Read below how I never made it out the door. A tropical storm dumped 18 inches of water on my doorstep. Ker-sploosh. Most summer rain is a matter of degree, not the odds. Normally, a hot day soaks up the Everglades moisture and pours it here as the air hits the cooler coast in the evenings. It means today’s report will contain gossip and research, always fun when cooped indoors. For instance, what is the smallest drill bit you have ever seen? How about this one? It is so fragile I pick it up with a magnet. (It's laying at an angle between the penny and my pointer.)
I cannot imagine any tool delicate enough to make use of this item. Yet, it was one of several that came with a set. Make sure you are looking at the right object, the drill bit at dead center. I’m pointing at it with a pin vise. As shown here, this bit is so tiny I lack the equipment to measure its diameter.
Ray-B on the line and we were talking the usual musician matters. Gigs, women, money, and what other people saying. He, too, is encountering ever more musicians who keep telling him to learn “modern” music. The immediate problem with that advice is he’s working and they are not. Play a tune because the crowd wants it, not because it is “new”. Guys, there is a reason the majority of new music never becomes classics.
He ran into the player for
The Flyers, who claims to be making a phenomenal annual income off his music. Granted, these are agency show bands, but I do not believe even the best Florida bands make $1,500 per week per member. My familiarity with the business tells me the guitarist has the “Willie Loman” syndrome. Takes his best week and multiplies it by 52, meaning he once made money at that rate. Not the same thing at all. The band has a tight demo sound that must be difficult to reproduce on stage. Is what I’m sayin’.
To the reader who points out that I have never played full-time in a band, I point out that unlike said reader, I’ve always had a high-paying day job. I am satisfied knowing I make more with what music I do play, sometimes much more, than the hacks. I totally disagree that stage experience makes anybody better musicians. That is so wrong, so untrue, that you can bet money on it. Most musicians I know have not learned a new song in at least five years. Such experience teaches the rare few who are willing to change on how to behave better, but it does not improve their abilities.
We also talked about women and I must say married men have the oddest ideas about dating. I can’t add anything to that topic, but it is a given how badly the world’s husbands misinterpret the facts. The married guy thinks he’s lost his touch, while the bachelor knows he never had the touch in the first place or he would not have gotten married. When the married fail, they implode with self-doubt. When the bachelor fails, he moves on.
However, both will constantly meet simpletons who say things like they must be looking too hard, looking in the wrong places, and to try going to church. Or the perennial idiot-phrase to the effect if you quit looking so hard you’ll find one. That has to rank up there among the stupidest declarations of all mankind. I admit to saying “simpletons” instead of what I meant because there are so goddam many of them out there I assume a small percentage of them get this far. So I don’t want to call them “azzholes” and neither should you.
Whoo-hoo, I found a 1920 penny. See photo. It’s good luck only, since it is too bad of a shape to be worth anything. Cointrackers said 35 cents. But the 1917 pennies from my paper route would today be worth a fortune. I’ve certainly mentioned this before, how I was forced to use the 2,100 pennies I’d saved, spent for morning coffee in college when my parents refused to pay for my education as they had sworn to do. That was in my second year. I was 18 years old.
This was also the time when my girlfriend’s father, a wealthy children’s dentist, said I should make the coffee at home for 3 cents instead of buying it at the coffee shop for 15 cents. That’s the same Doctor Gordon who supposed that running water, countertops, coffee pots, electricity, cups, spoons, sugar, tins of milk, tables, and chairs came from the tooth fairy. On top of that there was another 2,100 lead pennies from 1943 although these were not as valuable. But I did not know that at the time and having to spend them to survive results in the same degree of disappointment and sense of betrayal.
Strange products of the day, I found out what a Fahnestock clip is. Remember these from your electric train? They cost nearly 50 cents each. Make your own. There is also an “arc welder” light for your train set. When put inside a model house, it flickers to simulate a welding torch through the window. I may build one just because I can.
Next, JP was on the line. Last Wednesday before breakfast, we stopped in at the Shack to pay his phone bill. I was over at the electronics section when he called me to look up his phone number for the clerk. As I rounded the corner, cell in hand, I witnessed the clerk holding JP’s phone and heard him state to JP, “That’s okay, I can get it.”
After breakfast, JP forgot to pick up the phone and he returned today. The clerk is saying JP gave him the wrong phone number and therefore he has to pay for the service again. When JP objected, the clerk threatened to call the police. Bad move. I advised JP to pay it and deal with the headquarters later. He can’t lose. I was personally present that first day and heard all that is required.
What about that Miami club meeting I was going to attend, the weather settled that for me? Another record rainfall. I can tell when the lagoon forms across the main driveway she’s gonna be a wet one. Maybe next week if there is another meeting of that club, meaning their descriptions read like an amateur group whereas we are already on a war footing. But groups of people have something we don’t—oodles of moolah.
Right now my perfect gal would own an 11/64ths drill bit. One thing guys might agree on is after as certain age, women are all about money. The biggest lie in the dating world is that women want romance and companionship. I wonder if they regress to that because most men are pitiful poor company. Well, then lady, don’t marry the boring one. Nobody wants to live uncomfortably, but the trouble starts when comfort is redefined with dollar signs. I’ve slept in perfectly luxurious $30 motels.
You know, I’ll be somebody has done a study on the different way women behave about money once their charms are squandered. But change they do, from going out for dinner because they like the guy to going out for dinner because they are hungry or lazy or don’t feel like cooking. And the comfortable knowledge they have that some guy will always pay for it. I almost never take women out to dinner until I know them quite well.
Last, this new diet is indeed more than a change of food. I can eat a plate of vegetables and still be famished. Rest period becomes fitful, you wake up thinking of food. I can detect any barbeque within twenty blocks. This time the diet is also a change of habit where one slip-up means the deal is off. One could deduce it works by the expedient of depriving the system of the raw materials required to manufacture triglyceride.
ADDENDUM
Buddy Holly. I’m sorry, all you [Holly] fans, but I didn’t even hear a lot of his music until it was covered twenty years later by the born-millionaire Linda Ronstadt. What? You didn’t know her grandfather invented the rubber ice-cube tray? Don’t be talking to me about environment, she is not self-made. For a start, I was way too young for the Elvis era. I listened to Ronstadt in the late 70s because for reasons unknown I thought she was Australian. I never even played Holly until I was in my mid-thirties, and even then I considered it corny. I still do.
The video documentary is a near total sham despite overall accuracy to detail. Take a close look at this still from the movie. The equipment is pristine but any real bass player could tell you instantly what is wrong if not laughable on stage left. In an historic sense, this depiction could hardly be more wrong while managing to capture a good thick slab of what the masses believe playing in a band is all about.
This photo shows many of the false notions that are prevalent with bands right down to today. I won’t delve into it, but I have to laugh at the uniforms, particularly how the “backup” members are dressed like Amtrak porters. Who knows, maybe I am the first to question why certain musicians are always pictured in front of the others. There are at least twenty inaccuracies in this single picture resulting from how rigid and ritualized bands have become in the public eye.
In the movie, Holly never once lugged his own gear even when riding the bus. Must be nice. He bulldozed all opposition, single-handedly abolished musical apartheid in America, and had the foresight to use wireless stage gear thirty years before it was even invented. The video is an admirable effort by non-musicians who must have hired an inner city guitar player to arrange 90% of the scenes. And he did so to his own liking For instance, every last crisis in the band [is depicted as] sprung from them non-singing non-guitar-playing backup bozos who just will not learn their place. That is, from anyone but the guitar player and his ego.
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Return Home
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This beautiful sunset is something I’ll never see. It is on Mars. We aren’t there because NASA betrayed us. Sold out for thirty years being more interested in keeping their paychecks than exploring. The shuttle was so useless, they had entire departments who strained their brains to come up with “experiments” to justify the waste. You know the old joke of why the shuttle exhaust was so hot because it was really burning bales of thousand dollar bills.
I overheard some laughter concerning the degree of stupidity that was worse than usual during a beauty contest. I looked and found this picture of Miss Utah. She’s not only stupid, but in my book, ugly too. If this is what twenty-one looks like, I don’t want to see her at thirty-one. She looks like Miss Utah’s mother. Completely plastic, she has that body type that will go to seed fast. Her arms are already going to flab.
