Take a closer look at this photo, it isn’t just another of a recent series. Note to the far right of Dave-O’s elbow the smallest guitar on the rack. Roughly the size of a ukulele, it is not a toy and is exceedingly well made. The label says “traveling guitar”. Myself, I’m for anything that diminishes guitar presence on stage and for Dave-O, it is a fraction of the weight of what he is holding. The full acoustic sound is remarkable and got us both to thinking.
On the aside, it is inevitable that two guys like us will talk philosophy. We share the same attitude toward the establishment, but thereafter a divergence. Dave-O was schooled to an opposite standard. I was educated to believe what a person does with their life is more important than memorizing their name. On the flip side, Dave-O knows everybody’s name, but is (most often) astonishingly uninstructed about anything else. He can name who won the battle without a notion of where to find the Little Big Horn on a map. He knows the names of fifty guitar players but cannot play their music. He can name the rich without a clue how they really got so. I’m from a small town and well aware of the dangers of surface knowledge.
What’s this? A California town chucking out their politicians? After paying out $100,000 per year to those creeps (for part-time duty), the voters finally start belly-aching. All I can say is what a bunch of useless twits. When times were good, they didn’t say a peep. The working class is so stupid they always wait until long after the damage was done before getting fired up.
Well, I was the one that warned them decades ago and all I got was a “mind your own business”. So that is what I do today when they scream for help and support. We’ll be seeing a lot more of this type of backlash once the proletariat nears retirement and can’t pay their own bills much less the one’s they’ve been ignoring by playing Mr. Nice Guy for forty years.
But it is too late, protests now only affect the future, they cannot recapture the hordes of money wasted in the past. As a child, the very thought of allowing politicians to vote their own pay increases was loathsome, thus I have little mercy for those who draw the same conclusion so much later in life. It is known that most people don’t even think about their own retirement until age 58, by which it is too late. From the appearance of the California people on that news video, this age makes them slow learners even by that lax standard.
I’ve waited a long time for my turn to say to that type, “If you don’t like it, leave.” ‘Cept, where they gonna go? Maybe sit in that park they voted for that cost them twenty times what it was worth. What the hell, it was money from the public pool and they all wanted to be the Good Samaritan—with other people’s cash. Bunch of low-life hypocrites if you ask me.
This, I believe, is the anniversary of the day I broke up with Judy Mintie, half a lifetime ago. True, the end took longer than one day, but the great rift was assured when she dated some guy from Red Deer, up in Alberta, the sort of buzz-cut boy her father would approve. I realize now that Judy was far too dependent on family though I might have felt the same if I’d had protective, nurturing parents. This meant for her that, regardless of her feelings she was more
Judy could not understand the motives of someone who was not receiving free money from home. She was very mature as far as the ability to conform to certain social norms, but not in terms of independent survival. (This behavior was very common in Yuppies and is often mistaken for maturity.) From her perspective, if you want to be a doctor, why, you just go to university long enough to become one. She wanted to get married; I still had to finish school.
In the end, I did not get the degree I wanted (I had others, but not the one I wanted) until I was 36. By then, you have demographically long since missed the vital formative years of early career middle-management needed on a resume to rise to executive level. I graduated, but would never make company president. It’s like Charlie Daniels says. (A rich man goes to college . . .)
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