One year ago today: September 30, 2020, $26 bucks, woo-hoo!
Five years ago today: September 30, 2016, Mitch the Great.
Nine years ago today: September 30, 2012, what’s the connection?
Random years ago today: September 30, 2015, a ‘not much’ day.
On the road, no time to write, so here is one of my ancient-style travel logs. I have a timer while driving and check in on one-hour intervals. This stems from when I traveled cross-country, the world would know within an hour of what I was up to at time of death. America leads the world in giving driver’s licenses to blithering morons. Today was 14 or 15 hours of activity.
6:30AM Rise & shine, load up the van. The clinic called. Smart move fasting as they need all vitals to wind up the study. However, they will take me early.
7:30AM JZ’s battery is dead, get it boosted. The apartment complex took away half the guest parking spots, so I have to park a quarter mile away. Too far to carry luggage.
8:30AM Tank up on Pines Boulevard, the van electrical is acting up. It seems it does that after it has been on the road more than 200 miles, making it tricky to troubleshoot.
9:30AM At the clinic, it was all sad goodbyes as the original staff were there and I was an easy patient. Always took my meds on time, always followed the rules. I will miss their free calendars, which became a favorite around here. And the waterproof cases they supplied, great for storing documents in the Florida climate.
10:30AM I’m two hours ahead of schedule, so I stopped for breakfast. The cafe owner, a musician, has news. He’s the guy with the same band 30 years playing the same circuit and he reports in the past year, he’s lost four drummers. Two heart attacks, one Hep-B, and one diabetic. Folks, it is the demographics of my own era.
11:30AM Flying down the Donald J. Trump highway, or at least that is what old Highway 27 may soon be renamed. Good, for the left cannot merely defeat Trump, they must crush his memory and they are terrible at that. They’re making him a martyr.
Giant camphor tree.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
12:30PM Can’t read my own writing but again the only clear station is NPR. It seems the Teacher’s Union wants Biden to label parents who protest at school board meetings as terrorists. Good. First, protesting does no good without replacing the school boards. Second, you were warned forty years ago this would happen, so nobody listens to you just starting to complain now.
1:30PM Halfway to the cabin, I stopped for a butter pecan ice-cream. I know, but I’ve been fasting for 24 hours so it is allowed.
2:30PM Arrive home at the cabin just in time to pick up my bass and a few items and head straight on to rehearsal. You get a paragraph here. To me, rehearsals are not music practice. Practice is what you do on your own time. At the last moment, the lead player called in sick, but I voted to continue with the meet-up. To me, it is important that each band member know that things may have changed. That if you miss a session now, you will fall behind, and it can be damn tricky to catch up.
[Author's note: my ulterior motive is that the band be prepared to carry on if any member is late or a no-show. And yes, in case they quit or need replacing. I may not be managing this band, but I reserve the right to take care of my affairs.]
3:30PM Nobody told us the street was torn up for a new pipe across the entrance to the community center. And you need a pass to open the back gate. Finally, some observant person figured out thieves don’t show up with guitars and amplifiers and let us in.
4:30PM It’s evident I’m the only one who put in any time since last round. I aced all the tunes, plus sang a few new ones. Folks, I am not a vocalist. And I have trouble singing more than three or four tunes in a row. I don’t even do that at Karaoke.
5:30PM Five songs seems to be my limit, then I get a dry cough. Another paragraph. This band is turning out to be less than average but that is not, repeat not, a barrier. They are used to rehearsing by just “getting through” a song, where I often repeat specific spots that need attention. In the absence of the lead player, I faked the lead breaks on the bass. Plainly it is the first these guys ever heard such a thing. Also, the loose format of their rehearsals reveals these guys are unfamiliar with the very vocabulary of how it is done proper. That is most strange. If I told you the drummer was “hooked on a beat”, you could at least get it from context.
6:30PM Their management skills, as we now know, are next to non-existent. We have a tentative Halloween gig, big deal, that’s a month from now. There was an eye-opener for these guys. Note, this is where I get accused of bragging by the weak-minded. I’m not bragging, I have what it takes to entertain an auditorium full of strangers and make a fortune in tips, so I do not listen to critics who’ve never shown up to hear me. What happened is they wanted to play a Halloween song I’d never heard, so the keyboard guy played it on his phone. They were, judging by their last few bassists, expecting me to need a month to learn it. By the end of the second verse, they got a lesson on how experience really works.
7:30PM That pin-hole leak in my radiator acted up, so I stopped at the club long enough to get the cap off. I thought through the practice and I’d best be careful so as to not dominate the process. But, progress is definitely faster when I’m leading the charge.
8:30PM I mapped out four possible paths to follow in Tennessee. A cheap lot now would free up future capital for a nicer house later. But later may not be a great idea in America. A smaller or cheaper lot with something inhabitable for now is the other end of the spectrum. And I will need another month to come up with my full amount of available cash.
9:30PM I have the valve for the A/C but can’t get the old unit off. I’m also going to replace the fan relay, although that has not presented itself as a problem.
ADDENDUM
JZ finally wants out of that condo. Here’s the scoop. There are five buildings with 33 units each. The condo has been ill-run in the standard fashion. That’s were a small group of “welfare cases” take over the meetings and vote themselves largesse. Kind of a Democrat party in microcosm. If you are unfamiliar with communist politics, that’s where you take over slowly while everybody else is at work. You are waiting for a meetings where only your own people form a majority, then you vote in dozens of small laws over time.
Those little laws accumulate until at some future point, say a “pandemic”, you amalgamate all those wee laws into one big one and take over. It was all mapped out in the 1850s. Let’s let back to the condo. The condo association owns all unsold units and was renting them out when the COVID no-eviction law came about. I don’t know the details, but I do know millions of people around the country who could pay used it as an excuse not to.
This includes at least twenty of the units that JZ is aware of. This includes that guy across the hall who I warned him was a total jerk. It turns out the condo association had remortgaged some of those units. The rent in that part of town is probably in the $1,500 to $2,000 range monthly. Anyway, you do the math. Many pocketed their rent until they had the cash to go move someplace else, then skipped out. JZ says they are thieves, I say the bad guys are the condo management. Take away guest parking just because nobody ever visits them, that’s what I say.
That’s a problem, because like all communists, the people who caused the loss will now try to spread the cost around to everybody else. And if they object, well, look at what the Teacher’s Union is doing—asking the government to tag any dissenters as domestic terrorists. Well, JZ, I told you five years ago I’d put a down payment on a property if you’d rent it for the same as you pay in condo fees. I just know he’s going to get stuck with a $20,000 special assessment. The commies will use the money to pay off the other condos and he won’t see a penny. Kind of how they do things in Democrat-run cities. Ah, now he see’s the pattern.
