March 23, 2020

Yesteryear
One year ago today: March 23, 2019, I meant foot powder.
Five years ago today: March 23, 2015, remember the monster bike?
Nine years ago today: March 23, 2011, rare embedded video.
Random years ago today: March 23, 2005, my kind of crowd.

           This post is largely missing, so you get what I found. Oh boy, more about Camp Good Counsel. Keep reading.

           You will want to know how the car repair is going. As well as expected. The car will not be repaired the way we are proceeding, but it will soon look much nicer. It’s labor intensive, shown here is Agt. M (the club vice-president) working in the hot sun. His wife said no inside work, againt the virus thing. This is near the end of the work, with the bumper back on and most of the metal pushed out from the inside.

           We had to remove the entire interior panel, the rear bench, some of the upholstery, and bend a number of seemingly useless metal flanges out of the way. We also removed the never-used rear window washer tank. Shown here is the best that can be done with the tools available. Agt. M says is about four days for tricky work to get it smooth but that it can never really be make like the original without specials tools and skills. So what, it looks a lot better and that’s fine for now. I knew you’d agree

Picture of the day.
Instant eyesore, Manhattan.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           In a for-the-record moment, the elusive “Camp Good Counsel” has reappeared, now quite co-ed. This is the camp proved itself a mystery as searched west of Deland so long ago. It’s in the blog but buried too deep for my recall. That’s the area where even the mayor we met in the breakfast joint never heard of it. It’s in Floral City and JZ recognizes some of the pictures on the website.

           Maybe co-ed is misleading, as they still keep the girls on the far side of the lake. Naive people think that is to protect the girls, but who’s to say what reflects reality? Some of the older buildings, like the craft center are derelict but he can still point to them. He was there every summer for some 8 years. One change he definitely notices: the cabins now have air conditioning.

           I cannot imagine staying anywhere in Florida during the summer without at least a big fan. The theme at Good Counsel remains staunchly Catholic. At the camp I attended, I now realize the scam, they told us the girls from across the lake were to be our guests for hot chocolate. That primed all us 11-year-olds who were (as they said back then) “in the know” to polish the whole camp. Floors, ceilings, kitchen, everything. Mow the lawns, scrub the toilet seats. For clarity, I’m saying despite the shit that sex was forbidden knowledge at least in theory, they used it to trick us into cleaning there stupid camp.
           JZ and I found the latest blurbs of Camp Good Counsel on the web. It is now co-ed, JZ says, because the Church was unable to fill the pews with the younger generation. The pre-teens, I note, are still segregated except for the odd posed photo. That part reminded me of Camp Whitney, the sole summer camp I ever attended. That’s a chapter of its own. Despite the fact these young people spend twelve years in school together, they are prevented from mingling at camp, duh. Without a lot of detail, this segregation was my biggest disappointment at Whitney (not the real camp name)—the girl’s camp was three miles across a choppy, cold lake.

           I told you about the pipes in the ground? When we got there, everybody noticed a row of 1” pipes sticking out of the ground that bisected the camp. We were led to believe they were for flag poles on July 4th. I remember asking, if that was so, why was there one pipe in the middle of the fire pit? If you looked at the group photos on the walls, you quickly noticed that very few of the kids from former years ever returned.
           Two days before our stay was up and the next crew moved in. Saved them bundle on custodian fees. Just before the girls arrived, they unrolled a ready-made chain link fence and uprighted poles into those pipes that bisected the camp, girls on one side, boys on the other. That’s when I caught on, because up to that point I was like the other guys. Why did we have to wash and scour our cabins if we weren’t allowed to take the girls in there? I’ve never trusted guidance counselors since, you might say.
           For a camp that was supposed to be unconcerned with sex, Whitney sure had a lot of anti-sex barriers in place. Tells you something about the cap religion places on reality.

           Rigging up my DVD player gave me extra time to practice my vocals in the car. I say it sounds okay adn the reason people can’t hear it is they are unfamiliar with how harmony thirds are supposed to work. Six hours was enough to go through the entire list and I’ve got around half of them as good as I likely ever will. That does not apply to stage time, which is constantly self-correcting except for a lot of guitar players, You heard me.

           There is a flurry over scams surrounding the virus. Fake calls from the health department, $40 dust masks, warehouses of toilet paper. The pity is not the scams, but that there are still Americans who fall for them. You wonder how anybody could possibly be so thick in the head. The media is not helping by under-reporting the medical condition of who is dying and not mentioning that the recovery rate is already higher than the death rate. Occasionally they scroll the recovery rate along the bottom, but that hardly constitutes coverage.
           The Tennessee turtle, JeePee, with whom I maintain a fragmentary telephathic communication channel, is insisting the pllum tree be call PeeGee. Mark my words, this will cause conflictions. But that’s from a higher authority.


Last Laugh