69

I must interrupt my regularly scheduled ride Down the Mississippi River programming for this very important special announcement.

I turned 69 years old today.

I’ve been looking forward to turning 69-years-old since I was a little kid. 1969 was my best year of my life. I peaked in 1969 and it’s been all downhill ever since. I accomplished a bunch of incredible things for anyone, let alone a 12-year-old, and I got suspended from Hamilton Elementary School in Berkley Michigan, in the sixth grade, for being an asshole.

Since then, it, and I, have slowly but surely been going all to hell. It’s sad to accept that your best year was decades ago but what the heck.

Today has been a great day. I drank a couple of dirty Grey Goose martinis as a warmup and then I drank a case of Schells Deer Brand lager beer. So, I’m piss-drunk fucked up now as I wind down, with the additional joy of making myself totally satiated happy by making myself a barbecue bologna sandwich. That was my birthday feast. I could have made myself lobster, or filet mignon, or halibut, or gone out to a fancy restaurant, but I chose to take a two inch slab of homemade bologna, throw it on a charcoal grill, barbecue it, squirt just the right amount of homemade barbecue sauce on it, add some homemade coleslaw, and plop it all in a brioche bun. More on that when I get back to motorcycling through Memphis Tennessee but for now, let me just say that a Barbecued Bologna Sandwich is as delicious as anything that you might find in Paris France or Tuscany Italy.

Sixty-nine is a really special number, with a strong wink-wink quality. Who among my peers/age group doesn’t remember being coiled up like couple of earthworms, faces buried mid-ship at opposite ends, trying to focus on the other’s bliss. Maybe a few of you who knew me are blushing right now but I’m not.

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Me and Robert Crenshaw used to joke about the Prince song, 1999. We partied occasionally, and when we did, as the hours passed, we used to refer to the song with equal parts glee and reverence. And we did our level best to honor it with our absolutely most eager self-destructive effort. I remember one night with him and me and John Frantz and Jeanne McIvor enjoying a wholesome evening filled with Shirly Temples and G-rated snacks— I think we played 1999, like, 37 times. When Prince hollered, “two-thousand zero-zero party over, out of time…,” we sang along, derisively, like it was an abstract that was nothing more than a too-far-in-the-future joke that our eternally young, naive asses would never see.

My parents both died in their early seventies. My grandparents on my mother’s side both died in their early seventies, but my paternal grandmother lasted into her nineties. So, who knows?

And yet, a safe bet is—whatever thousand seven zero- motherfucker- I am out of time.

Therefore, I’m going to make sixty-nine my best year since '69. A rebound is in order!

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And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

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