Keeping Track

 Sometimes when you work in an office like this one (gestures widely to the corner of the room in which his computer sits) you have to make tough editorial decisions. As many of you are aware, this blog is a wholly owned and run subsidiary of the right half of my brain. Which doesn't mean that the executive functions don't periodically interfere with the creative process. Quite the contrary. What you are reading currently was generated some days before, and kept under lock and key until the one just before it reaches the light of day. This explains why periodically  you might be reading along, amused to some degree, but thinking to yourself, "Didn't Jon Stewart cover this on Monday?"

I won't apologize for my OCD. This is how I can ensure that the steady stream of clever bits come out on a daily basis. Mister Stewart, for whom I have unending admiration, sits behind his desk once a week. And there's his podcast. And a myriad of other things I'm sure, but I'm just this one guy and a computer. I don't have guest hosts or a staff of writers. I don't have reruns, though I expect that some of you may wonder about that after you've read my umpteenth screed about mass shootings or that kid at school that I just can't seem to come around to my way of thinking. 

All of this is to say that there are times, like today, that I find myself with an editorial dilemma. Hooking up to Al Gore's Internet this afternoon, to my surprise, I discover two celebrity deaths are in the news. One after another. In no particular order, Chuck Mangione and Hulk Hogan. I am in the business of documenting such transitions in popular culture, so my first instinct was to connect these two with the passing of Ozzy Osbourne because conventional wisdom suggests that stars die in threes. Wags such as myself might wonder if it isn't tens or eights and we're just not able to absorb that kind of carnage, but no matter: Here we have two humans who existed on a similar plane of my consciousness and now it is my duty to report on them. 

Not my duty. My calling. 

Chuck Mangione was the sound of my first two years of high school. He was the softer sound of jazz that followed my introduction to bands like the one fronted by Maynard Ferguson. After reveling in Feels So Good, my high school band took on his next year's release Hill Where The Lord Hides as part of our halftime show. For those two years, this was the soundtrack of my life, albeit supplemented by Foghat and Boston and Blue Oyster Cult. Chuck's music is completely evocative of that moment in time for me. 

A similar sensation occurs in me when I hear the roar, "Whatcha gonna do when Hulkamania runs wild on you?" Hulk Hogan, nee Terry Bollea, was such a breakthrough star in the first major wave of professional wrestling that he got himself a part in Rocky III. Hulk's heyday occurred just a few years after that of Chuck Mangione's, but they occupy disk space in a very similar file. I can't say that I was ever a Hulkamaniac, but I was impressed by the gusto with which the Hulkster approached his vocation. His was an outsize presence in a field full of outsized presences. 

And now they're both gone. I will say that they both, in their own way stomped on the Terra, though Chuck did so much more lightly than Hulk Hogan. And Mister Mangione had the good taste not to tarnish his image by showing up at last year's Republican National Convention and struggling a bit with his pre-ripped T-shirt. But they will both be missed by yours truly. 

Unless by some unforeseen circumstances they rise from the dead in the space of time it takes for us all to reach this post in the stack. In which case, my traditional farewell will work just as well as a greeting from beyond: Aloha.