
I went with my wife several months ago to hear and see Styx in concert in Greenville, South Carolina. This band still sounds fantastic. I first saw Styx as a teenager in the New Jersey Meadowlands in 1982 and then in February of this year in Las Vegas. Then I found out they were coming to South Carolina and had to see them again.
I love Dennis DeYoung’s song “Come Sail Away.” I have a funny story about that composition. When I was younger, my brother was in a band, and the group was hired to play a wedding on this lakefront property. The keyboard player was ill, and I had to fill in as the piano player.
Two days before the gig, they told me the list of songs I needed to know, and I felt comfortable with all but two. One was a song by Journey, and the other was Styx’s Come Sail Away. I thought to myself, how will I learn the piano part of the Styx song? The Journey song was complicated enough: Come Sail Away I felt would be impossible to learn.
I practiced the two songs for hours and learned them in time for the wedding.
To this day, I can play Come Sail Away with my eyes closed. I’m nowhere nearly as good at playing the piano in this song as Dennis DeYoung or the keyboardist we listened to at the recent Styx concert, but I’m not too bad for an amateur.
By the way, did you know that Come Sail Away was about aliens? I didn’t until recently, and I have been playing the piece for over 40 years. 😂
-Dr. Reizer

The Missing – A Novella by John Reizer
Where death is just the beginning.
In the heart of a quiet town lies Evergreen Cemetery—an eerie resting place where no bodies are buried, only empty caskets, each holding a dark secret.
Beneath the surface of this unassuming plot of land is a twisted conspiracy engineered by Trucient Industries, a powerful biomedical corporation with a terrifying agenda.
Trucient’s public mission statement is simple enough: freeze the dead and revive them in the future through cryonics. But the truth is far different. Behind the benevolent façade of preserving life, Trucient is secretly harvesting organs from the homeless, the forgotten, and society’s outcasts, selling them to the highest bidder. But that’s only the beginning. Their true, audacious goal is to map the human brain, digitize it, and create a fully conscious artificial intelligence that could reshape humanity.
When a young private investigator named Jessica Harris meets Billy Hayes, a groundskeeper at Evergreen who has witnessed mysterious happenings on the property, the two team up and discover a hidden operation; they soon become entangled in a web of lies and danger. Will they expose the truth—or become just another pair of missing souls claimed by Trucient’s vision for the future?
The Missing is a chilling tale of power, technology, and the price of immortality. Secrets lurk in the shadows, and no one is truly safe. Not even the dead!





Absolutely, John, I couldn’t agree more! 🙂👍
Lisa
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the post, Lisa. 🙂
I read one of the comments on the Styx YouTube video, and the poster said that music and listening to songs were the ultimate time machine, and I couldn’t agree with that observation more.
When I listen to or play certain songs, the process immediately transports me back to another time.
Music/frequencies have a profound impact on humans.
John
It’s so awesome, John, that you learned how to play on the piano the Styx song “Come Sail Away” and a Journey song for that wedding in such a short period of time. I have no doubt your performance was superbly out of this world! 😀👍
Lisa
The following is an interpretation of “Come Sail Away” from Google:
“Freedom and Adventure
Nostalgia and Relection
Hope and Perseverance
Escapism and Transcendence
The meaning shifts dramatically in the final section, as the sailing ship is described as becoming a ‘starship’ and heading for the stars. This has been interpreted as a literal journey with aliens, a metaphorical leap into superstardom for the band, or a more spiritual or fantastical escape into the unknown.”
🤣
“I thought that they were angels but much to my surprise, we climbed aboard their starship and headed for the sky” – yeah I knew… I always knew.