MORNING
This is my bakery treat. As it has evolved from the days of just a croissant with butter, so very many years ago now. Both myself and the shop are establishments, people have even learned not to sit in my spot. The coily thing is soft white farmer’s cheese rolled around a finely ground meat, which I think is ground sausage, if that makes sense. Um, this item is not on the menu. It is a special for myself only, known as “the Trump”, it’s meaning lost in antiquity. Meaning I can’t be bothered to go back and look it up.
The Miami foreclosure rate is down 50% in a year. Careful, that does not say total foreclosures are down, just the “rate”. The banks wouldn't lie. Or that movie “Jupiter Ascending”. In my day, it was the lady that dyed her hair blonde and the man who looked like he hadn’t bathed in a week.
It says here some Illinois politician was forced to apologize for mocking blacks on Facebook. You stupid twit-types, if he was forced, then he did not apologize. But it’s a good thing he’s gone if he hasn’t got the balls to stick up for himself. Harvard has banned sex between professors and students. While they didn’t specifically say older men and younger women, expect a drop in graduation ratios in the soft faculties. A Maryland 911 operator was removed for telling a kid to quit whining. Although the kid’s parent died, it was not a result of that comment. So I’d have to hear the operator’s side of that story.
Or how about that guy who rowed his boat across the Atlantic only to get mugged in Haiti. Dang, now the liberals are going to say that’s because you didn’t give Haiti enough free money, er, I mean, foreign aid. Of all the NPR shows I don’t care for, the worst is that Diane Rehms Show, “One of her guests is always you”. Rehms, rhymes with “beams”. Like in “beam me up, Skaw-TAAAAAYYYY”. Sorry, gang, she is pushing 80 and acts like it. She can really put a 1960s spin on anything but she is dragging the team down.
And don’t you love the tack of calling Putin “crazy” and comparing him to Hitler? Such people seem unaware that recently released archives are showing Hitler’s bad reputation is largely due to media manipulation. Nobody is totally bad. Is that the same newspaper people who didn’t mention that the journalists killed in France were also Jews? And one I first heard today, from an advice columnist in today’s Herald, “For the love of personalized matchbook covers . . .”
I like it. Add one more. “Holy paralyzed penguins.” Okay, I made that one up. But they walk like they are paralyzed. In the brain. They don’t even got feathers and they got feet like a duck. So they even stole that idea, too. They all look alike to me. I already said that? Good.
NOON
“If there were any justice in this world, oil company executive bathrooms would smell like the ones in their gas stations.” –Johnny Carson. And he ought to know.
Having an extra hour, I took apart that old tune “Heartaches By The Number” and put it back together for duo work. You never truly realize how shit-face ignorant most guitar players are until you see them try to write out song lyrics. I think it is a case of mass hallucination combined with the idiot savant theory. That’s where each guitar player, over time, convinces himself that sure, maybe he “never learned to read and write so well”, but Nature has compensated by making him so talented that mere mortals cannot spot it.
This song, which I’ve never played in a band before, is dinner music. A three-chord special. It lacks a proper bass line so I had to write one. To compose it, I copied the Eagles, who never had a decent bass player. The two associated with that band, Meisner and Schmit, were far more obsessed with their harmony vocals without ever producing a single bass line to be proud of. I’m not saying bass-wise they were not listening to, but that there are bona fide reasons why nobody ever does.
Even their [the bassist's] delivery is wishy-washy, though I kind of admire the guts of anyone who would get on stage with three lead guitarists. But even so, they could have done a better job of it by not playing such obvious “guitar” lines on the bass. I have always regulated the Eagles to an easy-listening band who wrote music for other guitar players. Kind of like the way most phys-ed majors wind up being teachers rather than athletes.
Further, to me the Eagle’s bassists epitomize the failed guitarist syndrome, with the “I’d rather be playing guitar” bunch. So, for the dinner music today, I wrote a wishy-washy bass line, but mine is admittedly designed to be that way. As for today’s guitarists who copy the Eagles, they say it right in New York: the idiot remains long after the savant’s role has ended.
To this day, I still regard “Hotel California” as an anomaly. It is too unlike all other Eagles music to have come from the same source. I personally believe they pirated the tune from old German harpsichord music. I’ve said before, when I first heard “Hotel California”, I thought it was a remake of that old tune. I heard every last note from “Hotel California” in an old Austrian recording of Black Forest music long before the Eagles. If I ever recall the name of that music, I will certainly publish it.
NIGHT
Trent was over for rehearsal, all I can add is that every time we go over the material, something new, something novel, is added. I cannot say the same about the droll practice atmosphere of that last orchestra I played with. I’m not making comparison; I’m mentioning a crucial difference. There was no mutual learning experience back then.
Somebody had left twenty pseudo-rap songs playing on the jukebox and it was drizzling outside. Picture that, a club owner and a mad scientist in a Florida bar, listening to afro-music and waiting for the weather to clear to go home. It was like living in Canada or on a penguin colony. That is, even if there is fun to be had, you’re not all that certain you want to get involved.
There was only one thing really decided tonight. If Trent and I are still around in 2030, we are definitely moving back to Texas. Most people who move to Florida find out the hard way how big the state really is. He’s going to a city, I’m going to a remotest farm I can find. Between now and then, I am convinced the world is hankering for another real country band. A sound that can separate the “Nashville Noise” from real country. The challenge is, I think this is going to require a lot more than good old talent.
In closing, here is a cute revelation of my thinking when I was twelve. I thought about the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, how everyone said they were such great musicians. I had long since spotted their major possession was incredible luck. I had planned that I, too, would be a musician in a famous band.
I would be so rich by 16, I would quit pretending I was interested in anything except the next girlfriend. I would retire and spend my life dating one after another young, together women, one at a time, but one after the other. No need for drugs, no gambling, only skinny sexy babes who didn’t need that junk. None would be clingy and possessive, they knew that was a deal-breaker with somebody as famous as me. And my old band? They would keep knocking themselves out, never having "enough". They would call me every other year to beg me to come back and help them cut another hit record to feed their habits, while I was happy in my palace.
All this is true, I had it all mapped out. But don’t judge too hastily. For I never planned to get drunk or stoned or wasted or hire prostitutes or anything of the kind--like the guys around me including my brothers. In a sense, I had in mind gaining the independent resources to discover a planet or invent a cure on my own. I never could understand why people as rich and talented as the Beatles didn’t switch to greater humanitarian pursuits. That’s how far back on the farm I was raised.
What I got instead was: penguins.
Last Laugh
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