One year ago today: July 23, 2016, possible exception: Miami.
Five years ago today: July 23, 2012, sweet potato fries, meh.
Nine years ago today: July 23, 2008, twice in a row.
Random years ago today: July 23, 2006, finicky Superman women
Are you ready to read? Good. This just in, JZ wasn’t kidding about his back hurting after dragging that 300 lb tent across the beach two weeks ago. I got the message this morning, he’s going to see the specialist. Hang in there guy, you know, JZ is the closest thing to the brother I never had. Sure, we argue, but over dumb stuff. Argue with my real brother and he’ll slash the tires on your car.
That’s when he’s [my brother, not JZ] not hitting on your girlfriend and going through your dresser when he thinks you aren’t looking. That’s all the news I have so far, but we’ve known for years JZ was going to get a turn with Mother Nature. While on the topic of nature, here is the north side of my back yard two weeks after the summer rains returned. Some of the vines I will leave because they stop anything worse from taking root. I will learn to hate kudzu.
Maybe he’ll slow down and move out of the city. In general I mean, but he should get out of south Miami. That is not the town he grew up in. All the decent people now live in gated communities and private neighborhoods. The federal government turned the city into a welfare mecca with every second resident on some kind of pogie. What? Pogie? That’s the old English derogatory term for people dependent on government handouts for a living. It’s a class of citizen created by the welfare state, and it breeds intergenerational dependency. That’s what.
Enter another potential complication. Back in my day, I was fully covered by private voluntary insurance. I had every insurance available except wage lose (dammit). Then came Obamacare. There are countless Americans, including JZ, who did not like being told by the government what to do. Obamacare is not about health, it is about control. It’s a pity it took the lumpen proletariat so damn long to catch on. They were too busy calling others conspiracy theorists. Such folks are not likely to pay more than the minimum premiums and according to JZ, even those are not exactly cheap. While this is a recent development for JZ, my other friend with a similar condition reports she is already out $21,000 for co-pay and sundry expenses. And she still hasn’t had the required surgery.
Not meaning to sound like a prophet of doom, but these back and nerve pains are not something that normally go away on their own. If JZ also need surgery, well, let’s just say the guy does not like hospitals much. I was the first in my gang to get hit with a debilitating condition so I have the most experience at it. Like most people, I grew up associating such matters with really old people and I never prepared for anything. Why should I, when I was only in my 40s. Folks, if you are under 45 these days, be prepared to live to be 90. I didn’t. All my plans stopped at age 71.
Myself, I went through back pain for years from my heart prescriptions. I forget which one, but I think it worked on the liver to stop cholesterol, I forget. But between 2006 and 2012 I could not walk more than two blocks without resting. Make sure you read that right, I still on occasion walked many miles in that condition, it just took hours.
There, this and other though-provoking material is one reason you love this blog and this blog loves you. You just never know when you’ll get more tales from the trailer court. You’ll get lots to read today because I’m at home in my comfy bedroom and no intention of doing anything until the gig later. Except make French toast and tea, which I just finished.
He slipped in how some parks steer the hunters away from the prize specimens, trying to trick them into culling their herds for free. The funnest part was when he tied into the behavior of some of the people who went on safaris. He pretty much stated that big game hunting is not the venue for vegetarians, feminists, liberals, tree-huggers, animal activists, or weak-kneed and weak-minded little snots. But dang, by the time I started listening to his answers, the others were already trying to hush him up.
Here’s another photo of how aggressive the vines are. This one is actually crawling up behind my siding, I’ll try to get you a photo of wherever it re-emerges.
The movie today was “Experiment Killing Room”, a creepy low-budget but well-made presentation of a government scientific experiment. The preface was the usual, it was based on the LSD injection scandal if the 1960s and all the files were ordered destroyed. The screen flashed an idiotic message that in the absence of said files, there was no way to confirm the program had been terminated. TV logic. “Good news,” Mr. Jones, “you’re wife is not officially dead because we can’t find the death certificate.”
Four people who think they are to answer a questionnaire are locked in a room. One is killed at intervals interval to attempt to find one who will kill himself to save the others. The plot is about inducting one stone cold bitch of a doctor into the staff. (She plays the role so admirably that today in real life is now a popular divorce counselor in Minnesota, where she gets the vast majority of her first-dates off eHarmony on a monthly basis.)
Albino.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
Checking out the new microscope is fun. It lacks a fine tuning knob and the zoom is digital, but I’m not much into viewing biological slides, so if nothing it serves as a learning tool for an upgrade. For now, I really like the viewing screen over an eyepiece. There’s no comparison for convenience, although I forgot to get the driver disk. The guy says he’ll email it. Also, it is missing the dust cover, but most any one will do.
Without that driver, I can’t show you any samples. The part they don’t tell you about microscopes is most of the work is preparing slides. I’ll maybe head to the river tomorrow, but I have no slide covers or paste and the only stain I have is purple. But it’s a start.
The manual doesn’t say, but I wonder if this unit will display stills and video in real time? You know, if I can use the big flat screen as a viewing monitor. Or will it just output files to be displayed by later. We’ll see, but chances are it is a minimalist application. My last microscope was not digital, so I’m learning the technology.
The new bedroom is indeed too comfortable. This will stall the renovations, mark my words. Not a half-hour of work has been done on the house since I moved into that room. By noon I injected a spy movie called “Traitor”. It’s so far about a trained American bomb expert who joins a terrorist group. It’s also well-directed but full of holes. Crap like America’s relentless fantasy that once an enemy is defeated in war, their entire population suddenly likes us. See Japan. The scary part is the portrayal of the types of people the US will train to be bomb specialists. The military plainly has some bizarre Disney World criteria of who they will accept into the program. Hey, it is no better over in Russia, where they keep giving surplus nuclear warheads to rogue generals named “Popov” and “Andreyev”.
“When’s the last time you washed a rental car?”
~ some air force sergeant.
Yet again, I ran through my song list, this time with a stop-watch. I burn through the tunes pretty fast. That’s partially a habit from the old five-piece I was in and partially because myself I don’t like musicians who kill time on stage. You know who you are, tuning up, talking nonsense, kind of thing. With the five-piece, there was no front man. They focused on putting on a technically perfect show, where what they should have done was have somebody like me working the microphone. But you see, I am only a lowly bass player. Yeah, a bass player who is going to do something today that not one of them has the talent or guts to even try (that I know of).
In a sense, the band did have a feature. The statuesque lady singer, she lacked stage presence. She was a bundle of nervous insecurity. But, she was still an improvement over the bland personalities of the otherwise excellent musicians. I wonder if she’s still wasting time with that band? I’ll look it up. Wasting time? Yes, the band is going nowhere. They do not play often enough to justify the immense amount of rehearsal, nor were they capable of promoting their sound. They are stuck in the 1970s mentality of t-shirts, CDs, and demo albums. All that stuff that doesn’t work that Guitar Center is only too happy to sell you.
I would have taken that band, walked over the Hard Rock or Mardi Gras and told them we’d play for free until we got scouted. But I never brought it up because with their attitude toward bassists, the drummer might have avoided doing that just out of spite—no band of his is going to listen to no bass player. This is the band that decided which tunes to play behind closed doors and informed the bassist later. The breaking point was “Strawberry Fields Forever”. That’s when I knew that band this band had not learned a thing about stage work from me. Instead of picking up clues, they took to bleeping out my standing ovations from the gig recordings.
ADDENDUM
I’m no longer a guitar-vocal virgin. Tonight I played a full hour and nobody threw any tomatoes. Good-bye amateur status as well, I made $4 in tips. My act went on after a five-piece rock group, an amalgamation of two other groups. It’s a big room and the audience was only six people. I hit a few wrong chords but otherwise kept my show going. In the end I played only half the material I had ready. It is a significantly different style from the big band. They were also playing for exposure, so an hour is all I got. Um, even though I was the only jammer who showed up.
Though the place was mostly empty, somebody still managed to kick a chair in front of where I had my camcorder set up, so no video except the back of a bar chair. My guitar playing easily telegraphs that I’m a bassist, so my nickname over there remains the bassguy. And one dude tells me the fiddle player is showing up again next week. The lady in charge asked me about doing a Thursday open mic. I believe I could carry that now, though I still have to think that one through. It would be tips only and several other area clubs are eyeing that Thursday, which is payday at some of the mines.
During the negotiations over the open mic, the party of the other part mentioned my tendency, when I did not like something, to give reasons for it. From my viewpoint, I’m fending off a bunch of “how come you don’t like it” questions down the line. I told her to mull over the fact that I had just spent 40 plus years living in a big city. I did not mention her snappishness and lack of sense of humor. That last one is odd. Like on Don Kinneberg, she alwaystakes the most negative view of anything, then a moment’s delay later, realizing that made a bad impression, would laugh about it in an affected manner. No, she’s not my type. She’s the party of the other part.
This, however, tips me off what to expect if things do not work out precisely as planned. What if another club brings in a full country band a mile down the road? What happens when a rainstorm or a tournament creates an empty-house? She’ll bite my head off. On the other hand, is any of that my problem? My think-ahead mode tells me to keep negotiating a bit while looking around for something else.
This is the first time I carried an entire hour by myself on guitar, and I’ve got a ton of good material I have not sparkled up yet. The difference is I now have confidence I can pull it off. I hit some wrong notes and played a few wrong chords. If you must know, yes, I did get butterflies. But jitters don’t deter me. It is like bravery. If you are not brave, pretend you are. Nobody will know the difference.
[Author’s note: these inferences to my “first time” may seem contradictory without knowing the run up. I have managed to memorize guitar chords in the past because I know about ten or twelve of them. Further, I have sung a few shows playing bass and done many a Karaoke. But those are distinctly not the guitar-vocal arrangements to which I am exclusively pointing at in this instance. I’ve faked guitar at a few garden parties and sung with kids. A year ago I played three 15 minute slots a week apart, testing the water. I’m not unsaying any of that. I’m stating that tonight was the first time in my life I got up on stage in front of strangers and sang a full solo hour set while accompanying myself on the guitar.
Think of it this way. A week ago I had no more concept of playing a solo stage set with the guitar than a guitarist would have had about doing the same playing only the bass. If you are wondering how I pulled it off, it was by brute force. Since last Sunday, I played the 14 songs I had ready over and over a total of 133 times, that is, more than twenty times per day.]
More bad news. A few months back I mentioned they took me off the original cholesterol program which supplied me with free statins. Since then, I’ve reverted to my prescription statins and guess what? My back pain has returned. I noticed it before but did not make the connection until I had to walk a half mile to the gas station carrying my Fender. Then it hit me, the identical pain from 2006-2013, aggravated by walking. I don’t know the cause and effect side, but the correlation is pretty direct, since I gave the $4 to a guy at the gas station to give me a ride the rest of the way home.
[Author’s note: yes, folks, I’m thinking ahead to the day when I can’t bail myself out of things like a broken down vehicle. While I view the odd breakdown as part of what makes the trips memorable, I know that I will be needing reliable all-weather transportation at some point soon. That’s where the station wagon comes in. I’m considering canceling my summer holiday this year to buy something now instead of in December. I said ‘considering’.
Influential in this was the security leak at the doctor’s office. Thanks to that, I’m in no hurry to attend a certain reunion in my present condition. But so what, from that doctor’s point of view, I can always reschedule the eclipse, right? As long as his office manager is in control, what else matters?]
Last Laugh
Return Home
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
