One year ago today: August 24, 2017, some guitar player antics
Five years ago today: August 24, 2013, dieting five years ago.
Nine years ago today: August 24, 2009, learn by being a victim?
Random years ago today: August 24, 2006, Linux is loopy.
Big storm on the way and I’m battening the hatches. Here’s some flowers from the front yard, I can’t name it but I’ve seen them so often I thought there were some kind of tame ornamental. I got a call from Punta Gorda this morning. What are you doing in late September? I’ve got an offer to call a professional bingo game. I told them I’m out of practice, I’ve got no gear (but I’ll check the shed), and I’ll have to hunt for my backing tracks. It’s a church function, so I’ll put in a bid for my travel costs and go see if any women show. I crack a smile when men say check the church. Ha, if a woman could be found there, you know what I mean. And I’m in church more than most men put together.
I got prices off Sam’s Club for two categories. What we can buy on sale and store, and what should be used daily. Every shopping trip will be a compromise. Unless I can find a store that has exactly on sale what isn’t at the other, the second shopping trip makes it all too expensive to comparison shop on a daily basis. And I kept running into that statistic that working part time, operators make $50,000 per year. I don’t doubt it is possible, but nobody quotes their sources. There’s a point where busting your ass can make a business worse than a job. I know a lot of people who started part time businesses that regretted it. Prime example is this guy I knew at the phone company who invested in a carpet cleaning van. We’d often compare weekend takes, his cleaning against my playing in a band.
He regularly made more than I did, but what a terrible life. At midnight I’m waltzing out the door with some total babe and he’s rolling up his vacuum hoses in somebody’s basement. I drove a Cadillac, he drove a beater. I wrote off everything down to my morning coffee and all he could do is brag how he cleaned his own carpet free twice a year. I’m saying there is a trade off beyond which you are buying yourself a part-time job . And of course, in 1990 when the company put us back on shift work, he lost all his contracts. That was the year my school marks fell and I began planning my escape. The company did the shift work thing because they knew 3 out of 5 people had second jobs. By then, I had no respect left for cube farm management. I used to bug them by taking my paycheck, opening my desk drawer and throwing it in onto a two-month old pile of uncashed, unopened envelopes.
[Author’s note: that paycheck thing was not as cruel as it sounds. It was more of a signal to management that their crooked little games would not work with me. Games? Yes, it’s covered many times in this blog. When you’ve worked there just over seven years, you’ll find their attitude and treatment toward you changes. It changes a lot. From the big happy family act to the get tough act. Over the decades, they knew statistically by that point, the average employee was so far up to his neck in debt that he’d do anything to keep his job. Things you used to “decline”, like excessive overtime, changed to your “refusal”. Now, on Xmas eve, one supervisor stays while the others leave at noon. To make sure you work to the last minute
Seven years. That’s when the force transfers begin, that’s when you get a home visit from your supervisor every time you call in sick. Employee parking is moved to three blocks away, rain or snow. And these force transfers were co-ordinated to ensure all employees at a given site had nearly the same seniority. Then they shut down the cafeteria. And changed the afternoon shift from 3:30 to 11:00 to 4:30 to 12:00. That’s after the last bus quit running and you had to pay for parking because they started closing the company garage at 6:00, making us the only employees in the whole company who had to pay it ourselves. You get the idea.]
But by my seventh year I was one of the wealthiest employees in the building. But the minute they bragged, I would point out they were living on credit cards while I didn’t even own one. I was taking 12 vacations a year by then. With a little deft shift scheduling, each month with your ATO (accumulated time off) you could get away for ten days, or “a week and a weekend”. That’s ten months of the year, and other two months were my 8 weeks holidays. Don’t confuse being wealthy with being rich. Most of the people around me came from rich families, and they still messed their lives up on credit.
Most of this era of my life was hand written. Some day, I’ll get it keyed in. I had little love for fellow employees who voted to look nice and please the “boss” even if it screwed their co-workers around. I went through all that, but it was them that watched me take the Japan Air 747 to Bangkok every November and come back in the next year. Mining the phone company, I used to call it. Listen, while I was there and on duty, I did something very rare for them. I worked. So no hasty conclusions. There were 17 people in my department. At the end of the day, I liked to lean back and mutter, “Another typical day. I fixed eight circuits and the rest of the department between them did six. You see, I took the desk nobody else wanted. The supervisor was right behind my divider and could hear every word I said.
That’s the job I retired at when I was 41. Which retirement? From the life where I worked for a living. I still worked, lots, but no longer just to pay the bills.
One tough, tough SOB.
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No siesta, I watch a DVD called “The Messenger” about these two army types who go around informing next of kin about soldier’s deaths. Quite intense acting, but one part I do not identify with is married people with children in combat. That is the ultimate of irresponsible parenting and I am inflexible on that point. Nor am I keen on this concept of the military as a career or job, you know, like an alternative to being a plumber. Eisenhower predicted all this before I was born. I am even against standing armies except as a border defense force. This idea of projecting power is so wrong.
This was supposed to be the edifice that transformed downtown Hollywood into a “world class” community. That usually means South American drug millionaires. It’s the tallest building in town and should be called the tombstone. Everybody knows the corrupt town council lost their shirts on that puppy. And yes, if you noticed, they are tearing up the streets again. They love to take perfectly adequate arteries and narrow them by putting trees down the former center turn lane, making the hellacious traffic even worse.
Have I got my personal version of jet lag from that single 400 mile trip? If so, I’m wasting some valuable cool summer days when I could be up in that attic. All I accomplished was a load of laundry downtown and some of you may remember, I owned a laundromat when I was in my early 20s. The lady owner gave me the horror story, a call-out repairman is now minimum $400. In every laundromat, there are a small portion of the machines that produce all the profit and they must be maintained. Strangely, they continue to produce regardless of which proportion of the others are working or not. Still, that’s one pile of quarters to have a fan belt replaced.
She told how the man was nice enough to show her a catalog of his prices for replacement parts. Relays that cost $6 or $7 two years ago now cost $39. We were tipped off and I’ve always felt part of that situation was the export of American technology and machinery. It’s a two-stage process well-known to competitors. You acquire the “machines that make machines” and produce at a loss until the fools that sold them to you lose their ability to make them at home. They don’t teach in American schools the history of how other countries historically protected their know-how and [how they] failed once it was smuggled out. Prime example would be England, who forbid the export of textile machines and lost their dominant position when it happened.
That’s an interesting period in history in itself, since it coincided with the American Revolution so closely. There was no economy in the colonies for almost 50 years after that war. Then, factories sprang up all over the place that could do something new and it was called mass production. No, it was not the brainchild of Ford with his assembly line, it had been going on for a long time. But the concept of building a factory from the ground up to produce the entire product under one roof took advantage of the fact that doing so in Europe would have meant tearing down their existing plant. Yeah, and now it is our turn. NASA can’t even build their own rockets anymore without reinventing the wheel.
Here’s some trivia from the same period. By 1700, slavery was a dying institution in the South because the slaves could no longer produce enough to pay for their own upkeep. They were scheduled to be let go, but that’s another story. There was no industry in the South to employ them otherwise. It was backward agriculture or nothing. Tobacco, indigo, and a practically useless species of cotton.
Here’s part of the blurb for my show next week. I was downtown today chasing my buddy around for some signatures, but he’s disappeared again. So I stopped at the mall and caught Johnny Rocket passing through . He’s now got my poster with the full gig information and I’ll be on the radio next week, some morning between Monday and Wednesday. Watch me get there first, I’m hoping for a day when half the county is listening, like that Flea Market. Did you know he personally turned that event around, from 12 vendors to 360 average? And, it’s really the only country station of any merit. The others play new country and you know what bugs me about new country? The same as latter day Rock. They make a list of everything that worked in every song in the past and try to plow it into every song. It comes out sounding like orchestral arrangements of the Hokey Pokey.
I’ll be performing live, in return, he is going to plug my bass show. The pub is hard to find, in the sense that it is on the highway between two towns. If he could draw an extra 15 people in to see the act, it would be the biggest crowd in weeks. Later today, I’m zipping over there to put some posters in the cans and the front and back doors. They have so few regulars, anybody new or extra there will make a genuine difference. I have no control or knowledge of how and what he will advertise for me. This is the best I can do beforehand.
Back to farming. Then some guy named Eli invented a machine that could clean the seeds out of that cotton. Almost overnight, it became the cash crop of choice. It was planted by the thousands of acres, and slavery was back in vogue. All that cotton had to be picked. The rest is history, as long as the South stuck to growing it, fine. But the instant they started building factories to produce finished product, out came the war drums. Sound familiar? It was the beginning of the long slide into Liberalism that ended with Trump.
Oh, it’s ended. The you-know-what media just can’t bring themselves to admit it yet. What azz-clowns they make of themselves. Practices that were acceptable for them are outrageous when others do the same. How about the bigmouths who are getting fired? I love it. Can them all, they have not been doing a proper job. They do go on about how they have a right to an opinion. True, but using your fancy government job as a platform to criticize your employer on national TV, maybe not so much.
ADDENDUM
The new coffee maker has easily paid for itself already by keeping me here in the mornings. There’s a downside. For me, going out for coffee has been a social fact of life since I was a university student. Many a bad patch, it was the only time I’d get out of the house. Now that I have a comfortable place, there is always the looming prospect that at some point, I’ll become Crazy Dave the Hermit. That’s not likely, but it makes good editorial. Home time is when I get lots done, although not always what I should be doing. Here is a still from my new copyright clip, which has the SammyZonk as the sound track. That unearthly noise he used to make. Pity that Google took away the video module of this blog and I can’t show you.
Now down to business. Notwithstanding the above, I’ve done some serious thinking about the way my music has been going and my recent decision to solo—even if this turns out a retrograde move. That’s the real hurdle. I’m no different than others when I want to serve up the best possible act, but for the past two years, it’s landed me where they are. Nowhere. Not in a band. I really do believe any band is better than no band, but with solo bass, it’s a decision of a quantum order different. It has not, to my knowledge, been done before. So am I leading the charge, or am I doing ninety down a dead end street? As usual, I find myself first and alone.
Taking stock, I play bass the same way I did thirty years ago. What’s changed, and it’s been a constant change, is my presentation. The big transformation was to country music beginning in my 30s. I still don’t like most country music but I damn sure like the effect it has on a drunk live audience. Well, not drunk but drinking. That’s when your audience most wants to be entertained and too many musicians are not mindful of it. My show has to necessarily be light comedy, but I some of my arrangements are damn serious music. I’ve already soloed this year albeit in front of a trained audience.
My conclusion is win or lose, to risk it all. I’ve never gotten on stage and been a total failure, I’ve done other things behind a microphone that have entertainment value. Look at how successful bingo was for years, and how close I’ve been to Karaoke how many times. I learned to sing in 2009 and that took guts. Did I not solo in Denver and Memphis and St. Augustine? Is a three hour show just not an extension, or is it more than I can chew? I’m digging my wireless microphones out tomorrow and my lady friend says I can plug into her PA to test this out.
I should be psyching myself out at the potential payoff. Things like this sometimes morph into some related area. You never know who is in the audience. Ha, the problem is they would never be in a Polk County audience. I don’t have to perform anywhere I don’t want to. And we know the act is novel enough to get away with almost any place if I’m only likely to ever be there once. I’ve done decent work with just a drummer on stage before. What would Boxcar Willie do?
Opening night is next Thursday.
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