I told my wife, Catherine, it has been a wild ride the past few weeks, and I’ve been emotional. (I can get my shoulders rubbed with that.) Lots of life events. First a friend died at 58. It’s a sad sad story. She was my wife’s maid of honor in our wedding — and they were like sisters in high school when I started dating Catherine. Carole even lived with Catherine when her parents moved and Carole wanted to stay to finish her senior year in high school. I included a tribute in my lyrics post. I went to her memorial. I brushed away a tear or two.
A 3-year-old was found in a dumpster. I used to cover the cop beat and courts. I’ve written about vile acts and unfathomable cruelty. But like the proteins killing my brain cells, these stories are taking a toll on me over time. I ranted a bit in a column that I think shows those internal struggles.
I wrote a memoriam to a colleague whose birthday is tomorrow. He died 10 years go come Nov. 29.
I went to a wedding in Tallahassee where beautiful Megan was married to her longtime sweetheart. I had all three of my (grown up girls, a boyfriend and husband and my wife. We all crammed into a big rented van (seats seven) and sang our way all the way to Tallahassee.
Stairway to Heaven, Four Non-Blonds “What’s Up” “Free Bird” ‘Earl Must Die’ and “I Shall Be Released” as done by Kevin Kinney drew the loudest singalong response. Megan and her family had been back door neighbors in Florida. The girls used to talk through the privacy fence — that’s how they became friends. Next they started using ladders taken from each garage to climb over and play. Finally Jim, their father, and I said enough. We took a saw and cut a door out of the fence, added hinges and a latch which they could open from either side by use of a screen and, voila, instant two-home compound. It would not be unusual to wake up in the morning and find one of the girls from the other house going through refrigerator or vice versa. “Help yourself,” I’d say, rubbing sleep from my eye. Of course I cried at the wedding, but not as much as I wanted to. It took a manly effort not to. Stupid gender rules.
I get feedback from time to time that people don’t see my stories. One thing is most of my stories are online only and not in the newspaper, so you won’t see me much there — just occasionally. The other factor is I write a lot on my blog which you are reading right now: www.myvinylcountdown.com . Some of these blog posts go on to AL.com posts or vice versa. Good Idea to put that website address on favorites and check every day or every other day for new content. But then also every week I publish in AL.com and sometimes that post is on my blog and sometimes it’s not. One way to check for that is go to the ‘search’ button at the far right top of the AL.com website screen and type in my name Mike Oliver:Al.com. It should give you a list of recent writings of mine.
Thanks for everybody’s support. I feel like I’ve been distracted from my music by other blog posts . So I’m going to jump on those. I finally am out of the ‘M’s’ unless I find some stragglers.
Couple other things. It was reported that Joe Henry, one of my favorite recording artisfs has Stage 4 prostate cancer. He’s my age. I don’t have him on vinyl thus he has not made my list. But now, maybe for my birthday I’ll get what I can that he does on vinyl. I have about five or so of his CD’s. My favorite I think is Trampoline followed closely by Scar and Kindness of the World.
So it’s been quite a week. I also filed the 12th and latest story, a fun, hopefully funny dystopian serial series that is at once silly and dumb. And to top it off it has no redeeming value. Gotta read it now, I hear you thinking. Must start from top, the first one and read in sequential order otherwise it’ll make even less sense than it does now. You can find them all in the website bar at the top that says Hisicanes and Hurricanes (A Serial Story)
I dedicate this post to Challen, a colleague at AL.com, who emailed me this morning to say he had Tonio K.’s ‘Life in the Foodchain’ cranking and thanked me for recommending it.
You know Challen, it’s kind of like carving the turkey, it’s kind of like mowing the lawn, everything gets to a certain dimension, winds up on the customer’s plane and then’s gone …