One year ago today: May 4, 2013, hard to follow.
Five years ago today: May 4, 2009, monster waves.
Ten years ago today: May 4, 2014, Honolulu is boring.
Tea puts me to sleep. Ordinary tea, like you get at any grocery. Two cups and I can be out as much as ten hours. So I’m totally rested up for band practice. Other than a splendid breakfast at Senor Café, music is all that happened today and it is already 7:00 PM. I took the long way home, driving the scooter down some of the nicer roads in town. The ones with tree tunnels. I was the only one. I gotta move out of this working class neighborhood.
I talked with LizJohn on the phone for an hour. That’s what happens when people have a lot in common. She reports that the union held its annual convention in a swank resort and voted the executives free cars and gas cards. I’ve often wondered why there are not more union businesses in Florida when that brand of corruption is definitely legal. She did not attend. I went to one union meeting once and was so disgusted I never returned.
First they make you stand there and sing all 37 verses of “Solidarity” and then drag you through tons of political gibberish, leaving the issue for which you attended until the last item ten minutes before quitting time. Thus, if you disagree, there is no time left to discuss it. One of the biggest problems with entrenched unions is that they become a form of parallel management. With about the same approach to the really thorny disputes, namely satisficing, that is, finding the least inconvenient solution that makes the problem go away. And by christ, they get good at it.
The quadcopter saga continues. The neighbor, the one who had been warned not to fly his, went to City Hall and got informed that there was nothing stopping him. I don’t like that kind of negative permission. Apparently what laws that are in place apply to the manufacturer. They cannot design them to fly higher than 300 feet, for example. It also turns out the complainer was the guy over on 21st, who whines about anything new in a life that passed him by, the loser.
The new copter is something else. It has the usual 26 minutes running time but a larger payload. And quiet. We had it hovering at shoulder height while we talked in normal voices. It is remarkably stable, both in hovering and flight. We were able to grab the skid and yank it, only to have it spring back to position. No way to tip the thing over. This photo is not the model, but representative only. It was too dark to show the dimensions but this newer generation have a two foot diagonal span. Don’t be surprised if you shortly hear of commercial models.
Band practice today was a matter of running over the few remaining rough spots revealed by the gig. The band has finally reached the saturation point, where learning each new tune means another old one gets shunted off the list. It wish some of them would get stricken, especially the old Doors’ numbers. But I’ve learned the way to not get anything done with this band is have the bass player suggest it. I see now that they run the band as a trio and everyone else is relegated to being a backstage flunky.
Keeping an eye on the horizon, I scanned through Craigslist to see what else is going on. Nothing, the same three or four bassists who have been advertising for months or years are still looking for work. There is a sharp contrast with my style, these guys are not looking to form a band, they are looking to join one. That’s a laugh, but then, I did find the band I’m in on Craigslist—it was the first time I’d looked there in ages. Bassist seeking band ads are like cars and houses, when the ad has been running too long you wonder what is wrong.
Since I’m just opining, I view there to be a life-cycle of musicianship. Very few musicians get into their first band late in life. Starting your first band as a teen is more likely because that is where you are most patient and tolerant. Plus, almost every band member is having to cover the same ground, so you put up with each other. The Campbell brothers were very lucky to meet me at age 15, where I already had two years of music and management experience. This is also the age that forms one’s musical personality.
Your twenties is the consolidation phase. Sadly, I found most teens who stuck it out were the ones that didn’t experience success at anything else they tried. Myself, I always had high-paying jobs and missed out a lot of music time in my twenties. Of those who didn’t find a career, the worst of the worst was drummers. I don’t know why but this world is full of perfectly good and unemployable drummers. I suspect it is because that is the personality that other musicians will least abide with if any quirks are present.
Oddly, it was because I had early experience creating bands that I was spared a lot of the arguing and clashes that I still see out there today. Only on TV are the bands made up of easy-going happy-go-lucky mop-heads. Since I normally owned everything on stage except the other guy’s guitar, I was prone to simply replace anybody who got out of line. Most often replaced was the guitarist. Most common reason was his ego.
In the thirty to forty age group you get a lot of last-chancers. It is also the age of ossification. They want to play their favorite music and nothing else. I can identify with that attitude because if you are still playing by then, a lot of ground has been covered. It is natural to want to associate with others who have done the same. Every ad reads “no startups”, and the band formation process sinks to the level of trying to find other musicians who play basically the same song list. My case is different, I’ve been trying to find a guitar player who would learn new music. I have not found even one in all these years.
After age forty, bands that form are latecomers and tend to outlast the competition. But they also outlast the crowd. I don’t even listen to live bands unless they have something superlatively unusual going on. Such late-forming bands generate musical maturity, which lasts into one’s fifties. And after that, you are, like me, just another old guy in a band. There are several ways to look at old musicians. I know that I tend to look at those who are not in a band as misfits of some stripe. My standpoint is, “I’d rather be a has-been than a never-was”.
Trivia. Melinda French was born 140 miles from where I was born, she to a family that believed in higher education, me to the opposite. Did her education work? Sort of, she married Bill Gates. This trivia is a question. Why are there no paparazzi photos of the wedding in Hawaii in 1994? Because in the weeks before the wedding, MicroSoft employees covertly went around the island (Lanai) and rented up all the available helicopters. Sneaky.
Ah, I hear the sharper ones asking what I’m unsure about enough to rattle me. It is the possibility of a return to driving [a motor car]. Until last week, my monitor revealed that I still get high blood pressure from being in a car, even as a passenger. Two items have changed. First, my pressure no longer goes into the danger zone. Secondly, from riding in Agt. M’s car with the broken A/C, guess what? My pressure stays normal on a bicycle, and a bus, now it stays normal in a car with all of the windows rolled down. So, what am I waiting for?
For my doctor’s okay, which could be day after tomorrow. And the long term decision to buy and operate a vehicle. It is reckless to make such a decision lightly. I know that in the long run, operating a vehicle requires approximately $400 per month. This last quarter I was hit with $710 of extra expenses and had a heck of a time absorbing that. The last thing I need is the type of car I could afford breaking down. The wrong move now could wipe out a lot of future. Déjà vu Dien Bien Phu, you might say. If you spoke French, that is. My thinking is to compromise. Wait until I am 65, then buy a really nice car and drive it everywhere. A wrong move now could wipe out that option.
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