The Real Memphis Mike (don't settle for imitations)

“There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do. She gave them some broth without any bread, And whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.” No one lives in a shoe. That’s just what the children call it. The building curves inward in a way that doesn’t feel right. Hallways narrow toward the ends. Rooms taper off like something was trying to make space where there wasn’t any. The youngest are kept at the “toe.” The older ones, what few there are, closer to the “heel.” It’s not official terminology. But it sticks. The woman assigned to the ward isn’t as old as she looks. Forty, maybe. Fifty at most. Hard to tell under the weight of it all. Too many children. Not enough staff. Not enough food. Not enough patience left in the world. She has charts. Protocols. A schedule that says what happens and when. Morning: broth. Afternoon: quiet time. Evening: correction. They don’t call it whipping anymore. Not out loud. But the marks tell their o...

2:40am, and he was lost in the sounds of Zufälligen Einbildungskraft. The rest of the world was asleep. He knew it wasn't his fault - at least not this time. However, he had a nagging feeling. The closer he was to achieving his goal, the further away it seemed. He'd read, studied, conjugated and codified - yet he felt no closer than when he began. The world was drowning in a sea of poorly corrected pitch, and he was helpless to do anything about it. The vibrations of authenticity and originality were growing fainter by the minute. It had been over thirty years since the last explosion, and even that had been a hollow replica of days gone by. His heart broke a little when he realized Waits was little more than a Partch fanboy with delusions of Satchmotic wailings.  Bones was a killer - with strings.  The legends had become just that. Forgotten mythology rotting on a shelf, waiting to be rediscovered by academics and weirdos. The day before, he'd sent pleas in multiple lang...

 It was late February 2002, and I was getting ready for my first trip overseas.  I had lucked into a handful of gigs, and I was thrilled by the chance. I grew up watching lots of Hammer horror films, and almost any British show I could find. Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Benny Hill Show, Dave Allen, and Tommy Cooper were regular viewing thanks to public television. I spent plenty of time reading British literature, especially Arthur Conan Doyle. My maternal grandfather’s family was British, so it’s fair to say I was an Anglophile. I thought I had a pretty good understanding of “the Queen’s English.” I was well acquainted with terms like spanner, lorry, telly, and most hilarious to twelve-year-old me, fags (or cigarettes, for those unaware). I was under the mistaken impression that “wanker” could be used as a term of endearment, not unlike jagoff. I later found this to be…not quite accurate. I was admittedly concerned about the food. While I occasionally consider myself ad...

I remember some years back having to switch to a new phone. I’m not a fan of change, especially when it comes to things I consider appliances. In the landline days of old, phones were relatively cheap, and you didn’t have to get a new one every couple of years. I still own a couple of rotary phones from the 1940s that work perfectly fine and have better sound quality than anything else I’ve ever used. But this story ain’t about phones. Or change. It’s about my personal phonebook. That’s one thing I’ll admit to liking about cell phones. Everyone’s number right there in the device. No more having to remember - or risk forgetting - telephone numbers. At the time of this particular phone change, I was at one of those midlife crossroads. My dilemma was simple enough: Do I continue with music at some professional level? I wasn’t happy with my playing. I felt like I was spinning my wheels, doing the same songs over and over. I was burned out. It happens. The young lady at the phone store help...

Lately, he’d been thinking about his ex-father-in-law. Not the ex-wife - calm down. That road had enough potholes already. No, this was about Kolya. They had never been especially close. Between the language barrier, the cultural divide, and the lingering fog of the recently ended Cold War, “warm relationship” was never really on the menu. Still, Kolya had made an impression. Men like that tended to. He was somewhere in his mid-to-late sixties when they met. Picture the farmer from American Gothic if he’d been drafted by the Soviet Union, fed boiled cabbage, and taught to glare professionally. Bald as a cannonball, which somehow made his head seem even larger. Thick square plastic eyeglasses magnified his eyes until they looked like a permanent accusation. He dressed sharply, but in a way that suggested the tailor’s motto had been adequate for the State . Then there were his teeth. No expert on the subject, he could only assume cosmetic dentistry had been dismissed by the Soviets a...

He sometimes said his greatest regret was not taking the old Trans-Siberian Railway eastward to Lake Baikal. Not because he cared much for bucket lists. He considered such catalogs as vanity with stationery, for those who had wasted decades suddenly writing down ten expensive ways to continue wasting time. No, what he regretted was more precise than that. He regretted never sitting in a dim canteen somewhere near Irkutsk while some broad-faced stranger lied to him magnificently over soup and vodka. He regretted never hearing the room laugh at a joke he only half understood. He regretted missing stories that would now likely never be told the same way again. His body had long since vetoed such ambitions. These days he was lucky if the month’s arithmetic ended with enough left over for prescriptions. If Melinda French Gates wished to finance a crippled Pennsylvanian’s global adventures, he remained open to discussion, but until then, conversations near Lake Baikal would have to survi...

 It wasn't how he expected to end up. Lost and alone, high up in the Rhodopes. The sun had gone down hours before, and he was sure he'd heard wolves, or maybe jackals. Three days earlier, he hadn't even known jackals were indigenous to Bulgaria! Had they picked up his scent? Of course they had. But would they seek him out? A midnight snack for the whole pack? Maybe. Maybe not. He wasn't sure how he smelled to such creatures. This could be a rare instance when his blood pressure medication and lifelong diet of chemically treated faux food might be advantageous. This whole mess had started a few weeks earlier.  He needed some time off. He needed to be away from everyone he knew, and more importantly, everyone who knew who he was.  The press had not been kind.  His public relations role for a well-known pharmaceutical company had put him front and center when the news broke.  So many kids had died due to tainted medication. It wasn't his fault, but he was the guy o...

 It was time to get her started. The old Ford coughed twice before turning over. The dashboard rattled like it always did, and the heater made that faint ticking noise that meant it might work eventually, or it might not. Either way, he didn't much care. He lit a Viceroy and watched the smoke curl toward the cracked windshield. Then he reached over and pulled the pint of Crown Royal from the passenger seat. The bag it came in had long since been lost. He took a short pull and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Six hundred miles. That’s what the note had said. He shifted into gear and pulled onto the road. Black Velvet was for sissies. That’s what his old man used to say. Unless you were Mexican. Or Elvis. He smiled faintly at the memory. His old man had been full of sayings like that. Half of them didn’t make much sense, but they stuck with you anyway. The bench seat was cracked Naugahyde, split down the middle like an old scar. The foam pushed out in yellow lumps. He shift...

  "Why is everyone so afraid of going up there?" The city girl had been pestering the locals for a few days now. Said she was a reporter or something. The honest truth was there was never really any news to report from around these parts. Every year, the seasons changed, but not much else. The deer hunters came and went, like they always did. The hikers and campers came and went, like they always did. The holidays came and went. Winter, spring, summer, fall. Rinse and repeat. Just the way things were up here in the hills. Walt Henley was renting out his old hunting cabin to her - dirt cheap, too. He figured she'd be gone after a day or two. The place had well water, which was usually enough to run off most city folks. But this gal was determined to find a story - even if she had to make one up out of whole cloth. Walt's mother, Abigail, was the one who invited the city girl to lunch. "It's the polite thing to do," she admonished him. "It's the C...

When I was a kid, we had an already ancient Royal typewriter at home. Book reports, certain schoolwork, or in my case, just for making noise. Mom had a nice electric typewriter that she used for work. But that old Royal - that's probably where my love of writing began. - MM I was thinking about my old typewriter last night. Writing was serious back then. Forty pounds of steel, keys, and ribbon. No batteries. No updates. No distractions. Just you and the machine. And that machine fought back. Type too fast and the keys would jam together like two drunks fighting in a bar. Type too slowly or too lightly and it might just decide you didn’t really need that letter or that word. Sometimes it felt like the thing had opinions. Like it was quietly judging you. You learned quickly. You learned rhythm. You learned pressure. You learned patience. It was like a built-in editor made of steel and stubbornness. Made a mistake? Start over. Or, if you didn’t mind your work looking like hell, dab s...

It's been a rough week. I don’t often show my emotions, but lately they’ve been harder to hide. I’ve lost two close friends in the past week: Georgia Thompson and Yanka Rupkina. It was through music that I came to know them both. Music really does bring the world together. Georgia was married to my rockabilly buddy, Hayden Thompson. We lost him at the end of 2025, and Georgia joined him recently. They were wonderful people, both of them. They shared a sense of humor I always admired - as odd as my own - and being around them was always a joy. Yanka - скъпи, скъпи мой приятелю - was truly a gift in my life. I had been listening to her for decades without even realizing it. We were friends for months before I finally figured it out. We can blame my less-than-adequate language skills for that. Yanka thought it was hilarious when I finally made the connection. From the moment she told our mutual friend - the conduit of our friendship - “Tell that BOY to contact me!” a true friendship w...

Имало някога едно момиче от малко селце в планината Странджа. Тя не познавала света. Познавала хълмовете. Познавала вятъра. Познавала гласа на хората, носен над полята по здрач. Първите си песни научила така, както децата научават всичко важно - не от уроци, а от слушане. От баба си. От жените, които работели. От старите хора, които помнели времена, когато светът бил по-труден и по-тих едновременно. Тя не знаела, че учи нещо древно. Знаела само, че песните се усещат като дом. Минали години. Момичето пораснало. Светът започнал да забелязва това, което селото винаги е знаело. Гласът ѝ носел нещо по-старо от музиката - нещо, което звучало като планини, като огън в нощта, като самата памет. Гласът ѝ носел автентичността на българския народ - неговата вяра, неговите трудности и неговата радост. Постепенно момичето от малкото селце получило нещо неочаквано: Получило света. Тя пътувала. Тя пеела. Тя носела гласа на своя народ по-далеч, отколкото някой би могъл да си представи. Но колкото и да...