Where to begin…

Maybe I should just start simply.

I’ve been listening to this album a lot lately. Perhaps it’s not surprising that I want to be enveloped by a warm voice tacitly singing about major life transitions.

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Joan Shelley’s The Spur, she wrote it while pregnant with her first baby (during COVID no less). It’s just a gorgeous, comforting record featuring a grown up Spencer Tweedy on percussion. Not sure if you’ve seen I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, but Spencer was born to be a drummer. When I read the liner notes to Joan’s record, all I could think was, “Is that tiny person from the documentary now an adult with opinions and legit professional drum sticks?”. The answer is, “Yes, yes, he is.”.

So, the tiny person in the above photo, like Spencer Tweedy, is a grown man about a foot taller than me with an impressive beard. No matter how adult he is now, I will always hear his 5 year old voice calling “Daddy” with varying degrees of urgency and happiness. Daddy, in this case, is the person with the Red Sox hat, who recently passed away.

If you ever listened to me at The River, you know that this boy’s dad is Comic Book Ron, the radio DJ yin to my yang. For whatever reason, no matter how schedules got turned at that place, he and I were always back to back. In the radio industry, it’s truly notable that 2 DJs remained at the same major market station as part timers for close to 15 years and were constantly back to back no matter the time slot.

I always referred to him as my brother from another mother and everyone we worked with knew it. So much so, when he went into the hospital, our boss called me in France and said, “You need to call Comic Book Ron NOW!”. I did. I remember that call & how sick he sounded. While I can’t say it was a steady decline since 2015, his health did not stay on a consistent upward trajectory.

When I got word in February that he was “ready to go”, I was a mix of deeply sad and deeply relieved. Things for him were fairly up & down and it was just hard to see how not well he was. We got to have one last crossover the day he passed. By crossover, I was just shouting at him over the phone with no response…which, if you ever listened to us on the air, was pretty on brand. I would shout to him across the studio with an open mic and he would roll his eyes at me. Sometimes, he would indulge me with a one word off mic answer but, for the most part, our crossovers were my large ass outdoor voice mouth yammering about Toblerones or Cage the Elephant or some stupid radio DJ bullshit. To be real, he was perfectly justified in not acknowledging my crap. The fact that he tolerated it for so long is the real notable thing in all of this.

So, today, Friday the 13th, was his service. I only cried through the whole thing.

As I am sitting here quietly, listening to Joan Shelley, trying to process everything, I can’t say I’m crying entirely out of grief. I’m crying out of change, out of transition, out of emergence.

March 13, 2020 was the official declaration of the COVID state of emergency. On March 12, 2020, I got a freedom of travel permit for media personnel and gas rationing coupons. They were expecting supply chain disruptions. If they started rationing fuel, as a member of the media, I was entitled to extra liters of gas. I remember holding the paperwork, thinking, “Damn. Shit’s goin down even though the official public word is ‘there’s nothing to see here’”. It was one of the weirder, more profound moments in my professional life.

A lot has happened in the past 6 years.

Here I am…on a Friday night in LA. I’ve got a big event on Sunday (cough cough) and I don’t know. I feel like change is coming. I feel like happy times are coming even though I feel emotionally depleted. I guess that’s how you always feel before big changes – exhausted, ready, anxious, excited, all of the feels.

More to come.

To the little person in the above photo: I taught you how to tie your shoes and nobody loves you more than me except your parents…maybe 👸🏻💗👶