There you have it. After much drama, Ace Frehley has left Kiss - you might need to revisit the words from yesterday to recap at this point - but he is gone. He is unmasked, out in the world all by himself and nobody recognises him without the make-up on. The people who love him are waiting to see what he does next but they're going to have to wait for him to write and deliver the songs that will appear on his new album. It might take a while - months or years even - by which time most of the people who love him will have forgotten they loved him quite as much as they think and when they finally spin that record, it won't sound a whole lot like the thing they expected but they'll give it some props anyway... because it's Ace and that's what you do.
Meanwhile, Kiss will press along and pretend that Ace still had a hand in the making of The Elder before settling into a new groove which will include disrobing themselves of all the thing we loved them for. More members will leave. The new Kiss looks nothing like the old Kiss but if we all wait long enough, over the next few years they will bitch about each other, fleetingly become friends again, bitch some more until eventually, anybody who could remember the good old days will be too old to care and nobody can remember what they were fighting about in the first place.
Occasionally, we will look at the new Kiss and smile. Occasionally, we will look at the new Ace and smile. Mostly though, we will wish everybody could have just gotten along because when it was great, it was the best ever - but we will also forget that people get older and people will always change.
Some people did not notice any of this because by the time they were old enough to appreciate such things, they were listening to Soundgarden.
My big small person disappeared off the radar today as she went on a trip to see Rihanna. I got a message a little while ago saying that she only sang for an hour and twenty minutes which was closely followed by another message saying all she could think of while watching Rihanna was how much better Panic At The Disco were going to be later in the year.
Which says it all perhaps.
Meanwhile, it was the last night of The Skool Dance Show for my not so big small person. I picked her up when it was over and she shared her wisdom of the events of the day with me. That would be both the events of the 'Kiss' debacle detailed above and the Dance Show. She talks so fast these days, I can't keep up and it should scare me but it always ends with:
– What's for dinner?
Once again, it's good to see that some things are a constant on The Spinning Ball.
Anyway, over the last few weeks - maybe months - every time I find myself in a bookstore, I find there's on book in particular that won't leave me alone. It's called The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov) and it happens to have a good cover too - so I picked it up. Translated Russian fiction which is a satire of 1930s Stalinist Moscow is not normally my bag but being as it mostly features The Devil and his associate - a talking cat - I figured I'd make an exception. Some things really do need to be in your life - particularly when they include such lines as:
"The most amazing combinations can result if you shuffle the pack enough.”
I'll report back sometime in the future, but to balance the equation, I also picked up a copy of You Can Do It, Charlie Brown which was published around the same time and in its own way, is probably just as smart.
It's odd how you can say as much in one small square that uses about six words as you can in 100,000 don't you think?
We didn't see Cerberus today either. That makes two days on the run - and it wasn't raining. I hope he's not dead.
In between all of this, I did some work. Proper work... pen and paper work. And then I sat in the garden with a coffee and concluded that if by the end of the year, the English speaking Western world is being led around the garden by Trump and Johnson, I would go all Hunter S Thompson on them because such a thing is far too good an opportunity to miss.