Frank Michels's Open Salon Blog

Cat Sale

Fri, 10 May 2013 11:05:38 -0400

A few years ago my wife and I had three cats plus Sam, our aging Black Labrador. In the space of a couple of years, two cats died of old age and one just disappeared, possibly due to becoming an entrée in a coyote’s repast. Soon after that, an animal-rescuing neighbor of ours foisted a little black ball of terror onto us, otherwise known as Lucy the Devil Cat. Lucy had flunked out of several foster homes by the time we got her, and she was pretty wild, but after 2 years with us she has learned how to be affectionate and playful, although she is still bad quite often. (But in a cute way.)

And now we have a new feline in the house, an ungainly tuxedo cat with the unfortunate name of “Murdock.” It’s not like we were sitting around one day and someone said, “You know what this house needs? More cats!” But I was checking Facebook last week and saw a notice that the Nashville Humane Association was waiving the $75 dollar adoption fee for older cats for a short time, I guess to clear out some of the inventory of hard-to-adopt cats.

My wife and I had gone to the Frist art museum to see an exhibit of Dutch Master paintings, and on the way home we decided to stop by the shelter and see what they had. In the cat room there were about 12 sleeping cats, mostly big and older than one year. We picked one at random, mostly because his card said he had lived with other cats and dogs, and carried him to the play room to see if we liked him. “That’s a big cat,” I said. The card said that he was five years old and ten pounds, and he was the kind of Tomcat that’s rangy and long. But what the hell. We filled out some paperwork, where we had to promise not to use him for animal experiments or other nefarious purposes, and walked out the door with another damn cat.

Murdock

When we came in the door with the cat carrier, you could almost see the dog thinking, “Oh Jeez…Really?” But Sam is a go-with-the-flow kind of dog. However, Lucy was another story. Even though Murdock is much bigger than her, she immediately put him on notice that this was Her House, Her Rules, and he spent the first couple of days with us hiding under the futon in the spare bedroom.

Now it’s been five days, and Murdock is gradually starting to fit in. He shows up at dinner time and enthusiastically eats everything in sight, including Lucy’s food if I don’t grab it first. And last night he slept with us for a few hours on the bed, which may turn into a problem, because when he jumps up it feels like someone just dropped a bowling ball on the mattress.

I’m starting to think this is going to work out just fine. Except when the big lug jumps up into my lap when I’m trying to work on the computer and wpejw0g= wspfdjmek f;fmpf

Sleeping With a Hose on My Nose

Mon, 6 May 2013 15:05:31 -0400

model wearing CPAP mask

I’ve been a traveling musician for the last 30 years. This involves riding to out-of-town gigs in a custom bus, with a sleeping compartment where the band (and sometimes the artist) sleeps in close quarters, in bunk beds stacked 3 high with a narrow corridor in between.

Last year, on a 30 day tour of Canada, the singer pulled me aside. “Frank,” she said, “Your loud snoring is keeping everyone awake. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to sleep in the rear lounge for the rest of the tour.” I was pretty unhappy to hear that, although I knew that my snoring had been a problem for anyone sharing a motel room with me for several years. But I moved to the back lounge, and slept with two sweaters and my winter coat on because it was so cold back there. And when I got back to town, I made an appointment with an Ear, Nose and Throat doctor.

“Here’s the problem,” Dr. Jarvis said. “The normal person has an opening the size of a quarter in back of their throat. Yours is about the size of a pencil. And as you have gotten older, the tissues in back of your throat have started to sag when you go to sleep, cutting off your airway and causing you to snore. I’m going to schedule you for an overnight sleep study.”

I showed up for the sleep study one night around 8 pm, at a non-descript medical-looking building near downtown Nashville. A friendly technician named Stuart showed me to a room that looked like a standard motel room, and after I had settled in, he returned with a machine with a Medusa-like tangle of cables emanating from it. He stuck electrodes all over my head, on my chest, and on my calves, along with bands around my chest and abdomen to measure my breathing, and a clip on my finger to monitor my heartbeat. “Sleep well,” he said cheerily, as he turned down the lights and went back to wherever he was going to monitor my brainwaves and other functions all night. Somehow, I did get to sleep, even though I felt like Frankenstein’s monster with all the wires glued to my body.

a man wired for a sleep study

A couple of weeks later Dr. Jarvis gave me the bad news. “You have sleep apnea,” he said. “The tests show you are waking up as much as 38 times an hour. When you fall asleep, your throat relaxes and blocks your airway, your oxygen levels drop, and finally your brain sends an alert to wake up so you can breathe again.” He said there were three options:

1. Surgery, which I immediately ruled out because I am a singer.

2. A dental appliance to push the jaw forward, which helps some patients but which he didn’t think would work in my case, and

3. A CPAP machine. CPAP stands for Continuous Positive Airway Pressure, and it keeps your airway open with a steady stream of air. “This treatment works 100% of the time,” Dr. Jarvis said. So I told him, “Let’s do it.”

So now I sleep with a hose on my nose. It’s taking some getting used to. I have a machine about the size of a toaster that contains a water reservoir, and it sends heated, slightly moistened air through a lightweight hose to a pair of soft plastic nostril plugs, kept in place with a couple of straps around the back of my head. I have to keep my mouth closed, or the air rushes out and I sound like Darth Vader. But I have been sleeping much better, and since I’m not waking up all night long I have finally been having quality REM sleep. This means that my dreams seem to go on forever, with really complicated plot lines that have a lot of time to develop. And I don’t snore anymore.

Which my wife really, really likes.

The British Invasion and My Busted Radio Dream

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 08:02:24 -0500

On February ninth, 1964, I was eleven years old, about to turn twelve. On the front cover of the Washington Post that Sunday morning was an article that my dad pointed out to me. It was about a new British group that was slated to appear that night on The Ed Sullivan Show, which my family and about every other family in America watched every Sunday night. The thing that sticks in my mind is that the article featured a small photo of Paul McCartney, right next to a small photo of Moe Howard from the Three Stooges. Because they had the same haircut…!

Anyway, we watched the Beatles performance that night, and while my dad made fun of their hair and clothes, I was enraptured, just like every teenager across the nation. And I especially loved their song, “I wanna hold your hand.”

I was a pretty naïve kid. I was the oldest in my family, and had no brothers, sisters, or older friends to show me the ropes. So I’m not sure if I even knew that I could go to a record store and buy the Beatles new single or their album. But I did have a transistor radio, which I kept tuned to WEAM radio, a local AM top 40 station. And because “I wanna hold your hand” eventually went to number one in the U.S., WEAM played it every couple of hours or so, and I would listen to that station constantly, hoping they would play my song again.

I had a very fuzzy idea of how a radio station actually worked, but I had seen a black-and-white film from the thirties on our small TV which featured a scene from a radio broadcast. It was set in a nightclub, and a tuxedoed announcer stood on a stage in front of showgirls bedecked in feather boas and sequins, and he introduced performers who sang into a comically large microphone. In my eleven-year-old mind I guess I thought that was how WEAM radio operated.

Then one day, my friend George from across the street said to me, “WEAM radio? They’re right on the other side of the woods!” George had a couple of older brothers, and he was much savvier than I was. We made a plan to hike over there and see the station on the next weekend.

Frank and George pretend to be the Beatles

When Saturday came, we hiked through the woods on paths that we knew well, past the stand of pines and the little pond where we sometimes caught tadpoles. Finally, we reached the edge of another, newer looking subdivision. “There it is,” said George, pointing to a bland-looking brick building down the street with a small parking area in front. We walked on the lawn around the back of the building, and then I heard the unmistakable sound of my favorite radio station, emanating from a half open window about head high.

I crept closer to the window and looked in. A fat man with a greasy black pompadour sat in a chair in the small room, in front of turntables and other electronic equipment, as a commercial for a car dealership played. He saw me at the window and said, “Hey, kid..” and I walked away, my dreams about the glamour of the radio industry pretty much destroyed.

I didn’t listen to WEAM radio as much after that, because I couldn’t get the picture of the fat D.J. out of my head. Instead, I got my mother to buy me the first Beatles album, and played it over and over on the turntable that my dad used to listen to his Perry Como records. I can close my eyes right now and hear John Lennon sing “I don’t want to spoil the party” in perfect fidelity, right here in my head.

I think I will.

Only One Day Until I Can Stop Hating My Neighbors

Mon, 5 Nov 2012 07:11:26 -0500

As my dog Sam and I stroll around this affluent Nashville neighborhood for our nightly walk, one thing is very clear. Just about all of my neighbors for blocks around are big Romney supporters. Passing by each well-tended large lawn fronting the large houses, I am greeted by 2 or more Romney/Ryan signs next to the street, complete with little waving flags. If there are any Obama supporters in the area besides me, they are cowering in their bunkers until the war is over and they can resume normal life again.

It’s tough being a liberal in a very red state, and I have the added disadvantage of working in the country music industry, which is loudly backing Romney and other Republican candidates with both money and personal appearances. Actually, a lot of musicians and other industry professionals are Democrats, but for the sake of our careers we don’t bring up that uncomfortable subject in mixed company. We all remember what happened to the Dixie Chicks, the great girl trio that was on top of the world until lead singer Natalie Maines mentioned that she was embarrassed by President George W. Bush at a concert in England. The reaction here was as if she had been caught butchering babies, and the group’s records were banned from country radio, sending the group into a tailspin from which they never recovered.

So I don’t have an Obama sign in my front yard, which I admit is a little bit cowardly. But I’ve still got to live here after the election, and get along with all of the other folks on the street, who are actually pretty nice as long as we keep the conversation confined to gardening, how lousy the Titans are this year, and when are we going to have another yard sale.

My wife and I are people of modest means, and we were able to move into this neighborhood because we bought a house that had been wrecked by bad renters, and fixed it up. But just one block away, houses are selling for over a million dollars, and the mansion in the TV series “Nashville” that young singer “Juliette Barnes” lives in is just a quarter mile away. There are no black people or Hispanics living in the neighborhood that I know of, and the residents are overwhelmingly Christian, white, affluent, and enthusiastic consumers of Fox “News.”

"Juliette Barnes" house

I think Obama is going to squeak out a win in the election, and the Romney signs will probably come down pretty quickly after that. I’ll breathe a sigh of relief, because I don’t like thinking bad thoughts about my neighbors. I know that we all are being manipulated into this us-against-them mentality by the increasingly partisan political parties and their media outlets, and that if you sit down with folks one-on-one, you realize they can be reasonable and willing to compromise.

But not until Wednesday.

U.S. Behind Canada in Giant Pumpkin Boats

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 09:10:46 -0400

As a proud American who loves pumpkins, I was distressed to hear today that Canada is stomping our butts when it comes to Giant Pumpkin Boat technology. Yes, while we are busy carving Jack-O-lanterns out of our pitifully small, basketball-sized orange gourds, those rascally Canadians are growing pumpkins large enough to hollow out and paddle around a lake in.

I am speaking, of course, about the Windsor, Nova Scotia Pumpkin Regatta that took place last Sunday on Lake Pesaquad. Scores of hardy Canadians took to the water in their carved-and-painted personal vegetable crafts, and raced to raise money for a local charity. If we let them get away with this, what’s next? Giant zucchini submarines?

This is obviously Obama’s fault. The president has been so caught up in campaigning and fund-raising, that he has let Canada leap far ahead of us when it comes to giant pumpkins that you can ride around in. Our agricultural sector has become a laughingstock overnight with the release of stunning pictures of smug Canucks paddling in enormous gourds.

What we need now is a crash program, involving Monsanto, radioactive isotopes, and billions of dollars, to try to somehow catch up with our wily neighbors to the north in the field of pumpkin boat innovation and technology. If we don’t manage to match or surpass their prodigious pumpkins, then Russia, China, and the rest of the countries of the world will sense weakness, and the U.S. will start on a downward slide from which we may never recover.

And so I implore you, my fellow Americans. Don’t let those hockey-loving poutine-eaters pass us by in the area of protuberant squashes. Next summer, grab your seeds, your shovels, and your bags of manure, and let’s show them what we’re made of!