Wow! Just… wow. I never expected I would be around to see this day! And I was right. I’m not!

As a young kid in Lubbock, I never thought I’d have a music career, let alone a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Heck, I certainly didn’t think I’d be a restless spirit wandering the Earth when I found out either! Life just surprises you sometimes, I guess. So does death! I’m just kidding, except not really.

Even when things started really picking up for me—touring with Richie Valens and the Big Bopper, for instance—I never in my wildest dreams believed I would be deemed notable enough to be immortalized like this. Funny, huh? Can’t really immortalize a dead guy, can you? You California-types! Always with the jokes!

It’s been a weird journey, I’ll say that much. Growing up in Texas, opening for Elvis Presley, having a hit song that would prove to be wildly ironic, going on Ed Sullivan, moving to New York, providing my hit song the hugely ironic context via my untimely demise, haunting Little Richard, languishing in the infinite loneliness known only to eternal inhabitants of Limbo… And now I’m standing next to THE Richard Kind! Well, “standing” might be giving me too much credit. “Populating on a separate plane of existence on a similar axis to that of Richard Kind” would be more accurate. Only in Hollywood!

This is probably about the time the celebrity would put their handprints into the wet cement, right? I’m afraid I don’t have anything even resembling hands, given I’m merely an incorporeal consciousness trapped on the cold and unforgiving Earth. Wait, is that Gary Busey sticking his face into the cement? Someone stop him! Where’s Don McLean? That guy owes me a favor.

Ugh, too late. Nevermind.

I have so many people to thank for bringing me to where I am today: my parents, for encouraging my love of music; my beautiful wife, for giving me all of the love in the world; the GAC agency, for scheduling the tour that brought me on that flight that robbed me of my humanity; and God—if He exists, which I am beginning to doubt—for playing this cruel, unending joke on me and denying me the eternal paradise I was promised so often in church. Without you, I would not have my name on this sidewalk alongside such greats as… Big Bird? I got a star after fucking Big Bird? Are you shitting me?!

Excuse me! Ahem. As I was saying… without you, I would not have my name—which is actually misspelled, by the way—alongside these other great artists on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, nor would I be a vengeful apparition who is seriously considering possessing the hell out of Gary Busey just for shits and giggles.

Thank you all, and I will see you in the Forever Abyss. You’ll know what that means when you get there.