November 24, 2016

Yesteryear
One year ago today: November 24, 2015, Bartow, Florida.
Five years ago today: November 24, 2011, bagging groceries is not a career.
Nine years ago today: November 24, 2007, I played Shenanigan’s.
Random years ago today: November 24, 2010, it wasn’t my money.

MORNING
           You get lots of editorial today. You see, I’ve moved my fancy desk chair to the operations center. So when I take a break, even five minutes, I can see my whole front yard, the birdfeeder, my parked motorcycles, the porch area, and any movement up and down the street both ways. All without taking my fingers off the keyboard. Even my bass rig is set up so I don’t have to reach far. I’ve got one of those little hotplates to set my teacup. So yeah, you get extra reading on such a day.

           First, glance at this work clutter in the back yard. All of it is centered on the jack under the corner of the building just to the left of the sawhorses. Yes, the sawhorses sporting up to four coats of amber varnish, same with the work wagon. The pipes were formerly driving into the ground as stakes to hold a small garden fence in place. I sniped two together and pounded them into the substrate. At sixteen feet down, it was still soft sand. There is no bedrock reachable from my property.
           Time to time, I read those blog rating “services” that show up from SEO algorithms, all fo which rate this blog very low because it does not generate revenue. These raters are Millennials, so that is their perspective. I offer a thousand brownie points to anyone who can show me a single new invention by a Millennial between 1991 and today.

           The stats say 30% of my repeat readership, the largest single group, view this blog [in order] to get away from mainstream commercialism. I take that to mean they know this blog has no free offers, pop-ups, and screens so full of hidden hotspots a single pixel miss sends you off to Bozoland, auto-downloading Millennial sick-ware and goof-ware before you can yank the plug.
           My gospel station goes off the air on religious holidays and after 8:00PM other days. It’s questionable how “religious” today is, but the point is I listened to the investment channel. No music, just corny advice, but the commentators do quote their sources and this particular station tells it like it is. Like how Goldman-Sachs has the stock market rigged so 95+% of all investors lose, and how that same company monitors every transaction to detect any hint of some outsider working a system. This is how we know that outfits like Enron and Madoff only get away with it when Goldman-Sachs turn a blind eye. Don’t kid yourself, they knew.

           Say, at the end of the day, you don’t have to tell the world I don’t give a hoot about gospel, but the station has great radio shows and is otherwise all country music. And since my baby left me, I happen to like country music. That reminds me, when I said that the TV series “Ponderosa” was never filmed in black and white, I did not mean that people never saw the programs that way. In the early days, there were lots of color programs that people viewed on older black and white sets. Sorry, I didn’t mean to confuse anyone by mixing the two events together.

           Thanksgiving. What a great day and the second-most corrupted and commercialized American holiday. Like most, I enjoy it because of the food. Not so much the annual gossip-fest. Do I miss the festive gathering and happy memories? Hardly. I miss the food. I’m more anticipative that the upcoming month will be the long-awaited first time I’ve operated at a household surplus in years. I’ve been hit with an extraordinary expense every month since May. Think termites, radiator, taxes, tree, closing, deposits, and costs associated with the move. Let this be the turning point as I struggle not to say “Smithsonian.”

           Trivia. It was today or y’day in 1889 that the first jukebox was rolled out. I didn’t know they had electricity back then. Isn’t that the year Elvis was born? Or am I thinking of Madonna? I’m watching the remainder of “Auto Focus”, the Bob Crane story, a few minutes at a time, mostly for nostalgia. Like the pre-multicultural scene where they buy airline tickets and walk directly onto the plane. Or the first video cassette about the size of an encyclopedia.
           They talk on those old Mickey Mouse phones, stewardesses were total babes, and cocktails were served in tall glasses. All the women except for the hired help are blondes and there’s not one fat person in the entire movie. They had concepts of sex as an “addiction”. Those were the days before AIDS and queers and tattoos, a happier time if you ask me. The primary incentive to get ahead was so you could get more and younger women without hiring prostitutes. Once that was removed by federal law, well, you’ve seen what is left.

Picture of the day.
Israel.
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NOON
           The day was warm and overcast, perfect work weather but I pooped out after only 40 minutes of productivity. Spent two hours getting ready but we already know nobody appreciates that part of the job. This is why I now have misgivings about renovating with JZ. Like most guys, he likes to charge ahead with new work, treating old work with disdain. I understand it, but that involves having a separate building to live in. I can’t afford that.

           Whether it was the food or old age, I don’t know, but I worked as much as I can. I confirm the talk that it makes a difference when it is your own house. That’s why I closely examined the older shed. I found the walls to be surprisingly solid. If I replace the room, I might just have an excellent little workshed until I complete the house.
           I’m pointing at the only damage to the walls, it looks like something pushed in the base of the panel where I’m pointing. The only other damage is the shed door, it won’t close. Not shown is how the roof was probably damaged by the tree that fell in the back yard a couple years ago. I’m tempted to throw some trusses and shingles on this structure and keep it.
           However, I would first like to know why it is so solid when there is no foundation. It is resting right on the ground, the floor is sandy dirt. Why? Because the shed is at an inconvenient location, I’d like to move it over to the north side of the lot. But if all it needs is a roof, heck, that’s a 10’x12’ mini garage and I’d be further tempted to insulate and air condition the place. The wall in front is a candidate for a new door. I can frame these things really easy and it would be a lot cheaper than the canvas shed I was considering.

           I finished watching “Auto Focus”, the Bob Crane story. For my younger readers, Crane was the star of a corny comedy set in a prisoner of war camp in WWII Germany. Crane was the con man always outwitting the Kommandant, Col. Klink. This unlikely premise was unbelievably successful, gaining a huge prime time following against all odds. However, like the career of Bob Denver in “Gilligan’s Island”, Crane was a flop at any other role.
           Nor was there ever to be another “Hogan’s Heroes”. By 1970, the formulas for American TV were scraped down to basics. Soap operas and detective shows with actors that just stepped out of the beauty parlor. Look at this actor from Knightrider(?) with his receding hairline completely disguised by bangs. This was also the era of “big hair”, styles “blown by unseen breezes” was the slur. Think Selleck. Big hair, can’t act, makes millions.

NIGHT
           I tried again to work on the house, but I tuckered out after maybe forty minutes. Then again, I should be glad I can still put in that much. It was around ten years ago the Hippie and I drove to some distant northern Palm Beach theater to see the Johnny Cash documentary, “Walk The Line”. I found the same movie in my Thrift Store batch and watched it again. I’m not doing yard work, but I was still repairing things on the bench. (I tend to play these DVDs in the background rather than sit and watch.) I don’t know how accurate the documentary is, but it covers the high points.
           Or should I say it covers the parts of the legend that were already well-known in the press. Back in Smallville, I was playing in my own band for years by the time Cash got into trouble. Of course, the yokels never let me forget that growing long hair or playing music led to a life of total debauchery. But I also noticed by that ripe of age that it was not music or any such thing that was the indicator of drug addition and so on. There were certain weak personality types prone to such habits and it was all too easy to blame it on rock and roll.

           I played throughout my teens and twenties without any substance abuse, although the one thing I certainly pursued was women. There were never enough women, in the sense that I could never get enough. But I got a lot more than anybody around me, that’s for sure. I’ve said how I never had to get a gal drunk, or use pickup lines, or talk a gal into bed. It’s as simple as that, the worst I ever had to do was wait. It’s true, I’ve never taken a fortress by storm. I’ve never “worked” on a woman for sex and I have very little patience or respect for men that do.
           The downside is that I fall for the right gal far to quickly. Only by skimming through as many as possible and never settling down did I survive a potentially disastrous set of early marriages. Plural. To this day, I believe in very long engagements before making the slightest commitment. It has nothing to do with maturity or responsibility. Those are the two qualities that should prevent spurious liaisons.
           I assure you there was overwhelming peer pressure and tireless propaganda to think marriage was a goal, a demonstration of one’s achieving adulthood. Ha, even when 2/3 of them ended in divorce within seven years, those damn hypocrites still thought of themselves as better than single people. But as I was saying, I avoid certain situations because I do fall in love too quickly. The worst instance was one gal who thought, or at least behaved, as though once she got me into a commitment, she could treat me as a given and be nice to all the other men. I would, she said, if I loved her, understand she was only being nice.

           This makes it doubly hard for me to understand men like Cash who get fame and money early in life. Why do they mess up with it. Whenever I gained something that got me more women, it pushed me further away from drugs, prostitutes, booze, strip clubs, etc. It may be arguable that any man who gets what he wants would behave the same—but the horror stories far outnumber the success stories. I was always content to have a variety. That’s part of the problem with dating older women. The lack of variety.

ADDENDUM
           For posterity, here is the menu for the whole day. That’s not just Thanksgiving dinner, but the whole day. Catfish fritters, green peas in white cheese sauce, baked Yukon Gold potatoes, turkey gravy, ham & cheese quiche, chocolate fudge brownies, tea, milk, turkey pot pie, carrots, biscuits, and jelly beans.

           Why turkey pie (instead of just turkey)? Because, not knowing what I was doing, I roasted the big bird last week. And there was only white meat left. I also prepared but did not bake an apple pie with store-bought crust and filling. And the biscuits and gravy were so good, I shouldn’t have done it but I ate ten of them.
Now, if you don’t mind, I would like to go lie down.

           Later. I changed my mind about the apple pie. I baked it and then took that siesta. Then I proceeded to eat half of it, with peach tea. If I’d had some ice cream, I would have cheated with that, too. I melted some vanilla bark instead. I can’t believe I ate half this pie in an hour. I think I’ll just keep quiet and not tell anybody.
           If anyone has noticed I no longer drink six cups of coffee a day, well, I now prefer tea. Coffee was a lifelong habit and it stopped itself. I now drink coffee only elsewhere. The bakery for all those years and now the library. There is a Dunkin a few miles away and it doesn’t have the noisy riff-raff like on Federal in Hollywood.
           The coffee budget is still there so I have something like six bricks of coffee in storage. But tea is a fantastic bargain by comparison. Correspondingly, my consumption of Carnation [evaporated milk] has also dropped to a half can per week. I’m hoping all these changes are for the better, healthwise. But don’t worry, it will be a long while yet before I take up fishing or stamp collecting.
With any luck, I won’t be reading any more religious tracts. I’m going to “accidentally” leave the “Name of the Rose” behind somewhere. Let it inspire somebody who needs it. Calling that book a bestseller is like pinning a ribbon on the ugly girl because she has personality. And happens to be the governor’s daughter.


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