No side effects, they said, from the nuclear test. I was bummed out all day, to borrow an expression from the 1960s that I don’t think I’ve used before. That is how I felt. Off balance, too. Fred is calling it the atomic test, since I am obviously taking time to readjust. Walking was impossible, I had to drive to Lee’s for bicycle parts, in this case one of the notorious Florida “thorn resistant” inner tubes. Mind you, that sums up their actual performance--they resist but not enough.Eddie called, he’s got a cast on his arm. That is still a delay I may not be able to afford. My ad for a vocalist stands, but I already had to start saying no to the more obvious soloists. Some of them were serious acts, like listening to Chet Atkins. I could add nothing to such a sound. Others were into experimental three part harmonies and exploring musical depths, none of which I can use or market. I spend three hours learning a tune, not three months. A few of the others live too far away. I have three potential auditions.
By late afternoon I was utterly dozy and tried to watch TV. Why is it all the predictors of doom from Merlin to I Ching to the Mayans all say the world will end on December 21, 2012? I know. Because that would be the same day my retirement pension checks would start if I decided to retire early. How did Mother Shipton and Nostradamus figure that out? With my luck the world is doing this just to get out of paying up. (FYI, I technically retired on May 23, 1996, due to a printing error at the phone company, making me the youngest person ever to “get away with it”. Hey, a contract is a contract. I didn’t retire a millionaire but that is not the point.)
Gretchin Wilson is the lady who sings “Red Neck Woman” and that riff has been stuck in my head most of today. I don’t really enjoy not being able to concentrate even though I come from a long line who swear by it. This could be telling me to learn that tune, which does make a point about women who put on airs. Being light headed makes me ponder the same philosophies as the shallow-thinkers of the world. Like why shouldn’t all garden vegetables cost exactly the same?
Without saying anything, my antenna was able to enhance several marginal signals around the neighborhood and again, I am picking up police stakeout dispatches through my home speakers. “Suspect is entering dark blue Toyota . . .” In trying to filter them out, I managed to reset all my Internet equipment back to factory defaults. That was a dumb move, especially my highly configured modems and customized routers. That was a costly mistake. Blame it on Gretchin Wilson.
Still no sign of Eric across the road. Several people have checked the place and they all have keys so I’m not about to get involved. It’s been a couple of weeks now. This is not looking good for the old guy. Did I mention a long term customer at the shop dropped dead last week? He was around 51, a landlord who knew Fred. He would often bring in computers from his tenants to help them out. Let me scare the pants off a few people. Actually, you don’t drop dead. I know from experience there is brief interval when you consciously know your heart has stopped beating, but you are paralyzed.
It is 7:56 PM and I’m about to grab the old bass and you can guess what I’ll be learning. This activity caused me to miss a phone call from a potential renter. You see, I have the worst combination of cell phone service and product on the market. MetroPCS and Nokia. The phone cannot be heard ringing from more than a few feet away and every other month you find yet another feature that interferes with the ordinary cell phone usage. The all time winner, however, is the condition where the phone will not ring if the calling party is using call block. Try to follow that brain-fart logic of the Nokia twerp who allowed some other person to control your phone and the MetroPCS bean-heads who let them. Listen you people, just put the calls through and let me deal with them. If you want to do something useful, design a switch that blocks telemarket calls.
But nooooo. People who build cell phones are way to stupid to do anything that useful. There is a reason everything they produce is always new and improved.
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