One year ago today: December 23, 2014, a bowl of sugarless feminism.
Five years ago today: December 23, 2010, jam at Mr. Laff’s.
Nine years ago today: December 23, 2006, huge surface knowledge.
Random years ago today: December 23, 2003, Beer, Guns, & Ammo.
MORNING
This is a short animation of the Sultan of Turkey signing his name in back in 1895 or something.
Why would 53 people be reading my blog at 4:30AM. In the morning, local time? Then again, why am I reading my blog at that ungodly hour? I can explain. I found something, but it is really out of the way. A country setting, population 6,000 and a two hour drive to town. The point here is that my worries could be over with one phone call. The hesitation is that there is never an instruction manual for these moments. No matter what I buy, a better deal will happen along. Yet, I need out of this town.
It’s been okay, but if there was a decent woman or a good guitar player, I would have found them by now. Please, I don’t need another lecture. At my age, who needs a woman who can’t sing and dance. As for the guitarist, I will never be able to figure out why these guys still think they are going to be the one who makes it. Maybe, like the Hippie, they dream in front of a mirror so long they start believing it. My requirements are never unreasonable.
A guitar player who can sing and play around 20 songs and is willing to learn another 20 of mine. In return, I’ll play the bass lines to his material to perfection. I understand the motives of the solo act, but it seems everybody has to make the same mistakes and are too old to change by the time it dawns on them. If you don’t make it in music as a solo by age 24, you are not going to. The days of the “recording contract” are long over.
So it is with amusement I talked to Ray-B for 40 minutes this morning on this very topic. I’ve started four bands from scratch in my lifetime. I know exactly how much work is involved. I’ve played solo, in duos, trios, four, and five piece groups. I learned that solo acts wear out the audience after the first gig. Unless you keep moving on, the effectiveness of a solo tapers off instantly. And anything above a duo, each new member brings with it a logarithmic increase in personnel problems. That’s why I avoid drummers and lead guitar players. More trouble than they are worth.
In a trio, there is always one weak member. I’m saying my preference for a duo is not something I cooked up last night. It bears repeating that my song list is chosen with a keen ear to an easy but otherwise challenging spot for a rhythm player. Ray-B as others have repeatedly told me of great success experiences with the material and methods I’ve suggested.
But no guitar player wants to take a chance. I could understand this, if they were successful individuals who had gone from strength to strength in their musical careers. Instead, I see people who have been repeating the same mistakes for ten or fifteen years and headed for another equal period of the same. The age of awakening for guitar players seems to be 52, and by then it is far too late. Anybody short of a stunned ape can learn to play guitar in that amount of time.
To keep the record straight, the most common reason I fire a guitar player is refusal to learn any music but his own. Yet, I can point to around 30 or 40 guitar players still playing skid road who play the same song list as twenty years ago. They are stuck in a rut so deep they can no longer see over the edges.
NOON
Finally, four trips (back there on my scooter) and ten days later, Office Max got my scribblers. So as to put that situation off again until 2018, I bought two. I fill one scribbler per year. I always thought the advent of universally available information would create a new class of intellectual. Those who could do and create if they could only get a reasonable source of supplies and information. Instead, we have a world of cloned and narrow minds. Instead, we get single mistakes repeated millions of times because humankind cannot process the new data fast enough. Hey, I just described Android.
For clarity, I mean that I grew up thinking the world possessed a small but significant pool of people who would blossom if given the same chances as the more fortunate. I was wrong. I called this my “Rowling” theory, you know, after the lady who wrote Harry Potter. Once she got on welfare, she had the time to create the masterpiece. Now, she’s sunk into fatal political correctness, if you’ve heard the news.
I can explain what I thought—we were never told the truth. When I first learned about welfare, I was around eight years old. I was indoctrinated that welfare people were just like everybody else, but needed a temporary hand to get back going again. That’s how it was taught, we were never told that people could intentionally go on welfare for life because they dislike work. Or they could shamelessly refuse to learn any skills to get work and take advantage of the Liberal system.
I’ve seen both situations, I told you about my aunt who had been on welfare for 54 years. (I did not know the truth about that until I was almost 26. That’s the aunt who just got pregnant once every 12 years, so her next child would keep her on the rolls. She lived in a condo on the west coast.)
From that “education”, I believed that every person on welfare possessed at least a normal drive to get ahead. Once freed from the burden of self-support, they would propel themselves into heights of glory. And of course, I wanted that for myself. Was I not creative, but being held back by having to work at lumber mills and drive taxi? I had to learn the system could not differentiate between those who needed a break and those who were natural bullshit artists.
In the end, I never got a break or a lick of real help. To this day, I strongly resent long-term welfare recipients. Nobody should get a free ride at taxpayer’s expense. And anyone who thinks welfare is not a joy ride should have to go spend a single afternoon at the government office over on Hiatus Road.
EVENING
Having letters to write, I watched a streaming movie called “Paris Trout”. Strange, but entirely believable. It’s one of those Hollywood specials that portrays bigots as all bad, even if their opinions are only a minor part of their daily lives. The all-bad white man shoots two black women and the system goes after him, but he essentially gets off—at the cost of his sanity.
I like the scene where he could not kick in the door of the spare bedroom. They even build doors better back then. JZ sort of likes the architecture as well. It might be ironic that neither one of us has ever lived in a house like that. Didn’t I tell you I was raised in two granaries shoved together. You do know what a granary is, do you?
It’s those little buildings in the outlying parts of old farms where farmers used to store grain in the 1920s. That would be about when the ones I’m talking about were built. It turns out hard to find pictures of these buildings, but here is a particularly well preserved model. Note there are no windows, only and opening near the ceiling peak to load grain through an augur. That’s a chute with a revolving Archimedes screw.
There was a small trapdoor near the floor to remove the grain later. The exposed frame is because the weight of the grain pushes outward, so exterior siding would not work as well. This example is a little taller than the ones I grew up in. The whole assembly is mounted on wooden skids to move the structure where it was needed.
Note the classic prairie clouds and treeless Texas terrain. This would be late fall, since the grass on the leeward side is withered dry and there are yellow flowers growing in the stubble. You push two of these together cut yourself some doors and windows with an axe, home sweet home.
In 1976, the average house price in California, the hottest real estate in America, was just around $45,000. For a really nice pad. And believe you me, where I grew up was no California. The average house price where I grew up was $6,000. Six month’s wages for my parents. They still had to borrow to buy that dump. Again, no lectures. I was there, you were not. I’ve already heard all the cute versions.
When I asked for a $300 amplifier to play in a band, my parents told me I couldn’t have one because “we had nothing”. This episode was the origin of the standing joke, “Why can’t we have nothing in California.”
I did get the amp, but only when an itinerant school teacher saw my plight and was willing to lend me the money. But it always took something like that to get anything. The standard excuse was if they got me one, they had to get all six kids the same thing. Which is ridiculous, because none of the others played any music. But to people who have no intention of letting you better yourself, one excuse is just as good as another.
But I’ll tell you, those granaries were better built than anything I’ve seen framed new in my life. With insulation, they were toasty during the winters. I can hear a few back there curious if I would ever live in a granary again. No fucking way, are you crazy? Have they not understood a word I’ve said? Listen up, Disneyworld is that-a-way.
ADDENDUM
In some ways, I don’t make it clear, but if there is one there is one thing I cannot tolerate, it is women who decide down the line that I am “worth it”. Like what, “after all”. The past few days have been Xmas parties and chances to review the offerings. I mean, any broad who has been to a bar should be able to grasp what I mean when you get looked at only after some gussied-up fancy-pants has scoped the place. That's what just happened to me.
It was agony, because the one tonight was literally an Amazon. But she must have thought I didn't see her cruise the place twice before she introduced herself to me. Her mistake? I was near the door, so she passed me up twice. That would have made me third choice. Nope, lady, that's a no-go. Trust me, if you are not an instant turn-on for her, you never will be. But she will continue to meet other men who are. You've been warned.
Last Laugh
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