Here’s the scooter as it looked this morning. Unless it rains again. There is a roller bearing I can’t get off the old unit which might prove to be a real bastard of a problem. I’ll solve it. I found a junkyard in Ft. Lauderdale that has my parts. I’m bussing up there tomorrow. My chicken stew was ideal as temperatures sunk. I’m ready for any type of weather, others may not be so prepared and they should probably watch out.
I’m half through “1984”. Now I remember why I found it borderline hilarious at fourteen. It is full of “dirty parts” which were not normally assigned reading when I was in middle school. It is now clear the book was meant by the board to be an introduction to adult literature. While others in class were shocked and embarrassed, I was amused. You see, I had already been, how shall I put it, playing in a band for two years and found the sex passages corny as hell. Even today they seem stale, like something you’d expect to hear from my brother or other males who got a really late start. I was not surprised when Julia told Winston she had done this “hundreds of times”. Hey, she was 23 and unmarried and exactly what I expected even back then. If she worked at the phone company, I could bet you where she’d be headed in seven, twelve and fifteen years into the future.
In that vein, I have a tale from the trailer court to tell about sex education. Back in my day, it was called “guidance class”, doubtless since it was neither. Only girls got anything like real sex education and it seemed to consist of telling them it was a no-no until they got married. I know of at least one instance where that may have worked.
The teachers in our small town rotated through, never lasting more than a year or two. They were recent grads building up their seniority and they thought they could bring some big city culture to us yokels. The hitch was they were the hicks and vastly underestimated why I had started my own rock band by the age of 12.
The worst was a Mr. Wurfel, a brush-cut phys-ed teacher who, if he had any pretensions about dating teenage women, should have been listening instead of talking at me. One day the all-male class awaited, amid intense speculation, his announced lecture on dating. This was in grade nine and nobody was gonna skip that class. Generally, the room was a year older than me, but I swear I was the only one who’d already been out with a girl. Okay, here’s the funny part.
Dating, my eye. Wurfel showed us a film about taking a girl to a restaurant. He was confusing dating with eating. I am proud to say I’ve never resorted to such tactics. If a girl is hungry, you take her to Winn/Dixie. Instead of just saying the limit, the boy was supposed to suggest something to the girl, who, if she did not like it, was supposed to find the price and make another selection of equal or lesser cost. Christ, it is even hard to say, so insipid I have a hard time writing it down for you even today. Wurfel probably wondered why I cupped my palms over my eyes and shook my head. I can still detect the echo of my single thought, “Get me out of here.”
Later, I had the scooter completely torn open at the front end. If I can do that, I can fix anything. It still needs a lot of work but I’ve got the time. At mid-afternoon, Panera Pete showed up, as usual the passenger in somebody else’s car. The story has a familiar ring, he got sick and had to crash up in the next county with no phone. The scooter is back together and I drove it to Karaoke tonight, except there was no show other than mine. I’d rate it a successful evening. The regular performer was on a cruise for her birthday.
The unusual event of the day was coffee. I arrived early this mornting and dipped into an ordinary corner café. The coffee was, read careful here, for a place that was not prestigious, the most expensive I’ve had in Florida. Ouch-ee-wah-wah at $2.30 a cup. I can’t find the receipt but it was the corner of 17th and Federal in Ft. Lauderdale. Ernie’s or Eddie’s. You done been told. Ah, found it. Ernie’s BBQ & Lounge, 1843 Federal Hwy. Hey I’m not telling anyone how to run their business. But they should post a warning sign.
I finished “1984” and it was just as long-winded this time around. Retrospect makes it easy to re-learn the context of the phrases that have become stock. The plot is prophetic insofar as one should remember that communism was taken much more seriously back near World War II. There is no doubt that the upper reaches of politics and stupidity are virtually indistinguishable. Many of Orwell’s passages are repetitious, dragging the plot out at least a third longer than necessary, but he keeps the number of characters to the essential minimum. All the qualities that endear such books to middle school reading assignments. Takes the teens minds off important things.
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