Mean Steve Piano was a strange guy, to me anyway. We just didn’t have much in common despite both being pianists and on the scene of Toronto’s Queen street once upon a Ned. I liked the thing he did, I don’t know what he thought of me though it probably tickled him a bit that we were both pianists and in our own way, showmen. He was maybe three years older than me and dedicated to the Jerry Lee Lewis type of playing. I doubt he ever expected Jerry Lee Lewis to outlive him by twenty years. I think Steve died twenty years ago. I heard mixed stories about him being in Europe then and taking his life. I have no idea, but I know a woman who had a love affair with him and she talks about him in a way reserved for someone, who to be paired with even if only one night, changes your life. Tonight, reading the obituaries for Jerry Lee Lewis, thought of my first encounters with his 1950s music which always included liner notes telling us he was a sexual deviant, marrying his cousin that was 13 when he was 21. Something like that. Those stories never added he himself was married earlier at 16 or two of his sisters were married as young teens. That was where he came from and how it was. Early examples of death by newspaper. I noticed news on both the Kari Lake campaign and the Candace Owen documentary about Black Lives Matter, blame the media. Attribute distortions of reality on their doorstep as if they, the media, are something with a mind that is changeable and self reflectable. It feels to me like they’re asking hormones to stop being hormones. Blueberry pie was consumed and suddenly there’s a lot of insulin jumping up and down. You can complain to insulin all you want but it doesn’t care, it’ll keep following the program.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"