Baggin' it: my Parkinson's and the kind-hearted stranger

 

Parkinson’s update: My left arm shakes to the point of uselessness whenever I’m under duress like, for instance, in the self-checkout aisle at the Giant Eagle. It’s stressful because shoppers treat it like they're participants in an Olympic event. So there I am struggling under the glare of hyper-efficient shoppers who appear eager to bag me. Just as I’m about to cry a woman emerges from the line and says, “You look like you can use a hand,” and begins to bag my stuff. Guess what I did…

a). I glared at her and said, “Take your stinkin’ paws off my Fruit Loops, you damned dirty ape!”

b). Jumped into her arms and said, “Mama, take me home! Me love you long time!”

c). Told her it was all part of a shoplifter sting operation and advised her it was in her best interest to consent to the pending strip search.

d). Genuinely thanked her for her gracious intervention.

Answer: “d).” The only thing she could have done to make it even better was if she’d have ponied up for the groceries and thrown in for good measure one of them Cadbury Eggs I find so irresistible.

Before I made it to the car I said a prayer that someone as good-hearted as she will be there for her to make it all better next time she struggles. In those few moments, she’d changed the world.

She took a sad song and made it better.

Lesson: If you see some one struggling with their burdens, momentarily set yours aside. Truly, you will change the world.

Or just go ahead and deport their sorry asses. 

America needs to hear the Lance Cowan story

 

The Lance Cowan story isn’t just one of the best stories in country music. It’s one of the best stories in the country itself. It’s a story of devotion, patience, self-belief, humility and a recognition so long overdue it seems like a cultural crime.

It’s not a story about making petulant demands. It doesn’t whine about how it was treated unfairly. It doesn’t want to punch anyone in the mouth

It’s gentle and so well-crafted it sounds like an echo of a Nashville that used to be but is no more.

As a PR pro, Cowan was known as a great guy who did creative and diligent work earning recognition for clients like Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock and the peerless Joe Ely.

Few knew he had a secret. Heck, he wasn’t even sure himself.

Well, the secret’s out.

He’s releasing his second album, “Against The Grain,” March 21. The collection is both long overdue and right on time. That it took him three decades to release his first album, “So Far, So Good,” is neither a sign of procrastination or of a perfectionist.

They are the signs of a man serious about his priorities.

“Music has always been an essential part of my life,” he says. “But when you have kids you start to realize what really matters and to me that means family.”

He didn’t see any value in hitting the road in pursuit of the kind of fame that often leads to hit singles but also to broken homes. 

He calculated his time would come. And he continued to write songs and he continued to hone his craft. As he approached his 60th birthday, the milestone added urgency to his ambitions.

Those dreams began to come true with the release of  “So Far, So Good” last spring.

From www.LanceCowanMusic.com:

“When I decided to release ‘So Far, So Good’ in 2024,”  Cowan explains, “I was really just trying to put together a calling card with the hopes of finding new venues to play.  I had no idea what to expect - in fact, I was pretty nervous about what kind of response I would get.  I was sweating every time a new review showed up.”

 

“Those reviews from his peers and some very tough critics were overwhelming.  “It stinks of quality,” wrote Duncan Warwick of Country Music People. “Cowan is a remarkably talented singer/songwriter who’s every bit as capable and credible as the artists he represents,” echoed Lee Zimmerman in American Songwriter. “Cowan is a superb troubadour tunesmith,” noted critic Robert K. Oermann wrote in Music Row’s DISClaimer. 

 

Richard Young of the Kentucky HeadHunters summed up the sentiment neatly saying “I have watched Lance for years help make other acts sparkle and he never muttered a word about being a singer/songwriter. You never know what is lurking in an eggshell until it opens and surprises crawl out.”

A highlight of the new music is the plaintive “Love Anyway,” about how we must react to the divisions in our lives. Also strong are “Old King Coal,” “Ragged Edge of Nothing,” and “I Can’t Stand The Winter.”

But there’s not a jarring note in the bunch. Play the album in front of a shrill meter and the little red needle will never bounce off “E.”

In an era when so many artists yearn to go viral, a term that still connotes a sort of runny-nosed madness, Cowan’s music is a steaming bowl of chicken noodle soup. It has a hardy flavor, clears your head and there’s just something about it that feels therapeutic.

You can go ahead and feel dismayed we were denied access to his talents for 30 years. Or just take it as a hopeful sign that at long last this long-overlooked talent is back for seconds.

Result's of last week's 5-hour surgery: ALL positive

 I suppose it’d be safe to say after three nights in the hospital and a five hour surgery that my back problems are all behind me.

But that reaction might be either a bit rosy and open to anatomical  confusion. 

Think about it. 

Aren’t even future back problems all behind us and can the back ever be described  the front?

I’ll try and come  back to this.

Let’s cut to the chase. The doctor said the operation was a success. I’m fine, thank you. And that thank you is from the heart (bpm, 75). I can sense in my veins (bp 120/80) that your prayers and well wishes were all sincere. It warms my soul (body temp 98.7) to know you care.

The operation involved “unpinching” a clutch of nerves that developed after the beavers in my back began damming up my spinal cord. There were bone spurs, arthritis, etc.

It was so bad I needed a wheel chair to get into the hospital for the healing.

The surgery should allow the tangle of nerves to rush to their stations. 

I’m no longer feeling the disabling hip pain that’s for three years made every single step a torture.

It effected every aspect of my life. People were asking what’s wrong with me. Will we ever see the old Chris again?

I’m, grateful especially to Val, Josie, Lucy and especially Val. The repetition is deliberate. She’s deserving of additional praise and affection.

Now, I’m ready to work on my personal appearance punctuation. For too long people have looked at me, I believe, and have seen a hobbled man locked in a defensive crouch, a man too timid to cross a busy street on a drizzly day. I looked like a man determined to shorten the drop into the cushioned comfort of any nearby coffin.

I intend to resume being upright, enthused and as publicly erect as the law allows.

When people observe me, they’ll no longer see a man bent like a nagging question mark.

They’ll see an exclamation point.

And then they’ll know the old Chris’s back. 

• Don’t think you’ve seen the last of me!

Wednesday I'm scheduled for a 6 hour operation; obviously the Doc is not a golfer

 

I’m getting my back operated on Wednesday at Montefiore Hospital in Pittsburgh. I have many concerns, foremost being it could be a really elaborate hoax. If everyone is in on the joke, how will I know they even operated? 

I’m 62 years old and have never once laid eyes on the part of the body — my own goddamned body — where they said they’ll be making the incision.

There’s a reason the office hooligans always tape the “KICK ME!” signs right about where they say they’re going to start cutting me up.

I guess my fears say more about my deceitful nature than they do about medical reality. Studies show it’s very rare for a doctor and his or her entire team to pretend they operated when, in fact, they did not. Even when it's all for the sake of a joke.

It’s just one of the ways MDs differ from BSJs (me). The BS, I’m told, stands for Bachelor of Science Journalism but it doesn’t take a wild imagination to think of a clever substitute for BS, does it?

The procedure, they say, will reduce the pain that is without surgical intervention on a trajectory that will leave me wheelchair bound within a year.

Many good friends have rallied to my side. They say they support me, say they have my back. I tell them they wouldn’t want my back. It’s a mess. My front is no prize either.

I’d say pick a side. Sides are cool. I dream of the day when you could walk into any deli or diner in America and hear someone say, “And I’d like a side of Rodell with that."

Order up!

It saddens me that I’ve succumbed to baseless conspiracy /theories, hinting that I’ve become one of those quacks I once disdained. A friend even offered to provide photographic evidence. I told him I wasn’t falling for his little charade.

“Either you’ll show me a picture of real MDs doing real work on a back I’ve never even seen with my own eyes or else it’ll be a picture of something phony, prepared or manipulated

“You know, something … doctored!”

I sent a text to close family members explaining the situation, telling each how much I loved them. I asked them, if worst came to worse, to honor what will be my last wish: Please do not bicker over my Earthly estate.

“We promise we won’t,” said my brother

Both family and friends have endeavored to put the challenge in the best possible light. They cite progress in the procedure, advances in technology and the growing experience of our top professionals.

They tell me I’ll be in good hands.

Wrong.

Good hands will be in me!

The operation is expected to last six hours.

I’ll be sure to let you know if the halftime show was as confusing to old white folk like me as Lamar’s was.

Seeking Go Fund Me donations: Why now? Why me? Why not?

The venerable Washington Post lost $77 million in 2023. I read that and felt an unseemly flush of superiority over the brainy  conglomerate that runs the place.

I lost way, way less than that — and I’m all alone by myself!

Still, the twin losses are indicative of the fiscal perils for those of us who seek to make money telling stories. For years, supporters have urged me to try a Go Fund Me campaign. I have always resisted the advice on the grounds that I didn’t think it would be  a very good look for me to insinuate my needs next to campaigns for families who’d lost their homes to fire or schools that couldn’t afford to heat the classrooms.

Heck, I didn’t have an effective argument for why you should fund me instead of one seeking funds to buy false teeth for the neighborhood hound: “Chompers for Chauncey!”

What’s changed? Other than all the great strides they’ve made in canine dentures.

I guess I want to ensure my new book achieves lift off. Therefore I’m now actively seeking sponsorship donations that will fund a comprehensive marketing game plan implemented by Headspace Media, the crackerjack local firm that’s become very renown very quickly.

Originally, a book about Parkinson’s, it organically became a book about the pre-existing conditions we all must endure. It tackles parenting, adversity, celebration, traffic woes, spirituality, male pattern baldness and the still incomprehensible reality that we all must press on without Tom Petty.

The book is “How to Deal With Things That Suck: The Art of Living Suddenly.”

I’m grateful for any shares, chatter or donations to help me reach or exceed my $7,500 goal

Our homes are way too clean

 

I’ve been witness to the phenomenon in the cities and the country and I’ve come to conclude our greatest untapped source of natural clean energy is cleaner energy. I’m talking about all the energy that is created and spent by people obsessed with cleaning things that are already perfectly clean.

Cleaner energy is all the time, strategizing and horse power anal retentive home owners  expend on cleaning items and spaces that are already clean and will look indistinguishably different after more furious cleaning activity.

I was making small talk with some friends last week and I asked about their weekend plans. She mentioned a visit to a destination restaurant, a movie and then, her voice rising an octave intoned, “And then we’re going to give the whole house a really good cleaning. We’re going to start in the living room. We’ll dust, vacuum and wax. Then it’s down the hall …”

As she said this, she looked like I remember Gen. Patton looking as he told reporters how he was going to take Salerno back from the Nazis.

I gave her an evaluating look. Not a hair was out of place. Nice smile. Impeccable makeup. This pretty woman was not the kind of person who’d ever even enter, much less reside, in an unkempt house. 

Then I glanced over at the husband. I noted the stress-related baldness. Nervous twitch and a pleading look toward the bartender to pour something down his throt that would spare him his fate.

In short, he looked like one of the soldiers Patton ordered to take back a key Salerno bridge armed with only a feather duster and a can of Pledge furniture polish.

I’ve seen that desperate, forlorn look on men like him a thousand times.

In the mirror!

It may be sexist, but the condition does seem to be more aggressive in the female of the species. I addressed this in  a parallel observation years ago:

“Women look into mirrors and see flaws … no one else can detect.

“Men look into those same mirrors and see perfection … no one else can detect.”

We need to harness and convert all the energy these subjects spend on cleaning and turn it into fuel, fuel to heat and light  our homes.

And what happens if these alterations in adherent cleaning priorities fail to catch on? What happens if the lights begin to dim?

Even better.

It’s much harder to spot a fleck of dust in a room that’s poorly illuminated.