One year ago today: December 31, 2015, submarine escape hatches.
Two year ago today: December 31, 2014, now that’s camoflage.
Three years ago today: December 31, 2013, woman with freckles.
Four years ago today: December 31, 2012, I predicted the loss to the penny.
Five years ago today: December 31, 2011, my glittering editorial . . .
Six years ago today: December 31, 2010, there were only 6 battles.
Seven years ago today: December 31, 2009, FOOD!
Eight years ago today: December 31, 2008, random busybodies and subpoenas . . .
Nine years ago today: December 31, 2007, “with minimal overlap”.
Ten years ago today: December 31, 2006, demo tapes are useless.
MORNING
How will you spend the last morning before the year you consider yourself no longer middle aged? Mine was in genteel quiet living, working in my own yard. It’s probably a fitting outcome when I look back on it all. Considering what I had to work with, I think I led a pretty full life and probably have fewer regrets than the schmeebs. If one considers only m y goal to not waste my life working a drudge job to pay the bills, then I did that very successfully.
I remind the reader, I knew by the time I was 30 there was no way I could win at the money and success game unless I got lucky. A few times I thought I got a real break or two, but nothing panned out. My detractors could say in I constantly worked extra and harder to get ahead but in the end got nothing more than the couch potatoes. It depends on how you measure the race. By the finish line, or by the distance run.
What did I do this morning? A hearty breakfast until it warmed up a bit outdoors, then I went outside to put in some time. This is top story, I have no New Year’s gig for the eleventh year running and I’m not happy about that. If I’d kept up with my guitar, I could have done a solo somewhere. Instead, I got to buying a house and feeding the birds. Remember those PVC pipes I found in the back yard? They were just left over from an old air compressor line Howie had once run to the back shed. Photo soon, I’m not finished my refill yet.
Agt. R says the city doesn’t get on your case if you have a decent fire pit, so I’m going to line one with broken concrete shards and throw a diamond wire grill over the top. Here’s some photos of the work. Dec. 31 is not the time to head over to my place looking for the party. I never party at home except one on one, and even then, I’ve rarely dated gals who don’t have their own wheels. I like women who are self-supporting, for obvious reasons, and the major criteria is does she have her own car?
The pictures show old and new work. There are the three bags of leaves per month that seems to be the average. The brush pile is only for proof I can still handle it, and there’s the shovel in the soft sand of the circular fire pit. This soil is somewhat more fertile than the rest of the yard, indicating there may have once been lawn or gardening back there. It’s the only spot that is open sunlight and away from overhanging tree limbs.
For sale, in Wyoming.
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NOON
Wait, there’s more exciting photos. It’s siesta time, so here’s the quick caption. To the left, you can see the roof of the shed is capable of being straightened without buckling. As shown, this prop on the interior pushes the exterior ribs upward, where I will slide a 2”x3” or 2”x4” under an existing lip and machine screw it in place. Also shown is the skylights in the old roof which make the interior nice and bright.
The middle shows my gospel radio. Ha, you thought I meant gospel as a program. Actually, it is a country station from Bushnell, Florida. I like it because it avoids the “new country” and has corny commercials. This is the station that has the CBS libtard news, always slanted more to the left than the roof on my shed. And the pipes. They were not buried as I first thought. As I cleared the dirt away, they were just two piece that got trampled into the dirt over the years. These were the only pipes and they were connected to nothing.
The weather turned warm by noon and unexpectedly got the cardinals out to the feeder. The whole family today, mom, pop, and the two kids. They are far less skittish and don’t mind as much when smaller birds land on the other side of the feeder, but the cardinals are careful to alight one by one. I don’t know the lifespan of these birds, however, I assure you these are perfectly fit and well-fed specimens. They are getting their vitamins.
How’s my singing? I’ve added the latest two hopefuls to my song list. I can just manage Tom T. Hall’s. “That’s How I Got To Memphis” in D and I can do the original key of “It’s All Goin’ To Pot”. I miss a porch to practice on and you know, I want a screen door on the kitchen. The door faces south so I like it open to both warm and cool the room. But like all country settings the flies appear from nowhere within minutes. Then I can say, “Don’t you slam that screen door.”
AFTERNOON
Here’s my model of the shed, working away at the plans. Neither Agt. R nor I have a decent wheelbarrow, so that is slated for the next few days. Inside the shed I found a partially poured concrete pad. It’s not enough to form a good floor, so that means a good five wheelbarrows of sand and old crap has to come out of that area to put down something for a floor that’s gonna work. I need this work space, pronto.
He places these events, four of them I think, between 13,000 and 1,300 BC. The long lives of the biblical figures? Easy, he points out the writing then measured age in lunar cycles, not solar years. That would make Methuselah a more reasonable 78 or so years old, which was still really up there by their standards. It doesn’t explain the younger “old people” unless the change to years occurred between the times things were recorded, but that seem more believable than people living way too long.
Thus, I say the book is too much for a casual glance at the subject. It is more akin to a graduate year text. The content can be read cold but you would be far better equipped to appreciate it with a full background in geology, history, the geography of the Antarctic, and some college level physics.
It reminded me of when I still intermittently try to study differentials. I’ll find a text that purports to make it easy, but after a couple of paragraphs of light explanation, they all launch into formulas with weird symbolism they will not explain. To me, a formula always reduces to a single number on one side of the equation. As in 2 + 2 = 4. But differential have equally incomprehensible constructs on both sides, like how the sine is the inverse of the co-tangent, or something like that. I can’t get anybody to actually tell me how to “solve” the differential formulas. Instead they get into some arm-waving mode which to me appears like they don’t really know themselves.
Then, the day gets warm enough for me to switch to working in cutoffs. How does that rate mention? Well, because who remembers those laser vein operations my cardiologist performed years ago? It took long enough, but be darned, my legs have indeed “tightened up”. I didn’t have a problem, but the doctor said it was common for people in my situation to get distended veins over time, which I considered a cosmetic treatment. Since it was covered by my insurance, I went ahead. But now look, my legs have not aged along with the rest of me. No, I’m not going to show any pictures, I’m just sayin’.
Trivia. The winds on Neptune, made up of methane gas, which gives it a blue color, reach around 1,500 mph during a storm. Enough to make those central Caribbean republics feel right at home. Aw, that was mean, but you can’t insist those people better their own lot because that’s trampling on their human rights. That’s Liberalism for you.
“One Day When You Swing That Skillet, My Face Ain't Gonna Be There.”
EVENING
I was out but home by ten. New Year’s is the other guy’s opportunity to be the life of the party. I drove to the nearest place, downed some, and was home by 10:00PM to the sound of fireworks. Some of those explosions were bad enough to do some injury, which would be fine by me. The club had that mother-daughter band tonight, but without the husband pretending he could sing harmonies. I must say I was always stunned by the near-perfect of the shape of the daughter, the 19-year-old daughter, one can’t help but gaze at such a precious thing. Next to her mother, it emphasizes the contrast. Tonight I got the explanation. I’d received wrong information. I‘d been told the daughter’s age wrong by five full years. You decide which way.
Sorry, no profound revelations or stirring tales, to me New Year’s is nothing unless I’m on stage. Without that, I’m part of the proletariat. The blue collar crowd that cashes their check on payday and broke by Monday. Well, I’ve never done things that badly, but when you are not on stage, you are in the crowd. Can I find any consolation in this situation? Give me a second to think. Got it. When I was a teen, the last goddamn thing I’d want in this universe is somebody like my parents on stage beside me. For “guidance and protection”. Yep, that coin has too sides. Protection from what?
That reminds me of a part of the interference and resistance I got in that small town when I formed my first two bands. The other kid’s parents. I quickly learned never to ask permission. There were two guitar players in town, both over 30 and had never heard of The Beatles, and even then, the caliber of their musicianship was unacceptable even by the standards of the time. I had to try to recruit kids to learn guitar, which was impossible to keep secret. When parents found out, it was not uncommon for them to get punished.
Did I tell you what happened to the Campbell brothers, the city kids I got to before the small-town mind-rot disease infected them? That’s the band I started when I was 13 that is still together today—although to be fair, that’s also family. I love t point out that ithout me they went nowhere and could not even get their own gigs. Well, they had come from a city where there were bands, so their parents didn’t say no. But they did march them right downtown the next day to make them get brushcuts.
It’s things like that which contribute to me taking as much credit as practical on certain issues. For me, music was a fifty-year uphill struggle. It took me forty years to learn how to sing. And thirty years to learn to play bass the right way. It only took me twenty years to learn to hate fat-headed guitar players and ten years to learn to bass solo. So yeah, I’m not so shy about what I do.
You want the latest example? Okay, I completely and intentionally blew those fat ladies away on stage last Thursdays, showed ‘em how it’s done. They were not just staring at me, they were staring knives. Why did I do it? Because I sat there the first hour before I decided I didn’t like their attitudes. Like they had seniority and it was “their” Karaoke. Double ha, you see with my show, they cannot let on like they were the least offended. And face it, the audience applause always lets them know who’s boss.
Last Laugh
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