while we're on the subject of the unofficial mayor of Pine Street, I have one more regret to throw out before I close. I regret that I'm only just now mentioning in this space that Willis' Melvins 7-inch on Suicide Squeeze Records sold out days before it was even released. Pain, I'm telling you.

kathleen@thestranger.com