And, with today's Google algorithm being the global ruler that it is...the whole Afghanistan situation has to be seen in the light of the algorithm....
I think that it (the algorithm) which sees the Taliban guys when they are sleeping, knows when they're awake, and to some extent might be able to extrapolate whether they've been bad or good.
The algorithm has (hopefully) figured out that the Taliban guys, who are "accused" by some as being out of the stone age (something I would challenge by saying that the plot to use commercial jets with full fuel tanks as missiles, came, at least, out of the bronze age mentality) would not want to do anything that would not garner them "likes" on Facebook and whatever the merits are that Instagram et. al. mete out. If they are 25 now, they have probably been poking at a phone their whole lives. But, then again, maybe the stone age references derive from them NOT having Google and Facebook and Tik Tok.
They were having Afghans lie down in a ditch while out of some Bluetooth speakers played recordings of actual gun fire. They were just having some fun and making a video. Kind of funny.
Maybe instead of trying to censure "conservative" speech, the Big Tech geniuses should try to flood the screens of these ISIS and Taliban and Odalisque members with non-stop Western Culture stuff. "...Every time I tap screen, comes blond girl -no Burka- singing 'slow clap' showing much more than just eyes!"
As pissed as I was for seeing the way the oligarchs basically deposed Donald Trump, I was more pissed over having witnessed something unfair go down.
Second, because I was SMH (shaking my head) over how it had been possible for democrats to go out and find all those votes for Biden; how they were probably able to scare up groups of 50 African Americans with their bullhorns; maybe they had tables set up, with hot dogs and mustard; and were able to log maybe 49 good votes for the now sitting president (he tires from too much standing).
It represented, to me, a small step backwards for mankind; to have us collectively so malleable, so controllable, through screen time brainwashing. That would have bothered me just as much if it became evident that the same had been done on behalf of the Donald.
But, it's easier to go into a area of heavily concentrated folks who seem to look and walk and talk and think pretty much the same as each other and get them all to vote the same way.
With the Trump voters, we now know with certainly that we had stood in their midst; in the supermarket, a hotel lobby; maybe sitting on a bus together, close enough to be touching!
There were a bunch of Trump voters, making up just about every other person you saw, but who were able to be like chameleons.
Once they got inside the voting booth, they changed to a vivid red color, but then changed back, so they looked like everybody else. Fit for a world where "the fashion" was to go around bashing the sitting president, saying things like "All I know, is, we need a new president, that's for sure!" but not having an inkling of what path that particular thought wormed along, on its way to where it tenaciously clings. Of course, they might believe it just came from everything you see, everywhere, all the time....
So, why can't we use cell phone technology to corrupt these radical Islamic people in the same manner. Make it so everything they see everywhere all the time is way out of step with their world view. I even met an Amish guy on a bus trip who was shaking his head and voicing serious doubts about their lifestyle. The young lady in the seat to his right had on some kind of headgear that resembled the "blinders" that are put on race horses so they cannot be distracted during the race by anything off to the side. I caught a glimpse or two of her nose.
I must have been about 13 when I started to really think seriously about TV.
I was at Whalom Park, an amusement park about 8 miles from where I grew up, which had a wooden roller coaster, that had to be constantly adjusted by technicians who probably had a similar skill set to those who worked on railroads, because the roller coaster car ran along very similar looking tracks which were affixed to the wood below it by spikes; possibly even railroad spikes given the availability of them in 1898 when the park was built vs. the trouble of having some machine shop machine out some special roller coaster track spikes that would be expensive.
You could get a palpable sense of the human error that went into the construction of The Comet, as that was its name.
On this one late August afternoon, I was at Whalom, having ridden my 10 speed bike there.
It was so late in the season that things there gave the sense of winding down. The least popular rides were idle, and there was the phenomenon of kids getting off The Comet and then, since there was less than a full roller coaster's worth of them, proceeding to zig zag their way up the intake ramps, to be the first ones in line for its next run. Perpetual Comet.
When the park was busy, you might have to watch 2 or 3 loads of people you care nothing about screaming their way around the circuit before you could get on again.
But, there was also some kind of show going on. I could hear the voice of what sounded like a TV game show type guy, interspersed with music, of the sappiest kind, I thought.
Scared out of their wits...
Sure enough, once I found my way to where that noise was coming from, I beheld a guy, dressed kind of in a tuxedo without the jacket, and directing a group of kids, who had somehow found their way up on stage, through a series of games and stunts, maybe rope tricks; I had no way of knowing, at 13, that I should be taking careful notes -they might prove useful if I find myself busking 45 years later.
But, there was this kid about my age assisting the guy, who was dressed in a pin striped suit, himself. And I stopped and watched and had no idea what to make of it. The kids would have their faces in plates of whipped cream and cherries, trying to find the cherries, or would be rolling eggs along the carpet with their noses, all the while the music, which was horn heavy, and was supposed to sound peppy but was failing in a way that only horn music coming out of a PA speaker that is meant more for someone like Hitler shouting through, than for reproducing the full range of horn music, can.
But then right in front of me, a middle aged, rather portly man turned to his ditto wife and half whispered: "He's really good. He's been on TV!"
But, I grew rather silent, perhaps over then next week or so, pondering the question of whether or not the guy had been really good. I also became aware of how, after hearing that he had been on TV, I had started to reassess him, noticing that there was kind of a certain flair and style to his delivery, and it became easier to think that he was really good.
I also noted to myself that there were some really rinky dink TV stations, like the ones that came out of small town in New Hampshire, where you wouldn't have to be that great to get on...
Come to think of it; one sex has to be submissive...and have you ever seen happier little girls? I'm starting to think we should just leave the Taliban alone.
I remember, as a high school kid, staying up late to watch Saturday Night Live, thinking that that was the acme of all things television, and that if you were on SNL, it was because you are truly really good. Frank Sinatra even nailed it when he said "If I can make it there; I'm gonna make it anywhere..." type of thing.
Well, I wish I could remember the name of the kid who was the assistant of the kiddie game show guy, because I saw him a couple weeks later after he wound up coming to my high school, and was even in my English class. I want to say Mark LeClair; but I often just want to say "Mark LeClair," at odd times...
And, sure enough, us kids were asked to write essays about something that happened to us over the summer vacation. It had to be in the first person narrative, and we were encouraged to use a lot of sensual imagery; sights and smells and sounds...did I mention that there was kind of a combination popcorn and motor oil smell that permeated the park that day?
And, honest to God, when Mark read his essay aloud, it was about his experience of being the assistant to this guy who has been on TV, and what an incredible experience it had been for the kid. I felt bad for him. I got the impression that he had a father that wasn't around much and the carnival guy had become like a father figure and mentor to him, in his place [cheesy horn section through a megaphone here]. The teacher, along with a few students did recognize the guy's name, from having seen him on TV.
I guess what I am saying is that this was the secondary disappointment I've taken away from recent events. The fact that, if you saturate the screens of a large enough chunk of the population, with what amounts to propaganda, you can change their beliefs. Shouldn't humans be evolving towards being less sheep-like?
It just makes me think that screens are an even more formidable brainwashing tool than the TV ever was; and that some day soon, some guy like the CEO of Google will, in effect, rule the world; by choosing what everyone sees everywhere all the time...
The host just stepped down because cancel culture found his old podcasts (in which I thought it sounded like he was trying to be "another Howard Stern") and took comments he made out of the context of a wannabe Howard Stern-like show; and so, I'm not even sure the show will come on in about 29 minutes...
I always have thought, every time I think about Steven King; that, first off, his writing is good enough so that, whoever starts reading it, can't put it down, and then passes the finished book off to a friend, telling them they must read it, type of thing.
But, I also have always wondered about what if he hadn't found instant success, and had to live out of a Volkswagon for a while until, maybe his 3rd novel breaks him through.
I picture him in the parking lot of Ponte Vedra Beach, in Florida, when up sauntered the local police of that community of millionaires where almost every house has a golf hole as an extension of its back yard.
And there would sit Steven in his VW, who would immediately be asked to show ID, etc...
Then, 4 hours later, by flashlight, the cops with his notebooks open on the rooftop of his Jetta, while he sits in the back of the cruiser, with handcuffs poking him in the back, having been charged with "suspicion," while the cops flip pages, and occasionally say; "Look at this; this sick, or what?!" to one another...
Then, Steven needing to sit in jail long enough, so that he can't afford the fee to get the Jetta out of impound "...Well, can I at least get my notebooks out of it?"
And then I think about how he is OK now at this stage of his life. Cops would expect to find creepy and disturbing things in his notebooks now.
Maybe it's going to take Cancel Culture going after Steven King, trying to censure "It" for him to get behind someone starting alternative social media sites.
Facebook that would offer all the same functionality and connected-ness; you could migrate your list of friends, and import your entire history, along with photos and videos and every post you ever posted. The experience would be entirely the same whenever your phone bleeps and there is a message that someone "liked" something you did.
Then we wouldn't have to worry about the politics of the oligarchs that, in a sense became such through luck. There used to be a lot of what Facebook became. There was liveJournal and deadJournal and two dozen more. But, people wanted to be all in one place. They didn't want some of their friends not seeing the funny little video they made because those friends aren't on melodramatic.com.
And so, humans have a desire for community and kind of want the whole world to hear what they have to say; an innate instinct, perhaps.
So, there must eventually be one totally unregulated place, where the regulation is up to the individuals; they can block and unblock at will. But, it's not cool to have things be blocked before they even get to you...
Well, time to see who is hosting Jeopardy tonight....
I saw this guy play in 1985 in the basement of what I believe was a "Unitarian" church in Fitchburg, Ma.
One of the lasting memories was talking to Cam Streeter who worked in a little health food store that I frequented for a lot of Rice Dream rice milk stuff and ampules of ginseng extractum.
But, Cam Streeter appeared to be an 80 year old woman who looked more like 65, and might have even owned the little health food store that was recommended to my by my chiropractor.
Doctor Delisle was that chiropractor and, as Father Shauris, a priest who taught at my high school and fondled several boys put it; was into "a lot of esoteric stuff." That stuff just turned out to be a devotion to some kind of Indian religion that believed that their was always a Christ presence on earth; and though the man from Nazareth eventually departed earth, there is a living Christ, and I believe he had gone to India to sit at the foot of him; and described an incident that could be corroborated by his wife who witnessed him floating to the ground like a feather after falling from a some considerable height.
And, so the guy would crack my spine into place. This always seemed to "unwind" mostly all of the tension, and I would feel very restful and nonplussed, but then would leave his office and re-enter a world where there were car payments to make and alarm clocks to obey. A world where a 22 year old, who would really rather play music all day, and have money come in from somewhere; than to go to his job that was taking 8 hours plus the commuting time, 5 days a week.
Somehow I wasn't a great electronics technician. I had gone through a 5 month program at Sylvania Technical School, now defunct I believe, but I was working alongside a guy who had an electronics hobby at home. You can't compete with that. Going home, smoking weed and then playing the guitar for a few hours after every work day isn't going to cut it. This guy was reading schematics, soldering components, and designing his own home stereo equipment for a few hours every night.
So, after I started going to Grateful Dead shows, and dropping acid; the stars kind of aligned to get me canned from that job by a very nice manager named Lou Gemellaro. He was kind of a Lou Grant (Mary Tyler Moore Show) style of figure. Kind of stocky and a little bit gruff.
Lou had been absent the day that I was hired by that startup company. I had been recently fired by Wang Labs, which was, at the time, the 3rd largest computer company in the world, behind IBM and Digital Equipment Corp. The cause given to me by them had been "Because you apparently don't care, and..." I don't remember the rest, as I looked over the shoulder of Jack Greenhalf, who was kind of a Ted Baxter from the same TV show (catch it on Decade network) at the cars going to and fro on Route 495 which was nicknamed "technology highway," by the way, it was approaching nightfall and so some of them had their headlights on and some not, it was that much on the cusp of day and night. I felt a great relief and excitement building up in me. I wasn't crazy enough to quit my job at that company that was literally so large and apparently haphazardly organized that at one point I was assigned a new manager (Ted Baxter) who was never notified that I was under his supervision, but my former manager was notified that I was no longer any concern of his.
The result was that I had no supervision, and would basically punch in, and then walk around the building measured in units of football fields and sight see.
I would visit the guys in an office area where there were cubicles that they never seemed to be in. I would flirt a bit with some young ladies who were tethered to soldering stations or other testing equipment, I got my weed and sometimes hash from a dealer who worked right out of the building on the third floor in the "manuscript" department. His job was basically to match the right manuals with the computers being shipped out with price tags like $3.5 million on them, and I guess to wrap them tightly in cellophane using a machine made for that purpose.
But, when you bought hash off the guy, he would send the lump through the same machine and it would come out in an airtight little cellophane package like a CD comes in. You would have to have sharp finger nails or be a good biter just to get at your hash.
I might swing by an see that guy. I always had plenty of cash because, having nobody who thought he was my manager, I was literally able to clock in at one of the half dozen or so entrances to the place; and then go back to my car and go for a ride somewhere.
I might go to the beach, about a 40 minute drive away. There, I might take off my shoes and sit in the sand, perhaps looking out at a rising moon over the ocean; thinking of the splendor of the universe, and the fact that I was clocked in at Wang labs, making $7.35 per hour.
I had a seafood place that I liked to go to in Reading, Mass. Maybe I would visit friends somewhere.
I would find my way back to Wang before the end of my shift, so I could clock out. This arrangement allowed me to take advantage of all the overtime that was available to us employees (a term I use loosely in my case). I could clock out 12 hours after clocking in, on any given day, and thereby get 4 hours of "time and a half" as that was the deal. And Sunday was double time. Yep, $14.70 per hour I would get for clocking in Sunday morning at 5 a.m. and then finding somewhere to sleep until noon. For, on weekends, none of the supervisors, who were salaried employees would come in. The whole company pretty much came in to sleep off their Saturday nights with no supervisor in sight. This was 1983 and there weren't really cameras "everywhere," at least not at Wang.
So, I was getting a pretty good paycheck each week, and had all my time to myself.
There were just as many days though, when I would take the walk around the place. There were, I think 4 floors and one corridor that went past a bunch of vending machines that were nearby a cafeteria that had huge windows that faced Route 495, the technology highway. I would spend time in there, abstractly gazing at the cars, wondering who was in each and where they were going, type of thing. I would probably make a good cop, lol.
And I liked to go into the office of An Wang, the founder of the whole shebang. He had a huge ass desk, there was a portrait of either him or some other Wang hanging on a wall, and there was a very plush leather chair that swiveled. I would sometimes sit in that chair. If I could do it all over again, I think I would have brought my little Fostex 4 track recorder and a microphone and my guitar in to "work" every night, and then set up and recorded songs in An Wang's office...
I also spent a good deal of time right where I was supposed to be, goofing around with the buddies that I had made over the course of me having a supervisor who would come around periodically to check upon me.
We liked to run around the large floor having fights by using rubber bands to sling-shot electronic components at each other. Capacitors mainly, because they are shaped more like missiles than any other components in the bins of them that lined one whole wall. The people who normally worked in that area were day shift people. I was on the second shift. It started at 3:30 in the afternoon. At 5 p.m., all the supervisors clocked out. I guess one of the perks of a managerial position at Wang was that you could work normal business hours. And so, "When the cat is away, the mice will play," is the way my co-worker and friend Mark Palermo used to put it.
It was upon one of these occasions when I was where I was supposed to be when Jack Greenhalf approached me and introduced himself and told me "I guess I'm your manager." It had been a newsflash that had reached him that day; after I had had a solid 6 months of whatever you would call a government that doesn't have any rulers over the people.
And eventually, as the line between tripping at Grateful Dead shows, and being a systems integration technician at Wang Labs, Inc. began to blur, I was somehow sitting in front of Jack, who was looking perhaps more Ted Baxter-ish than ever, getting the speech that started with "Because you apparently don't care and..." and feeling a lifting sensation as if my body was getting lighter and time was slowing down, as I looked over his shoulder at the cars on the highway, missing what the guy was saying because of daydreaming about what the people who had already turned their headlights on were like, compared to the ones who hadn't put them on yet. The sun was down, but there were bright pink clouds on the horizon, and a bright pink future for me; realized this moment as I sit here, type of thing...
But, I still wasn't ready to leave the human race and become a busker who lives in the woods with a group of raccoons as company.
So, I applied for a job at Artel Communications on a day when Lou, the big boss had been absent. I told them that I was relatively happily employed at Wang Labs but was taking some of my vacation time looking at other opportunities; actually using the greener grass analogy, I remember that.
I was hired because the owner of this small company which at the time employed only about 14 people and only one technician who went home every night and played with electronics for hours, thought that bringing in someone from such a huge company as Wang Labs would be a feather in their cap, and that maybe I would bring with me a certain culture of huge success, kind of like if they were a soccer team in some little country like Uruguay and had a chance to get a player off of the Manchester United team, or whoever wins the World Cup a lot...
Only, well, there I was getting fired by Lou, who looked kind of like Lou Grant, just about a year to the day after being hired.
Lou was trying to be upbeat and positive and told me stories about jobs that he himself had had and loved. And that there was a job out there just perfect for me, type of thing.
The Forehead Of The Aforementioned Master
What a long strange trip it has been to get here.
I was out of work, yet still had hefty payments to make on a new Colt Turbo, and I wouldn't be seeing Doctor Delisle for any spine cracking, I figured, which was kind of a bummer.
I was invited to his office, one evening, for a special gathering which his religion had a name for, and we were to be joined by, perhaps the guru of my doctor, a man who had sat at the foot of the living master in India and had been zapped by bolts of pure light which emanated from the forehead of the aforementioned master, and he was going to be in our presence.
And, so, on a cold winter night, about a dozen people sat around the office in a circle and then, soon entered a man who is hard to describe except as being in very good spirits. He was kind of between small and medium with curly half gray hair, and had under one arm a quantity of hardcover books.
I remember think something to myself like: "So this is the holy man?" whereupon the guy, as if addressing my thoughts exclaimed: "I just walked across the pond!"
There was a small pond right across from the doctor's office.
He started to hand the books out around the circle. I was still thinking about how the guy had practically answered my unspoken thought, when he handed me one, saying "It's frozen," as he did. The book felt like it was frozen, so I thought he was referring to it. But then, I connected his two comments and got the joke about walking across the pond because it was frozen.
But, in that instant, he was actually saying the two things at the same time. But, how was he to know that I was the one who had thought: "So this is the holy guy?"?
The rest of the evening went by in the same swirl of him saying things seemingly out of the blue, that seemed to address whatever I was thinking. I'm not sure if we all meditated, or if the book had been "The Liberation of the Soul." It surely wasn't "Be Here Now," which I also acquired through the good doctor with his esoteric stuff. That one had an extremely loud florescent cover.
So, being so blown away by the guy who could apparently hear my thoughts, it was with a sense of grave spiritual consequence that I took the advice of the guy who had floated to the ground after falling out of a tree, when he suggested that I go see Cam Streeter at that particular little health food store. He had written her name on a small piece of paper. It was as if he was trying to show me how cool that name looked in writing. It did. Cam Streeter.
I think I might have told Dr. D. that I no longer had coverage through my company's insurance which included regular chiropractic visits among it benefits, because I no longer had a company. I might have lamented having about 3 years of high payments left on the Turbo. Plus, the insurance payments were high because, I guess in my exuberance over being employed by the 3rd largest computer company in the world, I had signed up for the "all the bells and whistles" coverage.
Well, not long after that, the car was wrapped around a tree.
I was immersed in the Grateful Dead by then and was at the house of one Danny Young. He was a gruff kind of country-ish deadhead, who was 25 to my 22 years old. And so he kind of took the roll of the older, more tie-dyed in the wool deadhead. He was physically stronger than me, kind of resembling a bear; as opposed to the giraffe that I might have been more akin to. He had a full beard, a pickup truck, plenty of rifles and a 9 mm. pistol, and he lived kind of out in the country. In a log cabin type of house at the end of a narrow road that winds its way at least a mile off the main road before snaking its way by the cabin. The road can become slippery in the winter and living on Grimes Road, as that is its name, is almost justification for owning a Jeep, which is what Danny did own. A Jeep out of which the sounds of the Grateful Dead could often.
I suppose I was always slightly uneasy about the fact that Danny could kill me at any time; I had met him through friends; But, I think I was introduced to him as a novice deadhead because he did take up the role took up the stance of showing me the ropes or the ways of the deadhead. He I also was doing enough acid at the time to be able to see him as being some kind of allegorical figure; Danny Young. It was like he represented me in my youth, or was a spirit guide sent to help me through my early 20's.
Well, Danny and his roommate, another husky voiced lumberjack vibe type guy who would wear the plaid red and black shirt with leather coveralls over them, and had his own arsenal of weapons, had a few people over this particular night, besides myself, whose Colt Turbo wasn't wrapped around a tree.
It was in the driveway, as I sat at the kitchen table, participating on a card game called "gut." It is a game where everybody gets 2 cards, then everybody passes one of those 2 to the right, or left, at the discretion of the dealer.
A pair is good, when playing gut. But it is an intensely analytical game in my opinion. We were playing for amounts of money, which became pretty considerable, at times.
The game is analytical because, say one of your cards is an ace. Are you really going to hang on to an ace, hoping the guy to your right or left is going to pass you one. Who holds on to an ace, expecting to be passed one? So, you pass the ace, when you get one.
So, you hold on to an ace if you get one, because you always pass your ace because there is no chance that you are going to have one passed to you because; see rule #1.
So, gut is a really analytical game. Even if you adopt the strategy of always passing your high and low cards and hanging on the the middle ones (hoping for a pair of 9's which will beat 80% of other hands) then the people to your left and right are going to start hanging on to their high cards because you are the guy that will pass an ace or a king every time.
There were two couples, and I think one young lady unaccompanied, along with myself and Danny Young, and his roommate. The fireplace was kept ablaze with logs that had assuredly been chopped by the residents of the house. Why pay $80 for a chord of wood when there so many perfectly good axes laying around the log cabin of a house.
They had a dog named wolf. Of course they had a dog named wolf.
I was noodling around on my acoustic guitar, and taking my attention off it only to flip the 2 cards dealt me up, and then to pass one. Upon seeing my final cards, I could also feel the words "in" or "out" kind of written across my field of vision like a watermark. I would merely just say "in" or "out" accordingly and then go back to picking the guitar. Well, money started to pile up in front of me; something like $111.00, I recall. There was even a point, after I had won 3 or 4 straight hands that the young lady to my right said: "Give me that guitar," which I did, to no avail to her as I continued to win.
A little past midnight, the two couples departed, within 10 minutes of each other; having been wiped out in gut by a skinny guy with glasses and no rifles, and I did the same about 10 minutes later. I was starting to feel covetous of the wad of money on me; and became impatient to just get back home where I could pile it on my bureau and have sweet dreams about what I was going to do with it the next day. I would probably go to the Sunday flea market in a little town not far from where Danny and Wayne, as that was the lumberjack looking guy's name, lived, at the end of a long narrow and winding road.
The road was iced over pretty thickly. It had been warm enough during the day for the foot or so of snow to melt in the February sun, only to freeze into a sheet of solid ice after that sun went down, as people in log cabins played gut.
I knew that my desire to take the money and run was kind of pulling me out of the zone where the words "in" or "out" materialized out of thin air. It was a kind of selfish feeling, but on such a winter's night I just wanted to get home. The money was timely as, I had just lost my job and was saddled with high car payments and high insurance premiums.
So, I embarked upon Grimes Road in Hubbardston, Mass, with the Grateful Dead cranking out of my stereo as I snaked my way left and right in between trees which were about the only indications of where the road was, as some fresh snow had fallen. And there were the two sets of fresh tire tracks from the two cars that had left before me.
After about a mile of creeping along, periodically testing the traction by pressing the brakes and doing an occasional slalom to see how the steering was I eventually got to where Grimes Road T's into a more major road.
I had my high beams on and so it was easy to see that there was a car up ahead of me which was about 5 feet off the ground and wedged between two trees like a Sichuan dumpling between two chop sticks. One of the girls whom I had wiped out in gut was standing on the passenger side with the floorboard at about chin level. Her partner was climbing down from the driver's side in the clumsy manner of a drunk that would get his car 5 feet off the ground and wedged between two trees.
What happened was that the plows had come and cleared that road, with their blades shoving all the snow to the side where it was piled about 3 feet high and covered in solid ice. That it was also kind of pitched like the ramps that Evel Knievel's used bears mentioning.
And so, there they were, with her yelling something like: "I told you to let me drive," or "I told you to slow down!" They must have been doing at least 35, I thought, noting the elevation they were able to get.
And, there I was, just wanting to take my pile of money home. But, I couldn't leave them there; that wouldn't be the Christian thing to do, I thought, with some irritability. And, so I begrudgingly turned my car around to go back to the log cabin so that I guess a tow truck, a crane? could be called.
I was aware that I was doing the Christian thing begrudgingly, and just wanted to get it over with, so I headed towards the cabin. The Grateful Dead were blaring out my speakers; the song was Mississippi Half Step UpTown Toodloo, and it has a line or two about the time Jerry Garcia was involved in a car crash, the impact of which made his boots come off. "...Lost my boots in transit; a pile of smoke and leather." the lyric goes.
Well, I teased the fact that my car winds up wrapped around a tree a few paragraphs back, and I'm getting to that.
In my impatience to get help for Speed Racer and Nagging Nellie (not to help myself, but to get help) I was taking each icy corner a little faster than the last, and right before Jerry sings the line about the car crash, I came around a corner a little fast, and for some reason glanced at my speedometer to note that I was doing 35 miles per hour, and then, that I was turning the steering wheel but the Colt Turbo with 3 and a half years of payments left on it wasn't turning.
Then, I saw that I was going to hit a tree, but perhaps just nick it.
But the front right corner of the car got enough of the frozen solid tree to just about stop it dead. My head had hit the windshield hard enough to make a head shaped impression; not quite enough to go through. I only had a few seconds to admire the shattered glass in the shape of my head before the blood started running, it seemed, straight down my forehead and into my eyes.
It's really hard to see with blood in your eyes; it wants to coagulate, or something.
As far as my ears were involved, my stereo wasn't installed in the dash but was just a loose component that sat on the passenger seat that I would have to pick up in order to change cassettes or whatever. It went flying and wound up with its volume cranked way up, just in time for Jerry to sing the line about the car crash which sounded distorted from being turned up too much.
I had to feel around for the thing because my eyes felt like they were sealed shut with blood. I wound up just turning the ignition key off to stop the blaring.
Then, after I grabbed the handle and opened the door, there was a shot of pain coming from that hand which made me let go just as fast, and I tumbled out of the car and found myself on all fours staring down at the money which had fallen out of the front pocket of the army jacket I was wearing.
In that instant instead of in or out, the words were more of the tone of: You are going to get help for those people begrudgingly, and you mockingly ascribed it to being motivated by Christian love. And now you see how quickly you can become deaf and blind and lose your car, and your money; Don't EVER do anything begrudgingly in my name...or you might wind up in Shreveport. You might want to scoop up that money before it gets soaked in blood.
I had only been about a tenth of a mile short of the cabin, and so I walked back there; and I guess we called for help for our airborne buddies, and then I got a ride from Danny to a local emergency room, where a splint was put on my left hand ring finger.
I remember getting home and removing the splint and then forming a chord on the guitar. And then trying to slide to another chord but having the finger catch on a fret as I slid and it being painful. I believe I was able to bend the bone into a suitable angle for playing, by gripping the neck like I did. That would be a great story if I was the greatest guitarist in the world; how I bent my own bones...
So, it turned out that my insurance had been so good, that, after sending a guy with a bald head out the driveway of the log cabin, where the Colt had been slid to (I believe Danny just pushed it wit his Jeep) who said: "Oh, yeah, it's totaled; the frame's bent" and then paying off the balance of the loan on the thing; they even sprung for something like 6 months of chiropractic treatment, for my finger! I was right back to getting my spine cracked every week and having experiences; and I might have been low key searching for my own guru who can walk across frozen lakes.
And, so, armed with her name written on a small square piece of paper, I went to the little health food store and wound up having a pretty interesting conversation with Cam Streeter and I concluded that Dr. Delisle might have just been sending some business a friend's way; and not necessarily sending me to the magic potion lady who was going to impart wisdom unto me; although I was hanging on her every word at first; seeing if that same thing might occur where everything said refers to everything at the same time. The book is frozen, the lake is frozen.
But on one of my trips to that store for Rice Dream and this ginseng drink that had an actual ginseng root suspended in it; Cam told me that she thought I was going to have an interesting life, based upon whatever we had talked about.
So, anyways the point of the post is, as stated, Cam was also at the performance of Guy Van Duser, who actually did the Stars and Stripes piece that night. So when I next went to the health food store she asked me what I had thought of the guy. I remember saying: "Well, he is almost too good."
And Cam Streeter saying: "I know what you mean."
That's all, just a quick Guy Van Duser anecdote. He also had with him that night a partner named Billy Novak, who played clarinet and penny whistle, almost too good, too.
Tested out the new guitar case by bringing my guitar to Bobby's where we shot a video and uploaded it to Youtube.
It's just impossible to find right now; something to do with Bobby's phone having a San Francisco area phone number, maybe.
I tested out the microphone and found that it is easy to use just for vocals; and a bit more challenging to have it capture the harmonica and the vocals.
The immediate problem is the little dime sized microphone thumping against the harmonica or the brace, if I have it suspended a certain distance in front of my mouth, but only leave a narrow space for the harmonica to fit between it and my mouth. It remains to be seen if it will thump if I am busking and trying to do some Stevie Wonder type harmonica trills.
It really is designed for the mic to be right in front of the lips of the speaker/singer. Leaving enough room for the harmonica means I am singing into it from about 3 inches away. Who knows, this might be just the amount of vocal boost needed at the Lily Pad.
And, I still haven't gone and gotten the serum shot into me.
I wonder if the virus got out of the lab in Wuhan at an early stage in their development of it. I mean, had they had more time to manipulate it before it leaked out, would it have been more fine tuned.
It's easy to think that the only purpose a virus that has been made "more infectious" has would be as a weapon. But it could also be seen as a strategical device, to affect some kind of resetting of the planet.
Let's say that Jeff Bezos and those guys really became convinced that the planet is f**cked unless the whole world goes really green, and that it was necessary to immediately lock all the people of the world down, and then to plot things like the price of gasoline skyrocketing, and then, like a light at the end of a tunnel, right as humanity is emerging out of the pandemic; electric cars are in abundance and dealers are offering to pay a premium for fossil fuel vehicles taken in trade (to be sent to the crusher) and the leasing terms are very reasonable; and so why wouldn't anyone want to say goodbye to paying $15 a gallon at the pumps when they they could trade in their guzzler and ride off in a brand new, all electric whatever... I wouldn't image that China is going to emerge from the pandemic a more "green" country. If they wanted to go green, they wouldn't need the pandemic. It seems like geopolitically, (the first 7 syllable word used in the history of this blog) it is China, and everybody else.
We could have a really fine tuned green planet. I suppose the planet could begin cooling off. The kelp would start growing in the cooler waters, unmolested by purple urchins that thrive in the warmer tides. That might bring back the albacore industry, but I digress. We could all have solar panel roofs and electric cars and the windmills out on the planes could power the broadband network, so that the big tech oligarchs could extend their tentacles out into the sticks, and Google and Twitter and Facebook could influence even that demographic in future elections. And we could live in a streamlined world with Spandex jackets for everyone; and yet China could still be fouling up the planet.
I'm not bragging, but that IS my bookshelf...
I just wonder if it could be that the virus was being made to order for the democrats, with Fouci being their agent. Maybe it was supposed to function like some kind of nanobot that would actually go into the human host and alter its DNA, in effect deleting the part of the code that made them vote for Trump. Intended to only be released in America, but escaping and becoming airborne before it could be liquefied and put into Coke-Cola, to be shipped to red states, and rural areas of blue ones.
It could have leaked out before they were done working on it; and the rest would be history. Something to think about.
I am multi-tasking, with a live Phish jam contending with an interview of Doctor Chopra, who is talking about perceptual experience and the mind; and Phish are jamming away out of a different pair of speakers....
Let's see, do I have a Phish story?
Well, in 1989, when I was taking "a semester" off to get my finances in order before trying to return to U-Mass as a yet to be determined major. And I wound up selling weed, and I wound up selling a sack to the Phish guys, who had rented a Victorian looking house that sat on the corner not far from Hampshire College, and separated from the closest other other house by a pretty good parcel of wooded acreage.
At this time, there were bands that played the college circuit. And the most popular of them had names like "Minibus Sandwich," "Dinosaur Jr.," and of course there was Phish.
A guy who lived in my apartment complex, who was a math (in some discipline) major who was from Morocco.
I think he said his father was a genuine nomad, with camels and a diet heavy on dates and oranges.
But Deveaux, as that was his name, was very good at ingratiating himself with musicians of every ilk. I hadn't been cranking a new amplifier very long before I looked out the picture window to see a skinny, pretty dark black guy with an afro hairstyle. He was motioning to me, as in; could he come inside my place and check me out jamming, type of thing.
He spoke impeccable English, using a lot of "academic" words. This was right in the heyday of hip hop music, when rap songs seemed to introduce a new word or phrase with the release of each album.
But, Deveaux was befuddled by the American African Americans. One time another young black guy approached him on the street and began speaking in terms of "Yo, homeboy" and asking Deveaux if he was "down" with this or that thing, and using words like "crib" to describe a dwelling, etc.
Deveaux told me that he had politely returned: "I'm sorry, sir, but I'm not sure I understand what you are saying..." or words to that effect.
He thought the look of confusion on the guy's face was priceless. "I'm not sure that HE understood what I was saying," he laughed.
Deveaux liked to be the guy who showed up at band practices and gigs with "the weed" and so he was able to sell a good amount on my behalf, and he of course found his way into the orb of the Phish guys, befriending their manager of sorts, whose name was Mentos. Just like the little breath mint candies, or whatever Mentos are...
That name kind of stuck with me, as did the name Phish, because of the way they spelled it. They wouldn't become famous for at least another 10 years after that. But that is my Phish story; I sold them a sack of weed once, through a guy named Deveaux and another named Mentos.
The idea of a band sharing a house so that they can jam at the drop of a hat is a great idea. No worries about jamming without the bass player or drummer while you wait for him to arrive, type of thing.
Here it is Tuesday morning, and I finally woke up as the sun was rising, let Harold the cat in, and am starting my day.
The extra few hours that Harold had to wait made him at least hungry enough to eat some of the $1.79 Whole Foods organic, grain free, grass fed cat food that I often bought just so I could get cash back off my card.
Harold has become extra finicky about eating; turning his nose up at foods that used to be his favorites. I might have spoiled him with the 90 cent Fancy Feast cans that I started to get him.
I am especially annoyed by how he will meow at his dish until I put some food in it, but then will immediately want to go outside, without eating any of it. It's like he wants to know that there will be food waiting for him here, for when he comes back in. He also likes to use his litter box right before going outside; which I also don't understand.
The new bike, an Electra Cruiser is just too slow in its top end.
Yesterday I took a fairly long ride on it, and found myself wanting to shift up to a higher gear, which isn't there. I wound up going about 12 miles per hour so that the pedals wouldn't be flying too fast.
I need to see if I can work something out with the bike shop where I could give them the Electra back, and maybe they could sell it as a "slightly used" one, and I could ride off on a State brand one, after maybe giving them another 200 bucks.
I fell off the wagon, or whatever the phrase is, after posting last Friday about how well I was doing. Pride coming before the fall, again.
I spent 4 days over which I still had alcohol left from the night before, when I woke up in the mornings, and wound up picking up where I had left off. This led to some questionable food choices, and at least one box of toaster pastries were consumed in the middle of one of the nights. This, by a guy who didn't eat any sugar for something like 40 years.
The straw that broke the camels back, if that's the phrase, was when I toted a hamper full of clothes to the laundry room and then realized that I forgot to bring detergent and ammonia. No problem, I started the machine and figured I would be right back before the tub was full and would add the soap and clothes. But, I got back to the apartment and got distracted by something on the computer, and the bottle of 1800 tequila next to it, and forgot all about the laundry.
So, the machine ran its cycle empty. Then, after I returned with the soap and took more money off my laundry card to run it; this left me without enough balance to dry the clothes. I would have had to go to a store and get a 5 dollar bill -the smallest that the laundry card machine takes. I was just too drunk and lazy at that point, so I sat the wet clothes in the hamper back in my apartment, thinking that I would get to them before they got mildew-y.
That didn't work out, because the next day, I went out on a ride that started with a stop at the Shell, for a home made margarita, made with Minute Maid lemonade, spiked with 1800 tequila. Then I rode to the grocery store, where I did remember to break a 20 so I could use the laundry machine, but after riding back towards home and running into a guy selling weed, I spent the 5 dollar bill, not thinking of the laundry.
So, today, the cleanup starts all over. I just put the same mildew-y smelling clothes back in the wash, and have gotten back to cleaning the apartment out; simplifying things, by throwing away things that have sat untouched for a long time. I'm putting all my CD's onto USB sticks so that I can donate them to the recreation room, where there are also book shelves that will take all the books that I have already read, or have read all I am going to, out of them.
I hear recordings of groups that might have only had an acoustic guitar and a set of bongos and maybe some kind of bass ukulele and a tambourine, and it makes me feel like I have too many instruments and digital effects at my disposal; and makes me want to work on recordings that are much more basic.
The time that has elapsed since the Snowball microphone crapped out on me, I intended to use to put together a library of beats, done using the digital instruments that come with the Musescore application that I have. There is every instrument of the standard orchestra available in that app, plus a bunch of "ethnic" instruments, which would now probably have to be re-labeled "world" instruments, so as to not be racist.
Part of me wishes that I had just the turntable and one album, which I would play every morning, maybe even synchronizing some chores to them; washing dishes and cleaning the kitchen during side one, and then after flipping the record over, maybe cleaning Harold's area up, type of thing.
And then learning its songs on the guitar so I could do another thing, once I start busking again, which would be to play an album all the way through, in its entirety, type of thing. I even thought about making little placards with the picture of the front of the album and a "now playing" thing on it. Something like "After The Gold Rush," by Neil Young would be a good candidate for this; and as the only album owned by a guy who has just a turntable and one album, one could do worse...
I donated the jigsaw puzzles that I will never put together to the recreation room yesterday. They are the cheaper quality ones that I was buying before I discovered Ravensburger quality puzzles, that might be 24 dollars (compared to $3.99) but have thick solid pieces that snap together definitively.
