I’m coming late to the party on the news that Casey Kasem is retiring from “American Top 40.” To tell the truth, I wasn’t sure he was still alive, although his profane in-studio rant (BAD LANGUAGE ALERT) will surely live forever. It’s been a long time since I thought much about Casey Kasem. But for a few crucial years, he was the most important entertainer in my life.

This is going to make me sound like an unbelievable geek, so it’s accurate. From the time I was 11 or 12 until I was 15 or 16, I wrote down the Top 40 every week. I’d write down the artist, the song, the label, and off to the side I had a little arrow saying how far up or down the song was since the week before. In my town the Top 40 show was Sunday mornings — when we went to church — and so I’d put my little Sears portable tape recorder next to my Sears stereo and tape an hour (as much as the tape could hold) of the 3-hour show. Sometimes, when the preacher went long or we went out to lunch, I’d miss part of the show. Then I’d beg my mom later in the week to take me down to Norwich Street, where a bookstore that sold porn and cheap paperbacks was also the only place in town that sold Billboard magazine. Then, with the printed Top 40 in hand, I’d fill in the blanks in my little notebooks.

I rooted for some songs and against others — I remember really hating that Diana Ross theme from “Mahogany” for some reason, and of course it sailed right to No. 1. But there were thrills too — I couldn’t believe that something like “Ballroom Blitz” made it all the way into the top 5. Still love that song.

I couldn’t have told you back then why I was obsessed with the Top 40. I’m not all that sure I can tell you now. It had something to do with giving a sense of order to the world — the same reason I used to keep a scorecard for the baseball Game of the Week until I fell asleep in about the fifth inning. (I couldn’t get into regular-season baseball even when only one game a week was on TV.)

It had something to do with the dawning idea that some things in life were cool but also uncool, that you could like them and make fun of them at the same time. Everyone I knew listened to “American Top 40″ every week but everyone always made fun of the long-distance dedications — the thing Casey was ranting about up above — because they were so corny. We always had our little parody versions — We all thought the canine kidney transplant went well, but the next morning little Fluffy died in her sleep, and we’ve never been the same since… Casey, in honor of our little Fluffy, could you please play “Highway to Hell?”

But mostly, I think, it had something to do with fitting in. When I was little we listened to nothing but country in our house, and it took me years to get up to speed to what the other kids in school knew by heart. (I still remember hearing two classmates sing the break in “Black Water” and having NO idea what song it was.) This was a problem on many levels — I remember seeing everybody crowd around a kid with Nikes when I had never even heard of Nikes and had just recently found out about Adidas Stan Smiths, which of course by then were totally and completely out of style. When you’re 12, little stuff like that is somehow the most important information in the world, and I never felt like I was in on the conversation. Except for music. At that time — middle school, early high school — if you knew the Top 40 you could get by. And so I think what Casey Kasem gave me every week was comfort. One little part of my life where I wasn’t out of step.

Even back then, it wasn’t true that everybody was listening to the same music — I knew that from my country years. Now, of course, you can scan the iPods of your typical fifth-grade class and find everything from show tunes to Swedish death mental. We have access to more music, more movies, more clothes, more everything. I don’t miss the days when the Top 40 defined music. But I do miss getting out those notebooks every Sunday, drawing my little arrows, wondering what song was coming next, and what Casey would tell me about it. He helped me figure out the world, three minutes at a time.

There’s a new post about missing MTV. I’m still trying to figure out which stuff I write belongs over there (a work blog) and which stuff belongs over here (a personal blog). Of course, mostly I’m just trying to keep my head above water now that I’m back at work. Holler if you have any ideas for how to divide the blog (or how to keep from drowning, for that matter…)

Did a little Michael Jackson post over on the other blog… for a bonus, here’s my second-favorite MJ song:

“Thriller” was the album that put him over the top. But “Off the Wall” was the better record.

We started back at work this week, and the plan was for me to ease back into the job and write a comeback column for Sunday… until Mark Sanford stepped up to the podium for his news conference. So now I’m back. Here’s the column.

Off train at Penn Station 1 p.m., up escalator onto 7th Avenue, madhouse on sidewalk, coupons for free ink cartridges, brochure for doubledeck bus tour, big-screen billboard for Madison Square Garden, FREE LIGHTER WITH PACK OF CIGARETTES, left on 7th, you work and work in this town and one day you wonder who you are, don’t walk backs up the tide on the sidewalk, walk washes people over the street, sketches of Stallone and Will Smith five dollars, hot dogs and pretzels, kebabs and knishes, 42nd Street and no Billy Joel but Peruvian pipers like the ones in Harvard Square only louder,  Hard Rock Café, giant M&Ms, TKTS booth, Naked Cowboy (not really – white briefs) supposedly busking for dollars, mainly posing for pictures, WEST SIDE STORY, right on 51st, steak salad 19 bucks, second Coke free, people don’t want to talk to travel agents anymore – they just want cheap, right on 6th Avenue, officially Avenue of the Americas but nobody calls it that, Rockefeller Center, scent of scorched hot-dog water, sorry sorry, excuse sir, is this the 30 Rock?, Radio City Music Hall Neil Patrick Harris Hosts Tony Awards June 7, cabs honking, guy strolling down sidewalk with full set of golf clubs, renegade pigeon flying at eye level, sax man on corner playing “La Isla Bonita,” JON & KATE MARRIAGE DRAMA, black limo tinted windows slick as the Batmobile, right on 33rd, doorman like an extra from Buckingham Palace two doors down from PEEP SHOW, say man can you spare 50 cents, back to Penn Station, Ink Cartridge Guy still there, down the escalator, onto the train, pulls out 6 p.m., skyline in the window, wow.

This one’s personal. We sent off another one of the group tonight. Thabo from South Africa has a flight on Wednesday, so we told stories and clinked our glasses and traded long, slow hugs all the way to the cab. David is gone now, and Peter and Karin, and Sapiyat, and the rest of us will trickle away one or two at a time from this place and this moment. Most of us are going back to jobs we love and people we miss. But the truth is that none of us want to leave.

Last Friday the 2008-09 Nieman Fellowship at Harvard officially ended. We rushed through the ceremony because Harvard President Drew Faust was the speaker and we were on her tight schedule. It didn’t matter. No ceremony could have gone slow enough to suit us. We would have been thrilled to drag it out for weeks.

You know how you stay up late on the last night of vacation because you don’t want it to end? We’ve been like that for a month. Our body clocks are wrecked. Some nights we stay up ’til sunrise and some days we sleep ’til noon. There is always another party or another outing and we say yes, yes, always yes, because when we’re together we have superpowers, together we can bend time back toward us, together we can almost stop it.

There are 29 of us fellows; add in spouses, partners and kids and we come to more than 60. Think about spending a year with 60 strangers from all over the world. Think about realizing, late in the year, to your shock, that you like them all. Love them, even.

Our time together is called a fellowship, and lately I’ve been thinking a lot about that word. When I was growing up it was a church word. In the back of any decent-sized Baptist church there’s always a fellowship hall, and that’s where you went after the Easter service or at homecoming to grab fried chicken and deviled eggs, and then sit down at long tables to talk. That was the real purpose of the fellowship hall — to spend a little time, get to know each other, deepen friendships.

This year we have made fellowship halls everywhere. We have had fellowship around tables at bars, standing on the bow of a whale-watching boat, drinking coffee around a weathered wooden table, sitting on benches in a stately old theater, in our apartments, in subway cars, out on the sidewalk, walking the long way home so we can be together two streets longer.

We have learned more about one another than we know about some members of our own families. We have shared secrets. We have had bitter arguments and patched the hurt places. We are still talking, still fellowshipping, even though the clock has run out and we are deep into extra time.

The test, of course, is the follow-through — how tight we stay together when we scatter to the corners of the globe, back at our old jobs, with our old friends, with so many things conspiring to fold up this year and put it in a drawer until the names are too faded to read.

That has happened to me more than once.

But here’s what we learned at Harvard: Love and friendship is all. You don’t have to go to Harvard to learn that, but damn if it isn’t a lesson that fails to sink in for most of us.

There are these wonderful inventions called e-mail and Skype, and there are still such things as telephones and postage stamps. There are these glorious things called airplanes that will lift us up from Charlotte and deposit us in Dublin or Beijing or Mexico City, and they can lift you up, too, to the places you need to go and the people you need to see.

Love and friendship is all, and the only way to make it work is to live your life in fellowship, present tense. That is what we plan to do. And if we play it right these next few weeks of seeing one another off will just be commas instead of periods, and the sentence will run on and on and never end, and we will spend the rest of our lives hugging and waving and parting but never really saying goodbye.

If newspapers do go under one day, the thing I’ll miss most is working on a team. Of course you can do good stories alone, as a freelancer. But a newsroom means teamwork, and it means that electric crackle when everybody’s working on the big story, and most of all it means working with unforgettable characters. There could be lots of great characters at accounting firms, I don’t know, but I doubt most places have as many as newspapers. One of the greatest in the Charlotte Observer’s history died this morning. David Poole was 50.

Here is an incomplete list of the things Poole loved: UNC basketball, the Atlanta Braves, creative cursing, R.O.’s Barbecue in Gastonia, politics, old race-car drivers, the newspaper business, his grandbaby Eli, two cars side-by-side in the last turn at Daytona, and most of all, talking.

Here is a list of things Poole was not so fond of: the NBA, dumb NASCAR rules, stupid people in general, the occasional editor, being on the road six days a week, re-engineering and re-designing and all the things we tried to make the newspaper better instead of just doing better stories.

Poole loved to argue. LOVED it. All you had to do was throw out a word — “Earnhardt.” “Bush.” “Dean.” — and he’d be off. Lord help you if you ended up on the other side. He was smart and quick and forceful and pretty soon you’d end up in a tidy little pile of rhetorical dust. He would cut you a look that said, surely you didn’t think you would win an argument with ME. And then he would get tickled about the whole thing and you’d be friends again, not that you ever weren’t.

Sometimes he would get legitimately furious, and at those times it was best to give him about 10 feet of space in every direction. But from my experience it was mostly bluster and show, wrapped around a good heart.

I follow NASCAR, not enough to call myself a fan but enough to know what’s going on, and there’s no question that he was the best NASCAR reporter on the scene — he learned from the great Tom Higgins, the best there ever was. The thing about Poole is, if we had asked him to cover city hall or real estate or theater, he would’ve been the best at those, too. He was a good guy, a devoted family man, but most of all to me he was a great teammate. There’s no way to replace him.

The thing I’ll remember most is the guy running around in circles.

Springsteen played Boston tonight, and when the house lights went up for “Born to Run” you could see this guy at the far end of the floor, where it wasn’t as crowded, and he was running in circles with his hands in the air like he had just won the Olympic mile. Half an hour later, when the house lights went up for the second time (more on that later), the same guy was still running, high-fiving people, his pants falling down. He probably dropped two waist sizes just running around in circles while Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band showed for the 9,000th time why they are the best live rock ‘n’ roll band there has ever been.

For the fanatics: He played “Adam Raised a Cain,” and “Seeds,” and “I’m Goin’ Down,” and “Johnny 99,” and — a first for me, I think — “Growin’ Up.”* Jay Weinberg (son of Max) filled in on drums for the last four songs of the main set. Clarence was awake for the entire show. Here’s the full details.

*In the spirit of objectivity, we should report that Springsteen also played “Outlaw Pete,” which by pretty much unanimous acclimation is the worst song he has ever written — when you lift the melody from a KISS song, you’re in trouble from the start.** “Outlaw Pete” gets the full production treatment — fog machines, special lighting, a black cowboy hat that Bruce dons dramatically. It doesn’t help. I’ve decided that this is some sort of bet Bruce has made with the band that they can get ANY song over in concert. Next tour: “Mandy.”

**He also played “Radio Nowhere,” a much better song, but I can’t forget that the first time Alix heard it she said “That sounds like ‘867-5309.’” I think Bruce might be listening to the ’80s station a little too much.

Tonight I finally figured out what it is with Bruce and carnivals. From the beginning, the imagery of the carnival and the circus has cut all through his music — from “Wild Billy’s Circus Story” to “Tunnel of Love” to “The Last Carnival,” his tribute to the late keyboard player Danny Federici, who loved to make the organ sound like a merry-go-round.

Of course Springsteen grew up on the Jersey shore and the boardwalk is in his blood. But there’s something else about it. The beautiful thing about a carnival is that it promises something you’ve never seen before. Buy a ticket and see the two-headed cow, watch the Great Mephisto catch a bullet in his teeth, close your eyes as the man throws knives at the beautiful lady spinning on the wheel. In our minds, we know the Great Mephisto has the bullet in his palm the whole time, and the two-headed cow was sewn together by a taxidermist. But we buy the ticket anyway because we long for that unique experience, that moment we can’t miss because it won’t ever come again.

I have just described every Bruce Springsteen show.

At this point it’s built in — the audience brings posters with song requests, and he stacks them up on stage and pulls a couple out. (“I’m Goin’ Down” and “Growin’ Up” were the choices tonight.) On this tour he’s added a Stump the Band segment where people request ANY song, by anybody, and the E Street Band figures it out. Tonight it was ZZ Top’s “I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide” — whoever made the poster helpfully put the lyrics on the back.

I was a music writer in Charlotte for a while, and I knew it was time to quit when I would see the same act come through town for the third or fourth time with the exact same show. Springsteen NEVER does that. He’s always ad-libbing the setlist, calling out solos for the other band members, sticking his guitar into the front row to let the crowd play the chords.

He’s the barker AND the freak show AND the trapeze act — everything polished and rehearsed and professional until he decides to make it raw and daring and personal, this show, right now, for nobody but you.

Tonight, for the fourth song of the encore, he played “American Land” — a song he often closes with. Just about the whole band grouped together at the front of the stage to jam. Big finish. Springsteen walked off toward the back of the stage, having played 25 songs in two and a half hours, having jumped on top of the piano and held a backbend for half a minute and skidded across the stage like a kid on a Slip ‘n’ Slide.

He got almost off the stage. He paused for a second. Then he asked for a fresh guitar.

“It ain’t over ’til it’s over!” he said, and the band kicked into “Rosalita” — “Rosalita”! — and the house lights came back up, and there was that guy still running in circles on the floor, the absolute picture of joy, and in all my life I’ve never seen anything like it.

My brilliant sportswriter friend Joe Posnanski (author of the best blog in the history of the Internet) asked me to write something for his other blog, on the future of newspapers. I have pretty much made a vow never to go to another conference or workshop about the future of newspapers, because it all ends up sounding like a meeting of Depressions Anonymous. When somebody figures out the future of newspapers, drop me a line. If I ever figure it out, I promise y’all will be the first to know.

Anyway, I may have blown the assignment, because it’s not so much about the future of newspapers as the future of stories. Take a look and see what you think.

(photo from sssdc1 via Flickr)

A lot of thoughtful people have written about how most of us need a “third place” — somewhere that’s not home and not work, somewhere where we feel comfortable, somewhere to gather with our friends and make sense of the day. Bars are a traditional third place. Starbucks can charge ridiculous prices for coffee because it’s got the couches and the laptop jacks and the music: a great third place. The best third place in my life has been a scruffy-looking hot-dog joint called Willie’s Wee-Nee Wagon.

Willie’s has a Facebook group (and a Myspace page!), and a couple of days ago somebody posted on the Facebook page that Willie had died. It turns out the man we all knew as Willie was in fact named Arnell Chambers. Word on the message board is that his wife is not sure she wants to keep the place going. So this might be an obituary for Willie’s the place as well as Willie the man. Although I sure hope not.

Willie’s sits on Altama Avenue, the main drag in my hometown of Brunswick, Ga. The sign out front says “WE RELISH YOUR BUN.” It’s across the road from the community college and down the street from the bowling alley. If you ever want to find anybody in Brunswick, just wait in the parking lot at Willie’s. They’ll show up soon enough.

Calvin Trillin once wrote that anybody who didn’t think the best hamburger in the world is in his hometown is a sissy. So take this with whatever grains of salt you think necessary, preferably the salt from Willie’s, not those little snap-open packets you get everywhere, but elegant little tubes I’ve never seen anywhere else; at Willie’s even the salt is better.

I’ve had Chicago dogs recommended by locals, New York dogs from the street carts, dogs from the Varsity in Atlanta and Green’s in Charlotte and ballparks around the country. None of them touch the hot dogs from Willie’s.

Willie offers eight basic dogs, customizable to your tastes, and my tastes evolved over the years. In my younger days I went for the Bull Dog — a dog all the way — so crammed with toppings that the spillover made its own side dish. Later on I had an affair with the Willie Dog, dressed with mustard, relish, onions and tomato. Lately, with the discretion of middle age, I choose the simple slaw dog, sometimes with cheese, always with thick steak fries and dark icy sweet tea.

Willie’s has a sign offering $2,000 to anybody who could find a better pork chop sandwich in Glynn County. I suspect Willie might have been the final judge on that, so I doubt he ever paid, but if there ever was a better pork chop sandwich than Willie’s it might be worth $2,000 to find out.

All this comes from a building the size and shape of a single-wide trailer. It’s built on a little riser, so the cashier looks down on you as she takes your order, and you can’t really see what’s going on in the kitchen. That’s probably for the best. Willie’s scores high on the health inspections but the place always looks rundown, like it’s held together by half a pound of nails and 30 years of grease.

There’s a little screened-off area with a couple of tables, but people hardly ever eat there. At Willie’s you eat at the picnic tables under the awning, or you eat in the car with the windows rolled down so you can talk to your neighbor. It’s a small parking lot so everybody parks close together. You end up with lawyers in Sunday suits next to painters with Sherwin-Williams in their hair next to teenagers just back from the beach. They talk Georgia football and the state of the union and how the shrimp are running. It’s the democratic ideal with grilled onions.

At Willie’s my friends and I dreamed between bites. We dreamed of the bar we’d open one day, the lives we’d lead out on our own, the girls we wanted but seldom got. After I got older and moved away I came back to Willie’s to find old friends. I went there for a moment alone after my dad died. I went there to find something solid after we moved my mom to a new town. I went there with the woman who became my wife.

Years ago — at least 15 — I wrote a travel story for the Charlotte paper about Brunswick and the nearby islands. Somewhere deep in the story I mentioned Willie’s — I think I said that, if I were ever elected president, I’d have Willie’s hot dogs delivered to the White House every day. The next time I went home, I stopped by Willie’s and the story was pinned to a little bulletin board by the window. It stayed there for years. To this day I don’t know how they found out about it. But I do know this: For a newspaper guy, there isn’t much better than seeing a story of yours on the wall of one of your favorite places in the world.

I only saw Willie — Arnell — a few times. The story I always heard was that he was from New Jersey somewhere, came down to Brunswick on vacation and decided he had to stay. I remember two things about him. One, he always seemed to be driving a different car — I think the hot dog business was pretty good to him. Two, every time I saw him he was laughing. There are a lot worse things to do with your life than creating a third place for a whole town. So many of us, even good men and women, lead lives that fade into vapor the moment we’re gone. But no one where I’m from will ever forget Willie’s.