Another One Bites The Dust: Having Fun With Loss

November 23, 2019
   Here's my new routine. I wake up every morning and discover another loss. This morning I read that Gahan Wilson, the macabre cartoonist just died (two days ago). I absolutely loved his dark and crazy cartoons, but now he is gone.

A typical Gahan Wilson cover

   In the rock world, so far this year, we have lost Ginger Baker, Ric Ocasek, Peter Tork, Hal Blaine, Dick Dale and Eddie Money. Damn! All heroes of mine. Gives new meaning to "Another one bites the dust."

   On the home front, two of the prettiest cheerleaders who ever yelled, "Push 'em back, push 'em back, wayyyyyy back!" just passed and I am shocked and heartbroken at the loss of these two beautiful women.

Michele and Jan are both gone

   Again, this morning I woke up and found myself reading The New Yorker to find some relief from all the loss, when I came upon these words:

"Over the past year, as the effects of lifelong improvidence had begun to impose a final reckoning, my father had been obliged to liquidate the vast collections of stamps, coins, trading cards, autographs, comic books, and historical ephemera that he had amassed with methodical recklessness since his boyhood visits to the stamps-and-coins department of Abraham & Strauss. He was no longer able to boast, with a pleasure untainted by accuracy, of having been prescient in all his investments, correct in all his predictions, wise when all others were fooled."

—Michael Chabon, writing about the passing of his father in "The Final Frontier"

   Or, put another way:

"Nobody wants your Boomer parents' crap."

—A Millennial Mantra

   But enough sadness and heartbreak concerning loss. I have decided I am going to have fun with it. How? Like this:

Fun With Loss

   What has sixty-four eyes, massive wrinkles and six teeth?

   The first two rows of a Willie Nelson concert.

"Everything you love will be taken away."

—Slaid Cleves, "Cry"