​The other day I had a discussion that moved onto the topic of bands we have seen in-person and ones that we wished we’d heard live. A nostalgic enterprise which also got me thinking about the types of music each of us listens to over the years, how we progress from one genre to another, from one musician to another, developing our tastes, a bit like life in general.
 
For the sake of fun, I started writing down the bands I’ve seen and the ones I haven’t but wished I had. Memories flowed. Go get a pen and paper and do the exercise yourself. It might surprise you what this gets you dreaming about. It also tells you something about yourself, your tastes and how the music has formed your frame of the world to a certain degree. You’ll remember who you were with, odd incidents that occurred, how the concerts made you feel, the stage of life you were in.
 
Bands I’ve Seen Live (in no particular order)
 
Jethro Tull
The Outlaws
Crosby, Stills and Nash
Charlie Daniels Band (twice)
Heartsfield
Marshall Tucker Band
Neil Young
Bruce Springsteen
J. Geils Band
English Beat
Stray Cats
Midnight Oil (twice)
Grateful Dead
Nickelback
Weezer
Pink
Maren Morris
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
John Prine (twice)
The Strawberries
 
Band I Wish I’d Seen But Haven’t (some I still could go see, so don’t close the door)
Rare Earth
Steppenwolf
Cream
The Doors
Ten Years After
Traffic
The Beatles
The Rolling Stones
Led Zeppelin
Imagine Dragons
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (note above that I saw the first three together and Neil Young separately, would have loved to have seen them as a foursome in their prime; wow)
Lynyrd Skynyrd
The Allman Brothers
Lindsay Ell
Linkin Park
Public Enemy
OneRepublic
Lou Reed
Gil Scott-Heron
Parliament Funkadelic
Gang of 4
 
Writing this down takes me back and moves me forward. It’s a list longer than 50 years. I’ve danced my ass off in a high school gym with the temperature outside below zero and left the concert and felt the sweat freezing on my skin. I’ve seen a friend detained by police, and taken him off the officer’s hands so he didn’t get arrested. I’ve watched Springsteen jump into the crowd and get carried across the floor. And so much more.

Was there a best song or concert? I’m not sure. I’m partial to J. Geils Band. I will say this: The second time I saw Charlie Daniels Band was when I was biking across North America, staying at my older brother’s house in Dallas. When he cranked, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” I don’t think I’d ever heard something so electric and rousing, rocking the venue.
 
I hope to find new bands and see a few more concerts before I cash it in. Let me know which concerts stand out in your life and who is your list of bands you wish you’d seen.

​I had a column queued up for this week, but had to scrap it due to some magnificent and timely news. Aaron Rodgers (perhaps you’ve heard of him) made a decision about his NFL free agency.

This, alone, was probably not the story, no. Instead, to fluff it a bit more, the headline stated something to the effect of, “Aaron Rodger’s Free Agency Approach This Year vs. Last Year.” Now, that had to grab you, right?
 
If you happened to catch that headline on a news tracker, or social media, or the newspaper or to buzz you up for the upcoming television scoop of the century, it’s possible you chose to watch or read the segment. Or not.
 
When the eye-catching clip captured my attention, I yawned. Ho hum. Who cares? Seriously, tell me what segment of our population cares the slightest about that story?
 
I posed this question to multiple good friends. The best any of them could come up with as to the intended audience was: gamblers.  And, though I nodded my head when they responded to me that way, I don’t quite understand how gamblers would place a bet on comparing Aaron Rodgers approach to free agency from one year to the next.

What the headline and story say to me is this: there is no new news. There is no worthwhile news. News teasers, whatever type they are, will string together words to gain your attention. They’ll employ whatever tactics they have at their disposal – vague references, comparisons that no one cares about, predictions that make no sense.
 
Having been in the news business for most of my career, I keep an eye on these types of things. As our collective consuming of culture increased exponentially the past 15-25 years or so, “news” (read: opinions, prognostications, celebrity sightings, percentage polling) and its definition have expanded into the category of “less than one percent of society cares about that.”
 
Still, the stuff is out there. It keeps coming. It seeks our attention.

As the consumer (we all consume news like a product or food, eating it up), you must remain vigilant. You need to know when to blow off a story, when it’s total nonsense and strictly designed to agitate you or raise your blood pressure.

Take a deep breath. When you scan your phone, take a few extra minutes. Wait, you say you scroll through quickly? That’s where they get you. Those short bursts are designed to suck you in. First, they have to attract your attention.
 
How? They use names like Aaron Rodgers, or Kate Winslet or Yogi Bear. They find the familiar, something to arouse you. Yabba dabba doooo, Fred.
 
Now they’ve got you. “OMG, you mean Aaron Rodgers approached free agency in a different way this year compared to last? I gotta watch that one. My curiosity is killing me. Let me click it on.”
 
There you have it.  They got ya. Next you’ll want to know how Kate Winslet changed the way she ties her shoes and why Yogi Bear wears a yellow bow tie. You’re dying to know, aren’t you. And where is Boo Boo Bear? What’s up with him?
 
I’m not going to change the system. Still, I needed to get this off my chest. Thanks for letting me rant. Remember, no new news here, just some fun, and hopefully I got ya thinking, laughing, considering something you hadn’t thought about before.

​We all sleepwalk. I sleepwalk. You sleepwalk. Not literally.
 
Here’s what I mean: we sleepwalk through life. We gloss over things. We ignore things. We don’t pay attention.

We don’t do this with intent. We don’t purposefully miss the new carpet our spouse installed yesterday in the front hallway. We just overlook it. We’re focused on something else.

Think of all the things we miss every day of our lives. Beautiful sights, cloud formations, flowers blooming, the way a mountain ridge frames the sky. Scenery is but one of the things we blot out.
 
Sleepwalking means we’re on automatic pilot regarding many sensations – sights, smells, sounds. Here’s a personal story demonstrating how I never saw something quite simple for years.
 
Last week, I was sitting in the sauna at our fitness facility. A guy comes in. He walks over to one side, and takes one of those hourglass timers and turns it upside down which allows you 20 minutes before the sand runs out.
 
I go to him, “How long has that hourglass been in here?”
 
He goes, “As long as I’ve been coming in here.”
 
Me: “How long has that been?”
 
Him: “Oh, over five years.”
 
Me: “Holy mackerel, I’ve been taking a sauna here for close to eight years, since the facility opened, and I’ve never noticed that hourglass before.”
 
Not a big thing, but still, shame on me. How can you not see something like that for more than five years? I was sleepwalking, that’s how.
 
One of the biggest places where we miss out is driving our vehicles. We go so fast and must maintain our attention on other cars, their antics and stupid moves, so it becomes extremely difficult to gaze out the window in wonder at the scenery passing by.
 
When I bicycled across North America in 1982, one of the biggest takeaways was noticing how much I’d been missing when driving a car. Bicycling caused me to pause and take more in. You’re in the environment on a bicycle, not behind sealed windows. And you go slower, so you absorb more, contemplate more.
 
Those are good things. That summer allowed me to open my perspective on how I look at many things.
 
When we sleepwalk, we miss that contemplation time. We’re wound up about something else, our brains ripping along.
 
Recently, a tornado plowed through the area near our house in Wisconsin. We saw the damage in the woods surrounding our home. There were also some nearby gigantic trees toppled that stood out. That storm was several weeks ago.

Just this past week, I saw two trees downed less than a mile from our house that had to have come from the storm. I never noticed them before. I was sleepwalking. I paid attention this time because my wife was driving and I was able to enjoy the view out the window. “OMG, look at that tree that got ripped down. I never noticed.”
 
Downed trees materialized because I wasn’t driving. Sometimes that’s all it takes to eliminate sleepwalking. Give yourself some time to look around and enjoy the sights.
 
Other times you need to activate yourself. Take that step. Breathe. Smell. Look with intention.

Commitment can be a strange thing. It’s a word used to bind you to a goal, get you to stay with something, work through it, whatever that may be.

We throw the word around without thinking. It means a lot though if you stay with it (ha, committing to something). That’s where results occur. This also says something about who you are, that when you say something, others know you will follow through.
 
At the end of this past basketball season, I assessed my body and commitment relative to continuing to referee the sport in 2026-27. As my years have entered a seventh decade, the physical, mental and emotional demands of refereeing an intense sport take a greater toll.
 
For me, the biggest decision variable is the physical. How does my body feel at the end of the season? Can I meet the demands next year and keep my personal high standards on the court?  If not, then I don’t think it’s fair to the players, coaches, fans and my partners for me to go out again and blow the whistle.
 
Larry Bird, as I remember stories written about him, took two weeks off to recuperate at the end of an NBA season as he got further on in his years. He needed to rest, let the muscles lose their tension, stress and physical abuse they’d absorbed from November-April.
 
As I’ve got to my current age, the concept of stepping back to assess after a season has become stronger. I consider my aches and pains. Anything serious? Anything debilitating? Am I limping? Can I still get up and down the court effectively? How are my eyes (fans and coaches don’t think about this, I’m confident, but having good eyes is critical to high level officiating)?
 
This past year, as you’d probably expect, I was getting more worn out then previous years, which isn’t surprising giving my advanced age. I know the end could come any day when I have to hang up the black shoes, striped shirt and whistle. Or, it could come three, five or seven years (perhaps long, but highly unlikely) down the road. The point is, that day is coming whether I like it or not.
 
No one can referee basketball in a competitive environment forever. There are limits –  best to recognize them and go out appropriately on your own terms.

My wife has not heard me speak of my officiating in these terms (“You know, dear, this could be my last season. We’ll see.”). I spoke that way in March.
 
But, the spark remained and I made a commitment. You might find the following amusing.
 
To invest in next season, to make that commitment, I purchased new shirts, pants and socks. I committed. This wasn’t just about physicality, because more goes into officiating a sport than most people recognize.
 
There is a cost we bear as officials, like buying your own uniform. You also must have a belief in yourself that you are doing justice to others on the court. Do you enjoy officiating? You better.
 
Committing to new digs meant committing to how I will look on the court.  A new uniform means a fresh look, an improvement in how I come across to others.
 
I had been putting off the decision, uncommitted. I committed completely when I bought the new uniform essentials in March. I’ll be back in November, god willing. I’ll look better in the bright uniform, at least for a few months until the sparkle has worn off the stripes.

​People live in their own worlds. This happens to a greater extent, it seems to me, as we get older.
 
My wife and I discuss this often: the syndrome of people not paying attention. While distraction happens to a different extent depending on the person you are dealing with, we both notice the level of a person not paying attention gets worse past the age of 60 or so.
 
We know multiple distracted people in our interactions, and we have a dog, Pepper, who falls into this category as well. We laugh about the dog, and we wonder about the people (What’s going through their heads that they walk away during the middle of a conversation? Are we that boring? Did we say something offensive? Do they have a negative attention span?).
 
We don’t have the answers to those questions because as a polite human being, you don’ t ask, “Hey, bub, why’d you just walk away as we were talking?” Instead, you watch that person stroll away and question yourself.
 
Perhaps this syndrome is the way of the world today. People are distracted. They don’t listen. It’s the norm. I don’t like to think that way because I like to think the best of people, so I stick with the theory that it’s only certain people who appear to be getting more and more light-headed.
 
When you meet someone like this and have an interaction, you can almost see the individual not listening. They look off into the distance. You get an “mmmmmm” from them in response to your question and they show a faraway look in their eyes.
 
Then, they mosey along, like our dog Pepper. This is amusing and ties into the theory of living in your personal little world.

Pepper is 17-years-old, cannot hear (maybe barely) nor do her eyes function more than probably five or ten percent. She operates by smells and routine. She sniffs away, knows where she is, and moseys along.

This seems the way of the world with distracted older people: they mosey along, dum deee dum dum dum. Perhaps this is a good thing. Without hearing or eyesight, just puttering through your day could be quite enjoyable. No one would bother you. You couldn’t hear questions. Your personal world could service you quite well.

In some ways, that could also make your life easier, by simplifying things. Because you can’t hear or see very well, activities become constrained. You boil them down to the basics – eat my breakfast, take a walk, drink coffee, do the laundry, not listen to people, cut the grass, have a cocktail, whatever is in the basic daily routine. You have quantifiable routine things to do that can give you pleasure.
 
You do things at your own pace. “I’ll get there when I get there.”
 
Many years back I remember an interview with an elder celebrity who was asked what he looked forward to each day. His answer (more or less): “Having a couple of cocktails on the veranda with my wife before dinner and discussing the day.”
 
He probably moseyed along a bit each day, in his own little world, content and contemplating.