Left to my own devices

The venerable band KISS have made the news for selling their music catalog, brand name and IP (intellectual property) to Pophouse Entertainment Group. Apparently, KISS and Pophouse have already been collaborating. The company is responsible for the digital avatars that ABBA used during their recent(ish) concerts, and now it sounds like that may be where we're headed with KISS. The band already debuted digitized avatars of themselves back in December 2023, and that may be a sign of things to come. From the article:  The ways in which Kiss' avatars will be utilized has yet to be announced, but Pophouse CEO Per Sundin says fans can expect a biopic, a documentary and a Kiss experience on the horizon. That bolding was from me. I'm not sure what a "KISS experience" refers to, but out of what was mentioned, it sounds the closes to something akin to a music concert. And this gives me the springboard to talk about a topic I've been thinking over for awhile -- namely...

It would seem a tad dramatic to remark that I am here today (as opposed to being long-dead) because of one particular person, though it would at least in part be the truth. His name was Chris, and he was a classmate back in high school. He was a popular kid and I, well, I was not. He was young, blond-haired, handsome. I idolized him, in that perhaps unhealthy way that adoration of the concept of the person can lead to not really knowing the actual person. Chris wasn't perfect by any means, but then who is? I should probably clarify something at this juncture: Chris isn't dead. Sometimes I write these missives and it is because someone I knew has died recently, or has been dead for some time, and I remembering them for some reason. So, no, Chris is very much alive. In fact, the impetus for writing about him here is that I saw his picture on social media recently. And, no, he isn't the person I was writing about in the last blog post .

Twenty-four-years ago today, we lost one of the greatest singers of the rock & roll era. While Roy Orbison will be forever known in the pantheon of rock/pop legends, for me he will always be the voice that I melded with during turbulent high school years, and that I love to this day. Roy Orbison wrote and (more importantly) sang about love. Mostly, it was tragic love, not the happy-go-lucky love that so many of his contemporaries sang about. No one could do depressive songs better than Mr. Orbison. This is probably why I identified with his music so much. I mean, we all have had our down times but, during high school, I'd cornered the market.