I ducked into my favorite little joint for lunch today. I shouldn’t have. It’s not so much in the budget these days, but there are times when you simply must be surrounded by a building walled with crackling wood, seated on a barstool, and you simply must have an attractive woman serve you comforting food, and you simply must breathe all that in and enjoy the music and emulsify.

I often kid myself, that I will go in there and order a club soda and a cup of soup in order to keep la quenta to a minimum cost. Then I walk in and there’s that white board seated on that old butcher’s block, and there’s the soup listed, but there’s also the beef on weck. And it was Friday. So there’s fish.

As luck would have it, the music queue was in blues mode today, and the song that was rotating the minute I walked in was Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Crossfire.” I say as luck would have it wryly, I guess, because today is the 23rd anniversary of the day Stevie Ray Vaughn stopped refusing to die. Helicopters, man. Why not just put a rotating umbrella on a smart car and figure yer gonna be okay for flight?

I remember finding out while I was in a newsroom, my first newsroom, well really my second, but my first, the one at the Daily Kent Stater. My friend and colleague Greg, who made a persuasive argument for hating the living shit out of the Beatles, wore black for days, maybe months.

I betcha that Greg wore black today, too.

A little while ago where I work, an apparent former disgruntled employee took one day to pranking our help line. They called us maybe 40 or 50 times, I mean the weed they got hold of that day must have been freaking excellent. When I was fortunate enough to encounter this person, he asked me what I thought of an ongoing hip-hop feud between somebody named “Meek Mill” and somebody named “Drake.” I was relieved, nay, I was proud that I had no idea what in bloody hell he was talking about. But my co-workers, they are youngsters compared to me and a limited few old farts there are where I work, I am certain I can count the folks who are my contemporaries or older on one hand or maybe one of my hands and one of the hands of my middle school shop teacher. And they talk about music I have no idea exists, and they talk about it like it really matters. I think this is why when I was growing up I thought it was weird that my elders would squint so much and complain because I wanted to listen to Chicago. But that’s what happens I reckon. I mean Drake never moved my heart or made me gesture in the air spontaneously.

There’s just something utterly weird about all of that, and I can’t put my finger on it. But it makes me squint and pee a little. Maybe it’s just difficult to dig that you’re actually passing all of this on and eventually nobody’s actually going to give a care one way the other about Led Zeppelin.

Climate change is real.