Wednesday is my day off from retail work, which makes it my designated day to record my parts for each week's edition of This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio and to try to get around to doing whatever else needs doing. I always run out out of Wednesday before I run out of Wednesday things to do.
Before we get to this week's Wednesday, we should also cover this week's Tuesday. Some pre-arranged Tuesday chauffeuring duties--I had promised to be Kato to Brenda's Green Hornet for some appointments--made it best for me to plan on taking that day off from work. The actual duties were dispatched without fanfare; knowing there would be a little bit of waiting-around time, I brought my notebook with me. Instead of reading or scrolling, I would try to write.
That worked out. I've been working at early scratches of a novel, Lazarus Lives, a very fictionalized story inspired by my friend Tom's suicide in 1979. The novel is told by a middle-aged man looking back at the memory of his long-lost friend, and remembering their teen efforts to create a superhero comic book called Lazarus. My paid patrons already got a look at the novel's tentative beginning. In trying to tell this story, it occurs to me that I need to fabricate some semblance of the comic book my characters were trying to create in the '70s. Tuesday's notebook scribbling accomplished my goal of capturing the fantastical purple-prose narrative I imagine these kids would have been attempting before one of them decided putting a gun to his own head was a better option than putting pen to paper and living out the dream of making art.
It's worth pointing out that this scenario is entirely imaginary. In real life, I don't think Tom even liked comic books, and he and I certainly never tried to write them together; I did have another friend, an artist, and we submitted some samples to DC Comics in '76, but it wasn't anything like what I'm describing here. Lazarus Lives will be a novel, not a memoir, born of the lingering ache of my memory of Tom's death. I am flat-out just making stuff up, convinced that sometimes we can relate greater truth by stringing together the lies we fancy telling. The novel is off to a decent start, and my notebook account of the origin of Lazarus feels about right. I have other books to write first, but Lazarus Lives will be a priority when its time comes.
After Tuesday's appointments, we stopped for an early dinner at Crepe Delicious. When we got home, Brenda wanted to do some cooking, and I recorded my parts for the radio show. The playlist that Dana and I worked out on Monday night was roughly spot-on for time, and required only minor tweaking to fit (my chosen fade-out song, "Route 66" by the Rolling Stones, was a tiny bit too long and needed something else subbed in its place). The show was completed without difficulty, and the files transferred to Dana for the alchemy stage of radio-makin'.
Brenda's just getting over a cold, so we spent most of Wednesday morning and afternoon at home. I finally got around to organizing the approximately twenty gazillion CDs that were piled up in our home office, skyscraper stacks of discs that accumulated because I'd pulled them to consider and/or use for the radio show, and then neglected to return them to their proper alphabetized locations. I got 'em all in order, and began the long process of reintegrating them all into the larger collection. I made it through the Kinks before deciding that was enough work for one day.
As noted previously: I own too much stuff. I love stuff, mind you, but I need to scale down. I've sold off a number of books from my library. I've reduced my LP collection by two-fifths. It's time to thin the CD archives, too. It's difficult to let go, but it seems imperative. There's only so much room. There's only so much time.
We finally left the house around 3:00, completed errands--paying the property tax, depositing some checks, picking up a book at the library (Tex Simone: The Man Who Saved Baseball In Syracuse) and grabbing this week's haul of new funnybooks at Comix Zone--and enjoyed dinner at Vicino's Brick And Brew. After returning home, I pushed the tally of properly organized CDs into the beginning of the Ms before watching some TV with Brenda in the evening.
I confess that I've been fighting a persistent malaise, something that occasionally feels like an emptiness and at other times seems more like a dead lead weight. Of course it's politics. The theoretical leader of my country is a thug, no better than a Mussolini, and it's difficult to reconcile that shame with my predilection for writing about ephemera like pop music and caped crusaders. I know I'm not alone. And I also know this deep sense of something wicked afoot goes even beyond the awful man in the Oval Office. A friend of mine recently told me that 2024 was the worst year of his life. On the same day, another friend revealed that she is going to lose her battle with the cancer in her bones. I cried at the news. My tears do nothing to help her, or anyone, All around us, there are reminders of our frailty, our fragility. Our impermanence. Mortality. Mortality is really, really overrated. Sometimes life itself can seem overrated.
But it's what we've got. I cherish the grace that's allowed me the blessings I've had, and I pray that grace can somehow touch us all, comfort us, heal us.
I know it doesn't work out that way. That won't stop me from trying. For as long as I can. Lazarus lives.
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I compiled a various-artists tribute album called Make Something Happen! A Tribute To The Flashcubes, and it's pretty damned good; you can read about it here and order it here. My new book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1) is now available, and you can order an autographed copy here. You can still get my previous book Gabba Gabba Hey! A Conversation With The Ramones from publisher Rare Bird Books, OR an autographed copy here. If you like the books, please consider leaving a rating and/or review at the usual online resources.
This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, streaming at SPARK stream and on the Radio Garden app as WESTCOTT RADIO. You can read about our history here.
