COLUMN: COVID

I've been accused before of being set in my ways -- that I live my life too much by routine, that I'm afraid to try new things and unwilling to accept change.

Pshaw, I say to that. I am both hip and happening. I can roll with the changes like any thriving modernist. Just to prove it, a couple weeks ago, I decided I'd finally be trendy and participate in the latest fad. Yep, I figured it was high time to finally experience this COVID-19 thing everyone's been talking about -- and I've gotta say, having given it the ol' college try, I'm not a fan.

After two years of masking, vaxxing, distancing, dodging, and weaving, COVID finally caught me. Bleh. I was starting to think I was some kind of immune superhero. I've read a couple articles where scientists are starting to wonder if certain people are genetically immune to COVID, and I may have started to get a little cocky assuming I was one of the chosen ones. No such luck. I'm a regular schlub.

A couple weeks ago, I was leaving work on a Tuesday evening and thought, "I feel a little off." Well, it went from "a little off" to "uh oh" in less than two hours. It's supposed to take up to fifteen minutes for the results to appear on one of those home COVID tests, but it was more like fifteen SECONDS before the Positivity-Line-o'-Doom appeared on mine. Yuck.

It's two weeks later, and I'm effectively all good, though I'm still waiting to regain my sense of smell or taste. I have terrible allergies, so my nose is barely functional on a good day. But losing the ability to taste is weird and annoying. I just ate a watermelon jellybean, and it may as well have been a piece of plastic for all I could register. 

I wasn't especially prepared for sudden quarantine, so I spent most of the time raiding my freezer remnants for some back-shelf sustenance. Once upon a whim, I purchased a box of weird-looking frozen turkey burgers that have stuffing and herbs baked inside. You know, the kind of thing that could either be delicious or disgusting. Over the past two weeks, I've eaten that entire box -- and the jury's still out. They might be amazing and they might be unfathomably gross. I honestly have no idea. All I know is that I'll likely associate turkey burgers with illness for the rest of my days.

Still, I feel pretty lucky that I seem to have come out the other side okay. I felt like poo for a few days, but it never really evolved beyond nasty upper respiratory cooties, and I'm thankful for that. It wasn't fun to feel my heart beating through my sinuses, or to go through three boxes of Kleenex in three days, but in the grand scheme of things, it could've been WAY worse.

I barely took any time off and ended up working remotely through most of it -- it was actually better to distract myself than wallow in snotty self-pity. Thankfully, I could handle most everything over e-mail, because trust me -- no one wanted to be on the other end of a phone call with the COVID Goblin from Planet Phlegm. One afternoon, I went to yell at my cat after she knocked over the trash, but the voice that came out of my throat was better suited for a revival of "The Exorcist." Hand to God, I didn't see that cat again for a day and a half.

The CDC says if you don't have a fever, you only need to quarantine for five days. I opted for ten. The only thing worse than getting COVID is the potential of giving it to someone else, and I took no chances. I tested positive on a Tuesday. The Saturday prior, a good friend of mine had called because her car had broken down and she needed a ride. On Sunday, another friend called because HIS car had broken down. I dropped what I was doing that weekend to give both of them lifts. I could only pray that I didn't give them something much worse.

It turns out I likely DID infect my Saturday friend, or maybe she infected ME, because she tested positive two days after I did. Thankfully, her case was mostly asymptomatic and her worst symptom was having to listen to me apologize eleventy different times. All other friends and co-workers escaped unscathed from the gift that keeps on giving, so hopefully I can keep "professional super-spreader" off my resume.

I'll spare any lectures, because I'm as sick of them as you are. But COVID is clearly still a thing and I'm continuing to be cautious. I'll still be working every day and doing my side hustle DJing on the weekends. But I'll also probably be the ONE dude in the club still wearing a mask that you snicker at. I'm cool with it. I don't want these cooties again. This is one gift exchange I never signed up for. Use good judgement, stay safe, and be considerate of others. Mild case or bad case, you don't want this.

Trust me, you don't want to NOT know what turkey burgers taste like.

COLUMN: Dispatch

How's that saying go? "You can never go home again." Pshaw.

I can go home any old time I want to. My parents would LOVE it if I went home again. I don't know if my mom has so much as nudged a knick-knack in the past twenty years. I can go home just fine. I just can't seem to go back to WORK again.

My first ever job was (surprise) DJing at a teen dance club in my hometown of Galesburg. That dance club is now a parking lot. I worked for years at the Top 40 radion station in Galesburg, whose studios were in the basement of a downtown shopping mall. Not only does the station no longer exist, but I think that whole mall might now be shuttered. The office job I once held is now an empty room in an abandoned downtown building.

I'm all for progress and advancement and the dawn of a new future yada yada, but I hate having a front row seat to watch my favorite memories literally turn to dust.

That's why I winced when I got a shocking photo message this week from a former co-worker -- they're tearing down the old Dispatch building in downtown Moline.

Well, truth be told, we don't know exactly WHAT they're doing to it. The new owners are thus far keeping plans close to the vest. I've heard they may retain most of the main structure, but I can tell you with grim certainty that our old distribution center and our less-than-old warehouse area are now rubble. Whatever the future might hold for that spot, I guarantee it won't resemble the building I worked in for over 20 years.

As a structure, it wasn't especially lovable. It didn't have a magical vibe or an ambience worth remembering for generations. From an architectural standpoint, it was borderline insane. Newspapers and printing presses are especially strange beasts not given to form or flow, and it certainly showed. Over the years, a hodge-podge of various expansions and renovations had turned the place into a Franken-building of nooks, crannies, and a layout that made no coherent sense to anyone but newspaper people. 

When I first started at the Dispatch in 1994, I seldom wandered around the place -- I was too afraid of getting lost. I knew how to get to my desk, how to get to the break room, and that was about it. If you wandered down some hallway you didn't know, you might end up running into a room full of ink, press operators covered in ink, or rolls of paper so big Indiana Jones would be quaking in his boots.

When customers at our front counter would ask to use the restroom, we'd usually say no -- only because they'd need a map, a compass, and a minor in cartography just to find one. "Sure, it's just through the little gate here, hang a hard right, then jog another right at the copy machine and go through the door. When you see the stairs, take a right, then an immediate left. Then another left, a quick right, and it's the first door to your right. If you end up in a room full of what appear to be angry accountants, you missed a turn. If you end up at a giant scale, you've gone too far. If the floor starts shaking, it's just the press firing up. Here's my cell phone number if you get lost." Seriously.

Once, I was training a new co-worker on her first day. "I'll be right back," she said after a couple hours. "I need to go move my car." WE NEVER SAW HER AGAIN. The official explanation was that she must have picked a lousy way to flee from a job that wasn't for her. I'm convinced she's still there wandering the halls to this day, trying to find her way back. They say on moonless nights, you can still hear her ghostly pleas: "Excuse me, how do I get to the classified advertising department?"   

Also, our building had alarmingly few windows. Inside, you lost all sense of time, direction, AND weather. On every floor by the elevator, there was a single inauspicious light bulb jutting out of the wall. "What's the point of that?" I asked naively as a new hire. "Oh, it's the rain light," I was told casually. If the weather outside was bad, the folks in customer service would turn those lights on to let us all know to bundle up if we were headed outdoors.

Our building never pretended to be an architectural marvel. It could somehow be simultaneously both hot AND drafty. Mice would occasionally run across my desk -- one absconded with a Hershey's Kiss I'd just unwrapped. I once witnessed it rain in a stairwell. EVERYONE had at least one trapped-in-the-elevator story. 

Still, it's hard to believe that weird old building might soon be unrecognizable, because the ghosts of its former occupants will haunt my heart forever. Its where some of the best and worst memories of my life happened. It's where I met some of my dearest friends. Its the halls where legends like Russ Scott, Brian Nelson, Marla Angelo, and Laura Fraembs once tread.  

Times change, and so does the landscape around us. The downtowns we see today won't look anything like the downtowns a hundred years from now, and that's okay. Here's hoping the Quad Citians of the future will still be lucky enough to have a building somewhere full of hard-working weirdos providing daily news, information, and advertising. And I hope those weirdos don't forget to check the rain light before they head out without a coat.     

COLUMN: Momo

Well, once again mass media appears to be missing the juiciest news of the day.

Sure, there's the Jan. 6 hearings, and the whole Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade thing. And OK, there's crippling inflation, soaring gas prices, and a plague of gun violence. And, yeah, can't forget about the actual plague and its eleventy new variants.

But, shockingly, nowhere in the top stories of the day can I find one single solitary mention of Bigfoot. It's a good thing you people have me around.

Yes, it's time for another Midwest cryptid alert. Well, not so much an alert as it is a celebration. This week marks an important anniversary that I knew absolutely nothing about until I just read about it. It's the 50th anniversary of the Mo Mo Monster!

It was this week in 1972 that a Bigfoot-like creature was seen terrorizing the residents of Louisiana, Missouri. No, that's a not a typo, and it's not two states. It's the town of Louisiana in the state of Missouri. Already this story makes a ton of sense.

Until today, I had no idea that Louisiana, Missouri existed, but it does — and in fact, it's along the Mississippi River just a few big-feet south of Hannibal. That means if the Mo Mo Monster got itself a rental car, it could be here in a matter of hours, people. I grew up thinking Yetis and Sasquatches were fantastical creatures roaming mythical mountaintops half the world away. Compared to Tibet, the Mo-Mo Monster is essentially in our backyard.

In July of 1972, several townspeople in Louisiana reported seeing Mo Mo atop what's now known as Star Hill. I looked up Star Hill on Google Maps, and it's a fairly believable claim. It has all the makings of a perfect Bigfoot habitat: There are trees, there's underbrush — and, yep, there's a trailer court. This is classic Bigfoot country if I've ever seen it.

Reportedly, the monster was tall, covered in dark fur, and emitted an awful smell. Some said they saw it holding the body of a dead animal in its hands (or paws or hooves or whatever Mo-Mos have.) After numerous townsfolk claimed to have witnessed the beast that night, several additional sightings and/or smellings were reported over the following week — enough for the local sheriff to mount a 20-man search party that revealed little more than a footprint of unknown origin and some disturbed grass.

I've watched enough episodes of "Finding Bigfoot" to know that disturbed grass combined with a footprint can only mean one possible thing: There's a 'Squatch in them hills.

On the grand scale of Midwest cryptids, I give Mo Mo a B-. The majority of the sightings happened 50 years ago, so even if Mo Mo was real, there's a chance he's long since gone to cryptid heaven, or at the very least, made his way to a far cooler locale than the Mississippi River valley. And he's not especially interesting when compared to other Midwest cryptids, like Iowa's Van Meter Visitor. I devoted a column to the Visitor last year, and that's my kind of monster. It's a flying bird-like creature that emits a blinding light from its head, and early reports had it flying off with full-size adult horses in its mouth. Nothing against Mo Mo, but if I had to pick a favorite between an upright dog that walks around with roadkill or a horse-eating dragon that shoots laser beams, I'm Team Van Meter Visitor all the way.

The town of Louisiana has had a love-hate relationship with Mo Mo. After the sighting, cryptid enthusiasts flocked to the small town to soak up the lore and try to catch a glimpse of their furry friend. For a time, the local Dairy Queen sold Momoburgers — presumably not made from actual Mo Mos. But others, like the schoolteacher who claims she knows the students who hoaxed the original sighting — have tried to rain on Mo Mo's parade.

Still, there are some convinced that the Mo Mo Monster is fully real and roaming around the countryside to this day. One of them is Doris Bliss, who was 15 years old when she saw Mo Mo back in 1972.

"I used to hate talking about it, because people made fun of me and stuff," she told a reporter for the Quincy Herald-Whig 10 years ago, "but now —  and you can pardon my French — they can kiss my ass. I saw what I saw, and I heard what I heard."

Fair enough, Doris. And this year, the townsfolk of Louisiana, Missouri, are embracing their cryptid pal: This October, the town's annual fall festival has been renamed the Show Me Mo Mo Fest. I know where I'm aimlessly driving to this fall. I'm sure the burgers will be momolicious. 

COLUMN: Fireworks Suck

What I'm about to say comes with full awareness that I may be about to break one of my cardinal rules of column-writing: Never say anything that makes you sound like an old fuddy-duddy.

I don't care. It's story time.

It was Sunday night (well, technically, 2:15 a.m. Monday morning,) and I'd just made it home from a long, late DJ gig. Exhausted, half delirious, and ready to fall into the nearest available bed, I instead opened the back door of my house to a scene of devastation. Broken glass was everywhere. Debris was strewn about. Ceramic figurines lay shattered on the floor.

Without saying a word, I gingerly set down my gear, quietly backed out of the house, locked myself in the garage, and pulled out my phone to call 911.

"That's weird," I thought in a panic. "My security alarm never went off."

I opened the security app on my phone. My system was still live. None of the door or window alarms had been triggered, and the motion detectors hadn't sensed anything other than me coming home just now. WHAT WAS HAPPENING?

Cautiously, with my finger hovering over the button that would trigger emergency responders, I crept back into the house. A quick inspection proved that while the inside of the house looked thoroughly ransacked, the doors and windows were locked tight. That's when I realized what had happened.

No one had broken in. My house had been ransacked, alright -- by fireworks.

This holiday is officially ridiculous. Fireworks aren't even legal in Illinois, and yet every year, Rock Island turns into an Independence Day warzone. THIS year, the neighbors went so hogwild that their amateur pyrotechnics sent nearly every picture frame in my house crashing to the floor. It bounced knick-knacks off my shelves and even toppled my kitchen trashcan.

I was awake until 4:30 a.m. vacuuming up glass shards. This was NOT on my 4th of July agenda. 

Look, I get it. The 4th of July is a time to celebrate America, and strangely, our preferred method of celebration is launching tiny non-American-made rockets into the sky and watching them explode. It's patriotic, it's a visual spectacle, and I'm fully onboard. Fireworks are fun. 

But over the past few years, it's morphed into something REALLY different. So many people are launching illegal fireworks that it's no longer pretty and no longer fun. It's more like a low-budget war movie. The air runs so thick with gunpowder that Rock Island looks more like the foggy moors of Scotland. Quaint little bottle rockets have been replaced by mortars and explosives that share more with concussion grenades than they do fireworks.

I don't care if this makes me sound like some 90-year-old hermit yelling "get off my lawn!" This is a conversation we shouldn't even be having given that fireworks aren't even legal in Illinois. On my way home that night, I passed two police cars just sitting idly along the street while fireworks were launching from at least a dozen different backyards in my neighborhood alone.

I'm not a no-fun-nik, promise. I've been a DJ for over 25 years. Before that, I was a rave promoter. Disturbing the peace is one of my favorite pastimes. Whenever someone drives by with a booming subwoofer, I'm not annoyed -- I'm jealous. Every weekend, I stand in front of monitor speakers that propel dance beats directly towards my skull at a deliciously unhealthy volume. I'm no stranger to things that are loud -- and perhaps getting my house knocked around by fireworks is penance for my years of service spent damaging the eardrums of the innocent.

But I can say with some certainty, I have never dropped a beat loud enough to challenge the structural integrity of a building, nor have I ever snuck up behind somebody at midnight with a sudden boombox attack. We're proving day by day that basic human decency is a lost cause, but if you're one of those folks hoarding a pyrotechnic arsenal in your garage, maybe stop and think about who lives in the houses next to you. Maybe it's someone with PTSD. Maybe it's a dog scared out of its mind. Maybe it's a chubby DJ with high cholesterol who probably doesn't need adrenaline surges every five minutes.

Fireworks are fun to watch. Our area has great displays. Red White & Boom never disappoints. Matherville puts on a great show. Grand Mound has the best fireworks I've ever seen. What's wrong with kicking back and letting the pros do their thing? Their fireworks are better than yours, plus you stand better odds of surviving the weekend with all your fingers still attached to your hand. Just because you bought some mediocre fireworks doesn't mean I want to see and hear them. I own a mediocre guitar, but I sure don't expect you to attend a mandatory concert in my basement.

The 4th of July is morphing from a celebration of independence to a celebration of scaring the bejeepers out of our neighbors. Let's be honest, the other 364 days of the year are starting to feel scary enough as-is. If preferring to NOT have all my picture frames knocked off the walls and my floors NOT covered in broken glass makes me an old fuddy-duddy, so be it. Get off my lawn, and take your fireworks with you.

Column: Days of our Lives

I've been going home for lunch lately.

I hate a quiet house, so when I walk in the door, I usually flip the TV on straight away -- and when do that at lunchtime, magic awaits. I've been unintentionally timing my lunch to coincide with some of the greatest scripted dialogue ever written, courtesy Earth's guiltiest of pleasures: Days of our Lives. 

These are ACTUAL lines that have come out of my television in the past week:

"If you were shooting people to defend your mother, that's justifiable!"

"I just stopped by to see if you had any new leads on the case... and to bring you some pheasant."

"Kate, did you tell Lucas that Abby knew he was Sami's kidnapper?"

Yes, if you're having a bad day, rest assured that it's nowhere NEAR as bad as the fictional residents of Salem, who can never catch a break. Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives -- except their days don't look anything like the days of MY life, and I'm kinda grateful for that.

No one is immune from the addictive schlock of Days of our Lives. I mocked it relentlessly in college, but I akso WATCHED it relentlessly in college. Back then, it was common to stroll the halls and hear Days blaring from a dozen different dorm rooms. It's a dangerous drug. Date one girl who watches Days and soon YOU'RE watching Days. Next thing you know, you're waiting in line to meet Days star Matthew Ashford at a Rock Island autograph session. Or so I'm told. Cough.

It's been a long time since I've seen this silly show, but I watched, like, fifteen whole minutes today, so I think I'm up to speed.

For the uninitiated, Days is mostly concerned with two families: the Bradys (who are good,) and the DiMeras (who are NOT.) They all live in Salem, a town that appears to consist of five upscale houses, a bar, and a hospital. Everyone is dating everyone else. All the women look elegant and all the men look like Sears catalog models. A vast majority of the population has been murdered or presumed dead at least once. Oh, and occasionally, people get possessed by the devil.

The episode I just watched centered on Victor Kiriakis, who has been one of the reigning bad guys of Days for decades. I'm pretty sure he's about 108 years old now. (In real life, he's portrayed by the legendary John Aniston, dad of Jennifer.) Victor seems either upset or dead, I can't quite tell. 

"I know you're upset," someone says. "The situation is complicated and upsetting. But Victor, we're talking about a baby! A new life!"

"A new life," Victor replies, "that was spawned by a woman who tried to electrocute me in my own bathtub!"

Ahh, THERE's the Days I remember. It isn't Salem if there's not at least one lunatic murderer roaming the streets. But if Victor's a bad guy, perhaps it's a hero lunatic murderer roaming the streets -- an electrocutionist with a heart of gold. But wait, Victor was a bad guy. Perhaps the lunatic murderer is actually the hero here -- an electrocutionist mama with a heart of gold.

Also (spoiler alert): Someone named Abigail is dead. I don't think the TV audience knows who did it, because EVERYONE looks suspicious. There's a guy wandering around in a bloody shirt. There's another guy who blacked out and doesn't remember what he did last night. There's also a tiny flamboyant man in a plaid jacket whose every scene is accompanied by keyboards SO ominous there's no way he's not the killer. Plus, he has Evil Guy Hair. It sticks a half foot off his head and the tips are frosted. He's clearly a psychopath.

"I heard about Abigail," Frosty Tips says. "What happened?"

"She was stabbed," says the Sears catalog model, which then immediately cuts to a hazy flashback of Frosty Tips holding a knife.

"They said it was a robbery," says the Sears catalog model, which cuts to ANOTHER flackback of Frosty Tips literally sneaking around with a bag full of jewels.

That's as much as I could take. To sum up: Abigail's dead. Victor's old. Everyone may have done it, but my money's on Frosty Tips, in the conservatory, with the knife.

More than anything, I'm amazed at how many cast members are still around 30 years since I last watched. Patch and Kayla. Jack and Jennifer. Victor. I'm pretty sure Marlena's still around, but she's probably possessed by a demon, as is often her way. Oddly, Salem also appears to be now populated by a good chunk of the cast of the old "227" sitcom. I have no idea what that's all about.

I refuse to watch any more lest risk becoming emotionally invested in the dumbest show ever. I have no idea who murdered Abigail, but it's okay. Knowing this show, she's most likely not even dead. Eight years from now, we'll learn that she's been alive this whole time living on a desert island. They probably murdered her long-long twin sister Babigail by accident. On Days of Our Lives, anything -- LITERALLY anything -- is possible.