2024 So Far

It has been quite a while since I have dropped a blog entry and I think it is time to do that once again. We will start off by taking about 2024.

In the first 2 months of 2024, I have been hit with major loss. My mom passed on January 17th. My mom meant a ton to me. She my only true parent because my dad passed when I was 6 months old. It wasn’t my dad’s fault for the record, I’m not blaming him. Thankfully, my mom had a wonderful village to help with me.

26 days later, the biggest mentor in my life (outside of my professional life) passed. Ron Alexander was a huge influence on my life. My mom was a volunteer at the Y (and I was too growing up). I will totally admit I had a ton of privilege being one of Ron’s kids. Toward the end, Ron and my Mom were across the hall neighbors in their nursing home. It wasn’t that way at the very end, but I don’t think I should talk about that.

I’m going to step back a little more to July of 2023. July 7th, myself and Alex Paul, one of my part time employees at WFIW (have in it told you about that either?) were providing entertainment for the 4th of July Fireworks. Our national anthem prior to the fireworks was not working for some reason. In MRL and broadcaster fashion, I made the decision because I promised an anthem before the fireworks to sing the anthem. I plan for that to be my one and only time of publicly performing the anthem on the radio. Thankfully, nobody recorded that. MRL passed 2 days later and I was in Centralia with JD and Hollie that day. Just before I was over there for a cookout, I had gotten the news of Mark’s passing.

The last 8 months have been pretty harsh to me. That plugged with my own battles I have dealt with (cancer and Cushing’s) to always tell someone your feelings. I am using Liv’s terminology that I was a bit of a chicken shit. Part of that was I closed that part of my life for a long time. Just so happened, that word of advice came on the way from a Halloween Party nearly 2 and a half years ago.

In conclusion, none of us know what the future holds. Some of us want to paint the picture of happiness. The last 3 days, I have tried staying away from work. Because of my job, I haven’t been able to do that 100%. While I don’t know exactly what the future holds, I’ll definitely leave that one to God to decide. One thing is that I would love to completely be able to turn my cell phone off for days on end, but that has yet to truly happen.