Still having the flu, I ran through my entire bass act. What do you know; I found a new lick in one of the oldest tunes I play, “Proud Mary”. Yep, been playin’ it wrong all my life. Well, I found it, admitted it, and got it right. Being too feverish to do anything else, I also ran through all of Pat-B’s and the Hippie’s material as much of it as I play. I just don’t know a lot of slow music no matter who likes it.Nothing happened today, so let’s see if I can write filler. By now I should be just as good at rambling as the top news reporters in this state. All I need is a couple petty topics and a blank sheet. Why do writers write? Because it isn’t there. Give me two normally unrelated subjects and an angle. Let’s take, say, outer space and, say, my family.
Okay, here we go. Did you know there is an asteroid that follows the same orbit as Mars? It is called No. 5261 Eureka, I’ll shorten it to 5261. That would have made a good nickname for by brother. You see, one is a planet, while 5261 is only two miles across, hell, you can’t even see it from Mars.
Allow me to explain the connection. The only thing stopping me from climbing Mt. Everest or walking around the world was lack of money, not lack of ambition. This is a family thing, contrived poverty to ensure you could not do anything noteworthy. It backfired on me (because I did things anyway), but in contrast, take my brother. His only motive was to copy what I did, for in his mind it diminished my accomplishments. If there was ever a real prick of a brother, he was it.
He had a true jealous hatred and became obsessed with ensuring I was “never the only one”. A 5261. But he took so damn long it was embarrassing, often at twenty-something barely managing to fake things I’d done at age twelve. (In an interesting side issue, he lacked the ability to interfere unless I was teamed up with someone who had a kid brother. Then he’d “make friends” and start stirring up shit. He never succeeded in pulling this stunt unless that younger brother was present.) To this day, none of my good friends have younger brothers.
Now don’t go thinking me as "the enemy", for I tried many times to assist him in finding his own way in life since he was obviously so crappy at copying mine. He could never create, only destroy. That failed him because he concluded I couldn’t stand him showing me up all the time, sometimes hundreds of miles away. He had unlimited nervous energy to stay friends with the kid brothers, but impossible demands when it came to cooperating with me.
For example, he could never understand why I would not hand him half my talent and experience. Take bass playing. I had grade five in classical piano before I learned the instrument and was teaching it to others by age fourteen. At twenty-one he learned one bass line, seeking to imply that he could do in a few months what took me years to achieve as a schoolchild. He always was a sorehead. The more so because such tricks only fooled others.
This is where I learned the best defense was to simply not tell anyone what I was up to, a real challenge in an environment where privacy was considered a conspiracy of silence. You could not get rid of him. He quickly learned merely showing up would cause me to move along rather than put up with him. I once moved to a city 61 miles away. He showed up and hit on my girlfriend. I moved to a city 850 miles away and he arrived four years later running up bills in my name. Then, I moved 1,400 miles away and cut off all communication. For anything else it may be, it was the instant end of that problem. The question is, would anyone want to read that story?
There, you see? Could I write a dime store novel, or what? Come on, be fair. Tolstoy could have said the same thing in just under 3,000 pages. Mark Twain would have injected local “color” into the matter. Capote would have insisted I deserved such a brother. Hemmingway, well, forget about him; two subjects in one book was never his stock in trade.
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