I hate getting old.
I really do.
With each passing year another reminder of our human propensity to die arrives and its arrival does not get any easier.
Each year an icon, a symbol, a ‘piece of fact’ so large in our lives, so solid, so concrete as to be irrevocable turns out to be not so.
As I type this the tears are rolling down my face. I hurt, I hurt so bad. I want to cry, to shout, to punch, to kick, to belittle my stepchildren, to pick a fight with my wife, to scream at the top of my lungs, to howl from the rooftops in psychic pain.
The man who was an integral part of my youth, who helped me define who I was and who I wanted to be, is dead. The man who would live forever in my mind is dead.
The man who ruled at 5KA when there was no FM stations in Adelaide, who brought with him legions of fans when he opened the first broadcast on Adelaide’s first FM station, SSAFM (later shortened to SAFM), where he was the top-ranking DJ for a phenomenal 14 years. The man who, along with Leon Byner and ‘Car 15’, was to me a hero, an icon and the voice of my youth. John was probably the only man in Adelaide who shared my love of Status Quo to the same extent.
No more will Ken Oath and the Ocker Rockers sing ‘Having a Barby’ and ‘Tuneless Flamin Jungle Music’. My heart is breaking.
Why is it that the people that mean so much to you, people who are so integral to your sense of identity, your psychic dna, cause you so much pain when they die?
God bless you, John, for the decades of warmth you brought to this man’s heart.
