It’s hard to believe it’s our friendiversary again. Hard to believe we’ve known each other so long. You were 10 when we met. You’re 12 now. That’s practically old enough to be in a retirement home.

I remember when we met, like it was yesterday. It was an overcast, autumn afternoon. I was three pant-sizes smaller than I am now.

I arrived at a restaurant named Bama Bucks in the hamlet of Boaz, Alabama (pop.10,369). Bama Bucks, a wild-game restaurant with a commercial deer farm across the street. All the deer in cages were staring at me.

I asked a fellow customer what was with all the deer. The customer replied, “You ever been to a seafood restaurant with a lobster tank?”

So we were definitely not in Birmingham anymore.

It was your laugh I noticed first. Outside the restaurant, you were sitting in a chair, waiting for me, rocking back and forth, clutching a white cane. Hair in a ponytail.

You were saying:

“Is that him? Is that his voice I hear?” And then you just laughed.

The first thing we did was hug. And I like that. I like that we didn’t even know each other before we hugged. We just jumped right in.

You fit in the crook of my arms just right. You were so fragile. So tiny.

I knew a little about your story, of course. After all, you had written me a letter about losing your vision. Your teacher sent it to me.

Your biological mother was a drug abuser. You were one of those infants in the NICU with neonatal abstinence syndrome, in withdrawals the moment you left the womb. You were a foster kid, bouncing through The System like a veritable ping-pong ball, before two incredible parents adopted you.

Then, you lost your vision. Then you went through a really hard time.…

Gray weather feels a lot like taking a field trip to Hell. I don’t like overcast days. Whenever the sky gets like this, I sit by a windowsill and entertain the idea of composing Russian poetry.

I love the sun. I need the sun. When it disappears, I start to miss the sun in much the same way I would miss trees, grass, or ice cream, if those things were to vanish behind clouds.

I wouldn’t want to lose those things. Just like I wouldn’t want to lose muddy creeks and rivers, or large mouth bass. Or sausages from Conecuh County, biscuits made by hand, macaroni and cheese, and barbecued ribs.

As it happens, I hold a longstanding county-fair record for eating the most consecutive ribs without being admitted into the ER. I'll show you my trophy sometime—if ever these godawful clouds go away.

I wouldn’t want to lose kids, either. If clouds covered all the kids up in the world, I'd miss them.

Especially babies.

Fat ones that wiggle when they laugh in your arms, flexing their little stomachs as they cackle, their plastic Huggies getting heavier with each laugh.

I love children. They remind me of who I truly am inside. I am not an adult. Not really. I am really just a tall kid with a mortgage. All attempts to appear otherwise are fruitless.

And since I'm giving big fat opinions, here's another: I wish pop-singers would quit dressing like giant marital aids. Don't they know kids watch them on television? Don't they know there's more to music than The Carnal Urge? Do they even know what real music is?

Consequently, why is crappy music so popular? Why are pop artists with the collective IQ of room-temperature mayonnaise famous?

I realize this is not a new problem. Idiocy has always been in fashion. Each generation in history had pop-stars and…

Calhoun, Georgia. An autumn evening. I was supposed to be putting on a show with my band The Grand Ole Optimists. But that wasn’t happening. I was unable to perform because of a serious gas problem.

“A gas problem?” said ticket holders who were being denied entrance into the Gem Theater. “What on earth did Sean eat?”

The cops and firemen explained.

“Sean doesn’t have gas, ma’am. There is a natural gas leak beneath the ground. This is an explosion zone, folks. Step back, please.”

Calhoun was in full disaster preparation mode. There were cop cars everywhere. Pumper trucks blocked the streets. Emergency vehicles sounded sirens. The atmosphere was filled with red and blue lights. Midtown was shut down.

Various audience members, lingering on sidewalks, kept eyeing me closely, watching for signs of gastrointestinal distress.

This is probably because the theater marquee was equipped with a message that read, in bold letters: “SEAN OF THE SOUTH SHOW CANCELED DUE TO GAS.”

“You can look at it this way,” said one of my band members,

gazing at the marquee in much the same way you’d stare at a loved one, or the face of a newborn. “This has the potential to become the greatest flatulent joke of all time.”

About an hour went by. Everybody kept waiting for an update on the gaseous situation. Everyone kept hoping the firemen would tell them whether they were in danger of explosion, air toxicity, or worse, they would all be required to attend my show.

But no news.

So, everyone was sitting on curbs, waiting around, looking at their watches. Firemen were striding by in full turnout gear. Cops were flagging traffic. And it was growing evident with each moment: This gas simply would not pass.

But the night was not over. And this is why you have to love small towns. Because a Coulhoun-Gordon County library manager happened to be attending the show…

Hi there. This is that Little Voice inside your head speaking. Yeah, I know. It’s been a while. But how are you? How’s life? How’s the fam? You still doing keto?

Listen, I know we haven’t talked in a long time, but technically, that’s not my fault. You probably don’t remember this, but you quit listening to your inner voice just as soon as you hit the fourth stage of puberty.

The moment you developed armpit hair, you became a lot more concerned with getting a driver’s license, French kissing, and eradicating zits.

So over time that voice inside you got quieter. Oh, sure, every now and then you’d hear me droning in the background like Charlie Brown’s teacher. But you never actually listened.

Although there were a few times...

Remember that rude waiter a few weeks ago? When the meal was over, you almost stiffed him with the tip. But then, you dug into your wallet and gave him a ridiculously generous gratuity.

Did you ever stop to wonder why you did this? Well, I’ll tell you

why. Because the teeny, tiny voice reminded you that being generous was not just kind, it was right. That Little Voice was me.

There was that other time, when you gave a ride to two Mexican young women who didn’t speak English. Their car broke down in the Walmart parking lot, and they were crying. You helped them out because that faint voice would not shut up.

Also me.

And let’s not forget about the time you almost got into that fatal car wreck.

No, wait. You never knew about that one. You never did know how close you came to the end. Because the Little Voice told you to pull off the interstate immediately before the disaster happened. And you actually listened. In a few seconds there was a ten-car pile up on I-65, and four people were killed.

Still, most…

My favorite hymn is the one about leaning on everlasting arms. I got to thinking about this song today when I was sitting on the porch with my sister. We were both singing.

“Leaning, leaning,

“Safe and secure, from all alarms…”

My sister is a 33-year-old woman. She is beautiful. Funny. And she’s got a way about her. She’s meek. And you can just tell that she’s been humbled in her life.

I know a thing or two about being humbled. Which is a very different thing than simply “being a humble person.”

Being a humble person, for example, means that you don’t cut in line, take the last biscuit, or sing karaoke.

But being “humbled” (past-tense non-restrictive intransitive verb) is a thing that is done to you. Usually, without your consent. Being humbled is an experience that feels a lot like getting your head shaved.

I have been humbled a lot throughout life. In fact, I will be humbled as soon as I submit this very column when a reader with an English degree writes

to me and says there is no such thing as a “past-tense non-restrictive intransitive verb.”

My sister has been humbled too many times for anyone’s good.

It all started when my father died in a traumatic way, an event I’ve written about enough. When this horrible thing happened to my family, my sister and I both quit going to school.

At the time, I was 11, and had no use for sentence diagrams dealing with worthless concepts, such as, to pick a concept at random, intransitive verbs. My sister, however, was in kindergarten when she quit school.

As a result, my sister didn’t learn how to read until she was 20 years old. She became highly skilled at hiding this. Some people never knew she couldn’t read.

When you get older, it gets harder to learn how to read. And once you miss your…

One of the first official dates with my wife took place at her parents’ house. That night, her extremely nosy parents promised not to eavesdrop, nor bother us, nor hide behind the sofa and wait for us to kiss.

Her parents agreed to let us have the entire downstairs to ourselves. And I was nervous. What would we talk about? What would we do? Would her parents leave us alone, or spy on us?

My story takes place in an era when VHS cassettes still roamed the earth. My date and I decided to rent a VHS movie. Although as it turned out, we were so timid we couldn’t actually decide on a movie.

HER: Which movie do you want?

ME: Oh, anything you want.

HER: I don’t care, I’ll watch anything you wanna watch.

ME: Makes no difference. What do you wanna see?

HER: Whatever you wanna see.

ME: I don’t care.

HER: Neither do I, you choose.

ME: No, you.

HER: It’s up to you.

ME: No, it’s your call.

And so it went. Because all young lovers are afraid

to come right out and say something like, “Darling, I do believe I’d prefer to watch something produced by the genius that is Monty Python.”

We had the same hem-hawing conversation about which restaurant to choose for dinner. And in the end, we went hungry because we never settled on a place. We ended up driving in circles for three hours constantly saying, “Where do you wanna eat?” “I don’t care, where do YOU wanna eat?”

Eventually we returned to her parents’ house and spent the rest of the evening trying not to exhibit symptoms of dangerously low blood-sugar.

As it happened, our date night got worse. Because the movie we rented turned out to be the foulest, most inappropriate skin-flick Hollywood ever released. It was so bad we could not watch it.

Five minutes into the film…

I am in the lobby of my hotel, waking up. The coffee is lukewarm. The breakfast is freezer burnt. And the overhead music playing is “Highway to Hell.”

You can’t get away from canned music. It’s everywhere. Like the IRS. Playing in public spaces just loud enough to hear the music thumping, throbbing, pulsating, lamenting, howling, crying, screaming, bawling, thrumming.

There are no old songs used for canned music anymore. These days, most canned music is young music. The kind currently being produced by kids who are barely old enough to buy lotto tickets.

Kids.

It’s hard to find silence anymore. Silence is not a thing in our modern world. The National Park Service’s Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division recently measured noise pollution and discovered noise levels have tripled in the last few years.

The roar of traffic, the booms of bulldozers. Whirring distant blenders, making smoothies. TVs blaring 24-hour news channels. Every 11 seconds, somewhere in this country, someone uses a leafblower.

But

canned music is perhaps the most aggravating of all these things. This piped-in music is constantly running inside supermarkets, restaurants, public restrooms, colonoscopy exam rooms, etc.

Per day, Americans are exposed to an averaged 76 minutes of “unchosen” music in public. Stores use this music to develop what businesspersons call “immersive branding” experiences.

The canned music tunes are usually ones you’ve never heard before, produced by artists young enough to be your grandchildren, with names like Rihanna, Ke$ha, and Lady Gaga.

You cannot avoid this music. The music is blasted in parking lots, public parks, and nursing homes. When you are in the hospital, drawing your final breath, Ke$ha will be singing “We R Who We R” overhead, and the nurses will be humming along as they wheel your body off to the morgue.

It’s gotten so bad that some stores are removing canned music. Many Walmarts…