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Fleetwood Mac on 8-track as a kid, Christine McVie RIP

Hey Mike. It feels like I say this in every dispatch, but it remains truer ever day: getting old is really tripping me out. I envy folks who can just take it in stride and not have daily extistential breakdowns. Feels like everyday I discover another thing about myself that informs the last 50 years which would be great except: I CAN'T MFing DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT NOW. As mentioned in the title here, Christine McVie died yesterday, at 79. When someone like that cashes out at 79 I feel like I'll be lucky to see 60 - because I did all the drugs and hard living, but have had none of the last 15 years to sort of recoup like she and Stevie could do in the 2000's. Argh. Anyway, when John played a set of Fleetwood Mac this morning, I heard a song (Songbird) from Rumors that I hadn't heard in decades...and it almost made me tear up. I definitely choked up. When I was 9, my parents (dad, most likely chose it as mom wasn't much of a "trendy tech" kinda gal) gave me a portable 8-track tape player, and I had a very small collection: Robin Williams' first record, the soundtrack to Grease, the Eagles' Hotel California, Supertramp's Breakfast in America and Fleetwood Mac Rumours. There may have been a few more later, but those were the ones that I listened to constantly, that I fell asleep to on a constant loop. Those songs in particular are hard-wired into my sould in ways I only remember when I happen to hear the songs. Obviously, as it's late 2022 and those songs don't get played much at all (except in bars with great jukeboxes, on old school rock radio stations, and...the grocery store maybe?) and if they do it is one of the big hits (The Chain, or whatever) never the deep album cuts like Snowbird. Hearing that music shook something really basic in me this morning, and I am currently streaming the album to my headphones in yet another attempt to mine what is left of my memory cavity. Dammit Mike. This post is being iterrupted by breaking psycho news: the Nazis are having a field day, thanks to that batshit billionaire Musk who just bought Twitter (you really did bow out at the right time, as much as I miss knowing you are in this world, it's becoming comforting to know you aren't here to see this cultural dumpster fire get exponentially worse each day).

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