Posts from 2024

Several times when they went to commercial during tonight’s College Football Championship game, ESPN was playing Gimme Shelter from the 1969 Rolling Stones album Let It Bleed. It’s an awesome song. The entire album is fantastic, and I’ve loved it since I was in middle school. I am just having a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that a song released five and a half decades ago is still so popular (and well known?) that it works. For comparison, if ESPN had existed in 1969, and if the CFP existed in 1969, they’d be playing Carry Me Back to Old Virginny by Alma Gluck or It’s a Long Way to Tipperary by John McCormack. Those were “hits” right at the start of World War I and — I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here — teenagers at the tail end of the 60s weren’t rocking out to Alma Gluck.

And the Stones are still touring!

The last regular season NFL game was a banger. After spending the day logging and wrapping and putting away all the decorations, my son and I spent a few lovely hours watching the Bills beat the Dolphins before I shushed him off to brush his teeth and get in bed. Goodbye, Christmas 2023.

One of the (very, very many) things that suck about losing your mom before forty is that I remember almost nothing about my own daily life prior to high school. And because my parents were divorced and I only got to see dad for a few weeks in the summer every year, there’s nobody I can ask. I have two sons and am constantly writing (and printing) notes and reminders for them, like, “You loved to eat oatmeal with blueberries and pineapple every morning for breakfast in my forty-two year-old Empire Strikes Back cereal bowl until you were six and decided that you hate oatmeal.” Or, “If you want to make pancakes the right way you have to use the frying pan with the blue enamel.” I would probably collapse in a puddle if I ever found even a single note like this from mom. She was a writer and left hundreds of notebooks and thousands of loose pages of things. She wrote me cards and letters nearly daily from the day I left for college until shortly before she died, but sadly I’ve never found anything along those lines.