Songs I Love in 88 Words or Less: “Rock Around With Ollie Vee”

“Rock Around With Ollie Vee,” Buddy Holly

The third installment in my bimonthly series. Some songs are good to dance to, some songs you have to dance to. Buddy and the band are doing some serious gravity-busting here that gives me the same kind of dance-y cosmic jitters I've only ever gotten from a couple Michael Jackson songs. Weird, but for reals.


This ain’t no sock hop, bud. The punch is spiked, the pants are tight and your corsage is a black dahlia and bleeding hearts…

You dance—squirm, a thrust, gasp—until your palms are pomade-wet. Dreams thump and grind to a hiccuping guitar, caress curves of the stand-up bass. This is the realm of the half-man, half-boy, and I’m just along for the ride because sitting still for  2 minutes 18 seconds is impossible. 

P.S. Ollie Vee’s twin baby sisters: future muses for "Teenage Head" and "Orgasm Addict."


Well, I sure hope you want to listen to it now! Here you go.

Also in the series:
"Rock And Roll"
"Over the River"

How Sweet Hearts Can Be

I would have posted this sooner, but I couldn't come up with a good-enough title. I figured the only way I'd think of one was when I wasn't thinking, and there it was, whispered in my ear in the middle of a dream at 3 AM in the morning last week.

Those same bright stars in heaven above
Know now how sweet
sweethearts can be

Of course. One of my favorite lyrics ever, the ouch of the three "ows" softened by a double dose of turbinado… So simple, it takes lesser poets 5 more lines to say not even quite that. I fell right back into the most satisfied sleep, so, so thankful for those kinds of gifts from the universe…

That's probably one reason why I run, because running has lots of gifts to give. And running doesn't mind if you're me or Meb--you plan well, you put in the time and give up that last tiny bit of control your ego thought you had, and it'll take you where you need to be…wherever that is. It brought Meb to the Boston Marathon finish line before everyone else, and it brings me, even though I'm at the complete other end of the natural talent spectrum, to this…

Two weekends ago I was in Central Park, trying to find the calm in the dappled shade of the bridle path, the nothing-but-flatness of the reservoir loop…anything but the outer loop, which I had been on quite a bit in recent weeks. It's hilly, which I don't mind, but nasty hot in the bright sun, which i do. So I avoided the outer loop like the plague, until, of course, I stopped paying attention to how crappy I felt for a second and found my feet leading me there….

Who drew all those chalk hearts in the pedestrian symbols painted on the road that show which way we're supposed to be going? It doesn't really matter, and it doesn't even matter why they wrote "88" in each of the hearts on said pedestrian symbols from West 90th all the way to… wherever they ran out of chalk on the east side.

It matters to me because my mom was born in 1926, and because the last birthday she celebrated was her 88th on April 16. And just in case I didn't quite get the message that those who have left their bodies are always in our hearts, this one kept coming up in my iPod shuffle…