Still getting used to the new Blogger interface... I am about to go and buy 2 cans of Fosters Lager in the oilcan style dispensers.
I have found that drinking 2 beers each evening, while not "drinking to elevation," as Ben Franklin warned us all against doing, gives me calories, and a lot of B vitamins, and I haven't been waking up depressed, and I might have even gained a couple pounds.
Ben Franklin's "morning question" that he asked himself, right before washing up and eating his breakfast, was: "What good can I do today?"
So, I have been asking myself the same morning question but just asking it in the early afternoons lately.
Ben Franklin also said: "Eat not to dullness; along with drink not to elevation."
More GIMP editor magic, using "filters."
Now to grab the umbrella and the bike and get the 2 beers.
I should come back here and get 2 solid hours of practice in, using the metronome; and then will go back to work on getting something that I can post here.
Besides charcoal drawings that took me all of 8 minutes to do...
By Otto Sinding (1842-1909) - Painting by Otto Sinding, Public Domain, Link
Sweyn Forkbeard, up to his tricks, circa 1002
It is already Sunday afternoon.
I have been working on musical projects, and yet I have nothing ready to post up here.
I recently went to the old mp3 hosting site where I originally uploaded the very first pieces of music that I did with the first laptop I ever owned.
The laptop: "my old beat up laptop," had been mailed to me in St. Augustine, Florida by a guy named Martin Wright, of West Virginia.
The first recording, I made using the built in microphone in the thing, with it sitting on my lap, as I played the guitar and harmonica.
Not an ideal setup, as I had to be careful not to let the laptop fall off my knees, on top of trying to play the two instruments, and sing.
But, I have retrieved all those old mp3 recordings, and they are not as bad as I thought they would be; at least they show "effort."
It was an appropriate starting point for someone like me, who likes to start at the very bottom and climb all the way to the top, type of thing.
Starting Somewhere In The Middle
When I was in sixth grade, there appeared, about halfway through the year, a large box that was propped up on kind of a pedestal, that was divided into 60 compartments.
Each compartment held one of a set of carefully graded units for the teaching of reading and comprehension.
There was a long passage to be read, followed by the typical multiple choice questions about the subject matter, with an essay assignment; to be completed on a separate sheet of paper and to be between 500 and 1,000 words.
Reingold Elementary, Now Solar Powered?
But, the cool thing (I thought) was that this Placement Test was designed to determine which unit, out of the 60, any student would be able to begin at and, in effect, skip over a lot of material.
If you were really a dim bulb, like Billy Brown, well, you might have to start on unit 5, like he had to, then work your way up towards number 60.
Billy was the first instance of an allegorical character to come along in my life, because he was literally the "brown"est skinned kid in our class of about 30. In the tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne, he could aptly have been named Young Dumbboy Browne.
To get a passing grade (of D) Billy would have had to at least reach something like unit 25, whereupon he would have drug himself up to a sixth grade level of reading and comprehension
He probably didn't, because he was that dumb.
He was the kind of kid who would huff model glue in his spare time, while others might be assembling the actual model with it.
Billy always wore a crew cut and, only now do I think back and wonder if it was because of the fact that he was a mulatto that he didn't want his hair to grow out and give him away with its tell-tale kinkiness. It was already bad enough to have to be the brownest kid in a class of upper middle class whites.
Debbie Richard was equally brown, but she was a beautiful Latina looking girl, who fell somewhere in the middle of the pack as far as how smart she was. Her brown hair fell in curls to her shoulders; no source of shame to her, there...
By grade six, the kids who hadn't learned to read and write were beggining to stick out like sore thumbs (or like a feces floating in a pool amidst rolls of toilet paper, as one black kid described his feelings on the subject to me once).
Billy Brown had distinguished himself, through scores like 9 or 13, achieved infamously by him on typical tests.
My connection to him came about because often Miss Hayford, our teacher, would wind up throwing both mine and Billy's scores out, in order to massage the bell curve into a more manageable shape, preparing to "scale" the grades.
Miss Hayford was a large woman with unruly blond hair that fell halfway down her back. She usually wore "moo moo" dresses; but was a very nice teacher. I suppose she let her size do the yelling and threatening for her, so she could be as soft-spoken as she likes.
Some of the boys nicknamed her "Haystack Calhoun," after a professional wrestler who was on the scene at the time, but this was just because of her size, combined with the phonetic similarity of the two names, and a modicum of creativity from the boys.
Haystack Calhoun (left) at work
Sometimes Miss Hayford would throw out Peter Capute's or Patricia Donlon's on the high end of the spectrum; but it was always Billy Brown's that got tossed off the low end -as an anomaly; something not to be factored in as being a representation of the class as a whole. Maybe that one kid hadn't slept the night before; and maybe that other kid has an unnatural ability in the subject that the rest of the kids shouldn't be held up to, type of thing...
Scaling was unheard of in the private schools; the theory being that a kid needs to become aware that he is only absorbing 48 percent of the material; because The World is certainly going to notice. Better to have your feelings hurt than to be sent off to college, where a rude awakening awaits you if you are Billy Brown.
If the class average on a test was 58%, then that would become the criteria for a grade of C, denoting an average student.
The 17 percentage points would be added to everyone's score, so that the kid that got a 58 would then become a C student, sanctioned by association with 75% having been (arbitrarily?) chosen as what the average student should be able to perform on a test relative to having retained that amount of knowledge, out of the pool of knowledge that had been available, to have answered 3 quarters of the questions correctly, that is average.
This was most likely to make the school system appear to be doing at least a passable job of passing the kids along.
So, the fraud was perpetrated that we were an average class of average kids who would then be shuffled along to the next grade, with the hopes that, by the time they graduate high school, they will have at least learned to read and write, but to move them along to the next grade to make room for the younger tikes coming along, none the less.
But, I suppose, just keep giving the kid reading and writing, over and over, even up to and including in the 12th grade if you have to. That would be a worthy goal for the teachers in the world's public schools of the Billy Browns of the world.
Reiterate things that are eventually going to give the Billy Browns an education in the things that they had not yet mastered in the first few grades.
That way, they might be able to know how many eggs they will have left after they use 4 of them, and be able to do it in their heads.
Keeping a kid in the school system all the way up to past his 17th birthday is going to become quite a challenge now that the veil has been pulled off of a totally online education system, by the virus.
Who is going to want to go back to a bricks and mortar school system, now that it has been demonstrated that you can really learn just as much from Google as you can from any school system
Plus, you can insulate the pupil, from any hidden agenda or bias that might be harbored in the school's staff, like teachers trying to turn your kid into a socialist, for example.
The used to be that schools were equal parts day care centers, and classroom, because parents in a nuclear family worked.
This was pretty much the dynamic in the early 1970's. The nuclear family was still pretty strong back then, if having just one Billy Brown out of 30 kids is any indication. The Story of the Box of 50 Compartments, continued...
Back to Reingold Elementary School, which I attended from grades 4 through 6.
My father had carefully vetted Reingold, which was where kids from my neighborhood that didn't go to private schools went.
That wasn't very many of them.
The Ryan's kids went there, and that was probably because their dad was a politician, as well as a real estate mogul (by the standards of our city) and it would have been hypocritical for him to get on the stump and talk about how excellent our school system is, yet send his kids elsewhere.
It was a brand new school, and it was only a mile and a half from our house.
I remember that the principal, Mr. Erickson, had assured him that he ran a tight ship, with an iron hand, and that he had zero tolerance of misbehaving kids, and that it was a good school, I guess. It was decided that it felt safe to send me to the public school, for just 3 years.
I was 9 years old, and that is still a little young for kids to be attacking each other with knives or guns. That stuff doesn't really begin until at least high school....
Plus, given the school's location, it drew upon mostly upper middle class white neighborhoods. The parents of these kids ran tight ships with iron hands and instilled good values and work ethics in their kids before they even left the house.
But the two mile radius around the school, where they culled their students from, was big enough to encompass some of the more economically depressed parts of our city.
And, so, enter Billy Brown, wearing an ordinary sweatshirt, old sneakers, and apparently the owner of no more than 5 tee shirts.
If his homework hadn't gotten done, it might have been because his parents had been fighting, or there had been some other drama, like blue and red flashing lights and paramedics and cops radios squawking in the living room, to have distracted him from it.
Billy was the darkest skinned kid in our class of 30, with the exception of Debbie Richard, who was a beautiful brown Latina girl with brown eyes.
Still, in my 9 year old mind, I didn't correlate Billy's skin color with his very poor performance in school. I figured he was just one of those kids that had already started drinking and smoking pot, or huffing gasoline.
And it never occurred to me until now, that the crew cut that he always wore (while the rest of the boys had varying degrees of long hair the fallout from the recently concluded decade of the 1960's) was perhaps a way for him to hide the fact that he was a mulatto and would be given away as such, were he to let his hair grow out.
Billy Failed By Teachers
But, It's hard to memorize things like "12 minus 5 is 7" and then memorize "12 minus 8 is 4" separately, as if they aren't related, and then have to memorized every other combination involving 12.
I think Mr. Brown became overwhelmed, and had already given up on "education" at the ripe age of 9.
He probably should have been taught with a more kin-esthetic approach. The teacher should have brought in a dozen eggs, and given demonstrations like:
"OK Billy, I've got 12 eggs here, and I'm going to take 4 of them out; how many are left in the carton?" type of thing.
At least that is what worked for me, being able to visualize numbers.
I got the highest grades in the class, or maybe 2nd behind a kid named Peter Capute, whose father was a detective.
A detective with the Fitchburg Police and so it is assumed he was a smart guy; and so was his kid.
Detective Capute would actually have to visit me a couple years later in that capacity, after my best neighborhood friend and I had left robbery notes in the trash cans at the local bank.
We had some kind of business in there because we were 12 year olds who were already working in some capacity and had bank accounts. This was back when the bank would give you a little book with your transactions stamped on it; but most notably, there would be a column labeled "interest" and you would actually see nice amounts of money appearing there to be added to your balance as time went by. The bank where we were at was paying something like 5.2% interest, compounded monthly, but I digress.
We were in there putting our less than ten bucks into our accounts and started messing around at the table and passing notes which we thought were funny: "all the money, or you and pimple face get it!!" or "they'll be finding pieces of you in the air conditioners filter if you make a sound" -just regular ol' humor to amuse ourselves with.
But, apparently when the bank custodian empties the trash, he also reads it.
The employees were worried that someone had been right on the brink of pulling an armed heist of the place, but had perhaps lost their nerve (over the prospect of blood and gore) and had just tossed their notes and gone home. But, maybe to try it again; the next day...type of thing.
But that would mean I would be meeting Detective Capute who had compared the handwriting on the notes against everyone's who had done business with the bank that day, and had dropped by my house and my friend Dave's to verify that it had just been us joking around (I think he made reference to some law that he could have arrested us under, but said that he wasn't going to because we were just 12 years old, and starting out as a felon is no way to begin life, or something like that...
"One false move and fat ass in the red dress gets splattered!!"
Peter Capute would have been attending the public school because his dad was a public servant and his going there was sort of a vote of confidence for the entire "system" itself.
For that reason, the Ryan's, whose dad was a real estate mogul, but also a politician, went there, even though their family could afford to send them to private schools. It would be hypocritical to get up on a stump and extol the merits of "our school system," but send your own kids off to a country day school at $1,200 a year, per kid -a lot of money in 1973...and hypocritical.
And, then, you would have the disciplinary problem kids, like myself, whose family could afford to send him to private schools, but who was seen as being incorrigible in the eyes of nuns, whose expectations were that their kids would sit up straight, with their feet squarely on the floor, eyes front and center, and uttering not a word to anyone the whole time that class was in session.
I have blogged about the time I was so deeply focused upon melting a handful of crayons into a waxen blob that I hadn't noticed that the bell had rung and the rest of my contemporaries were out at recess.
But, that was just one day in my life as a parochial school kid.
There was the time that I found some charred bits of wood on the ground next to the cinder block maintenance garage at one edge of the recess yard, and found that they could be used to draw and write on the wall of that garage and then spent the rest of the recess doing so -cars, people, flowers, clouds, birds, the sun, a tree, a squirrel- they were all there in black charcoal as I sat in the principal's office, my knuckles still stinging from the brass ruler, hearing the principal (Sister Mary Agnes, was it?) vaguely threatening my mom with a bill being sent to our house to cover the cost of pressure washing the garage (I think they had just decided to let the rain eventually rinse it off because it really didn't look that bad, depending upon which school official was looking at it).
Then, there was the armpit fart concert...
It had been the first really nice day of the year -probably in mid April- and Sister Theresa had rotated open all of the windows to allow warm fresh air in, redolent with the fragrances of fecund mud, cat tails and evaporated snow, all to the sound robins chirping.
This had inspired me to jump up on my desk and regale my classmates with an impromptu under arm fart piece, based on a Strauss waltz , but intended to be like the Rite of Spring.
The encore to that was another trip to the principal's office.
But those were just a couple days that I remember right off. It really seemed to me that I got in trouble every single day at that school, involving a trip to the principal's office.
So, there were kids like myself at Reingold -ones who didn't get along with nuns.
But, Billy seemed to have resigned himself to the fact that he was dumb; it had become kind of his calling card. He would take a seat at the back of the classroom on the first day of school, type of thing; as far from the action of learning as he could be.
One impression of him that kind of stuck with me was when, during one of our after-lunch record playing sessions, someone put on "Bad Moon on the Rise," by Creedence Clearwater Rivival, which evoked an immediate response from Billy, which involved him smiling a dopey smile and bobbing his head along with the repetitive and simple beat of it.
To me it was the "See Spot run" of songs.
No wonder Creedence sells so many records; they are limited only by how many Billy Browns are out there...
But the simple song played in straight quarter note rhythm: "Dum dum dum dum (dumb dumb dumb dumb)" and Billy Brown, wearing the grin, bobbed his head in dopey approval -the "bad moon on the rise" being something he was in tune with, while maybe "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," was over his head.
Oddly, this association that I made between the more dim witted individuals, and the music they like later became a stumbling block to me, as I attempted to write what I hoped would be "more sophisticated" music. It kind of drew me away from the fundamentals before I had mastered them enough.
I eventually realized that there is a little bit of Billy Brown in everyone and that even the most majestic of pieces of music contain some basic elements as their "backbone."
Beethoven utilized straight quarter note rhythm; he just didn't make an entire 4 minute song out of nothing but it.
But, back to the graded educational packages, Billy would have started somewhere around Unit 5, which was basically a review of 2nd grade reading skills, while my aptitude test results had placed me at unit 52.
So, I could start with unit 53, and earn an A, just by ascending to unit 60, and then take the rest of the year off, I guessed. This was a full 4 units ahead of Tammy Kendall, who came in second at 48.
But what happened was I began what was to become the nagging life-long habit of resting upon my laurels.
Comfortably atop the class; I began to goof off, and it wasn't until I learned that Tammy was about to begin unit 58, and would most likely be the first in the class to finish all the modules, that I got back to work.
A couple of weeks had passed and it was our teacher, Miss Hayford who had pointed out to me that I hadn't done anything except sit there complaisantly "at the top" of the class, and that I had fallen into second place, behind Tammy Kendall, and was about to be overtaken by Julie Condon and Peter Capute.
I did the same thing after I first tried to play lead on an electric guitar.
Finding that I had some innate ability, and could play what I thought was some cool sounding notes; I put the thing down; figuring that the ability would always be there "in my bag of tricks" and it wouldn't be until years later I would learn that practice actually makes a person better; no matter how much ability they start with.
The bugs seem to have been worked out of the new Blogger interface, and I take back what I wrote about their focus having moved to mobile devices at the expense of the desktop user's experience...
All the original bells and whistles are there, but are just a little harder to find by someone who relies upon the English language.
Things like the button that used to be labelled "New Post" have been replaced with the "international" symbol of the circle with a plus sign.
This makes sense, considering Blogger is on the "worldwide" web, and only an English language chauvinist would object to everything not being "clearly" labelled in English
The toolbox that spans across the top is loaded with even more features.
The box with the word "Normal" in it allows you to make a heading or sub heading out of anything you highlight; and this automatically makes a keyword out of it.
So, when people are searching for "24 Hours Sober," for example, they might see this post near the top of the results.
This would be more helpful to me, as that subject might be of interest to someone who is in the same boat as myself, as far as trying to quit drinking, and it might make a regular reader out of them.
My blog post titles don't tend to serve me well, there.
They are usually double entendres, and innuendos. (an innuendo being the "Italian word" for an enema, for example).
So, the new Blogger interface gets an A (as in apple) from me!
The Apple of My Eye
Lilly with her Apple
I have been resetting my phone and changing the tones on it so much lately, that, as I sat on my bed and heard it chiming repetitively, I thought that it was a string of texts, coming in from Jacob, whose phone always splits longer ones into a group of shorter ones.
But, when I looked at it, I saw that it was an incoming call from none other than Lilly!
She had gotten the piece of cardboard that I'd left on her windshield 4 days ago, and had waited until she thought I might be up, which meant at high noon.
In the old days, I would be playing on weekend nights until around 1 or 2 AM on her stoop, and wouldn't be getting to sleep until about 4 AM. So, she was allowing me 8 hours of sleep before waking me with her call.
She said that she too had feared I might be dead, and had lost my phone number.
She told me that I could play, but I would have to wear a mask, and that I should check with the Arts Council, or the Musician's Union to see if I am allowed to do so first; and it was pretty much the usual from her.
She tends to reiterate things, but the Musician's Union thing is new from her.
She told me that the COVID19 is "a terrible death," that involves the sinuses, asked me (a reiteration of) if I am registered to vote, and then went on to say: "We need to get Trump out of office," saying that he was a traitor, and that his handling of the pandemic shows that he doesn't care about the people.
Lillian was living in The Big Apple in 1990, and seems to have taken the Marla Maples thing pretty hard.
Things like the de-funding the police and then having the constitution of the United States torn up and replaced by "the black constitution" (loosely based upon Venezuela) are kind of worrisome to me.
I think that Trump will win in 2020, and then Ivanka will be elected in 2024, giving the country it's first woman president and a Jew in one fell swoop.
Donald will be her Advisor -one who also runs the country.
Then, after her 8 years are up and the United States is great enough to have kept the threat of China in check, then....
I was up, a little bit late -my clock said: 9:35 AM- and I immediately had to go to this blog and see what I had written the night before.
I lean to the left in order to try to read this weeks edition of the ever thinner Gambit, the free rag that I have used to start many a cooking fire with, when I lived outdoors. Its weight loss has been due to the removal of all the listings for live music, and for restaurants, etc. I can see it "evolving" towards being just a big sheet of paper with "Black Lives Matter" on it; folded in the middle.
I was thankful that I had deleted the bulk of the post from the night before about a half hour after writing it
It had been written in anger, defiance and ingratitude.
This is threatening to become a regular thing -the morning deletion of what my drunk self posted the night before. But, it is the drinking that is threatening to become a regular thing..
Here it is a beautiful sunny Monday morning; and in the light of day it is clearer to me that "the drinking" is, or is becoming "the problem" once again.
Friday, A Bike Ride
I took a leisurely bike ride Friday, to pick up the money that my friend Ted Broughey sent me. He doesn't want to take any credit for having done so. There he is in the photo to the right..
A leisurely bike ride, with a stop at the first store along the way for a 16 ounce can of Coors "Banquet" beer led to kind of an adventure, as I continued on into the French Quarter, where I had ran into some old familiar faces that I hadn't seen since the day before the start of the pandemic.
Xavier, one of the workers at the Rouses Market on Royal Street had put the bug in my ear about the 600 dollars per week that unemployed people here have been getting, since the start of April.
That made sense to me, because there has been no looting or things being burned down, and there doesn't seem to be people getting mugged by The Starving as soon as they step out of their houses not brandishing a weapon.
Then, I had gone to the spot where I used to play (the Lilly Pad) and was pleasantly surprised to see Lilly's SUV parked across the street from her house.
There were 2 beautiful girls of about 18 sitting on the "other" stoop from the one I play next to. Neither were wearing masks.
If I Only Had A Brain
By then, I was working on my second can of beer, and that was a larger 24 ounce can than the first one.
The small one had been $1.99 and the big one, $2.29, so it had been a no-brainer; yup, quite a no-brainer indeed...
I asked the girls if they had a pen I could use to write a note to leave on Lilly's windshield. This led to us talking for about an hour, during which I told them how I used to play "over there" and about other interesting things.
As I polished off the 24 ounce can of beer, I eventually had to ask them to excuse the fact that I wasn't used to drinking, and that that day was like a "falling off the wagon" one for me, or whatever the term is.
I left the note on Lilly's windshield, not sure, even now what I wrote, or how she will take it. I remember putting: "I have been praying for your soul because I thought you might have died..." in it.
Having still the $160 (minus the cost of the 2 beers) in my pocket, I offered a dollar to the girl who had lent me the pen "for the ink," but she declined to take it, and then, before they got up to walk off, the other one handed me a 5 dollar bill.
It was the first 5 dollars I had made in the Quarter since April 7th, I think it was, I'll have to check my records (older posts).
The effect that had on me was to make me feel like the French Quarter was going to take care of me one way or another, somehow, but always through some kind of magic.
I felt kind of like I had been tipped for being a colorful character.
Several guys who had walked by had said "You're beautiful," to the girls while I was talking to them. And one short black guy, whom I had seen before wanted to use one of their phones. They refused him, probably thinking, as I was: what was to prevent him from just running away with the thing.
Saturday, I went to the Jefferson Feed store, intent upon getting Harold a can of something more exotic than the Friskies that has been his staple.
I had promised Ted that I would do so, after I texted him back to thank him for the cash, and he asked me to send him a picture of Harold eating whatever I got.
Then, I went over to the Winn Dixie, the "other" grocery store in our area, where I grabbed a 24 ounce can of Yuengling lager, out of their "beer cave" and then went over to the meat case, where I noticed that they had some great prices on pork, but that it was all labelled "previously frozen."
Turning to a Pakistani looking guy of about 20 years old, and wearing sandals, I said: "Previously frozen; that means I would have to eat it all tonight, cause you don't want to freeze it twice, doesn't it?"
He then kind of rudely said, "I have no idea, but I want get this," as he advanced towards a pack of pork, that I was standing kind of in front of, with the implication that he just wanted me to move and get out of his way.
All of the things that I dislike about the "generation z" kind of bubbled to the surface as I looked him up and down, and saw in him a selfish special snowflake whose smartphone was probably his best and only true friend, and whose despicable social "skills" were a product of him probably only interacting with other humans out of the necessity to shop for groceries after he had worked up and appetite from poking his thumbs at a screen.
I just mumbled "Pfff..generation z waste of flesh" and refrained from going any further and perhaps saying something like "Of course you would have no idea...your just f***ing wandering around in a pair of sandals like a beach bum...or some wannabe terrorist"
He reminded me of Travis Blaine, who stayed with me for a couple weeks and wound up paying me in sugar packets from McDonald's when it was all said and done; one of the most selfish f***s I've ever met. (there are posts about him that I need to move to the "biographys" section; maybe after making them even more scathing in their indictments of the guy.
"Now, to me....in my opinion, I'm like; OK, I've always been kind of; what most people don't realize about me is; ok, I have to take you back to when I was 12 and lived in New Jersey; see, where I got my views about certain things; and I'm gonna get to some of that in a minute, but I've always been, I like to think,-and you may or may not agree- people have different opinions of my views, but I'm gonna explain some of them..you see, another thing a lot of people don't realize about me is.....like when they first meet me; now first I have to tell you about the school I went to as a kid, I don't know if you've ever heard about St. Mark's Academy in Long Island, but it's basically one of the highest rated schools not just in the country, but in the world, and you're probably gonna understand a few things about me more clearly in light of the fact that I was considered a genius by the time I was 5 years old; and that is interesting, but what is most interesting about me being considered a genius is...ok, some more background: my mother worked long hours and used to let me sit and Google stuff all day on the computer, so I wound up supplementing my education just sitting there, and some of the stuff I was Googling was not what a normal 10 year old kid would be Googling; I mean it attracted the attention of some real academics; That being said....and again, I'll fill in more details as I go along. See, I've always thought.....and the story I'm about to tell you will make this clear; but that story needs to be told after I lay out some more groundwork....When I first got to St. Mark's the instructors were like: (and on and on .etc. etc. etc.)
One time I was getting ready to record something on the guitar when he interrupted me, but the microphone was still on.
He went on for 45 minutes before I finally had to tell him that I needed to get back to recording, and he could finish his story later.
At that point, he retreated to the couch where he sat with his arms folded across his chest, staring straight ahead and breathing a bit heavily; visibly upset that I would have opted to do whatever it was, rather than listen to his story.
That Travis Blaine
I later played back the 45 minutes during which I had gotten only about 5 words in myself, and I was able to count something like 150 occurrences of the words "me" or "I."
That Travis Blaine -the one who, after I had not gotten a job that I was hoping for, had never even had it cross his mind to recommend to me that I could do the micro tasking work for Amazon that he did. It wasn't until I asked "What about me being able to work like you do?" that he piped up as if the thought had just occurred to him. That Travis Blaine...
And so, I was looking this guy up and down and seeing more and more of a resemblance to Blaine the more I looked.
I was, once again, surprised at the level of anger and hatred that seems to dwell "just below the surface" of me.
It was probably fomented due to the most obvious factor, just like the meaning of dreams is usually related to whatever the person was thinking about when they fell asleep; and that would be the internal tug-o-war over the can of Yuengling in my hand, which is what I had been grappling with when I made the ill fated decision to consult another human being about previously frozen pork.
The fact that I had decided to drink a second consecutive day was probably in conflict with my core values.
I decided to grab a shank bone instead, to make bone marrow soup rather than risk wasting some of the 88 cent per pound pork steaks.
I was still doing the self examination over why I was so pissed off at the special snowflake for having dismissed me so rudely, and was thinking about how by drinking alcohol, I am depriving myself of a sense of superiority over the likes of Leslie Thompson, whom is someone that I would look down my nose at, the times I had run into him over the 3 year period that I had gone without touching a drop.
Who was that masked man?
I even told him once, when I found myself behind him at the register of the Unique Grocery store, after he had stood there with a stony face, ignoring me (there's that peeve again) after I greeted him: "I give you about 3 more years to live, you're drinking yourself to death, you look like you've aged 5 years since I saw you a year ago; you'll probably never live to see the year 2020."
Oddly, such a terrible sounding thing to say to someone, had actually made him smile. Was that the nicest thing anyone had said to him all day?
I was remembering this exact incident, when I turned to my right to see none other than Leslie Thompson about 6 feet away from me, or at least I thought it was him behind the mask.
I decided to ignore him, and then walked off toward the cat food.
But then, I started to think about it.
I remembered another time when I was trying to quit drinking and had managed to go something like 28 days before breaking down. That time, I literally had bumped into Leslie when coming out of the store with the drink that was going to ruin the campaign.
I thought it odd that the same thing had kind of happened again. I thought it at least a minor coincidence that Leslie was all the way up in my neighborhood, when I had never seen him there before.
I changed my mind, and decided that if I still saw him in the store somewhere, I would walk up to him and greet him as warmly as possible, "Hey, Leslie, how's the virus been treating you?" or something.
I would be as friendly as possible and then leave it up to him whether or not to ignore me.
So, sure enough, the Leslie look-alike was at one of the registers with his back toward. But, as soon as he spoke, I knew it wasn't him but, rather, his doppelganger; pretty darned close.
I was tempted to ask him if he was related to a Leslie Thompson, but then had misgivings about where that would get me. He looked pretty angry, and I had had my fill of people returning rudeness for my friendliness. I was going to be drinking beer and didn't need anything to stew over while doing so.
The Loaf That Spoke To Me
So, I went outside and was unlocking my bike when, along comes the Leslie look-alike. He still had an ornery look about him, and didn't even look at me; probably thought I was about to skeeze him for a cigarette. He had stopped his cart about 10 feet from me.
But, when he stepped out of sight a bit, I had a chance to look at his groceries.
Something about the loaf of bread melted my heart for some reason along with the eggs and the lettuce. It was just sitting there, the loaf of bread; it spoke to me on some level I can't explain. I found that I liked the guy. Maybe because everything in his cart was so normal, bread, milk, eggs, cheese.
So, after polishing off the 24 ounce can of beer as I stood there, and even though he had stood there the whole time and not acknowledged me, as I was shoving off on my bike, I said a hearty: "God bless you; I see you've got your daily bread!"
At this point, he began to speak.
He said that it was the most he had ever paid in his life for groceries, but that he had been down to a can of beans and a can of tomato sauce.
I asked him if he was sure they had put his "rewards" number in "'cause their prices are ridiculous without the card..."
Yeah, they had swiped his rewards card...
He then went on and said that he had made some tiny amount of money too much in order to have gotten the 600 dollars per week.
"Oh, yeah, a friend of mine was just asking me yesterday (Xavier) if I was getting it, that was the first I'd ever heard of it. But, I'm a street musician (showed him the callouses on my fingers) so I'm up the creek without a paddle with a headwind.."
No, not really, you can get it. Hey, they don't check. These agencies don't communicate with each other, so you can just about tell them anything, and in this situation they're so swamped; they're gonna just send out the check. Tell 'em you were making a couple hundred a week -don't tell them over 540 a week 'cause that's where I screwed up, but tell them that because of the virus you're out of a gig; you should be able to get at least the minimum..."
"Wow, thank you so much," I said.
And then his cab arrived simultaneously with me shoving off on my bike the second time. "Like a Swiss watch," I remarked about that.
If I get the check, and I see him again here, I'll buy him at least 20 or 30 bucks worth of food.
So, I decided to take a long, slow bike ride, after waking up Friday morning, with a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach, realizing that I was basically out of money and that I couldn't see any forthcoming.
After staring at my wall for I while, I finally brought myself to call my mom.
It wasn't with the intent to beg for money, but primarily out of concern over the fact that my previous 2 calls to her had gone to voice mail.
I would mention the fact that I was out of money, as that was the most pressing matter at hand, but only in the course of normal conversation.
I called her, and immediately my cheap government phone started to glitch so that both of us were hearing each other in fragments.
This, I believe is because Google wants to sell a lot of stuff, and is using its "Android" operating system as the platform for it, but their pitch is geared towards newer phones.
Speech through mine can become garbled when Google is trying to simultaneously transfer the call, and eavesdrop on every word spoken at the same time, so as to ultimately tailor advertisements to myself and whomever I'm talking to, based upon our communication.
The screen of the thing basically becomes a billboard for advertisements that are obviously targeted at small minded individuals, with tawdry displays that are maybe just one evolutionary step above the "you are the millionth person to come along, click here to claim your prize" type of eye-rolling inducing ads.
I have never played a game on a phone in my life, nor do I intend to.
But, my phone was apparently owned, before me, by a black female in Houston Texas.
I think so because the ads that the thing becomes inundated with, not long after the "factory reset"s that I frequently do to it, are targeted at such an individual.
No, I really wouldn't like some device to air brush my face to cover my blemishes, nor would I really like to "fix" my credit score so I can become fodder for predatory money loaners; you must think I'm a black female in Houston; and a vain, superficial, shallow and materialistic one, at that -someone who would fain click on your ads.
"They're vulnerable," said my friend Howard Westra, with regard to supermarkets having merchandise set aside in conspicuous locations like at the end of aisles.
"The black people see it there, and they just scoop it up; the stuff could even be priced higher than what it is in the regular aisles. It's peculiar..."
I never bothered to personalize the phone, giving it access to my location or anything like that. I use it to text, and as a hot spot, and to call my mom, that's it.
I still get the occasional call, asking for "Dee," and the front panel has been displaying the weather for Houston since I got it.
But, luckily it cleared up enough for me to talk to my mom, who said that she could send some money, but that it wouldn't be too much, and that I would have to find some source of income, rather than rely upon her, and that "the Lord helps those who help themselves.." I had expected so much before even calling her.
As we were talking, there came the chiming noise to signal that I had gotten a text message.
Upon hanging up, I saw "$160 waiting for you at Western Union" having been texted by my friend Ted in Boston, whom I had been talking to, off and on, but whom I hadn't even asked for any money. I guess he just intuited my situation.
The day had started fortuitously as far as getting some money was concerned, but it was just getting started.
After a while, I figured I might as well go and get the $160 dollars, since I didn't even have 10 dollars left to my name, and couldn't even buy any more data to use this Internet.
So, I rode off.
Seeing that there was a Western Union sign at the Banks Meat Store, I stopped there and went to the kiosk.
After I got the stack of 20 dollar bills, I went and got a Coors beer out of the cooler. This was kind of a nod to my friend who had sent the money. In our recent conversations, which have resumed after not having spoken to one another since 2009, when I was in St. Augustine, Florida, he mentioned that he was in the habit of drinking a couple beers before laying down every night, after working his job as a cameraman for channel 7 in Boston.
I could spend some of the money he sent on beer and hear his imaginary voice saying: "Yeah, man, get yourself a beer...or two!" whereas, should my mom send any, I will have to keep it in a separate pocket, because I would feel guilty spending any of it on beer.
I then rode off towards the French Quarter.
I had been curious about it, and I was in the mood to take a long slow bike ride. I planned upon getting another beer at the Unique store, and then riding down Royal Street, eventually going by the spot where I used to play almost every night.
I went into the Unique store and got the second beer. I had decided to get a more expensive one than the ones that the alcoholics, only concerned with alcohol content and not so much flavor, get.
This was probably like a flag for whatever skeezer started to walk towards me as soon as I stepped out of the store, and was getting on my bike.
I don't have to lock my bike at the Unique store because they all know me there, and all the skeezers know that they know me there, and if a skeezer stole my bike then the guy's at Unique would never let them skeeze in front of there again; and that would be devastating to the skeezer; it would ruin his livelihood.
One thing about the New Orleans skeezers is they know enough not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, and being barred from that particular block which is fabled for drunken rich guys handing out hundred dollar bills just to show off to a girl he might be with, just for a bike that was left unlocked, is something that they know better than to do. The ones that didn't; you just don't see them there anymore.
This is just one of the perks of having known those guys since coming here in 2010 and having gradually gained their respect after they had seen me stopping in there every night, with my guitar on my back, going out to play; being kind of a crusty homeless guy who lived under the wharf the first few years, who would buy alcohol, but then eventually seeing me show up in better and cleaner clothes, and not buy alcohol, but maybe rolling papers, then return hours later, sober and with incrementally larger wads of money coming out of my pockets as time went by, buying only a Bang® energy drink, or a packet of kratom.
Respect is hard to come by, in the Quarter and, well the upshot is that I don't have to lock my bike there.
I rode on down Royal Street and realized something.
The entire French Quarter had become a law unto itself and had shunned all the advice from the governor.
It was business as usual.
Maybe half the people were wearing masks, but everything seemed to be open, or at least trying to be, and people were enjoying life.
Buskers were on their usual corners...and just then, I figured it out.
Let the governor make his proclamations that everyone in the state (except, wink wink, where most of the revenue from the state comes from) must wear a mask and practice "social distancing" and then watch as New Orleans does whatever the hell it pleases, as it has always done, what goes on here, stays here, type of thing. Now I get it. I just wish I wasn't so slow on the uptake. I even wonder if the images from the webcams showing nobody on the streets were static shots now.
Nobody who is quarantining themselves elsewhere will ever need to know that the party is back on in New Orleans. They will be in their houses getting all their dour news from the "media."
And, will this cause a spike here in COVID19 cases?
Maybe we can be the control for that particular experiment.
The Rouses Market was open, where Xavier yelled: "Daniel!" as I rode past.
I stopped and he asked me how I was doing.
When I said that I had almost run out of money before being rescued by my mom and a friend from Massachusetts, he said: "You're not getting the 600 dollars a week?"
"What 600 dollars a week?" I rejoined.
Xavier was the first person to tell me about the 600 dollars per week.
It figures.
I went on to the Lilly Pad, where I was pleasantly surprised to see Lilly's vehicle parked across from her house.
I had thought that she might have died.
I left a note on her windshield. I hope there is not some reason why she hasn't been calling me.
I had succeeded in reverting back to a sleep schedule that had me rising with the sun.
Before sleeping 8 hours, I had spent 10 hours writing the blog post of the previous day entitled: "Houses By Ponds," or something (I don't have it in front of me).
Somewhere, during the week, I had put in 14 hours working on a music project in Audacity, and this had pushed the sleep schedule back to where it belonged (for a person who had purposed "in his heart" to find a job of some kind).
But, this had not come without a price.
I Am Become Death
Now I know how the pilot of the Nola Gay felt as he was dropping the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
Because, I bought a couple of "roach motels," and placed one in the draw where I keep my silverware, and another in the cabinet under my sink.
After that, I couldn't help checking them every 15 minutes.
After about a half hour, the first hapless victim was stuck to the bottom of one, trying to run from me after I picked it up and it saw me. It must have been like one of those nightmares where it was trying to run but it was like it was stuck in some heavy kind of glue.
Maybe so many people have that nightmare because the cockroaches are actually the most intelligent life form on earth, barring even humans, and are trying to tell us something, through telepathy..
The next morning, there were about a half dozen trapped in the silverware drawer one, and about twice that in the one under the cabinet.
After one week, there was hardly any room left on the bottoms of either one, so I flipped them over in order to provide a "fresh" floor for them to stick to.
Eventually they were crammed in there like sardines, and I suspected that the newer members were roaches that were coming in to eat their own dead, attracted by the smell of death, and then had become trapped themselves.
That's what you get for wanting to eat your own dead. Even humans don't do that; they would boil them first...
I have seen fewer and fewer of them around the house, with the ones I do see being very small ones.
Very Little Wiggle Room
And, like the roaches trapped in the motel, I seem to have very little wiggle room, myself.
Things seem to fall apart very quickly after I fall into bad habits.
Like running out at 4 AM to get a bottle of wine, to return home with it and stay up another 8 hours getting things done, hoping that it will help me wind down and eventually get some rest.
The alcohol fueled rant against the employees at the Brown Derby
store was kind of like a bottom that I hit, which I have hopefully
ricocheted off of, and am now headed back (once again) in the right
direction.
I think I subconsciously do some things
to make matters so bad that I will guarantee myself saying: "enough is enough" and
committing myself to better habits.
A second bottle of wine might give me a
big enough headache in the morning, that I will go out with throbbing temples and put
all my cash into cat food, a big bag of kratom, data for my
hotspot, and stuff like laundry soap and potting soil, to insure that I won't be repeating the failed wine experiment
again.
That way, I will be set up to be clean and sober and busy, and only be able to "wish" I had the money for a bottle of wine.
Thankfully, things seem to fall back together just as quickly after I get back to better ways.
I woke up and went to the blog to clean up the post, then downed a bottle of prune juice in order to flush the entire past day out of me both literally and figuratively, then took a shower.
But, then it hit me like a punch in the stomach: I was just about out of money.
Dissociating? Hadn't Even Considered It, My Mind Was Busy Elsewhere...
When all of my focus had been upon the music project and the blog post, I might have been "dissociating."
This is a term that I first heard when I was being accused of doing it, back in 1992, when I was in jail in Palmer, Massachusetts.
I had been able to substantially reduce my stay at that jail by availing myself to the many programs offered there, to get inmates out of their cells and into counseling and job training, religious activities, etc.
An inmate could wind up "doing" only 12 days out of each month sentenced, if he were to load up his schedule with these kind of things.
This represented some kind of breakthrough in corrections, with the jail I was being held in being a trailblazer in this regard; behind the theory that just holding prisoners in cells for x amount of time does nothing to reduce their "recalcitrance rate," once they are released.
This was all very new at the time, and had to be backed up by studies and statistics, in order for the taxpayer's money to have been diverted into such programs.
But, an inmate had to have the appropriate charges in order to warrant his inclusion in certain programs.
For instance, I couldn't knock an additional 4 days per month off my time by attending the anger management program because (darn it!) I hadn't beaten my girlfriend, and in fact had no domestic violence on my rap sheet at all.
But, I was able to get into the Narcotics Anonymous program, by virtue of a pot charge, and the S.L.A.A. (sex and love addicts anonymous) program because of an indecent exposure charge (which is a story for another post).
But, I almost got removed from the computer skills program, where I was knocking 9 days per month off my time, because the counselor from the S.L.A.A. program witnessed me working on one of the computers in the lab, making some kind of database using Lotus 123, where I was entering the stats for every single NFL football player, with as many subcategories that I could think of.
This kept me very busy and the days flew by; and I was able, with a few keystrokes, to tell you how many punters that weigh over 200 pounds went to Notre Dame and were born in Kansas.
But, Roy Dudley, the counselor and college graduate himself, watched me from afar and became very concerned.
He thought that I was using the computer to "dissociate" and was considering having me removed from that program.
Because when you dissociate, your mind is a million miles away, and you might not even be aware that you are in jail, and so you are not in a position to ponder the consequences of the actions that have put you there, nor can you feel the utter helplessness, despair and remorse over what you did and take full responsibility for it.
I was using the computer as an escape, thought Roy. I was robbing the jail of its purpose.
I wondered if he wanted to take all of the books, and maybe even the chess boards out of the jail for this reason.
I had the same accusation leveled at me as early as third grade when, I was sitting at my desk melting some crayons into balls, using my body heat.
I was tapped on the shoulder by Sister Mary Theresa, whereupon I looked up to see that I was the only kid in the classroom. The recess bell had rung and the rest of the kids were out in the yard.
"Do you notice that your the only one in the classroom, you didn't hear the bell ring and all the other kids go out for recess?"
This cost me a trip to the principals office and a (worrying probably) call to my parents.
Maybe I kind of did see all the other kids go out to mill about the recess yard and pointlessly kick balls around; but I was onto something. I was busy...
Sister Mary Theresa and Roy Dudley were made for each other; too bad one is a nun and the other probably a fag...
Coming Next: Hope; the story that I set about to write after entitling the post, but before getting "busy" writing about other things, like atomic bombs...
This represent the achievement of having rotated my schedule around so that I was rising with the sun, rather than vice-versa.
By 8 o' clock, I had had a cup of coffee and one of kratom, and I opened up the piece of music I had done the day before in Audacity "just to listen to it."
14 hours later, I took a break from working on it, adding a second vocal and a little bit of lead guitar.
I found the spots where I had played through a section without making any glaring mistakes, and then repeated them 4 times, to replace the times I had gone through and either improvised a not so clever verse, or had flubbed a note on my brand new harmonica.
The mistakes came from my handling it with kid gloves, so as not to blow any notes out on it before I ever get a chance to go out and make 80 bucks playing it. There were spots where, had I had an audience reaching for their wallets to possibly throw a tip in my jar, I might have bent the hell out of a note, in order to wring as much emotion out of it as possible. But I was very conscious of the harp still being in its "break in" stage.
As I worked on the thing, ostensibly doing "Just one more thing" to it, while in the back of my mind thinking I was going to close it down and then go on Facebook, to see if I got any more messages from people in Massachusetts who had dug out some of the old cassette "albums" that I had recorded when I was in my 20's.
After I had posted a plea to people in New Orleans to steer me in the direction of any kind of job at all, I had gotten a message from a guy whose "friend request" I had accepted, without really remembering his name, or where I might know him from.
He was asking if I had any of my old tapes for sale.
Every year, from 1984 through 1991, I would compile an album of mostly my original songs, that I had recorded on my 4 track cassette deck.
Then I would make an insert by copying stuff on both sides of a suitable sized piece of paper that could be folded into cassette case size and stuffed in the plastic boxes so the tape could nestle in them.
These would have a photo or drawing of some kind, along with a lyric sheet, and other kinds of things that I had gotten the ideas for from looking at "real" cassette inserts from commercial music labels.
I would go to a certain place in Boston where I could buy custom length blank tapes, which were purportedly fitted with BASF "high bias" variety. It was pretty quiet and high fidelity stuff.
But, I would buy 40 or 50 (as my "popularity" grew) of them, in lengths like 23 minutes and 42 seconds per side, so that there would be no more than a few seconds of blank tape on the shorter side, after the last song ended.
The response to these ranged from "Wow, you did all that yourself? (1984) to "I can tell you've been practicing a lot" (1986) to "Whenever a bunch of my friends come over to party and listen to music, I always put on one of your tapes -you actually have a fan club in Templeton, Mass.." (1988).
But, everyone on my Christmas list was mailed the one from that year, and that included all the other musicians I knew from having taken lessons and hung out at the music store, and then the friends I had who were in bands.
The music was the antithesis of what any of them were required to play in clubs, under the thumb of some manager who might tap his watch while staring over at them, to inform them that their break was over.
They were in that particular business of playing the songs that people heard on the radio, the way they sounded on the radio, so that people would stay and buy drinks and dance and buy more drinks, type of thing...
"Well, if the customers like it, they will keep on payin';
if they keep on drinking, then they'll end up stayin'" -Elvis Costello "From A Whisper to a Scream" (Columbia 7 02140-1)
I was wished very good luck by my musician friends who were working under such arrangements; for they knew that my path to success, doing original songs like mine would be one of sleeping on subways with a suitcase, a guitar and an amp all tied around my wrists, just so I could get some sleep before knocking on the doors of certain clubs that catered to the discerning and miniscule audience that went out to hear original music by artists whom they've never heard of.
The only way to populate a club with maybe 20 such souls, would be to cull them out of a city that has 5 million people in close proximity to one another.
And, to play for "the door" which would be 20 times whatever each of them was willing to pay to check you out -maybe 2 dollars, or maybe 3 dollars which would cover a "first beer free" kind of thing, with the manager taking the 3rd dollar out of the "door."
The idea was that, if 20 people saw you and you were actually worth something as an entertainer, then they would each tell 5 of their friends to check you out, and, maybe within a month "the door" would be able to feed a band of 4 very skinny musicians a couple of hamburgers each, before they went nighty-night on the subway bench.
And I would be trying to play at clubs such as The Rathskeller, in Boston, right across from Fenway park (and where you had to be vigilant of being clunked in the head with a baseball that had just been thrown by a major league pitcher, before being batted out of that park by Ellis Burkes, or Jim Rice, or Rick Burleson, of the 1985 era Red Sox.
The Rathskeller, through this proximity, took on the aura of being in the major league of clubs where a band that is eccentric and does their own material would want to play.
But, the Talking Heads, and The Cars and The Jon Butcher Axis and The Jim Carroll Band, that "came out of" that club were the tip of an iceberg, in which were petrified a huge, countless mass of nameless subway sleepers...
So, my musician friends in my home town wished me a lot of good luck.
"I can tell they're not New York musicians; they're not skinny enough," said a friend of mine named Mike Hickey, as we watched some band setting up at a club where we had run into each other.
Mike Hickeywas "a New York musican."
He would wear what we now call "skinny jeans" in the mid 80's; and his legs were no bigger around than a stop sign post at their thickest point. A pendant on a necklace that he wore would literally clang against his collar bones when he moved around.
I remember watching him walk around the place, and was thinking: "If I was that skinny, I would probably wear baggy jeans, in order to hide the fact. He seems to want to flaunt his emaciation like an emblem, stating to the world that he is a New York musician. How in the world is he going to attract any girls, being so much the opposite of the "hunk" that females seem to gravitate towards...more like a sliver..."
Just then, as if to answer to my silent musing, a very beautiful girl who was standing near me, and had the same view of Mike drew in her breath, audibly, and then turned to her equally beautiful companion and half whispered: "That's Mike Hickey!" Then they both stole glances at him, as if already playing a game of not wanting to stare, so as to not appear interested in him.
I was tempted to interject something like "Yeah, all 85 pounds of him!"
I realized that at that point, that Mike's fame preceded him and that "the emperor" that he was, was indeed wearing clothes -skinny jeans, in fact- in the eyes of those beautiful young girls.
They were also there because one or both of their boyfriends were the ones in the band that was setting up, and they might have seen Mike as a possible conduit to "the big time," for they and their boyfriends.
But Mike was back in his home town, on break from touring Japan with a band named "Venom" and was that cities claim to fame, joined a few years later by Shawn Patterson, the guitarist in the band I was in, named (by them and certainly not I) Warp 5.
The only thing that made that band name remotely cool was the fact that there were just 4 of us. Had there been 5 guys in Warp 5, it would have just been too sickening to me, for some reason.
I never was a Star Trek aficionado, mainly because every episode cut for the first commercial at some point after something incomprehensible and head scratching had happened; and it never piqued my curiosity enough to want to wait 2 minutes before resuming watching and learn that it was "the Borg" up to their tricks, or whatever. But, I digress...
Mike Hickey was the best guitarist who ever played a guitar that I owned.
He did so, one particular time, after showing up at the Patterson's house, where I was in the basement, working on some of my songs. The fact that their practice room was literally a "padded room" seemed to make it and appropriate place for me to work on my stuff.
The fact that they were siblings put yet one more hurdle in the way of me ever being the leader of that group.
Shawn and Tim were out somewhere, and Chris, the drummer was up in his room with his girlfriend, so I had gone into the room and plugged in and was running through songs.
When I joined the band as a "front man" and singer, they already had about 2 dozen songs that they had learned together. And that meant that they had measured them out down to every beat with no room for any improvisation -hurdle number 2.
But, Mike had driven by and seen my Pinto parked out front and decided to drop in.
I had heard him play one time before, after I had just bought an Ibanez guitar that had the Floyd Rose™ locking nut whammy bar setup on it, which was the flavor of the decade in guitars, being heard on almost every album by every "hair band" of the 80's.
But, I was having trouble, learning how to tune the thing. When you tightened up one string, it would relieve the pressure off of the other strings, so they would go flat. If you brought them all back into tune, it would flatten the first string that you tightened up. I hadn't figured out yet that you had to over correct the strings the strings that were off, or you would be going back and forth forever.
I was living in a mansion on a hill at the time, which was owned by an older gentleman whom I had met from singing in the Bethany Baptist Church choir. I was the only member of that church who played rock music in bars on Saturday nights, and then donned a robe to sing with the church choir then next morning, hung over, many times.
That is a whole other aspect of that time period, the fact that the Pattersons gave me a lot of crap about being a "choirboy" and the damage that it could potentially do to my rock and roll "image."
And the baptists, holding hands with me in a prayer circle, praying that I would see the light, and realize how much damage playing in bars could potentially do to my choirboy "image."
But, Mike was a horse of a different color when it came to being judgemental.
For someone who had played on stage in front of thousands of screaming Japanese fans, and who could shred a guitar as well and anyone (literally anyone) that I have ever heard, he was humble, to say the least.
After I expressed my frustration over the Ibanez, and even told him I was thinking about throwing it in the lake in front of mansion. Associating me with the mansion I was staying in, he had taken this to be a serious threat (I could probably afford to do that) and tried to talk me out of it ("or at least give the guitar to me, before you do that").
He showed me how to tune it, then showed me a lot of the cool things that can be done with the Floyd Rose setup, which basically led to a full blown demonstration in the form of an amazing solo, using harmonics and blazing runs capped off with whammy bar dives, and it became clear to me that it wasn't the guitar that was holding me back.
The Mansion on the Hill by the Pond
And his first demonstration was at the mansion of Richard Cushing, who had coaxed me into moving in with him (and giving him 35 dollars a week, so that it couldn't be said, by any of the others who held hands and prayed together, that I was taking advantage of the old gentleman) after I had been forced to leave the place I had been renting, because the landlord was going to move one of his relatives in, who had recently become homeless.
This was 1988, and the word "homeless" was barely in the English vocabulary.
Now, two Bushes and an Obama later, and there's probably a homeless guy sleeping in the crawl space below my floor right now...
But, Mike was always very complimentary -he thought my Pinto was cool (with its dashboard missing, after I had removed it to install my stereo and then been too lazy to put it back in; wanting to start driving around immediately, listening to the Pioneer Supertuner™) and once, when I was listening to something I did in my studio, he walked over to my car and talked to me for a while, and then said "I like this" about the music; which surprised me, coming from a heavy metal guitarist.
It was kind of a pop sounding thing, done mainly using a keyboard, but with its share of Ibanez whammy bar dives in it.
It had the sounds of wind and rain as the background.
I had recorded that by sticking a microphone out one of the windows of the third floor, which was the one I occupied at Richard's house.
When I played the same thing for Mr. Cushing and then explained how I had recorded the storm the previous week, he gave out a sigh of relief.
He had seen the window open and had feared that I was smoking marijuana and trying to let the smoke and the tell tale smell escape. He apologized to me for what he had been thinking, and then added something like: "That just goes to show you what can happen when you rush to judgement; I thought for sure you were smoking something up there..."
Richard's family expressed happiness over the fact that I was living there, as if it made them feel better that someone would be around to help the 72 year old church deacon, should he fall and not be able get up, type of thing.
The 35 dollars a week I was paying kept me "honest" with regards to my not using him for a free ride, type of thing.
And, somewhere in the back of Richard's mind, he was hoping to sway me away from the bar scene and steer me towards Christian rock.
On the occasion when Mike Hickey showed up in the Patterson's studio, he again played amazing guitar while I sat 3 feet away, noting that there were no strings nor mirrors, just incredibly fast fingers, and a penchant for playing the most blasphemous sounding tones, that gave Richard that much more to try to steer me away from.
But, as we sat in front of the 150 watt Marshall amp with the 4X12 cabinet that was in the Patterson's padded room, and after he had demonstrated a variety of metal chops, he paused and asked: "You know what I really like the most, though?"
(Above) I handed Mike my guitar and he played it (kind of like this) then said: "There's nothing wrong with this guitar," and handed it back. Being a master of the whammy bar, he is somewhat limited by this Les Paul,in that capacity, for its lack of one...
"Uh..." I was thinking that he had yet another style of music in his toolbox, which he was about to show me.
"This," he said. He then turned the volume on the Marshall all the way up to ten and all the tone knobs up to 10 and played a solo that literally made the little hairs on my arms tingle from the vibration of it.
It's ironic how tiny "nuances" can be brought out of the electric guitar just by bringing incredible volume into play.
I was impressed enough to ask him -even though I was pretty dedicated to pursuing the music I had in my head, and if I had wanted to play metal, would already have made inroads in that direction (I would have at least owned a Marshall stack amp)- if he could show me something, in the way of a guitar lesson.
"Sure, I'll give you a lesson; a very good lesson, the best one that I ever got myself," he said.
Then he stood up with the guitar and told me: "When you bend a string, do this." Then he bent a string and bent his whole body along with it.
"And when you play a high note, play it like this!" He then played a high note while arching his back a bit and looking skyward, as if the note was actually coming down from on high.
And he gave a few more lessons which all involved body postures. It was like he was playing exaggerated air guitar, only with a real guitar in his hands, and actually playing the amazing kind of stuff people feel compelled to play air guitar along with.
And he wanted me to understand that he wasn't being sarcastic, he was well meaning through it all.
And his lesson has stuck with me, and there is a lot of validity to it.
For example, if you are having trouble learning to play a Prince song; just watch a video of him and mimic his dancing while you play. You will find that the hip bone is connected to back bone, and the back bone is connected to the...shoulder bone etc. and it all eventually runs to the finger bones; and you will be soloing over Purple Rain in no time.
Mike told me the story of how, when Venom was touring Japan, there was no shortage of young Japanese girls willing to go on their bus and have sex with the band members. He said they had hidden a tape recorder somewhere to capture the sounds of these encounters and then had a contest to see which one of them could get a girl to make the most remarkable sounds during sex. Mike had been voted the winner after he got a girl to "bark like a seal" during his encounter with her. He had told her that that was what really turned him on...
Shawn Patterson had actually taken "the sensible approach" to a career in music.
He had gone to the Berkley School of music and then the Grove Institute of music, in Los Angeles, where he had gotten a degree in film scoring, and then had hit the pavement looking for work and was eventually hired by Warner Brothers, where he wrote the music for things that I know nothing else about, like "Robot Chicken," and "The Lego Movie," as well as one of those shows like "Family Guy."
When a cartoon parody of Aerosmith appeared on The Simpsons (was it?) the music, which sounded like Aerosmith songs just rearranged a bit and mocked a lot, was done by him.
This was apropos of the fact that, my biggest complaint about Warp 5 was that "they didn't have a creative bone in their bodies."
Shawn was a jazz student, and his "jazz" solos were comprised of riffs that he had learned off sheet music from artists such as Charlie Parker, played verbatim ("I started my solo with a Charlie Parker riff, which lead nicely into a Joe Pass kind of thing that I did next" was a typical thing he might say)
The riffs would "fit," alright, having already been fitted back in 1948 by someone like Wes Montgomery.
But, I wound up shaking my head after the irony evolved that Shawn would actually rehearse his "improvisations."
But that kind of went along with Shawn's attitude towards music in general, where he seemed to be devoid of any of the feelings that had inspired the music in the first place, and was not really trying to "say" anything with his solos (except maybe "I'm giving you a dose of some of the greatest jazz ever played; appreciate it, you morons!") but was rather only in awe of the technical acumen that went into it.
Left, one of only 2 people to like my performance at the Lose It at the Lake party.
So, it was kind of a cosmic joke that I would wind up in his band.
And, that had come about after the brothers had seen me play at a party, which was held annually behind a large house on a lake, called "Lose It At The Lake."
The owner of the house, whose name was Michael Collette, was a champion of local music and would set up a Woodstock style stage, complete with lighting booms and the whole nine yards, in his back yard ever year, and would invite select musicians to play for what usually amounted to over 200 people (although a good 50 of them were the musicians themselves).
It was kind of an honor to be invited to play there as it ostensibly branded you as being "one of the best" local acts, and worthy of being bestowed with the blessings of Mike Collette.
A video of the whole thing was shot every year, ala the Woodstock Movie, and made available to anyone who wanted to pay something like 25 bucks for a copy. I shudder to think that my performance there was documented and is surely still in existence, in a stack of dusty VHS tapes in someone's attic, next to a dusty VCR that still might play (but probably could stand to have a demagnetizing* "head cleaner" run through it).
It had been a disaster for me, and the band that I had been able to assemble, by dangling the prospect of getting to play at Lose It at the Lake in front of some, as yet unknown, musicians that I knew. They had all been "in" immediately.
But, I had recently become a deadhead and my plan was to surrender to the muse and let inspiration come to me on the spot. To go up on stage with no idea of what I was going to do, and to surprise even myself, pleasantly I hoped with whatever I was able to pull out of thin air and play -the exact opposite approach from memorizing Charlie Parker riffs, to be regurgitated on stage.
I really didn't belong on that stage. I hadn't forged any musical identity through playing the local club circuit. Mike Collette certainly had never heard of me, but it was a good word put in his ear by one of my friends (who, to this day would probably deny ever doing so) that gave me the opportunity.
The Suffering Snails
The band consisted of a high school friend name Jeff Caisse (rhymes with bass...the musical instrument, not the fish) on bass, who was a very novice musician and certainly not up to the task of pulling music out of thin air.
And then there was Jeff's jamming buddy, Rick Shaw (yup, like the carts used in China to tote passengers around by foot) on one guitar. Rick was a big fan of the Irish band U2, which were at the crest of their popularity around that time; and would often try to "scratch" his guitar, ala "The Edge" from that band, usually with dismal results, and he was also a fish out of water when it came to scratching something out of thin air.
And then, there was Paul Zadrozny on drums, who was the drummer that the other 2 had been jamming with, in Rick's basement, whom I was seeing for only about the sixth time ever when he arrived for the party/gig.
A set of drums was already on the stage, for every drummer, as well as amps that just needed to be plugged into.
Pete Sawyer, a huge (but lovable teddy bear type) man was behind the soundboard, making sure that everyone was mixed and balanced.
He knew enough to add copious amounts of echo, as required, to any vocalist who was sounding a little shaky, such as when Ted Broughey sang "You Might Think," by The Cars, while also playing drums.
We had "scratched" the name "Sons of Heart Patients" for our band -we thought it a bit disrespectful to each of our father's, and in poor taste to make light of the fact that they had all underwent bypass surgury; and had gone on instead as "The Suffering Snails."
The other guy's looked to me as the moral leader, with my having been invited to play at L.I.A.T.L. speaking volumes about which one of us should be the moral leader.
It was most likely the members of Peer Pressure, who were right at the forefront of local bands, who had gotten me on the roster.
It was in a late afternoon time slot, before the sun had gone down and the light show came into play, and before half of the eventual crowd that would show up had arrived and -also working against us- before a dent had been made in the dozen or two kegs of beer that had been set up by the lake, because people were pacing themselves for an 8 hour event; but it was still a chance to go up on the Woodstock type stage.
Peer Pressure's drummer was my best high school friend, Ted Broughey and I had met the other members through him.
It was their bass player Stefan Arsenault who was most encouraging of me, telling me once "You've got the look," after seeing some photos (see cassette cover above) of me with my guitar, taken in black and white by a friend for a photography course he was taking at Fitchburg State College, in 1980.
Maybe he had stopped short of saying, "now all you need is the music.
By then, I was into just the second of my Christmas albums.
The improvement from the first to the second was quite marked, though.
"Either Go To A School Like Berkeley, Or Take Lessons From Mark Marquis."
I had started taking guitar lessons from Mark Marquis in late 1985.
About undertaking a serious study of music, Stefan had said: "Either go to Berkeley, or take lessons from Mark Marquis. I opted for the guy who was 15 bucks an hour, and the equivalent of 4 years at a prestigious college.
I had to practice a bare minimum of 15 hours a week, or Mark would be able to tell that I hadn't done enough and would reissue me that same material again for the next week. It became plain to me that, by not practicing, I might be stuck on the same harmonic minor scales indefinitely. The fear of never getting any better grew within me.
It was only if I sat with a metronome for a long time that he would shrug, and say "OK, you've got that.." and then unceremoniously hand me the next set of chords or scales, as if there was plenty more where it came from.
The week after the first time that he told me my scales weren't good enough and that I had to come back the next week and play them better, I practiced for 36 total hours with a metronome. I had set goals for myself and, despite sometimes really wanting to stop practicing and go do anything else, I plodded on, until I reached a stage where I was able to let my mind wander into daydreaming while my fingers kept running through the exercises, as if of their own volition.
I never would have reached that plateau, had I not known that Marquis was going to flunk me for the week otherwise, and the practice turned into a kind of meditation.
It took all that for it to sink in to me that, by not practicing, you don't get better.
Bike Man The Song
But, one of the songs on the '85 tape was called: "Bike Man," and was based upon my experience with one Mr. Eugene O' Neil, of O' Neil's Bike Shop in the city where I grew up.
It was one of only 2 bike shops in our city, and residents seemed to patronize one of the other.
In the late 1970's mopeds enjoyed a modest uptick in popularity, due, in part, to the "gas crisis" of 1974 having made an imprint upon Americans, and the concerns people have about waste and pollution which are pretty much ongoing.
They got around 85 miles to a gallon of gas.
Both O' Neil's Bike Shop and Gamache Cycles (the other bike store in our city) had added mopeds to their lines of products.
My life's savings, at the age of 16 was just about enough to cover an $849 moped.
Not many other 16 year olds could say the same, and adults were unlikely to trade down from a car to a moped, even though gas prices had gone over a dollar per gallon for the first time in history in 1980, and so that is probably why the modest surge in popularity was short lived. People who could afford almost a thousand bucks for moped were just buying used cars for not much more instead. And thanking themselves every time it rained really hard when they were in those cars.
I had worked at a country club, from when I started caddying in 1974, until I was eventually promoted to an assistant to the Professional.
My boss was PGA pro Jim O' Leary.
When I was talking about wanting to buy a moped, Jim has said: "Why don't you go see Mr. O' Neil, if you're thinking about buying a moped?"
I was thinking that Mr. O' Leary might be just saying that to help out a fellow Irishman. He probably thought there was no material difference between me buying the same moped, for the same price, from one of the bike stores rather than the other (owned by a French man).
He had been my boss of for 4 years, and had done a lot to mentor me and mold me into the man I am today, type of thing,since those were the 5 very "formative" years from age 12 through 16.
And so, I humored him and went to O' Neils to buy the moped.
This was kind of against my intuition, though.
I would have preferred going to Gamache's Cycles because, whenever I went there, it was clean and spacious with shiny floors and there were what looked like trained staff using special equipment designed for bicycle repair.
But when I went into O' Neils dingy place, that looked like it had once been a stable, he had bikes being held by vices, and he would be whacking the heck out of something with a hammer, and kind of cussing under his breath, for example..
But, I bought a Peugeot moped from him (and I had actually forgotten to drop the name of Jim O' Leary while I was doing so, so he never got any credit for having sent me there).
But, the thing started having problems a month or so after I'd bought it.
It would gradually slow down to about 6 miles per hour, seemingly as it heated up. It would run like a champ on colder days.
So, I brought it in for repair.
During one of my visits to check on it, O' Neil was working on a bike, and as I stood there, he began to speak.
And I think, to this day, I still have his words memorized, they were as follows:
"...What we really need to do is get all these politicians and these bureaucrats out of Washington! And you can't vote 'em out, because they've already got the power. We need to take them by force! The next thing we gotta do is take all these hippies and these homosexuals and send them in the army for a few years, that'll make men out of them! And the ones that don't wanna go, we kill them!" -Eugene O' Neil, circa 1977
By then, I was thinking that Jim O' Leary had just known that the guy was Irish, and nothing else about him.
It was an excellently designed moped, that had a centrifugal slip clutch, which ingeniously changed the gear ratio based on the speed that the bike was going.
O' Neil had first told me that he had called some guy named Bud White and had put in a new spark plug as Bud had suggested, and that there was nothing else he could try, and would get me "a new bike."
But, after a time, he had reneged on that, telling me that I was going to have to pursue getting it fixed at a small motor repair shop, or something.
So, I got Ted Broughey to call him from a payphone in one of the lobbies at Fitchburg State, claiming to be a lawyer, in order to perhaps pressure him into giving me a new moped.
Ted chose to be "Attorney Stacie" once O' Neil answered the phone, "calling on behalf of our client, Dan McKenna, who say's you promised him a new bike..."
O' Neil then began to simmer a bit: "I took that bike for a ride, I rode all the way to the Goody-Goody (a general store about 5 miles out of Fitchburg) there's nothing wrong with that bike, it's the best bike made!
But, when pressed further, O' Neil swore to "the attorney" that he had "never promised him a new bike," and went on to further say that "someone told me he was doing sky jumps, on the bike; they saw him doing sky jumps with it! In Leominster (the next city over from Fitchburg).
"Please Calm Down, Sir; Get A Hold Of Yourself!"
When the lawyer told him "That's simply not true, Mr. O' Neil," the latter began to raise his voice and to insist once again that he had never promised a new bike, eventually reaching a boiling point to where I could hear his squeaky voice shouting out of the receiver from 10 feet away.
Ted started to counter-punch with lines like: "Please calm down Mr. O' Neil, get a hold of yourself, sir," until all I could hear was Ted repeating "Try to get ahold of yourself, calm down!" over a steady staccato of squawks coming out of the receiver.
And then Ted was able to get in: "I don't think you have both oars in the water!" before O' Neil hung up.
We enjoyed that so much that I wrote the song "Bike Man" and for the sake of it, we recreated the conversation by attaching a recorder to a phone in my parents bedroom (we had a phone extensions in all three bedrooms of our house, as well as one in the living room, and one on the wall in the basement. The fact that my dad was a long term employee of New England Telephone might have had something to do with that.) and so Ted picked up one of the other receivers, and me, yet another, while the recorder in my parents room captured both of our voices, sounding like they were coming through a phone, because they were.
Then Ted reenacted Attorney Stacy's part, and I was tasked with imitating the curmudgeonly bike man, and we recreated the conversation, complete with me yelling and screaming toward the end, and Ted telling me I didn't have both oars in the water, and then, for good measure, we free styled for a while for a while, with me throwing in some other things that I had picked up along the way from Eugene, like: "What we really need to do is get these bureaucrats out of Washington!" and Ted adding "I don't think your elevator goes all the way to the top, sir!" and all of it found its way onto the recording of the song while I vamped in a minor key on the guitar, and Ted went into a ride cymbal beat on the drums, which was funny because that is a common device that drummers use whenever an instrumentalist is soloing; it kind of puts the energy of the rhythm in the very high frequency range, so as to leave the melody instruments register uncluttered. So, just when you might expect to hear a sax solo begin, my imitation of Mr. O' Neil comes in.
*the way we got the dial tone to go silent after picking up the phones was just the dial one digit, where after the phone went silent, waiting perpetually for the next digit to be dialed.
Then, I used another innovation of mine by creating a section where O' Neil is speaking (the "send all the queers into the army" speech) with the rhythm being comprised of one of those bell shaped bells that go on handle bars, along with one of the horns that you honk by squeezing a rubber bladder, with additional percussion provided by the ticking of a ten speed wheel spinning and the spokes of a wheel being plucked rhythmically. Without knowing that Frank Zappa had already done it, I was pretty much playing a bicycle like an instrument. This was to paint the picture of O' Neil being in the middle of working on a bike while ranting away on the state of the nation, etc..
That came off the second Christmas album from 1985, which was called "Parallel Lines" and had me on the cover, sitting in the middle of a railway track, holding my guitar, with it photographed from an angle that made it look like its frets were in the same perspective as the railroad ties behind the guitar.
I guess this subject has come up, due to me getting a message on Facebook, after I had posted a status asking if anyone in New Orleans knew "of any jobs available around here."
It was from Paul Zadrosny, the guy who, 35 years ago, had played the drums at the one and only performance by The Suffering Snails.
He was offering to pay money for any of those old cassettes that I issued forth each Christmas for 5 consecutive years.
For trivia buffs, they were entitled:
1984 "What Can You Do?"
1985 "Parallel Lines"
1986 "This Is My Head"
1987 "Enlarged To Show Texture"
1988 "The Little Girl In The House on the Corner"
1989 "Law and Order"
Then, in 1990, after having dropped out of college, and started to work full time, the Christmas albums stopped. Having equipment stolen from me around that time didn't help the cause.
And having all of my cassettes stolen along the way means that I have none of mine to sell to Paul.
But, it was on the strength of those tapes that I had wormed my way onto the list of musicians at the Lose It at the Lake party.
But, when The Suffering Snails rehearsed in Rick Shaw's basement, I left a bunch of things under the category of "To Be Announced," having faith in the inspiration coming to me "at the last moment" and we had only run through a couple of the songs in the manner of a technical rehearsal.
For other ones, like "Rock and Roll Music" by The Beatles, we just ran through the chords and I told the guys that I would change the words and they would be a surprise to everyone at our performance of them.
And I also said things like: "I might just vamp on a couple chords and make stuff up; maybe look around and sing about the things and people that I see, type of thing." We never practiced doing that, though, and I never stopped to ask: "You do know what a vamp is, right?" or other questions that might have helped us.
It was going to be magic that would save us. You'll see, it will all work out...I must have thought I was playing in the Grateful Dead.
It was a disaster.
With the unsettling feeling that the host of the party was thinking: "As a favor to the Peer Pressure guys, I'm letting this guy whom I've never heard of, play. Even though he technically doesn't qualify for being here. The rest of these guys are fixtures in the local clubs; many of them teach at music stores and most of them have cut albums or e.p.'s." We went up on stage.
There are some things that can only be learned through experience. I had never played through a 15,000 watt setup before.
The other guys were buckling under the pressure, if the nervous looks they gave me before we started were any indication.
But, I was fine. I was going to improvise something out of thin air at some point, I thought.
Now, one of the problems with that, is that people can't tell the difference between something someone is inventing on the spot, and something that they have run through a hundred times in rehearsal. They tend to think that it's the latter, but that you are screwing it up so it sounds like you are making it up as you go along.
As far as the sound system, it was hard not to hear the echoes coming back a few seconds later after having traveled across a lake and bounced off a building, or the hills in the distance, and not think: "Geez, that's me. That's the voice that I have been using my whole life, and now, 5 seconds after I sing something, I'm hearing it again, and it sounds insecure and nervous, and people 2 and a half miles away are thinking the same thing..."
We began "Rock and Roll Music," by the Beatles, and I began to sing the (secret) lyrics that I had in my head, to replace the original ones.
"We're here to play some more rock and roll music...
whether or not you choose it..."
This was an allusion to the fact that the band before us had played nothing but reggae for about 45 minutes, and the guy's after us were to be a jazz quartet.
Before the first line was even out of my mouth, it became saturated with copious amounts of echo. It was like a knee jerk reaction, I thought, by Pete Sawyer from behind the soundboard. "He only does that for singers that are sounding bad," was the distracting thought that came to me.
"We've got a lake here, you can lose it...
And a keg, but don't abuse it...
Gotta be rock and roll music; if you wanna drink with me...
Yeah, if you wanna drink with me...dum da da...
It ended right there, intended to be just sort of an introduction, but one that seemed to resonate like getting off on the wrong foot, so to speak. Maybe it was a peeve of Mr. Collette that I was focusing on the kegs of beer when it was the music that he wanted to be center stage.
Maybe he wasn't legally allowed to distribute beer on such a grand scale without having obtained a special license, or without having carded everyone; and here I was, broadcasting to everyone within 5 miles "We've got a keg, but don't abuse it..." Who knows; I know that we pretty much did a sucky performance of the old rock and roll standard.
And the copious amount of echo had me wondering.
I then segued into a joke, which was something like:
Yeah, go easy on the alcohol. Last night I got so drunk that I came home and mistakenly put the wrong key in my door. It was my car key..
But what was weird was, the house made the sounds of an engine turning over and then started up and sat there idling; it woke up the whole neighborhood...
It was indeed a joke that I had thought of the night before, yet, amid the groaning sounds I heard one guy yell: "Aw, that's a Steven Wright joke!"
hmm...Stephen Wright...what else can go wrong?
It wouldn't have been the first time I wasn't the first one to think of a certain joke.
So, then, after playing the Grateful Dead song "Cold Rain and Snow," I was out of jokes, except for the joke of a performance that was to come next.
It was my song: "The Night of the Living Porcelain" which was about a porcelain skull with a porcelain snake wrapped in an out of the eye sockets which I had bought at a flea market."
Intended to be a macabre almost Halloween inspired little ornament, I took it home and put it on my book case.
Then, I wrote a song about me dropping acid and the snake coming to life and chasing me around the house, or of my hallucinating it..wouldn't the effect be the same in either case?
And that was what "Living Porcelain" was all about.
Do I remember the words? Let's see.
"Well I was laying on my bed; It was 9:30 at night
Peace was in my head; I had just dropped some 'cid; and I was looking at;
my porcelain snake on the bookshelf; with a porcelain snake through its eyes.
I had picked it up at the flea mart, They wanted just 2 bucks; what a pleasant surprise...
(band kicks in)
Well it was in such good condition; I was pretty damned proud of myself
As I viewed my acquisition; across the room on the wooden shelf
Now my outlook on life was improving; as I started to catch a buzz
And the snake, you know, it seemed to be moving
BECAUSE IT FUCKIN' WAS!!
chorus:
[CAUSE it was the night of the living porcelain
the night the reptile came to life
the night of the living porcelain
the night I slept with a knife]
The reptile's scales were glistening as it slid across the floor
My heartbeat began quickening; I was looking towards the open door
I thought that I could beat it; but I might have to make a dive
If it headed me off I was in for the worst; I might not get out alive
I heard my little sister shout; she thought she'd heard a mouse
I said "Lock your door and don't come out, there's a reptile in this house!"
Then it started chasing me, now I was really afraid
Because the f*** thing was pacing me; and I'd forgotten where I left the can of raid
[chorus]
Then I felt it grab me and I landed on my back
It's fangs were about to stab me; when everything in the room went black
I woke up hours later; glad to be back in bed
My joy was made even greater; when I noticed the snake was back in the head
[chorus]
But, just as we were beginning the song; the lyric sheet that I had taped to the mic stand blew off, and wound up in the lake, so I had to try to remember the words, on top of everything else.
After we finished, there was mostly silence from the audience.
I walked over by the soundboard and was about to say something to a guy who was standing around, and he just turned and walked away from me. Isn't that just like a lot of people. Had we gotten a huge ovation, the same guy probably would have been there to shake my hand.
But, among the crowd were the Pattersons, Tim and Shawn, who walked over and told me "We really dug that; we knew what you were trying to do; f*** these people..."
It was 3 years later that I ran into Shawn again at the mall, he was putting a notice on the bulletin board: "Lead singer/frontman wanted for new band."
"Hey, you're the dude who played the song about the porcelain head at the Lose it at the Lake party, aren't you?"
He reminded me that he and his brother had been the 2 (out of 250) people who had liked the performance, and basically the only 2 who had spoken to me after it was done (Rick, Paul and Jeff had gotten in their cars and high tailed it away from the scene).
Shawn then pointed out the notice he had just tacked up, and invited me to audition and, against my better judgement, given that they were even worse at pulling music out of thin air than the Suffering Snails had been, I met them at their padded room and soon became the lead singer for Warp 5.
And so, I guess this story has come full circle
*it is very much a sign of the times that the spell checker put a red squiggly line under the word, as if, in 35 years VCR's have gone from being a household item to: demagnetizer tape, what the hell is that?!?"
Still getting used to the new Blogger interface...
Travis in a nutshell
