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New days ahead

It’s one of those slowed down beautiful Fall days. Yellow leaves fall and float against a cloudless blue sky.

It’s about room temperature. Except you get a little leftover summer breeze if you sit outside.

The day is idyllic but I can’t settle my mind. A news alert warned of a wreck that shut down two lanes of I-65. My middle daughter, Emily, went to a wedding in North Carolina over the weekend and would be driving back. Worried mind, I called her. She was fine. She’s in her early-30s for goodness sakes but worries take hold.

No matter how old, you worry.

This is all a long way of telling you I had another grand child this week. Eloise Mae Archibald, a beautiful baby girl. The sweet petite baby was 6-pounds 3-ounces, birthed by my daughter Claire. Ramsay Archibald, son of my friend and colleague John Archibald, is the father.

Her Wednesday. Oct. 28, birth, comes on the heels of Isaac Michael Turner born April 13 in Korea where mother, Hannah and father, Tom Turner live. We were blessed to have been able to see Isaac thanks to my sister, Julie, who bankrolled a surprise visit to see us and other friend and relatives.

Seeing the babies and watching them and holding them did something to me. It reinforced my commitment to fight this disease Lewy body dementia, which I have had now for six years. Life expectancy after diagnosis is on average 5 to 8 years.

The grandchildren reminded me of the fragility and perpetual nature of life’s cycle, death and rebirth. It also showed me to be wary of another cycle, the spin cycle of worry.

Everything is going to be OK.

There won’t always be blue skies, but when there are, you appreciate them with every fiber in your being.

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RIP Gus

Gus is dead.

The rust-colored family dog, a poodle mix, breathed his last breath Monday morning, moments after a veterinarian injected him with a lethal drug.

He was 17.

I wasn’t there at the time of death. I couldn’t bear adding anything to the trauma it brought to me. As someone living with Lewy body dementia, things like this give me a double- wallop.

My wife, Catherine, who was at the clinic in Avondale, said Gus died peacefully about 8:30 a.m.

I’ve been through this before. My father is a retired veterinarian. Molly, my yellow Labrador, was euthanized in 2012. I was stroking Molly when the injection was made, and Molly’s eyes went from deep pools of consciousness to click and fixed.

I wrote about my experience with Molly and then later wrote about Gus’ health declining . Euthanizing Molly was an easier call to make than Gus. Molly went from walking to not walking in just a couple days. She lie sprawled on the kitchen floor wheezing, likely due to heart failure. We carried her literally to the car to go to the vet.

Gus’ situation made it more difficult to make a call. At 17 Gus was already well beyond life expectancy but he was not senile and he was fairly mobile. He had a tumor larger than a golf ball on one side of his chest. It was benign. His back legs were in various stages of paralysis and climbing the stairs at night to come sleep on his dog bed was becoming more arduous. More than once he slipped and rolled down those steps. Only to pop up and try it again.

The newest deficit was incontinence. Unable to make it to somebody who would let him out, Gus ended up leaving ‘surprises’ for us nearly every morning. His eyes were clouded with cataracts, and as far as I could tell he was about 90 percent deaf. To hear you, Gus had to see your face, kind of like a lip reader.

Counting family pets growing up, I’ve had more than a half-dozen dogs during my life. Gus was probably the second smartest one I’ve had. Maggie, a dog we had in the 1980s, rescued from the Etowah County dog shelter near Gadsden, was a mixed border collie and literally could understand everything you said. Catherine rescued Gus from a shelter in San Francisco. Gus’ nickname was psychodoodle for his frenetic energy driven behavior in earlier years.

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Dunk brings it home for Lewy body fight

The game was knotted at 18. It had been getting a little intense, some might even say ‘chippy.’

The next bucket would win.

Every  shot was fiercely contested. Most shots brought shouts of ‘Foul,’ and the ensuing usual arguments. 
“You’re holding.” “He traveled.” That’s to be expected when the two best teams in a field of 17 are duking it out.

It was the finals Saturday morning, Aug. 20, for the 2022 MikeMadness’ basketball fundraising event. Lives were on the line.

Say what? MikeMadness raised a Madness record, about $16,000 for research and awareness of Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disease that is always fatal.

I have the disease. So they were playing for me and the other 1.4 million affected by the disease in the U.S.


Jim Bakken/UAB

The event brought 100’s of family members, friends, and curious spectators and thousands of dollars (we are still awaiting official tallies.)

So it all came to down to this, 18-18. Nineteen wins it.

Jim Bakken, chief communications officer at UAB, had the ball in his hands at the top of the key.

“You have no idea how much I look forward to Mike Madness,” Bakken said later. ” Getting to play in it this year with my son and showing him why the day is so special was really meaningful to me.”

His son, Jack Bakken, a 16-year-old hoopster at Mount Brook High School, was on dad’s team. And he was a chip off the old block: long and lanky, only a few inches shorter than his 6′ -foot-6-inch father.

The University of Alabama at Birmingham and the UAB Student Rec Center have hosted Mike Madness for four of the last six years since 2017. COVID thwarted attempts in 2020 and 2021.

MikeMadness has raised a total of more than $55,000 with the the four tournaments.

“So much of what UAB is about – like health and wellness, research and serving the greater good – is embodied in the tournament, and we are honored to join Mike in his fight.” 

Jim Bakken splits the double-team at MikeMadness, a fundraiser to find a cure for Lewy Body dementia. The3X3 basketball event at UAB Rec Center was all tied up and at game point when Bakken drove the lane and slammed down a vicious dunk. (Photo: Trisha Powell Crain)

But what about the game? The UAB team and the Power Ballers have met before in Mike Madness finals. They are usually hard fought games, and this was no exception as it came down to the wire.

”It is a bit of a blur,” Bakken remembers.”I was actually planning to pass to a younger teammate but saw an opening to go left and create some separation. I decided to drive hard and see what happened. As a 44-year-old weekend warrior, my athleticism and ability to drive hard can be pretty inconsistent, but luckily I caught a little burst of adrenaline. ”Without that, I’m pretty sure it would have been a boring but fundamentally sound left handed lay-up.”

Instead it was a slam dunk amid three defenders. The crowd went wild.

NOTE: Early post of this story had the wrong date for the tournament. Correct date was Aug. 20, 2022. Also corrected to say 17 teams participated. For more information see www.myvinylcountdown.com and the Lewy body dementia association LBDA.org.

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Oiling up the old machinery

Let’s see. I type one letter at a time as I am now doing. So far so good.

I have not been writing much lately. I am working on some other things. Certainly, I have not been typing like I did over the past five years, writing 678 reviews of each of my vinyl records, plus an uncounted number of non-musical reviews, features, Lewy body news, and basketball observations. My theory was that typing, or writing was the perfect exercise to address both the physical and mental aspects of the disease. I think it’s working.

I believe the physical muscle coordination of fingers and keyboard addresses the Parkinsonian aspect of Lewy body dementia. While the focus to make sense and remember what I’m writing — and have a point –exercises the cognitive diminishment portion of this debilitating disease..

I figure even if I am deluding myself on the typing’s effect on Lewy body dementia, it’s still worth doing. Typing, that is. I didn’t take that 11th grade typing class for nothing , working my way up to the 50 words per minute level.

I have to tell you a secret, though. Not many journalists know how to type.

They just develop a speedy hunt and peck system. They lean over the keyboards, like a praying mantis. Usually their face is nearly touching the keyboard because they have to see where the letters are.

I derive this from 40 years in newsrooms across the country watching people hunt and peck, hunt and peck, hunt some more and peck some more.

Now classically trained typists, such as myself, can make the untrained feel inadequate with our flurry of tap tap taps, and ding dong dings. Our fingers tell us where the words are. And yes typewriters used to ding , most notably when you hit the end of the sentence. (Not sure if they actually donged; I’ll just call poetic license on that.)

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

That’s a typing warm-up; the sentence has every letter of the alphabet. Now I have to confess, numbers on a typewriter which appear on one of the upper rows, slow me down as do the shifts for dollar signs, asterisks and hyphens. But it’s just a few milliseconds.

Back to typing, er, writing.


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Higher ground

I’ve been taking some time off from posting here as I have another related project I need to finish.

The past few weeks have been memorable and miserable. Our basement took on water during the massive rainfall deluge one day recently. That was bad but then — possibly related although days apart — one of my shelfs collapsed. sending hundreds of albums crashing to the ground, which was covered by wet carpet from the aforementioned flood.

Miraculously, the other records landed on top of other records. And many had plastic over-sleeves.

The good news: minor water damage on three or four albums, nothing special was lost and it’s forcing me re-organize and make decisions about what to do with my slightly out of control collection, which I estimate is close to 750 now.

The culprit? Too many records, too much weight. So be careful now when you’re rearranging your storage system or display system. Records are heavy.

Meanwhile, keep checking this blog, read some of the older pieces. I’ll be back!!

Heard on the street. after two (or three?) years on COVID hiatus, Mike Madness the Lewy body fight for a cure fundraising 3-on- 3 tournament MAY be coming back. Still firming things up but this year, we are aiming for a mid August time slot. Location likely UAB.

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Saddest story ever

That this war could be the backdrop to my own death disturbs me greatly.

The horror is visual and visceral as brought in bytes and bits bounced off satellites. It really has me rattled.

I was diagnosed five years ago with Lewy body dementia, a degenerative brain disease characterized by memory loss and tremors.

I’m trembling right now. I feel the whole world is trembling. Not in fear but rage, and sorrow.

For some reason I got this ‘legendary’ Ernest Hemingway story stuck in my mind. Challenged to write the shortest story ever, Hemingway apparently came up with:

For Sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

Legend has it, though Snopes doubts it — Hemingway jotted those six words down on a beer napkin and walked out with $10 from each member of the group.

Baby shoes, kids-sized shoes, adult-sized shoes. There’ll be closets full of these shoes in Russia and Ukraine — some never to be worn again.

I’m thousands of miles away but I can’t shake the shakes and the disbelief. And it makes me so sad on many levels. I feel like I’m leaving a world for my daughters that is so messed up.

It’s always been like this, you say? Wars, plagues, exploitation, greed and discrimination. Greed? Did I mention greed? Maybe I’m the guy who keeps beating his head against the wall expecting a better result. Some tiny shred of evidence progress is being made in human history.

Instead, we see and hear, through our gadgets, teenagers lining up to get their very own Kalashnikov and an ill-fitted helmet. We see brigades of men and women bustling in a room where they pour gasoline into beer bottles and stuff it with a cloth. A Molotov cocktail.

We see daughters and sons and mothers crying for their fathers at the train station as evacuation was not allowed for men over 18.

If challenged, I, too, can come up with a six-word story.

For sale, broken heart, never mended.

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My Vinyl Countdown’s top rated albums

I started this blog in September of 2017 on the premise that I would review all of my 678 vinyl records. I set myself a fairly simple deadline — my death.

Diagnosed a year earlier with Lewy body dementia, I didn’t know if it was possible for me to live long enough to fulfill that vow or if it would be easy-peasy.

Well it hasn’t exactly been easy- peasy but I am alive, and this morning I paid $250 bucks to extend my blog site and keep my domain name until 2027.

I’m optimistic.

The formula seems to be working. Do something I enjoy so I’ll keep doing it, exercise my brain and help people understand the disease inside out from someone who has Lewy body dementia. OK, now that I’ve been through all my records, doing a little write-up on each one, I’ll tell you what I found. First thing I learned: That’s a lot of album reviews.

Today, I am distilling that 678 by listing my highest ranked albums. My rating system is a fairly simple 1-5 rating, 5 being a top album, or classic even. A more detailed look at ratings here.

I do half scores: 3.5 or 4.5 e.g. Today I have culled all the 5-rated albums.

There are 50 in here that have achieved the ‘5’ rating. If that sounds like a lot, remember these are records I shopped for and paid for. I’m shooting to buy a ‘5’ every time. If somebody else came by and dropped 678 records on me, the results may not be so heavy with 5’s.

I think this would be a pretty good list for those starting a record collection. I’ve said before, I’m not a collector as much as I am an accumulator; much of my collection came from bargain bins. Some were bargain bins from 40 years ago. Here we go:

Joseph Arthur ‘Temporary People.’ One of several unknowns in my collection who deserves more recognition.

The Beach Boys Pet Sounds. I didn’t get what was so special about this album at first but then after repeated listens to ‘God Only Knows,’ I caught the vibrations.

Chuck Berry ‘The Great 28.’ The closest to the Beatles in terms of influence in his day.

David Bowie The Rise of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. A chameleon.

Buzzcocks ‘Singles Going Steady.’ Punk power pop.

Bob Dylan Biograph 5-record box set and ‘Blood on the Tracks.‘ Dylan has a number of albums that might be 5’s but I don’t have them. These will give you a nice sample of his though.

Van Cliburn Tchaikovsky Concerto No. 1. Some highbrow music from the tall Texan.

Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Club. One of the best live albums ever.

Creedence Clearwater Revival ‘Chronicle.‘ Keep on Choogling.

Miles Davis ‘Milestones.’ Trumpet player about to bust out.

Derek and the Dominos Layla and other assorted love songs. Eric Clapton and Duane Allman hit it off.

Electric Light Orchestra Ole’/ELO. Greatest early songs.

Peter Gabriel. His first solo album.

Marvin Gaye Every Great Motown Hit. Among the best soul singers.

Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five ‘New York, New York.’

Dexter Gordon. ‘One Flight Up.’ Tenor sax player, one of the best.

Al Green. Greatest. After an extraordinary string of hits, he became a pastor and sang in church.

Jimi Hendrix, Greatest Hits and Axis Bold as Love. Revered by some as the greatest rock guitarist ever.

Joe Henderson ‘Our Thing.’ Saxophone man.

Peter Himmelman ‘There is no Calamity. From the severely overlooked artist from Minneapolis.

Chris Isaak. ‘Chris Isaak’ Smooth singer informed by rockabilly.

The Kinks. Lola vs. Powerman and the Money Go-round. Quirky, smart, rock and roll.

Carol King, ‘Tapestry,’ One of the biggest selling albums of all time.

Led Zeppelin. Fourth album with ‘Stairway to Heaven.’

John Lennon Plastic Ono Band. Pain heartache catharsis.

Bob Marley Legend. Reggae great’s music is timeless.

Mekons ‘Rock and Roll.‘ Raucous rock with the hard stuff and the melodic stuff.

Van Morrison ‘Astral Weeks,‘ ‘Moondance.’The Irish Bard.

The Best of Dolly Parton (1975). Parton has three major ‘hits’ albums, this one, at the beginning of her peak is best.

Pink Floyd ‘Dark Side of the Moon.’ ‘Wish You Were Here.’ Tricked you into thinking they were noodling progressives. Then smack you with well arranged, well played, rock with a touch of noodling.

Bud Powell Bud Powell! Influential jazz pianist on Blue Note.*

Elvis Presley Sun Sessions. Pivotal record in history.

Prince ‘1999’ ‘Purple Rain.’ ‘Sign Of The Times’ also could have made it.

REM ‘Murmur.’ The subtle but groundbreaking debut for the band from Athens, Ga.

Rolling Stones. ‘Exile on Main Street.’ ‘Sticky Fingers.’ ‘Hot Rocks.’ Legends.

Bruce Springsteen. ‘Born to Run.’ ‘Born in the USA.’ Singer songwriter with amazing live shows.

Richard and Linda Thompson ‘Shoot Out the Lights.’ Why does love have to be so sad? (See Derek and the Dominos.’)

Al Stewart ‘Year of the Cat.’ Beautiful sound and lovely songs.

Tonio K. ‘Life in the Foodchain.’ Criminally underrated.

The Who ‘Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy.’ They could see for miles and miles.

Neal Young ‘Decade’ ‘After the Gold Rush.’ One of America’s most important artists for 50 years. And he’s from Canada.

Zombies. Odessey and Oracle. A 1960s classic falls out of the British Invasion.

Remember these are from my collection. Sgt. Pepper Lonely Hearts Club Band would likely be a 5 but I don’t have it. I did buy and receive a number of albums over the 4 years I was doing this blog but for the most part, the rule was that this was a list of 678 bought before I started this blog. There are exceptions.

<Correction, originally had Powell down as drummer.>

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Put it on ice, willya?

I got nothing against ice.

I like ice cubes floating around in my iced tea on a hot summer day. Ice was among our first inhabitants when the world was being formed.

I raise this issue because I heard on the news a story about News Jersey pro surfer (Yes, they surf in Jersey.) This Ocean City man, Rob Kelly, has vowed to take an ice bath or swim in the ocean every day this year — part of a New Years resolution.

When the blizzard or so-called ‘bomb cyclone’ hit a couple of weeks ago, he could be seen trudging through snow covered beach, stripping down to his surf shorts and hitting the waves, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Rodrigo Torrejón.

I would rather have the eye fluid in my head drained with a hypodermic needle, with no anesthesia, than jump in 35-degree water.

I was a promising swimmer as a precocious 7-year-old living in St. Paul, Minn., We had moved North in the late 1960s from Alabama where I swam in lakes, rivers, creeks and community pools.

In Minnesota, I became part of the Red Cross training program. It had levels like Beginners, Advanced Beginners, Intermediate and so on. I breezed through the levels. All the time. I was aiming to get a Lifeguard certification, which was the highest level. But, alas, I was too young and too small to drag the weights from the bottom of the pool. And frankly I was too young to tell people two or three times my age to stop dunking the other kids or pushing them in the pool.

Now I can’t remember exactly what happened, but for some reason I began practicing my swimming technique in a Minnesota lake with a whole bunch of other kids, many Norwegian, who had a natural immunity to cold it seemed.

Now Minnesota is the Land of 10,000 lakes and woodchucks are abundant: “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a wood chuck would chuck wood.’

I’d go into the water with my faded Alabama tan and come out as blue as a B.B. King song. I spent the rest of the day shivering.

This is a long way of telling you that I avoided swimming as a sport when I moved back to the South. Football, baseball, basketball yes. But full immersion in water colder than a warm bath, I’ve sworn it off.

Soaking in ice is considered therapeutic. It’s a trend among athletes seeking quicker recovery from sore and injured muscles.

Not me, you go jump in the tub of cubes. You’ll find me in a 180-degree sauna sipping a cold ice tea.

Which brings me to one last thing that may explain my cold aversion. I tip the scale the other way. Bring me the heat.

I can sit in a tub with water hot enough to boil shrimp. I can take a shower that melts the curtain.

It still makes me smile, slightly sadistically, when I hear my wife, Catherine, walk into the shower. I hear the water come on followed by what sounds like the yelp of a scalded dog.

After 40 years of marriage she still forgets one of life’s important credos: Never stand under shower head when you first turn on the water.

P.S. I did do the Ice Bucket Challenge a few years ago to raise money for ALS by signing up to have a large bucket of ice water (it took two people to lift the bucket) dumped on my head.

In that moment when the water (with cubes) drenched my body, my breathing ceased, and memories of Minnesota flashed before my eyes, one thought made its way to my head: Next time I’m going for the elective eye surgery.

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If you know what I mean …

Some things are said but never done.

If you know what I mean. And I think you do.

Some things are done and never talked about.

If you know what I mean.

We live life seeking pleasure and meaning. But we too often settle for something just slightly less uncomfortable. And more questions.

If you know what I mean.

We are fooled every day into thinking we are in control. When in reality, we are not.

If you know what I mean.

It’s hard to understand there are billions of opinions, laws, edicts, theories, declarations and warning signs. Each formed by human observation and experience over time. We build the tower of knowledge one brick at a time. With lots of coffee breaks. Thousand-year coffee breaks.

If you know what I mean.

It’s hard to believe that when you look up into the sky you are seeing the distant past, hundreds of millions of stars that don’t exist anymore. They burned out long ago.

If you know what I mean.

It’s hard not to believe that your own opinion is the correct one when in reality it may not be. Or, it may be that there are many correct answers to a question. Or, that the answer is that the universe is both finite and infinite

If you know what I mean.

It’s hard to believe our own star — the sun — will burn out too, and its light may be seen by someone, some being, (another version of ourselves), a million years later, a million miles away. Eating pizza. On a coffee break.

If you know what I mean.

We are billions, but we are connected. By the roar of the machines we make, by the blood running through our bodies, by the inexplicable violence against one another, by the definition defying qualities of love.

If you know what I mean.

And I think you do.

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This isn’t writing, it’s typing

I am doing that. Typing. And it is a slow, painful process. I’d have paid for somebody to stop me from writing this sentence.

I’m in a stage, late afternoon, sun going down, that messes with the minds and bodies of many of us with Lewy body dementia and other brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. It’s called sun-downing.

For me right now, it is that my hands are trembling. Another name for it is tremors. When nighttime slowly drops like a dark curtain, people with dementia may get confused, disease symptoms may be exacerbated. Some dementia patients are at risk of wandering.

I guess in the old days, folks went to bed when it was dark. But now we work until dark and beyond. We got light. We got lamp lights, overhead lights, street lights, flashlights, dashboard lights, spotlights, and refrigerator lights which turn off when you close the door. Or does it really?

Is it possible the refrigerator has been fooling us all this time, and nothing happens?

But I digress. Man, do I digress.

These tremors I’m having due to this sun-downing effect are hard to describe. It’s like a mind-over-matter thing. I can stop it if I focus directly on the tremor. There I just did it for 10 seconds — but then I started to think about this writing and in seconds the leg starts twitching, my fingers slowly tap the keyboard just like they did in typing class in high school. You put your two hands on the keyboard and your fingers still seem to magically find the right letter. Only now it is excruciatingly slow as some unseen force is holding them back. My right little finger twitches as I type. It struggles to hit the P.

I get flustered and know that if I push down hard on the laptop with the heels of my palms, I can go faster.

But right now I was going to ask a rhetorical question about how this technique works, but I had to stop to find the ‘question mark.’ It’s shift ‘back slash’ or is that a forward slash??????? (Please intersperse these extra question marks to sentences that need them.)

I’m doing all this, not because I like the torture of a million minor trembles, but because I have Lewy body dementia and maybe my experience as a journalist can give you an idea of how it affects the body. Plus, I think it really helps in slowing down the disease’s symptoms. Can’t prove it, but I absolutely think it works.

During day or night these bouts can come, but sundown is prime time. The best way to make it stop is to stop what you are doing, close your eyes and think of something that makes you happy. And breathe.

When in this agitated state of tremoring and tightening your muscles you focus directly on what your body can do to help. I know, your toes are tied in knots, your entire body is rigid and then you counterattack with more relaxation and body awareness, and rest. Try thinking about relaxing your feet. From the feet go up to your legs and focus on untightening and relaxing. and so forth up your body one area at a time.

LBD kills multitasking. Focus becomes difficult. Now I am going to tell you to do the opposite of what I just said about dealing with these tremors. That’s a way to keep the symptoms at bay. Now that we’ve learned some of those skills, it’s time to fight back.

Make the brain work to do what you want to do. Don’t ask for help in putting on that shirt. Type, knit, play dominoes, card games or anything that works out your brain messages to your body. Get your brain started again by working against what the alpha-synuclein proteins are inflicting.

Be hopeful.