The project that was, is, and will be

Over the years, I’ve had a lot of projects, big and small. Many of them were completely successful, more or less, and others were less successful. Plenty of others were in-between being successful or not. I’ve jokingly called those “incomplete successes”, but now I have one where that’s literally true. Or, maybe it isn’t?

The second week of June, I began a project that I joked on Facebook was my “Super-Secret Project” (yes, another one…). What I was actually referring to was a project to set-up the two workbenches I have. This has been delayed ever since I moved in because I couldn’t find the bolts to assemble them, after the movers took them apart to bring them to Hamilton. I found the bolts and screws—I thought?—right after I moved in, and never saw them again (yet again, I put them "somewhere safe"). Then, the garage became more and more messy and overrun, despite my (many) periodic efforts to tidy it.

Recently, I realised the bolts were for the crossbars joining the leg assemblies along the back of the benches. The tops, I realised, were held on with screws. I have plenty of screws and bolts, so I decided to just go ahead and put the benches together with what I had on hand. I began working on that in earnest on Tuesday, June 11 (the day after I installed the mirror in my en suite), by clearing out the area where the workbenches would be going.

I finished assembling the first workbench on the Wednesday (June 12), and did the second on Thursday. There were delays when I suddenly thought I should go to the home centre to get more bolts and chipboard screws. In the end, I decided to stick with my plan to use what I already had, and that turned out fine.

This was the point at which the project morphed into a much bigger one: I decided to start clearing the garage.

I made the workbenches “Part 1” of my project, and “Part 2” was separating the stuff into four categories: Toss, Recycle, Donate/Sell, and Keep. “Toss” meant pure rubbish, things that aren’t useable or recyclable. “Recycle” is obvious. “Donate/Sell” is also obvious, but it includes packaging (wrapping, boxes, etc) for things I’ll try to sell. The final category, “Keep”, is obvious, too, but was only for stuff I’ll use or can’t part with for whatever reason (or none). Part 2 was to lead onto “Part 3”, sorting and organising what I’ll keep into clear, logical spaces/systems so I can find them again—and to log where stuff is, of course.

I hit a wall on the following Sunday when I realised I simply didn’t have enough room to properly sort things: I was basically just moving the piles of stuff around, and that meant there was simply no way I’d ever be able to clear enough space to do the organising part. I felt crushed and utterly defeated.

Nevertheless, I continued with what I was in the middle of, work that left me with a big enough open space in the garage, I thought, to take photos of some larger things I wanted to try to sell. I’ve never had that before.

The background to this is that some of the family were going to help me move boxes of stuff into a storage unit so I’d have the space I need to reorganise the entire garage—or, really, to organise it for the first time. Part of my motivation that June week was to reduce the amount of stuff that would need to be moved, though in my mind I’m sure I was imagining I’d be able to avoid using a storage unit at all. I decided that was stupid.

Part of what’s going on with me is history: Nigel and I got a storage unit when we lived on Auckland’s North Shore, with the idea it’d be temporary. We ended up moving everything to our garage in South Auckland in 2017.

We never went through the stuff we’d moved south, and in 2018 (I think) we ended up getting another storage unit close to our house. I was against that because, as I said to Nigel, “we’ll never actually go through it”. I backed him, anyway, as I always did, but, in fact, we never did go through the stuff we put in there. Fortunately, we also put very little in there before Nigel died, and I ended up using the unit to put stuff I took out of the house after the house sold (especially the contents of the garden shed). My brother in law helped me to completely clear out the storage unit when Covid allowed. I was determined to never have another storage unit.

That reality was my driving force, and I continued working on the garage—until I simply couldn’t handle it anymore. Part of that was beyond my control: It got COLD, and the garage wasn’t somewhere I wanted to spend time. Then, there was the oppressive oppressiveness of the project itself: It had been hanging over me for four and a half years, and it not being done blocked so much in my life: My workshop wasn’t set-up, so I had to way to work on projects. Being so full, the garage also gave me nowhere to put things that were inside my house so I could declutter that. It was a never-ending loop of things undone, barriers, frustration, disappointment, embarrassment, shame, and reinforcement of very negative view of myself I’ve ever had. I spiralled relentlessly downward.

In the five weeks since the last time I bothered to document my work, I’ve just tinkered a bit, doing very small tasks. Much of that lack of progress was down to to my feelings of failure, and the rest to the cold temperatures, but either way, not much has happened over the past month.

I’ve learned (I think…) to stop expecting too much of myself, because if I do I’ll inevitably be disappointed. Four and a half years of of hard physical work on that garage has yielded not much of anything, and that failure has kept me from finishing the rest of the house, too. I have no one to blame for that but myself—although, Nigel was every bit as bad as me at sorting through and getting rid of stuff, and was often actually far worse, but the point is that I didn’t get into this mess on my own.

I don’t know when the garage project will end, but my vision is clear: I want to clear enough space to be able to park my car in the garage. When that happens—and it will—there won’t be much room in there for anything else, so my original plans for organisation are gone, but it’ll be manageable until I can get rid of stuff, something that’s been my goal since I moved into this house.

The one thing I hope I’ve learned is to cut myself some slack. I’m far from perfect (shocking, I know), and things will take as much time as they take. If I do achieve my goal of being able to park in my garage, I’ll revisit this post and talk about what’s next. But I simply can’t even think about a storage unit as being part of that future. I think that will continue to be my driver in this whole stupid project.

The photo up top is me with two particular finds in the garage. First, I’m wearing safety glasses with LED spotlights Nigel bought, I think, sometime in the last year or so of his life. I found them on the floor where a workbench was going (no idea how long they've been there). Nigel used them for his many projects—and every time I saw him in them, I’d do my best Star Trek impression to say, “We are the Borg”. The thing I’m holding is something I’ve been looking for many months (a year or more?): It goes under a large outdoor planter pot so water and air can circulate underneath it, and so that water doesn't get stuck under it. I wanted it to put on the table on my patio so there was some air movement under the cover, a story in itself.

Nature’s punishment

Yesterday, I had my second and final shingles vaccine jab. Today? I. Feel. Awful. I know that this is isn’t unusual, just typical post-jab crud. In fact, this is probably only Number Three on my all-time yuckiest post-jab Hit Parade. Basically, I feel flu-like—tired, a little achy, and fever-like (I don’t actually have a fever), and the injection site hurts like a mofo.

BUT: This time they gave me a post-jab flyer from the Ministry of Health talking about most common yucks and what to do about them. For what I’m feeling, they say, “Because paracetamol or ibuprofen can interfere with your immune response to a vaccine, only take them for relief of significant [the boldface type was in the original; I guess they must mean it…] discomfort or high fever.”

I’m well aware that post-jab crud is an indication that my immune system is responding, and that’s both exactly what should be happening, and a very good thing. But I feel truly awful.

I felt okay up until evening, when everything started getting worse. I was in bed by around midnight (which by my standards is still evening…). At around 3am, Leo decided he wanted to go outside, even though I made him go outside right before we went to bed. At that moment, he was my demanding four-footed flatmate, not my much-loved and cherished friend and companion. It took me the better part of ten minutes to get myself to sit up, get out of bed, and lead him to the patio doors. Leo stood and watched me.

I gave him about ten minutes outside, while I considered taking some paracetamol, but the flyer’s words were ringing in my eyes, and I couldn’t work out how to define “significant discomfort”. I just had a glass of water (one of the flyer’s recommended things), and then had to whistle for Leo to come back inside (dogs like to stand around and sniff the air, which Nigel said was them “reading the neighbourhood newspaper”).

We went back to bed (me under an additional blanket), and we got up about 7 hours later—ten hours in all, including the interruption. As a result, I feel rested, but also awful. I feel a rebellion coming on: At some point soon, I’ll defy the Ministry of Health and take the damn paracetamol! Well, probably not: I’m a lousy rebel, and besides, it’s been a bit more than 24 hours since my jab, so it should start improving “soon”, without chemical intervention. This 2-jab vaccination costs everyone except 65-year-olds $700+, so I want to give it the best shot, so to speak, of giving me immunity to shingles. Like I said, I’m a lousy rebel.

Early this afternoon, I was feeling sleepy and tired, somI decided to have a nap. An hour or so later, I woke up, mainly because I had to go to the loo (all that water I’ve been drinking must be returned eventually). At the time, I felt a little bit better.

Unfortunately, that was the high point of the day, because the achiness became a more noticeable part of the flu-like symptoms. I surrendered at 9pm: I finally took some paracetamol in the hope it would take effect before I go to bed. I hope it does.

Fortunately, this sort of thing doesn’t happen to me very often, but every time it does happen, I wonder why I put myself through it. The not getting sick or dying from preventable diseases is my “why”, but right now it’s very difficult to remember that.

Update – July 24, 2024: The paracetamol took effect a couple hours after I took it, and I did feel better. However, I was worried the yuck might return, so I stayed up long enough to take another dose. I slept well enough last night—which kind of surprised me considering how much sleep I'd had during the affliction. This morning, I felt pretty much okay-to-good, and I only put it that way because I felt so washed out after the ordeal. Oddly enough, that feeling aside, I probably felt better than I have in weeks.

Still, I got absolutely nothing done yesterday or Monday evening, and even I was surprised at how much I had to get done today just to catch up. The important thing, really, is that the post-vaccination crud has ended.

Our mission is unchanged

I don’t know why, but I hardly ever talk about politics of any sort on this blog. Time was, a large percentage of my most-viewed posts were about politics, US politics in particular. It’s not that I stopped caring, and I certainly never ran out of topics, it’s just that I wasn’t in to it, for a lot of reasons. I suppose. Maybe it’s time I changed that a bit.

Today, the bigger picture has grabbed my attention.

I should say, first, that I admire and respect President Joe Biden for his decision to wityhdraw from the race. It can’t have been an easy thing to do, but he was definitely putting the country first. All of which is something I cannot imagine the Republican nominee ever doing.

Amid all the breathless news stories today, though, what strikes me is the one thing that political pundits and journalists have never been able to grasp: For most Americans in both 2020 and 2024, the issue was never who the Democratic nominee for president was, even if they supported them all along. Instead, it was only ever about who the other party’s nominee was. To be clear, President Biden had firm supporters in 2020 and 2024, and Vice President Kamala Harris will this year, too, but after the disaster of 2016, American voters understand one thing clearly: In November, the person who wins the presidential election will be either the Democrat or the Republican, and the choice this year could not possibly be more stark, serious, or consequential.

I will absolutely vote for the Democratic nominee—guaranteed—and there was never any doubt about that: I’ve never voted for a Republican nominee for president, and there was no way in this universe or any other that I would’ve voted for this year’s Republican nominee, either. Absolutely NOTHING has changed except the name at the top of the ticket. I fully expect Democrats to rally around Vice President Harris, and I’ll absolutely vote for her.

As so many others have pointed out, elections aren’t a marriage, they’re a bus. I’m not looking for “The One”, I’m looking for how to get closest to where I want to go, and then board the bus that will do that. If the bus isn’t going close enough, I don’t just hmph and stomp off into the driving rain and hail, I do what I must: I take the bus that will get us all closest to the destination—and then keep pushing for better bus service.

This year in particular I will make absolutely sure my vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, whoever that ends up being, is counted, and even if it ends up being that the only reason I do so is to help keep the Republican candidate out of the White House. Democracy, the US Constitution, personal freedom, and liberty, are all on the ballot this year, and the only way to preserve, protect, and defend them is vote Democratic in numbers too big to rig, and too real to steal. Let’s win this!

This began life as a post I made on my personal Facebook earlier this afternoon—which is kind of ironic, since I talk about politics there far, FAR less than I do here. I guess I had to start some place. This version is somewhat revised from the original.

Winter of my discontent

I joke all the time about how I hate winter, but it’s actually true—when winter is being winter, in the usual sense for wherever I was living that season. Here in New Zealand, the news media and ordinary people alike have all talked about the past few winters with the word “unusually” preceding whatever they’re talking about: “unusually mild”, for example, though it could be cold, wet, dry, or anything else. While there could be faulty memories involved sometimes (as in, “winter was never live this when I was a kid”), it’s also true that records of all sorts are falling all over the planet.

Take the gross weather, stir in things going on in my own life, add the short days, and for me this winter has been particularly awful. All the things I hate about winters in this part of New Zealand—cold, rain, and days in which it doesn’t rain, but that remain dark and dreary, anyway—have been present more days than not.

To be sure, it’s not dark and/or rainy every single day—there have been some beautiful days, too. It also hasn’t been below freezing every night (though it has been on far too many nights…), and some daytime temperatures have been quite pleasant. However, taken as a whole, winter this year has been pretty awful—in my opinion, of course.

I took the photo up top on a very foggy night last Thursday, when I took the recycling to the kerb for collection the next morning. However, I didn’t share it anywhere because I didn’t think it showed the fogginess well enough. Leo and I then went bed, and a few hours later, at 2.40am, he woke me up to let him outside, and I sleepily ambled into the lounge, slid open the door to the patio—and saw that the fog was completely gone. Kirikiriroa-Hamilton is legendary for having heavy fog in winter, especially in the morning, and after I snapped the photo I just assumed it would thicken. Instead, I think it may have rained between the time we went to bed and when I noticed the fog was gone, and the temperature may have changed, but whatever it was, I was definitely surprised.

Fog isn’t normally that much of a problem for me: I think that since I’ve moved to Hamilton I’ve only had to drive in fog a couple times—once once in the morning when I went to a medical appointment of some sort, and once at night after a family get-together. The truth is, winter weather phenomena like fog or frosts don’t actually affect me. It’s cold and sunlight.

The trouble with cold is that my house is mostly unheated: Only the living area and my bedroom have a heat pump air conditioner, which means that the other two bedrooms (one of which is my office) and the hallway can feel pretty cold, especially at night. To cope, I add another layer of clothing, and I shut the doors of unheated rooms—the guest room, the toilet (room, not throne), the bathroom, and, when I go to bed, the en suite attached to my bedroom. I also close the door between the living area and the hallway until there’s just enough room for Leo to get through in the morning (he loves running down the hallway to the kitchen).

Unfortunately, I can’t do anything about the amount of sunshine or the length of the days, so I have to rely on other things to cope with those problems.

My solar power system reduces the amount of electricity I need to buy, dramatically in the summer months, and slightly in the winter. The problem with winter is, first, the days are short, and second, it rains so very much, or at least is overcast, that I don’t generate much electricity in the winter months.

To cope with that, on the many days with no sunshine, I do power-hungry chores—like running the clothes dryer or dishwasher—after 10pm when the electricity rates are lowest. When I can, I wait until a sunny day to do those sorts of chores so I have free electricity, but that’s not always possible—especially when we have the better part of two weeks with nothing but cloudy or rainy days.

And then there’s the potential problem with hot water.

I have a special device installed that diverts solar electricity to my hot water cylinder before sending it to the power grid, meaning that, basically, I have a solar hot water heater. The problem is that the solar panels have to produce enough electricity to heat the water. When we have several days in a row of cloudy skies, especially if some of those daylight hours are storms, and especially if we have nighttime temperatures around or below freezing, it can mean my water never heats properly, though it’s rare for the drop to be noticeable—in fact, the second time it happened was this week.

I had my shower Saturday morning, and noticed that the water temperature was barely lukewarm. I turned the knob toward hotter, and it was warm enough, though it could’ve been better. The thing is, the en suite is at one end of the house, and the hot water can take forever to get there in winter, so I needed to test it—maybe I just had to wait?

A little while latter, I hand washed a couple dishes in the kitchen sink, and even turned to all the way hot, it wasn’t very hot. Time for my back-up plan: I went into the garage and tapped the “Boost” button on the controller to use mains power electricity to head the hot water for one hour (at the time, the panel on the device said something like that it was “waiting for surplus power”. This is an expensive way to heat water (hot water cylinders are normally on a special circuit at a reduced rate), but, as the saying goes, needs must.

The only other time I’ve needed to do that was the first winter after the controller device was installed. In fact, there was some sunshine Saturday, and again Sunday and today, so the hot water is back to normal. Hopefully, the weather will be more favourable for power and hot water for the rest of winter—something I say with no rational reason for doing so.

There’s not much I can do to change all that at the moment, however, if I stay in this house long-term, I’ll change the heating so that all the bedrooms are heated/cooled, and I’ll work to get the hot water less reliant on sunshine. Right now, though, my strategies for coping with winter weather are pretty much working. Even though I can’t always say I’m comfortable, I nevertheless have it better than many, and far better than some. Still, it does seem kind of pointless to have to cope with cold temperatures and lack of sunshine without the pay-off of snow—is something I’d never actually say.

By the way, have I ever mentioned how much I hate winter? No? Well, here’s a bonus photo: The moon amid the clouds around 3am Saturday night/Sunday morning, after Leo got me get out of bed. Again.

When words fail

Words have been part of my life, one way or another, for as long as I can remember. From a very early age, I understood the power of words arranged in the just the right order, and especially when they’re delivered at just the right time, however that may be measured. So, when words abandon me, it’s a particularly difficult thing.

When I was somewhere around seven, give or take, I found an antique manual typewriter in the attic of our house. It had belonged to my parents, though I have no idea where it came from. Nevertheless, I carefully typed out what I labelled “Schenck News”, with some small “news stories”, including an “interview” with my dad which reported that he liked his job. It even had a “comic”, the humour of which was based on an answer to a question that was random letters/characters that I typed. I don’t know, but I doubt I thought that was actually funny even back then.

Whatever that was way back then, I’m fairly certain that it was my first attempt at creating something that I specifically intended for others to read. I did that several times during my childhood and adolescence, and the pace only picked up over the decades after that, and this blog has been part of that for nearly 18 years.

In recent years—say eight, give or take—I’ve had periods in which I didn’t produce much of anything, for one reason or another. That’s become much worse since Nigel died, mostly because of the realities that followed. In the past couple of years in particular, something new emerged: In my head, I heard only silence.

Actually, that’s not entirely true: There have been times when posts popped into my head nearly fully formed, though often at night when I was in bed and trying to fall asleep. Many other times, there was simply silence, and no amount of willing things to be different could make the words arrange themselves on the page.

Any recent casual reader of this blog would see that my last post of June and first post of July were both in the ”Weekend Diversion: 1984 series, and it would be logical to assume that those were pre-written and their publication pre-scheduled, since I talked about doing exactly that back in March. However, both were written shortly before I published them, and, in fact, only two of the 10 posts in the series so far were pre-scheduled.

This is a specific example of how things are for me at the moment: I knew those posts were coming up (it’s a set schedule, after all), I knew the subject of each post, and probably exactly what I thought about it. I could easily have pre-written all the posts in the series—but I didn’t.

I’ve been trying to figure out why this happening, and why it’s been far more intense than it ever has been before. I don’t have one single answer, and that’s part of what has made all of this so challenging—and frightening.

I know part of it is that this is a very difficult year for me, what with its overload of challenging times: My 65th birthday, what would’ve been Nigel’s 60th birthday, and the fifth anniversary of his death. All three of those events are how the fuck can that be true?!” moments for me. My age, that Nigel didn’t make it past 55, that he’ll have been gone five years—all of that means I’m in an existential nowhere land, carrying a rich and beautiful past, but also nothing but doubt, uncertainty, and fear about the future. Even so, much of that has been the case ever since Nigel died, so what’s different now?

I think part of it was that I launched into what turned into a major a project I’ve yet to talk about here or on Facebook, for various reasons and no particular reason. I began with the best of intentions, and then derailed myself—and my emotional well-being—several times along the way. Worse, the project isn’t even finished yet, though there are extenuating circumstances for that.

So, when I take the existential angst I live with like background radiation, add in the specific emotional demands of three important anniversaries, and then put all that under the immense weight and pressure of an absolutely huge and very physically demanding project, I know it was inevitable that something had to give. As bleak as I know that sounds, it’s actually not: Instead, it’s actually a light, and a bit of hope: This means that the current dark times will pass, and not as long from now as I am from where this particular challenge started. The massive project will end, and then I’ll get through each of the two remaining challenging dates this year, just as I got through the first one.

What I can’t know for certain is that the end of my current dark times will mean the silence should end, too, and the words will return. I hope so. Still, I’ve also learned that, if necessary, I can learn to live without arranging words in the just the right order, and delivering them at just the right time.

Footnote:

When I was thinking about this post in recent weeks, my mind once again seized on pop music, in this case, the 1982 song ”Words” by French musician F.R. David (video below). I’d never heard of the song when lived in the USA, and when I heard it on the radio here in New Zealand, I thought it was performed by a woman. Clearly I didn’t listen very carefully then—or ever, to be honest. Still, it was the lyric, “Words don't come easy to me” that kept playing in my head as I planned this post, and it’s definitely not the first time that my life and pop music had interwined. It’s not surprising I didn’t know the song in the USA: It only hit Number 62 on the Billboard “Hot 100”, but it did hit Number 7 in New Zealand, which is probably why I eventually heard it on NZ pop radio. Veritas in musica/ and all that.

Road way

It’s been a year since that road connecting my neighbourhood to the rest of Hamilton opened, something I talked about at the time. That’s probably because I’ve used it so much over the past year that it feels like it’s been there for years. I use that road to get to nearly anywhere I’m going in Hamilton, so, in a sense, it really did connect my house to the city, something I talked about last year. That’s mostly about “feel”, of course, but isn’t that true about much in life?

Making me feel physically connected to the city aside, it hasn’t exactly made Hamilton feel like “home”. I think I’d say, “it’s okay”, which is the kind of non-committal indifference I’d say about things I may not love, but also don’t hate. I say that about things that I really do think are okay.

One thing that would make me like this city a lot more would be if they would finally build the small commercial area along that now year-old road, but there’s no indication that’s going to be any time soon. Maybe when interest rates finally drop?

The original part of the road we were connected to last year has a new development under construction, Orient Industrial Park, which will have warehousing and live/work light industrial units, along with “two onsite food and café providers plus an interactive indoor golfing simulator,” the latter made me chuckle.

Interestingly, at one point Nigel was really keen on us moving to a similar live/work unit on Auckland’s North Shore. The concept was new to New Zealand, and I wasn’t as keen as Nigel was (honestly, at the time I thought it sounded kind of odd). He moved on to being interested in living other places—in fact, I lost track of how many houses we actually visited, let alone how many others we just looked at from the road or online. Still, I backed him, as I always did, and if he’d truly been into the live/work units, I’d have backed him on that, too. Of course.

So: A year on from that road opening, my ordinary daily life is so much easier than it was before then: It now takes around 5 minutes from my house to The Base/Te Awa, two different supermarkets, my dentist, and Leo’s vet. On a bad day before the new road was opened, it could take me 15-20 minutes or more to get to those same places, so the road brought a big improvement.

There are several different things holding me back from feeling at home in Hamilton, but at least now I can see how the feeling could be possible—and that new road is definitely an unexpectedly huge part of why that is.

I’m still only at the start of my own personal road, still finding my way, and there aren’t any maps. But that actual new road really did help my actual and existential journeys.

This post began life as a Facebook post. That’s only relevant because that’s the only reason this is post is here. More about that soon.

Weekend Diversion: 1984, Part 10

Number One songs come and go, and some hang around longer than others. This week in 1984, yet new song went to Number One and began the year’s second five-week run in the top spot, but this one was especially significant for that year. On July 7, 1984, “When Doves Cry” by American musician/singer/songwriter/produce /etc. Prince (his full name was Prince Rogers Nelson) went to Number One. The song was the lead single from Prince’s sixth studio album, Purple Rain, which was the soundtrack album for the film Purple Rain. “When Doves Cry” was Prince’s first Number One on the USA’s Billboard “Hot 100” chart.

“When Doves Cry” was was the second single of 1984 to stay at Number One for five consecutive weeks (I talked about the first, Van Halen’s “Jump”, in Part 3 of this series, back on February 25), however, “When Doves Cry” was even more significant because it went on to become the Number One song for 1984 on Billboard’s “Year-End Hot 100 singles of 1984”. “Jump” was Number 6 on the same year-end list.

As we all know, Prince’s life was complicated. In 1993, he had a dispute with his label, Warner Bros, and changed his name to a symbol, but was often referred to as “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince” (or “TAFKAP”, usually said as a word, as I recall) or was just called “The Artist”. In 1990, after moving to Arista Records, he began using his own name again. His personal life was also complicated, with some controversy. At the same time, though, he was hugely popular and sold more than 100 million records worldwide, which made him among the best-selling pop artists of all time. He was also clearly a gifted musician, songwriter, and performer, and all of that is quite a legacy.

I liked quite a lot of Prince’s songs, beginning with his 1983 song ”1999”, which peaked at Number 12 on the “Hot 100” (and was probably my favourite of his songs). I liked “When Doves Cry” when I first heard because its sound was so different from other songs at the time. In the years that followed, I liked more of his songs, but not necessarily all of them. Even so, I can’t think of any of his songs that I actively disliked, and that’s kind of unusual for me: When I like some songs by a musician or band I don’t consider myself a fan of, there are inevitably songs of theirs that I don’t particularly like. However, I also can’t think of a time I intensely disliked a song by a person/band I otherwise liked (for at least some songs, anyway).

“When Doves Cry” reached Number One in Australia and in Canada, Number 2 in New Zealand (Gold), 4 in the UK (Platinum), and it was Number One on the USA’s Billboard “Hot 100” and also on their “Hot Black Singles” and “Dance Club Songs” charts, as as well as Number One on Cash Box. The song was also Platinum in the USA. The song charted again after Prince died on April 21, 2016, reaching 8 on the Billboard “Hot 100”, the first time it was Top 10 since September of 1984.

The album Purple Rain reached Number One in Australia (3x Platinum) and in Canada (6x Platinum), Number 2 in New Zealand (5x Platinum), Number 7 in the UK (2x Platinum), and Number One on the USA’s “Billboard 200” chart (13x Platinum). In 2016, the album charted again, hitting Number 5 in Australia, Number 7 in Canada, Number 4 in the UK, and Number 2 on the “Billboard 200” chart, as well as hitting Number One on their US “Soundtrack Albums” chart. A remastered version of the album was released in 2017 (the first of his albums to to be remastered), and hit Number 4 in the USA.

The next post about a 1984 Number One song will be August 11.

Previously in the “Weekend Diversion – 1984” series:

Weekend Diversion: 1984, Part 1 – January 21, 2024
Weekend Diversion: 1984, Part 2 – February 4, 2024
Weekend Diversion: 1984, Part 3 – February 25, 2024
Weekend Diversion: 1984, Part 4 – March 31, 2024
Weekend Diversion: 1984, Part 5 – April 21, 2024
Weekend Diversion: 1984, Part 6 – May 12, 2024
Weekend Diversion: 1984, Part 7 – May 26, 2024
Weekend Diversion: 1984, Part 8 – June 9, 2024
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