One year ago today: April 21, 2018, my electrical panel, whee!
Five years ago today: April 21, 2014, 22 televisions.
Nine years ago today: April 21, 2010, oon journalism school.
Random years ago today: April 21, xxxx, WIP
One of the books I bought in Mt. Juliet had this card as a book mark. A young men’s social club, what the hell is that? I do remember growing up in an era where this sort of organization was highly pushed, but I never fell for it. I considered them all anachronism for British boarding schools, although I knew nothing about how those schools were run. I did, however, notice in movies and literature how often standing was determined by such connections. I rejected the entire concept.
This gang mentality was alive when I got to university. There were organizations constantly recruiting. The one that I listened to the most was the “Varsity Christian Fellowship”, who kept up their proselytizing all winter session, convinced that I “had potential”. That was the year I scored half my lifetime total and made me want to stay on campus the rest of my life. I was one of the few non-regulars who actually got any. Let me see who I can remember through the fog of the years.
Lorraine – the social worker
Noreen – said it would never happen
Judy – wrote me poems
Pamela – married the psych prof
Dora – hated jocks
Patsy – a real contender
Arliss – became a lawyer
That Mormon gal – talk about rich
The blonde friend of Noreen
Betty – not the waitress, the other one.
Wendy – did almost everything right
Another Wendy – fantastic body
Maureen – married Shultzie
Bear in mind the times. Yes, it was the sexual revolution, but not everybody passed the physical. There was still the dominating factor of money, which never goes away. Around a tenth of the school was rich boys, but at the end of the day, that turned out to be just another sort of club. They scored with the sleazes, no matter how you slice it. My little harem included the best-looking, firm-bodied, right-off-the-farm, fresh faces they could only dream of. Nothing over 105 pounds. Usually, I can only recall about half, so round the list off to twenty. Is this a double standard? Not at all if you consider people’s wishes. Such as it was, people forget the “double” part and the standard itself never helped me an iota. I was 18, I had no car, no money, no good clothes, and it would be another fifteen years before I picked up the bass again. And that was because I met the gal I was with last week.
The talk amongst the guys was that the women were coached by their mothers that clubs and organizations were places to meet better sorts of men. By better, they mean the ones who derive their sense of belonging to a symbolic scout troop and to an extent, it works. To this day, I still go places where women go to meet men. Hint, Ken. Rule out pool halls, nude beaches, playboy mansions, and most mains streets after curfew. And I hate to be the one to tell you, but that rumor about gay bars was, methinks, started by the queers themselves.
Are there clubs left today? Yes, you need only look at the Meet-Up site to see the low-grade, non-academic, goof-based factions that pass for them. This was the basis of the robot club, to weed out the dullards. The NOVA A.I. club has no standards and robot shows all try to sell you stuff you don’t need. I’d say the clubs still exist, though membership criteria is reduced to a single searching question: how much are you looking to spend.
Even the writer’s club I joined was a flop. Every week, the floor went to some little old black lady who had written another chapter about a subject she had zero experience with. Slavery. And god’s sake that topic gets tedious. Not wishing to end on that, here’s a photo of the biscuits and gravy I made up in Nashville last month. I still make most of my home eating from scratch. GMOs only increased my motives to eat that way, they did not create it.
Inside the Kiev library.
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I biked ten miles up to the shopping center on a this unbelievably beautiful day. The city is completely shut down except for those fat boys who race around in their high-axle trucks because they always have some place more important to be than you do. The ones so fat if the boss told them to haul ass, they’d have to make two trips. I didn’t know the bars were open today. Here’s a gif that
By dusk, I’m flat on my back. But I recognize what is happening. I’ve got ordinary muscle soreness but at the same time coming down with stomach flu. It took me a long time to remember this has happened before. I rarely get upset tummies, I can’t even remember the last time. I don’t mean the trots, everybody gets those, I mean an actual pain in the belly and you still gotta eat. There you have it, the most exciting happening of this day. I’m invalided and reading some Lewis Grizzard. You know, he was only about ten years older than I was.
His writing style was motivating for me. He told a lot of tales about how he grew up. My family moved around so much I didn’t have many close friends until I was around ten. No kids my own age lived in town except a few with very strict parents. Barry had neat toys, like model airplanes and a BB gun that didn’t work. I was pals with a lot of the farm kids, but only at school since they were not even allowed to go downtown at noon break.
At age twelve, we moved to a big town with 2,500 people. That’s where I met Zim, Switch, and Smitty. We were a team and a half for around a year. But none of them had any musical inclinations and I was the only boy in the county who took piano lessons. I struggled for years, wondering when they’d teach me how to play and sing, but of course, back then classical piano was the only availability. Within a year I started my own band, “The Ides of March”, not anything to do with the band that recorded music in Texas some years later. This band is documented here and there, but we played for only a year before internal rivalries broke things up. In what became a long and repetitious pattern, after I left, the band stayed together quite a while but went nowhere.
That’s the year the Campbell brothers moved to town, and that band lasted four years. From what I hear, they are still together, playing the same song list. I know this is old news for this blog, but so what if I mention it every five years? That’s the band my younger brother maliciously broke up once he put two and two together. That came to four, the number of women he dated before he figured out they were after me.
ADDENDUM
With my bellyache, I’m grounded and took up my trusty Danelectro Longhorn. If this bass could only talk. I read Lewis Grizzard to the level it is conclude-able we are from the same era. But there was a change in the fifties, that division between the old war babies and the new war babies. There are other publications of this difference which I would call the Elvis-Beatles demarcation. Sure, Elvis was a rebel and it was TV, not radio, which made his career. To my older sister, he was King. To me he was an idol of the James Dean set, of which I knew very little.
Free for you, I’ll give you another aspect of history that’s not in the books. Media broadcasting is what made the changes of the sixties and seventies possible. The “older” generations groused that that rock ‘n roll was the Devil’s music, but let me tell you something. Before broadcasting, most people had to go into town to socialize. Locally, all that happened was barn dances, church socials, this type of entertainment was so bloody boring that even circuses made money. It was broadcasting that got the city out to the country, and it let young people do more than suspect others were having a good time.
I knew schoolmates who got married right after high school. Getting hitched at 18 was normal, kids who had never seen a fraction of the world. Well, they were about to find out it was there and they’d already taken themselves off the market. If you want an explanation for soaring divorce rates around that time, think about what I’ve said. In themselves, radio and TV were novelties, but once they started broadcasting music, they were stepping in to fill a void of near total boredom that had been the rule in America for 150 years.
I was Beatles, completely. Compared to their smooth harmonies and the crazy notion that they wrote and performed their own music was something Elvis could just not manage. Even his tacky movies with the circus acts and palm trees seemed trite, and I was not even a teen yet. I never did calculate how old I was when The Beatles arrived, because I had to wait a long time before I heard any of their music on the barber shop radio. They were an instant inspiration which sadly put me back several years, musically. You see, I did not know that Beatle’s music was particularly hard to decipher and play correctly. It was another ten years before I even heard of the 12-bar Blues.
And I didn’t like it. You heard me, and I still don’t like most of the Blues. Bands of the time used the slow, dragging Blues as filler music. Now I know why, but I still don’t like bands that do this. Don’t know more than twenty songs? Do a lame half-hour Blues jam. Doing this on stage proves you can’t be a bozo part time or just when you feel like it. When I finally used the pattern, it was playing some ZZ Top, that what-the-hell band who managed to pull off three-chord specials long after we thought the fuzz box had become just another item in Madonna’s wardrobe.
As for jamming the 12-bar Blues, in my life l I’ve done it less than maybe a combined five hours.
