I stated in previous chapters, my battle was nothing. I never got sick beyond a sore throat, and feeling really, really tired. I do still have a recurring headache. For those curious, this is my vaccination history:
Pfizer
Moderna
Pfizer
Jen had the exact same combo as me, but she suffered a lot harder. She’s on the upswing now, but her symptoms included sore throat, mild cough, lots of body pain, congestion and fatigue. I believe I brought it into the house from work.
I wanted to write this Covid journal to keep people informed, let them know what Covid is like. Fortunately this journal was a bit of a bust! No complaints from me.
RECORD STORE TALES #1052: The Covid Chronicles Continue
I’ve stopped testing. Jen is still suffering pretty hard.
I worked from home for most of this week, which both sucked, and didn’t. Because I didn’t have to do the usual stuff – shower, pack a lunch, drive, wait – I had a lot more free time at home and got some extra creative projects done in the mornings which I like to do.
I also explored un-ripped parts of my music collection, as seen below. The “G” section was easy to access, and so I grabbed a stack of discs that I had not played in over 10 years. Much much longer in some cases:
Peter Gabriel – Shaking the Tree – Sixteen Golden Greats
Marvin Gaye – The Very Best Of
Girl – Pure Greed
Giuffria – Silk & Steel
Roger Glover – Butterfly Ball
Glenn Gould – Goldberg Variations – 1955 version
Glenn Gould – Goldberg Variations – 1981 version
Glenn Gould – Beethoven/Liszt Symphony #6
Green Bullfrog Sessions
Rediscovering Glenn Gould was a delight; I especially like when you can hear him humming or singing along to his playing. Green Bullfrog was funky and cool! Blackmore really wailed and I could absolutely hear that it was Ian Paice on drums. Butterfly Ball was surprising fun. Giuffria was way, way, way more Journey-like than I remembered. Sounds like they were really going for a Journey vibe, especially with David Glenn Eisley’s vocals. Peter Gabriel and Marvin Gaye were fun re-visits with a lot of great songs. But the real surprise was Girl, featuring Phil Lewis and Phil Collen. I loved hearing Collen’s trademark shred, but Lewis is an underrated singer. Girl was the favourite of this batch. Sorry Beethoven.
Back to Covid. Jen is suffering, not gonna lie. I have zero symptoms, but this morning I did cough up some phlegm. Kinda like you often do several days after a bad cold. Except I never had the bad cold.
Jen’s experienced dizzy spells and general, all around malaise. She wishes her nose would stop running.
I experienced a troll on the “Let’s Get Physical” Facebook group who commented that Covid wasn’t real, when I posted my Covid listening list. I told him to “eat shit” and blocked him.
Back to work, and I am tired. A couple hours of work are enough to make me feel it. Legs are tired too. Maybe because I’ve been on my back all week. I have no cough, nothing wrong with my lungs…I got lucky.
Jen is less lucky. She has the symptoms. A bottle of Sprite tasted like fish to her. And I feel bad because it was clearly me that brought it into the house.
I only go one place. Work and back. I’ve been nowhere else.
RECORD STORE TALES #1048: Covid Chronicles 3 – Sharing is Caring
Day Three
Fatigued and restful, I did need more sleep. What I did not need was to pass this Covid on to Jen. Our pharmacist advised it was inevitable that I would, given our small living space.
She has a scratchy throat, a cough, and now her sense of taste has gone completely out of whack. Sprite tastes like fish.
I am grateful that I have not gotten worse, but I feel terrible about this latest turn of events.
I slept for hours! Lost track of how many hours. In the morning I was still testing positive. Jen is still negative. In the afternoon, my sore throat went away, leaving me only tired and achey.
Monday will be a sick day from work. I am hoping to go back on Tuesday. Only the test will tell.
How it happened, I can’t fathom. I haven’t done much except go to work, and I have limited contact there with anyone. Jen has been to the hospital a couple times, so my current theory is that she brought Covid home from there without getting sick herself. I’m positive, she’s negative.
My health has been all out of whack lately, with a nasty stomach bug the week before. Stress levels are close to all-time highs. I’m triple-vaxxed, but I had a panic attack the day I was supposed to get a booster and never did the fourth.
So here’s the Covid Chronicles, check ’em out and see how I’m doing.
RECORD STORE TALES #1048: Covid Chronicles 1
Day One
I woke up Saturday morning bright and early with creative juices flowing. In a long and effortless spurt, I completed 7000 words of Tee Bone Man vs. Edie Van Heelin’, some of my best fictional writing to date. It took a few hours, and several spins of Night Ranger’s Greatest Hits, to finish. I had a tickle in my throat, but felt fine otherwise. Tired, yes, but I only had four hours of sleep, so that was to be expected.
I tested myself shortly after lunch. I was shocked when the line filled in immediately and strongly. Covid? No way! It didn’t seem possible. It still doesn’t.
I went to go lie down and caught a couple more hours of sleep. I talked to a few people and got some advice. Everyone said to hydrate. I placed an order with a convenience store for a few gallons of Gatorade, and some ice cream. Why not? Why not enjoy something, while I still can. We ordered drumsticks. What a delight. I hadn’t had drumsticks in years! This one had to be the best I’d ever tasted. The saltiness of the nuts, the sweet of the chocolate and caramel, and the perfect creaminess of the ice cream. Suck on that, Covid.
Jen made steaks and carrots for dinner. They too were also great. I had the leftovers for breakfast this morning and they still tasted great.
At present, everything smells and tastes normal. I have some mild body aches, a dry throat, and some fatigue. I also haven’t slept much; I caught about five hours and two more hours in a couple spurts last night. I’ve been up since roughly four in the morning. It’s not that Covid is keeping me up, it’s that I feel relatively normal and my creative juices are waking me up. I had a really productive day yesterday and my brain wants to continue that today, though I want to try and stay horizontal for most of today.
I’ll test again later and keep you posted as best I can.
The worst and most tiring kind of days at the Record Store were the ones with customers bringing in endless boxes of discs for us to buy. These took up a lot of time and counter space to keep organized. I hated it when multiple customers with multiple boxes arrived at once. All you could say is say “leave your name and number and we’ll get through these as quickly as possible. It could be a couple hours.”
Some customers understood, some did not. That’s retail.
By contrast the best kind of days were often the ones without the pileup of CD boxes. If everything came in at staggered times, that was ideal. Even better if all the discs were in good shape. Icing on the top of the cake if the customer wasn’t a jerk about pricing. Everybody assumed their discs were worth solid gold. To be truly the best kind of day, customers would be bringing in good stock that you wanted for yourself! Whether it be a new release or something rarer from a back catalogue, those were the good days. You’d slap your name on a post-it note, stick it to the CD and claim it for self-musical enrichment.
I may have mentioned this a couple times before: the Big Boss Man hated when we bought stock for ourselves. But that was 50% of the reason people wanted to work in a music store. The best of days were those when the Big Boss Man and his underlings were not around!
One factor that didn’t affect whether the day was good or bad: who I was working with. I liked virtually every single person that worked in my store. There were one or two who made me pull my hair out, but they never lasted very long. I was very fortunate to have good working relationships with just about everyone in my staff. I tried to show my appreciation by buying them CDs or dinner.
Speaking of dinner, one of the best days I had was in the late 90s. A Jack Astor’s restaurant opened in the plaza across the street. I was working one afternoon minding my own business when a guy showed up at my door with a “Jack Attack”. I was shaking my head “no” as if to tell him I didn’t order any food, when he explained it was all complimentary! A bucket of wings and six bottles (bottles! Not cans!) of root beer. He dropped off a menu with ordering instructions for delivery. That was a very good day. I was working alone, but I left a couple bottles of pop for the night shift. (A couple. I was thirsty.)
I liked working alone, but eating a meal on a lone shift was tricky. Even the best of days were food-free days. The boss absolutely hated when we ate meals at the counter, but where else was there to go? We were working alone, we couldn’t leave the store. We couldn’t go into the back room to eat for 15 minutes. So most days, at least the ones working alone, were junk food only. Chips, pop, candy bars, pepperoni. That was it.
But combined with good tunes and no bosses, a pretty good day!
WARNING! This is not a pretty story. A sequel to #686: Puke!
Jen was super sick on Thursday. She had eaten some Indian food from a place that was new to her, and it wasn’t good. We both assumed it was food poisoning. Until Friday night.
I was scheduled to go live at 7:00 PM. I messaged the guys at 6:40 – “I just barfed”. Usually I’m just “one and done” when it comes to barfing. Not this time. I was prepared to go on with the show, but 10 minutes later I barfed again and got hit with the chills. I cancelled.
By 8:00 PM I had barfed five times. This never happens to me. Clearly, Jen didn’t have food poisoning the previous night. Whatever stomach bug she had, I now had it too. Five pukes in 80 minutes – that’s a new record for me. The last few were closer to painful, dry heaves.
I asked Jen to place a Skip the Dishes order with a gas station or a Little Short Stop – get me Gatorade, ginger ale, and water. (We scored here – we ordered and paid for small bottles but they sent big two-liter ginger ales.) I began sipping the sweet, cold, soothing beverages as soon as they arrived, and they were the most incredible sips I’ve ever taken.
The farts that came with this sudden illness were unreal. Easily and by far the most wretched and lingering smells I have ever produced, and that is saying something. Putrid, foul, rotten. My wife is a saint.
Despite sipping the drinks, I was so thirsty. Constantly thirsty. I was sipping every five minutes. Obviously dehydration set in. I barfed again at 10:30, but I then changed my strategy a bit. When I was a kid, my dad wouldn’t let me drink anything when I was sick, so I wouldn’t barf it back up. This time it was different. I drank Gatorade and ginger ale in earnest until I could feel my stomach was full.
The next three barfs were nothing but water, ginger ale and Gatorade. They came out easily, in mad gushes, and amazingly still tasted good. The red Gatorade puke still tasted exactly like red Gatorade. Because it was pure liquid and nothing else, it was effortless to bring up and I was in no pain (unlike the dry heaves). When I was done throwing up, I re-hydrated immediately and repeated the cycle a few more times. My final puke was around 4:00 AM on Saturday, my ninth. Another record. But I didn’t have any dehydration or associated pain/discomfort. A win.
I’m feeling a lot better now, just sore. Very sore. My joints are sore and mostly my chest.
I tested Covid negative, so it’s just a bug. Unfortunately I cannot go see my grandma in the hospital today because of this, and she is lonely.
The original title for this chapter was “My Sister, Age, and How Things Change”. It was originally Chapter 8.
RECORD STORE TALES #1045: The Lost Chapters: Doctor Kathryn
My sister had some distinct musical phases. Early on, she decided that she was going to like most of the music that I liked. At first that meant Quiet Riot, Kiss, and Motley Crue. Motley Crue was her favourite, but not for the right reasons. They were her favourite because a) Nikki and Tommy were really tall, and b) they both had spikey hair.
There was further evidence that my sister was bordering on wimp territory. One was that she didn’t like W.A.S.P. In fact she hated W.A.S.P. I’m not sure if it was Blackie Lawless’ voice, or if it was the fact that he drank “blood” from a “human skull”. Either way, I liked W.A.S.P. a lot, and if she didn’t like them too, this demonstrated an unhealthy streak of independence.
Then, the proverbial shit hit the fan. (We didn’t have air conditioning back then, just fans.) One day in 1985, she decided that she liked The Pointer Sisters. And Cyndi Lauper. And Corey Hart. She always liked Bryan Adams, but I forgave her this. Bryan wore jeans and T-shirts, so he was still firmly in rock territory, even if he wasn’t heavy metal. (I didn’t find out for a while yet that Bryan did in fact have some metallic roots. He wrote several songs with Kiss, including the heaviest material on the Creatures Of The Night album.) The music that Kathryn liked was incorrectly labelled by us as “New Wave”. We didn’t know that New Wave was a term usually used for bands like Blondie, Devo, or the Talking Heads. We just assumed all crappy pop music with synthesizers was New Wave. And New Wave was bad. Very very bad.
Back then, life was simple. Life was black and white. Whatever MuchMusic’s “Power Hour” played was good. Everything else was bad. The only exceptions to that that rule were Kim Mitchell and Bryan Adams. I’m not sure why Kim was an exception, except that he and long hair, and that I liked him, and so did the next door neighbour. If you wanted to boil it down further, stuff with guitars was good. Stuff with keyboards was bad. And the stuff Kathryn listened to didn’t have any guitars, just lots of keyboards, fake synth drums and people with really silly clothes and hair.
There were a few exceptions. I had never known a Van Halen without keyboards, so I accepted them. They were clearly a heavy metal band. The Power Hour played them all the time, David Lee Roth had wicked hair, and everybody was talking about that guitar player. Even if I didn’t know the difference between a guitar and a bass, and thought that Michael Anthony was in fact Eddie Van Halen, I decided that Van Halen were cool. You were allowed to like them. Eventually I sneaked ZZ Top into the list of music that was allowed as well, because one of the neighbours said they were like Van Halen.
So if the music Kathryn liked was bad, and the music I liked was good, you can imagine the arguments. They were glorious and often ended in physical injury and/or destruction of property, and not just by me.
Her awful taste in music even held back my own progress. She liked Bon Jovi first, therefore I had to dislike Bon Jovi—until they released that damned “Wanted: Dead Or Alive” song. The song was so good, so undeniable, I had to let Bon Jovi into my life. I still think it’s a fantastic song, well written, well played, with some beautiful 12 string guitar. (Another reason Bon Jovi didn’t make the grade at first was due to their keyboards. This does not explain why Europe did make the grade. There were many inconsistencies.)
Kathryn’s rebellion worsened. Her taste in music declined. I won’t even begin to list some of the awful music she listened to, but I will say that she bottomed out in 1990 with New Kids On The Block, MC Hammer, and Vanilla Ice. Obviously, this was a person who had no clear idea about integrity within music. However, like a junkie who hits rock bottom, she eventually started to rise up again, with a little encouragement from Her Loving Brother.
The turning point was when Vanilla Ice cancelled his Kitchener tour date in early 1991. His reason stated was that he was too big a star to play a town like Kitchener. There was an instant hatred for the man all over town. Kathryn sold her Vanilla Ice tape immediately.
There were some other clear signs of improvement. A newfound obsession with Cheap Trick was good. Sure, they weren’t metal, but they were definitely rock! Hell, they even worshipped Kiss within their song lyrics. I happily encouraged this love of Cheap Trick, and even bought her Cheap Trick tapes. I think most of her Cheap Trick collection was courtesy of moi.
Rod Stewart came next. I feel that perhaps Rod snuck in the door due to his enormous hair, but I didn’t care. Rod still had a rock pedigree. I encouraged her love of Rod. I asked her questions about him and his music. It was like carefully manipulating a mentally ill person back to health, and I was succeeding in a marginal way. I felt that she’d never come all the way back to metal, even though she owned tapes by Bon Jovi, Def Leppard and Poison. Yet I was satisfied with the progress we were making.
Now, 15 years later, I own Rod Stewart, Cheap Trick, Bryan Adams, The Payola$…all music that she introduced me to. She got the last laugh. I’ll never admit that she was always the smarter one (I can’t, since she never understood any movies we watched) but I’ll admit that she got the better of me on this one. We even attended concerts together. It started with Blue Rodeo, then we saw Jann Arden and Amanda Marshall. While I still won’t own any albums by Arden or Marshall, they both put on excellent shows. Blue Rodeo blew us both away and now they’re one of my favourites. I’ve never seen any band more often than Blue Rodeo, and I’ll argue that they’re Canada’s best band, with Rush as a close second.
Even my parents get points. They sure hated “Big Balls” by AC/DC, but now I own more Johnny Cash and Gordon Lightfoot than they do.
Now, I certainly can’t allow Kathryn to come off as the winner in this chapter. So here’s a punch in the arm for you. There, now we’re even.
I don’t know what I was collecting these quotes for, but I found them on a hard drive recently, and so here are my favourite quotes by Eddie Van Halen!
“I can’t read music. Instead, I’d do stuff inside the piano, do harmonics and all kinds of crazy things. They used to put me in these annual piano contests down at Long Beach City College, and two years in a row, I won first prize – out of like 5,000 kids! The judges were like, ‘Very interesting interpretation!’ I thought I was playing it right.”
“The one thing I do have is good ears. I don’t mean perfect pitch, but ears for picking things up. I developed my ear through piano theory, but I never had a guitar lesson in my life, except from Eric Clapton off of records.”
“It’s music theory, not music fact”
“If it sounds good, it is good. Who cares if you didn’t do it modernly.”
“To hell with the rules. If it sounds right, then it is.”
“I destroyed a lot of guitars trying to get them to do what I wanted, but I learned something from every guitar I tore apart, and discovered even more things.”
“Music is for people. The word ‘pop’ is simply short for popular. It means that people like it. I’m just a normal jerk who happens to make music. As long as my brain and fingers work, I’m cool.”
“David Lee Roth had the idea that if you covered a successful song, you were half way home. C’mon – Van Halen doing ‘Dancing in the Streets’? It was stupid. I started feeling like I would rather bomb playing my own songs than be successful playing someone else’s music.”
“It’s all about sound. It’s that simple. Wireless is wireless, and it’s digital. Hopefully somewhere along the line somebody will add more ones to the zeros. When digital first started, I swear I could hear the gap between the ones and the zeros.”
“If you have a great-sounding guitar that’s a quality instrument and a good amp, and you know how to make the guitar talk, that’s the key. It starts with the guitar and knowing what it should sound and feel like.”
“Actually, if I could deliberately sit down and write a pop hit, all my songs would be pop hits! Let’s put it this way. I play what I like to hear. And sometimes I like to hear something poppy, and sometimes I don’t.”
mikeladano.com 