Over the River and Through the Woods...Wait..We're LOST!

I could write about how our Grandmothers came over for Thanksgiving and how I enjoyed the turkey, gravy and cranberry sauce from a can. Or how I thought any kind of squash was the invention of the Devil to torment kids, but that's boring and our family was not a sugary perfect Walton's mountain kind of happy.

So here's a great Thanksgiving DWI story when driving completely wasted was legal.

Saint Raphael and Tolman High school had a football rivalry and the key game was always played on Thanksgiving mornings at McCoy stadium. A few days prior to that, Saints, would have pep rallies for the students to rev up the team players and the school for the fun it. I once witnessed the principal of Saints, Br. Peter Bonaventure, a balding, pointy-nosed, proud and religious man, don a cowboy outfit and dance his way through the gym to start the festivities. None of knew it was him till he whipped off the hat and beard to reveal himself. We kids thought all that guy did was pray and run a school and then pray some more.

Once, some of us rolled our eyes at him after the entire West building blew a fire drill evacuation time. He stood amongst us, berating us for taking far too long to leave. Ever get chewed out by a man in a black cassock who also has taught in Catholic schools in Africa, Malaysia and other continents? Even though a bit short of stature, this guy had that glow of Martyr about him.

 

 

The uniform of a DeLassalian Brother.

I still have no idea what that split thing around their neck signifies.
They bop these guys all over the world to teach in schools and
are a hair less crazy than Jesuits.

The Tolman kids, each year, would make a nighttime terror attack on the statue in the front of our school. It was of an angel standing atop a stone which had the names of all the alumni killed in WW2. The kids would spray paint it red, the Tolman color, with either the name of the school or sometimes “FUCK YOU” would be the word. Br Peter Bonaventure was never pleased about that but we Saints kids would've spray painted something at Tolman, if it had any kind of monument to deface but they had none.

The rivalry was kind of intense at times.

My brother and I attended the games twice, both times we became wasted. We weren't the only ones either.

McCoy stadium isn't that far from my house. Driving to it just requires a right, one left and one more right and we can be there in about five minutes if the traffic is light. Good, remember that.

The game began at 10 am and my brother had gone to the liquor store the night before to get a fifth of Popov vodka. I've told you about Popov vodka before. It's the kind of vodka you buy because you're a teen and have little money and you want the most alcohol for the buck. The problem is that Popov tastes like CVS rubbing alcohol. He had also bought a one litre bottle of Pepsi to cut it with and we ran out of that fast.

Like some Thanksgiving mornings, it was brutally cold and we huddled in our stadium seats, drinking Pepsi/vodka drinks out of the soda cans we brought with us. We could easily remake drinks w/o too many people witnessing it. Of course, we made a 50/50 mix so we'd get goofed up quick. We ran out of mixer and then began to drink it straight. Thank God the vodka was chilled by the cold air. It took less than one quarter of the game before we became stupidly drunk.

Then as a comedy bit, we'd come up with the most disgusting rants to hurl at the Tolman players. “Tolman's very good at handling BALLS!” yelled my brother. “Make them SUFFER!” I yelled out after one of their players had to be taken out on a gurney after being body slammed during a play. We didn't really swear and spit epitaphs at them, just came up with the most sarcastic and tasteless insults we could. Those around us, older folks who attended this game as a tradition, would look upon us with derision. I'm surprised the cops never showed up to police us or others who were obviously out of it and making the game a miserable event for all the others who thought you shouldn't yell out insults about Tolman player's sexual health. As I remember it now, there were only traffic cops there.

The game was over by noon or just after. We stumbled back to our car to drive home and now in hindsight, it would've been better if we just walked home as it was no real long distance. But my brother was 20 and I, 15 and both of our abilities to make the right decision was shot to hell.

Here's a map of our drive home and I'm pulling this from a distant memory but I know we ended up in the woods of Rehoboth as I remember the farm.



The distance between those two circles, McCoy and my house, is about 1/3 a mile.

 

 

 

And where we ended up.

 

 



I don't know why my brother became lost on his way home. I'm sure the vodka had a lot to do with it. I kept busting his balls about getting us lost in the woodlands of Massachusetts when our home was all of spitting distance from McCoy. He finally swung his car around in a hard, sharp U turn which tossed me into the passenger seat floor, whacking my head on the glove compartment box on the way down. I wasn't injured, well, I was leaking some blood but I didn't know till we nearly got home.

Pulling onto our street finally, my brother made damn sure that I wasn't to act drunk at the Thanksgiving table. “Look, we're to eat, shut up, speak only when we have too and then, get the fuck out of there as we're both too gooned to keep it secret any longer...and get that blood off your forehead!”

I had slit my scalp a bit where my hair was and the blood had been trickling down. Lucky for me I clot fast.

We both tried sobering up some. We came in, hurriedly eat the dinner and made some small talk to give it an appearance that we were normal. I sat there wondering if either my Mom or Grandmother could smell the vodka vapors coming off me. What's weird is that neither of the two made any mention of us being stinking drunk.

Here's a combination, drunk and well fed. There are two things you can do, either vomit it all up or pass out. Luckily for the two of us, we passed out. I found my spot on the floor in the living room. No joke. That required some explaining when my Mom poked her head in the room. “Oh for God's sake...sleep on the couch!” I gathered all my strength to crawl up on that. In about two hours, I was cured and felt fine.

That amazes me to this day. Well it shouldn't. When you're 15 and silly drunk, your body is still young enough to cure itself and you bounce back fairly quickly.

My brother a few hours later claimed he never remembered getting lost in Rehoboth. I remembered it. Oh well. That's life in 1980. When drunk driving laws were tiny misdemeanors and you have all the luck in the world by not sliding into a 100 year old oak tree.

After the four day weekend, I returned to school at Saints. I can remember sitting in Ted Dukuk's Human Physiology class and by stupid luck, we were learning about the liver the days before Thanksgiving and still doing it. Ted then remarks, as a ball busting comment, that the liver cannot remove alcohol fast enough to prevent it's effects on the brain. “Alcohol has a depressant effect on the brain and can cause the person to make silly, stupid decisions and to act like a moron.” He then then shoots a knowing look at me with a smirk as I was in the front row. The classroom started laughing. I guess Ted was at the game nearby us to witness it all.

A Small Christmas Story

Every Boy Wanted One of These. Click the Pick to See the Movie.

 

 

I have my own Red Ryder Christmas story, but it's not as sugary as the 1983 movie. The first time I touched a BB gun happened about five months before in July when Jim and I made friends with a kid named Baxter. He had, what amounted to me at the time, was a canon called the Crosman 760 Power Master pump bb gun. This could shoot holes through stockade fences. I tried it a few times in his back yard and the next thought I had was, “I have to get one of these! I just have too!”

Of course, there were obstacles to owning one. My damn parents. My Dad and Mom were both worry worts. One time, I was helping my Dad do some lawn work with a hand held electric lawn trimmer when I put it down to go inside for lunch without him knowing I had done so. I was on the north side of the house, he on the east. As I was sitting at the kitchen table eating, he comes charging into the house thinking I had cut every finger off with the thing as he did not hear it chattering away after a few minutes.

He admits to my Mom that when he noticed that he had not heard the trimmer being used, he jumped to conclusion that I had somehow horribly injured myself and ran inside to see what help he could provide. Mom and I both looked at him as if he were insane. I said, “Wouldn't you have heard me screaming at the top of my lungs had I cut off just one finger with it?”

(Perhaps one day I'll tell you how I turned the tops of my index and middle fingers on my left hand to hamburger with a lawn mower...but not today. This is a different story!)

So, my parents weren't about to hand over a gun to me when they thought I'd shoot out everyone's eye up and down the street with it. Or shoot out a window or the cat or the mailman or...

So for about five months, I had to use the best of my 12 years of experience with manipulating my parents. Actually my Dad who I could tell wasn't too keen on the idea. If he said yes, my Mom would go along. I was a sly one I can tell you. The best approach was of complete subtlety.

I broached the subject on Friday nights. On those nights, we always went out to eat at the Friendly Tap restaurant and after knocking back his two Manhattans (“Please, with whiskey and dry vermouth!) he'd loosen up, become more amiable and then I'd unleash my PSYOPS attack on him.

I didn't come out and request a bb gun for Christmas, that's way too abrupt. I just talked about them, any gun in general. My Dad had been in the Army during the Korean War so I'd ask about the guns he used then. Or I'd ask about if he had any BB guns as a kid. He claimed he never owned one. You see, dropping a few small, innocuous ideas here and there, spaced a week apart, was the best way to approach that lion's den and convince him to let YOU eat HIM.

With each week that passed, I applied slight but steady pressure on him. He wasn't stupid, he figured out I wanted one for the holidays. I'd get his views that they “weren't toys” or “we're dangerous” but I'd counter that safety could be learned and there was risk in everything.

On most Saturday nights, my parents would be at the kitchen table watching the TV night line up (Mary Tyler Moore, Newhardt, Love-American Style) and sometimes I'd sit with them. Then came on a commercial for a rifle that “shot” light at a target that either registered your aim as a hit or not. I saw my Dad's eyes light up just for a second at that idea. I turned to him and said...”Ah, who would want that anyway? It shoots at one thing and probably takes 8 D sized batteries.” I didn't want a toy that couldn't shoot through a beer can!

I was making some progress with him when one night he let slip he owned a BB gun when he was eight years old. I then had him. I went into a bit of a sarcastic tirade about his argument that I “wasn't old enough” when HE himself had one at eight. I won.

My Dad, though at times a “Presidente For Life” dictator, did appreciate a good cogent argument from me, or at least my attempts at them. He found it harder and harder to issue orders to me because I became better and better at spotting irrationality. He hated to be called irrational and if I could argue my case and win. I won.

“Because I SAID so.” lost it's authority with Dad. His own kid would poke major holes in it. And if he did make “I said so” stick due to being stubborn, I would acquiesce but go Viet Cong on him later. That is, I did whatever he said "No" to behind his back. I was learning Sun Tzu's Art of War on my own. I was a tenacious kid about certain things back then. If I wanted something, I was going to get it come Hell or High Water. I usually succeeded.

My Dad gave in and we made the trek to Ann & Hope to purchase it, to be opened for Christmas. Until then,  he had kept it under his bed and I'd sneak it out, fill it up with bb's and go upstairs and start popping away at various things in my room.   I just couldn't wait till Christmas to shoot it.  The weapon wasn't loud as it was low powered and the TV volume in the kitchen was set on “10.” After a few minutes I'd sneak it back to it's box under the bed.

Finally Christmas came and I opened my presents. I opened the box for the gun and I gave a very heart felt “Thank you” for being allowed to have it and then acted like I couldn’t care less by pushing it aside while going after the other presents. But, an hour later my brother and I were downstairs popping my old coloring books with it.

 

 

This was it. The Daisy Model 96. Pathetically weak and underpowered but to me, it was an AK 47.

 

 

I wasn't a moron with the gun. I knew it could “put an eye” out or send a bb two inches into my flesh. But being a kid you are a moron a times, it comes with the territory. In the following January, I was popping just about anything in the cellar I could get away with popping when I just aimed it at the concrete wall and fired. The bb had hit the wall and blew out a piece of cement with a puff of dust and I heard a funny sound returning to me. It was a long whizzzing sound and I felt a “tink!” on my two front teeth.

“Shit? What was that? as I held my mouth. “Was that a ricochet? I thought.

I went upstairs to the bathroom mirror and looked. I had chipped my right front big tooth near the bottom. There wasn't much missing but you could tell the tooth no longer had any clean lines. Yes, it was a ricochet and I had shot myself.

“Oh FUCK!” If my Mom ever finds this out why this occurred, I'll never live it down.

A few weeks went by where I learned NEVER to smile too much in front of Mom. I managed to get away with it, for a while, when she then said..”What's wrong with your tooth?” All Moms know their kid's inside and out. Any changes in their bodies and Mom will spot it.

I had already thought up an explanation (read this as a BIG lie) and told her I was riding my bike with Jimmy when we both decided we'd try riding on frozen puddles. I lost control of the bike and hit the ice with my face, chipping my tooth some.

I got a 180 second chewing out for doing something “So foolish and stupid” but I stood there, taking in every insult as I knew this was far better than the super nova my Mom would've exploded into had she found out what really happened.



A year later, when I was 13, we had our first Christmas without Dad as he had died earlier in the year. I make no pretense at being the most moral person at all, even at that age. I managed to convince my Mom to get me a Crosman 760 Pump Master bb gun as she had NO idea of the difference between that and the low powered Daisy gun I had. My Dad, had he been around, would've known though and prevented any such purchase. A Crosman 760 could shoot through galvanized steel. The Daisy I owned might have shot through a few beer cans.

This was the second one. Eminently more powerful and dangerous.

 

 

It's funny how we still carry our hobbies, interests as a child to adulthood. Women of my age collect dolls they had as children. There's one guy I know who loved planes as a kid and today has one of those radio controlled airplanes. I myself have a Diana Mayer & Grammelspacher pellet rifle I purchased years ago. A pellet rifle is just a more accurate type of air gun, but still in the same caliber as a crappy BB gun. The difference is that this thing I own could blow a hole through the wall of my house. Gotta love that German engineering.

 

 

This puppy is serious business. Can nail a tack at 90 yards. It oughta, I paid enough for it. Those marks at the butt came from my Shepherd chewing on it when very young.

 

And yes, I learned not to shoot concrete walls with it.

Men are just boys with bigger toys as the saying goes.



Wheel of Fortune.

Not the TV One...the REAL One.

 

 

 

I'm not sure if anyone reads words and sentences anymore. Words and sentences that are found in books. Books that you have to open and have the patience to read page by page and not find it chore. There are times in conversations I have had or a situation that is occurring, I'll be tempted to remark that it was similar to something I read in a book. Oh shit, now I did it. I caused their eyes to glaze over. Most, out of politeness, will sweetly fake some attention to what I'm about to say. I am now obliged to speak since their false attention demands I uphold my end of this social interaction. The enthusiasm of what I was going to remark on evaporates quick.

Never mention books or others will hold up garlic and a silver cross at you.

*****

I”ve finished Joan Didion's Blue Nights, a book on her reaction to her daughter, Quinton Roo's death and of aging in general. I became hooked on Didion from her 1968 book Slouching Towards Bethlehem. It was written as New Journalism. What's New Journalism? Read this which I lifted from Google.

“New Journalism was a style of 1960s and 1970s news writing and journalism which used literary techniques deemed unconventional at the time. The term was codified with its current meaning by Tom Wolfe in a 1973 collection of journalism articles he published as The New Journalism, which included works by himself, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Robert Christgau, Gay Talese and others.”

New Journalism allowed the author to become part of the story. Beforehand it was a sin for a any reporter to shuck off their objective stance that may color an article. New Journalism contended that how can you write about something thoroughly without being immersed in the action itself?

I loved this genre. I was introduced to it by reading Hunter Thompson's Hells Angels book.

Joan Didion made herself fairly rich on her books after wards. She went from being a daughter from the farm life of San Fernando valley to living on both coasts, with homes on the right blocks of LA and NYC. Joan was an ascendent among the liberal intelligentsia by writing for Vogue, The New Yorker and Hollywood screenplays. She was at the right place, at the right time with the right goods.

She married and adopted a girl and named her Quinton Roo as her attempts at becoming pregnant were fruitless. The process of adoption then was as difficult as picking out a puppy from a pet store. Do that and then go to court to declare you are the new owner of this child. Done and done.

Things went along swimmingly for years until her husband John Dunne slumped dead on the kitchen table from a heart attack and a few weeks later, her daughter ended up in a NYC hospital with pancreatis which never healed and finally took her away. The double whammy caused Joan's nearly perfect world to fall apart.

Joan's quite honest about herself in the book. She speaks of the changes that heaps of money brings to your outlook on life. Living “well” does create a new view on things. Such as always thinking the future will be positive; if not, then at least easily fixable. Anything that bad can't really happen, can it? That's not a view shared by most people who have to scrape by and have their feet near the fire. Nor by people who from very early on, learned how thin the ice can be. Feeling very sure about next month is sort of a luxury if you're rich. Also living life with the luck of safely skating that ice falsely teaches you that it won't ever break.

She tells of a incident that didn't pan out but caused her to wake up some. She and her husband were in the position to go to Saigon, during the Vietnam War, to root around, perhaps find a story to write about. Joan busied herself on Fifth Avenue by finding the right clothes for Quinton Roo to wear in that jungle climate. Fifth Avenue is the fashion capital of the world and even kid's clothes cost an arm and a leg there.

They never took the assignment as something else cropped up, but they would have.

She later admits her head wasn't in the right place. She comes to find out who the hell would take an infant to the worst place on Earth, crawling with Viet Cong insurgents and a populated by those who price a human life less than you would price a used Moped. Saigon then, was a shithole.

I admit, as I was reading the book, I was a bit pissed off at her talent and phenomenal luck she had at writing and the success she gained. That comes from her descriptions of life among the New York and LA crowd she mixed with. You can be happy about a friend winning Megabucks but you can't help but also feel a slight tinge of jealousy at the new life they're about to embark on too...and you won't be living it with them 24/7.

What happened to Joan was that after living in that rarefied atmosphere that causes you to view the world as predictable and safe, was brought down.

Joan responds to this criticism without being asked. She knows damn well that she and Quinton Roo were “privileged.” But she retorts, “So what if I was, sickness, mental illness, raising a child who then dies causes the same pain in me as it would in others.”

'Fuck off.” She says to that indictment. She might have said that to me as well had I intimated my thoughts about her station in life.

I understand it. The two people in her life that meant most to her were taken far too suddenly and having to deal with two gaping holes in your life isn't easy. Who, rich or poor, smart or dumb as shit, could easily navigate a minefield once you realized you're in one and two sneaky mines have detonated? What do you do then?

You stand there shocked and numbed, that's what you do. It's human. Then you gather your resources together to find a way out, to cope and to go on with life without those who once traveled with you.

“Suck it up” some would say. Yeah, well that's a means of surviving it. But I know those with that attitude cannot but help, deep inside, feel that loss somewhat no matter how well they managed to scrunch it down. Denying your humanity...is denying your humanity. Simple as that.

*****

She ties getting older with the loss of Quinton Roo. You really cannot protect your children from all threats and you cannot stop time from advancing. If you compared Joan from when she was a cute 25 and her now, in her mid 70's, you can see how her looks have completely fallen apart. She knows this and isn't living in delusion.

The title of the book comes from the weird blue glow we get after sunset, in early fall, just before the black of night. She says that's where she is in life now, in that blue glow. She knows this and I think she wrote this book as a means as therapy, as a way to get it all “Out of her.”

I have been told that I am just, just now starting to approach that time in life where aging speeds up and I am fully aware of it. I write about it here and have complained numerous times to others in real life about the fact I cannot be young again. Like Joan, I felt as if I wouldn't get old nor lose my youth. Like her, I and probably you too, live life enjoying and hating it's various moments in the NOW. Then one day, all of a sudden, we come to find out we've advanced quite far after living and focusing on so many “Nows.” You raise your head and look around, “Holy Shit! How did I get here?”

It comes from focusing on the moment, you don't look forward too far or back too far. You short term attention span cannot appreciate the horizon as it's job is to zero in on the details of here. You've been having so much fun you forget the speed your traveling at and you cover much ground at that speed.

To tell the truth, Joan isn't exceptional in that way of thinking, we all do this.



But Is She Pretty on the Inside?

I used to go to an old club called Sh-Booms in Providence. It was styled as a 50's Sock Hop with waitresses wearing Poodle Skirts and the music leaned toward Elvis, The Big Bopper and Bobby Darrin. It also had plenty of contemporary music as well. Sh-Booms is long since gone now, turned into Olive's restaurant and that's probably gone as well as far as I know.

One Saturday night in Sh-Booms, I was standing next to this stunning brunette while the MC was on top of the bar, promising the club goers what a great night they were about to have. He kept shouting out names of old bands and those dances that were fads for a month or so, in order to get the crowd riled up. I was making eye contact with this woman, trying to get her attention and then inserting a little small talk as we both stood there watching the MC. She responded to me with one word replies, but was nice enough though.

I kept at it still.

The MC then said, “We have a very special guest with us tonight! I'm proud to have here in Sh-Boom's Miss Massachusetts, she's boarding a plane tomorrow morning to compete in the Miss USA pageant! Please welcome Marsha Turner!”

I, the crowd all looked around for Marhsa. The girl who was standing next to me brightened up and strode forth to the bar and climbed on top of it with the help of the MC. I then realized I was hitting on Miss Massachusetts and that she'd never give me more than a three word reply to any of my advances.

Oh well. I didn't feel too bad at striking out. Without knowing it, I was trying to bag a Miss USA contender. She never won the crown that year but I'm sure she's married to a hedge fund manager or someone similar, living a life I could never provide.

How many pretty girls have I gone out with? That's a hard question because pretty is subjective. What I think is pretty and what you think is can be quite different. There have been times when my friends introduced me to some new girlfriend and inside my head, quietly, I thought, “What that hell does he see in her?” I'm sure others have felt the same about me as well when I introduced someone new.

Two girls I still know, from my 20's, badgered with questions about “What guys think is pretty?” I swear they were trying to get me to divulge some secret that only guys knew and if these girls found out, they could use it to make themselves more attractive. I gave them a roundabout answer that wasn't definitive at all. “I know it when I see it” was the first answer and that's true, I do know it when I see it. The final answer that was a descriptive as I could get was, “'Pretty', is found in the eyes.”

The girls weren't satisfied at all with that answer but it was the best I could come up with.

The prettiest I was with was P. She was a blonde I dated , which is odd because I don't naturally tend towards that. But those first few dates were fun due to knowing I had a real looker and was probably a bit smug with myself for having bagged this one.

There's a known fact in the PR industry called the “Halo Effect.” A person who is good looking will have that fair opinion attributed to other aspects of them as well. A girl looking at Brad Pitt will think he's handsome but will also think that everything else about him is that good too. It's painting with a broad brush really. Brad Pitt may look good but it doesn't confer an environmental sciences degree upon him when he speaks of the “carbon sink” that the world's oceans are known for. But many will accede to his opinion without knowing it because of this halo effect. It's why commercials tend to use pretty people hawking their products. The pretty looks of a model rub off onto the Preparation H she's trying to sell you.

P had a halo effect with me back then. I thought she did everything right, till I got to know her well and found her to be just as flawed as anyone else out there is. In fact she had some major flaws, like we all have.

Her prettiness became duller as the weeks passed. It was one of life's lessons you learn in your 20's that teach you that shallowness is just what it is, shallow.  Her glow became darker when I discovered her penchant for alcohol and a long list of loser boyfriends that had preceded me.  

There's a guy I know who comically retells this story about a long time girlfriend and a fight he had with her. They were both vacationing in Key West and were at beach cabana type bar when their morning long snippy argument went nuclear. It provided great entertainment for all the others there too.

After throwing deadlier and deadlier barbs at one another, she finally pressed the Big Red Button and yelled at him, “Yeah? Well you SUCK in bed! Did you know that!!?”

The customers at the cabana become dead quiet at hearing this.

A moment passes when the boyfriend responds with, “Well....you suck OUT OF BED!”

He tells me the people at the cabana started clapping to his retort.

At 20, I don't think I would've truly understood that comment to it's fullest meaning. How could I? With my then superficial and inexperienced view on everything. Today, a pretty face isn't the promise I once thought it once was.

 

 

 

There she is.  The one in Sh-Booms who blew me off. 

Good Enuff...

I go on a tear about various things and I gorge myself on them till I puke. I'll get an addiction to Popsicles for a week, then forget about them for another year. Or it'll be some kind of food I'll make in vat style quantities and feast till I wonder why I liked it in the first place. What's common with any of that is focus. When you can hone in, perfect your ability to ignore distractions, is when you can make Great Works of Art, be it a bucket of chili or trying to get this computer to run as cold as possible.

“You're more interested in that damn hobby than you are in me!” is a sentence I've heard from time to time. It's true. I can be more interested in a thing than I can be in people at times.

My tinkering is entertainment to me. I'm not sure this is just a guy thing but we can blow off the rest of the world and go nuts on gaming, working out, radio controlled planes or fill up a cellar with Tycho train sets chugging through a tiny town. Some of us build actual man caves to hide and grunt in while others portion out some of their time and attention for an interest that seems silly.

Lately, for me, it's been the stereo. If you want an infuriating hobby that will provide hours of tweaking and calibration, this is it.

I've gone on before about this and it's not a waste of time as far as I'm concerned. Music is the best and and I can back that up with eons of human history saying so. What dogs this particular hobby is the incessant need to constantly perfect the quality of sound. Now I'm doing room acoustical treatments to further perfect it. In the process, the living room doesn't look like a living room anymore.

Corner bass traps, skyline diffusers, reflection control panels, SPL meters; are all fun toys to play with if you're into this game. The problem occurs is that I never can reach nirvana and have it 100% correct. If I can get it to 99.98%, there's that last .02% that I MUST correct. The truth being that it's impossible to do, but I try to squeeze as much perfection as I can out of the room and system.

Why go through this effort? I guess you have to love music in order to devote such care. There are songs that have just one note, one small passage that can make the entire song. Sometimes the beginning of a song is what makes it, the rest is just support for those first few seconds. It's a feeling of “Ahhh...that's it!” You know when you hear it. That feeling can come from anything really. It's when everything falls into place without much effort, letting the moment rise on it's own. That's when beauty can be seen. “Nailing it” would be a shorter description but I prefer to define, define, define.

“Sundown” by Gordon Lightfoot has two notes in it where Gordon bends the strings of his guitar, making the note swing down deep every time I hear that song. That's what I'm listening for, that moment when he does it.. It's heaven. When you hear that through a system that can reproduce the sound, even the raspy sound of the string clattering on the fret board, it's even better.

The intro to Bad Finger's “Baby Blue” is another example I can think of.

*****

There comes a point when I should listen to the music instead of listening to the system itself, but it's hard to differentiate those two as they are so intertwined with one another. Songs I've heard a million times are etched within me and when they're not reproduced like I want them to, I start hunting for the cause. There are numerous causes for shitty sounding songs too. Alot of them I have no control over either. FM fade outs, MP3-4 compression which chops the highs and lows off (that's why they can fit 1,000 songs on a chip) or some annoying DJ who talks right up to the post of a song. Add to that crummy recordings of live material, intentional “brightening” of music because that's what a lot of people enjoy or great songs recorded when recording technology was awful.

Life is short. I'll play audio engineer because I find it fun and I'll just sit back and listen to the music as well without worrying if my picture window is reflecting in the 2000-5000Hz band.

Below are some cartoons I found about this hobby.

 

 

 

 

What a Neat House, These Must be People of Quality!

Just Outside My Kitchen Window

I used to have a garden. I used to be one hell of a gardener. I could grow patches of corn that reached seven to eight feet in height. I had sprawling vines of cantaloupe that would perfume the yard when they ripened. I had and still have Crockett's Victory Garden book which I found out was the Bible on vegetable growing.

Used to. Had. Did.

Now most yard work bores me to tears. Well, it bored me to tears when I was in my mid 20s.

I now cut the lawn when I deduce the neighbors are near upon calling the Zoning Board to complain. My own personal pride concerning how the yard looks has waned over the years. I'm not quite sure why that has happened.

Now, the damn leaves are everywhere. I looked out my kitchen window and the yard looks like great background for a Hunter/Gun catalog. Lay in some Italian shotguns, a few duck decoys and some wool sweaters and my yard can be a photo shoot. Will I rake it? No.

After my Dad's death, it fell upon me to do the yard work as my brother had not the stamina to do that. Ok, fine. I didn't hate the tedious work then. I also perhaps felt a bit of that suburban guilt. I cut, raked and bagged to show just how clean our family's mental hygiene was for the neighborhood.

“See? Our yard is just like all the others and it's proven by our short, leafless lawns. We're not faithless degenerates at all.”

My faith and religious duty to proving to the others slowly waned though.

One Saturday morning, way too early in my estimation, my Mom was bitching for me to get out there and rake up the leaves. I said, “I would.” But that didn't mean I'd fly out the door that second to start the job. Not at 8AM was I going to start. Saturday's are meant to be eased into because nursing hangovers from the nightclub before takes a few hours, perhaps the whole morning.

About a half an hour later, who do I see raking the yard and doing so furiously? Mom.

I go out there to tell her to stop as I would do it...eventually. She continued to rake. I swear she jumped on that job at 8:30 AM to rub it in my face. She had “waited too long and had to do the job herself.”

I know that trick.

I go on

“Look, I said I would do it, now why don't you go back into the house?”

No answer. Ignoring me is a good way to make the sarcasm come out of me.

“What? You LIKE raking leaves? Is that it? Ma, (my voice is getting louder now but under a shout) if you like raking leaves...I'll take you to Slater Park, you rake ALL THE DAMN leaves you want!!”

Stubborn Irish bitch...she kept raking. Fine, you rake to your heart's content, I'm going back inside to drink Gatorade to quell this hangover I have.

It's funny how some memories, even if just moments, stay with you. I was walking to my car, on my way to work when I noticed how the yard was shoe deep in dry leaves. I said to myself, “Ahh...the wind will eventually make them disappear.” A second later the next thought was “What a bastard you are, letting the leaves blow into everyone elses yard for them to rake up.” Yeah, I suppose I can be one.

I think the major reason I hated the leaf job was due to the fact you cannot create a big pile of them, drop a match and have one hell of a smoky bonfire like they used to do before the Clean Air Act was signed. I do sort of miss that, that smell from my childhood. I guess ten's of thousands of small, smoky leaf pile fires across New England just might screw the air we breathe up a bit. Still, it seemed a rite to Fall to be able to do this. You could buy metal garbage cans that were perforated for burning leaves then. Contain that fire and dump the ashes in one swoop.

They outlawed that. Then it turned into putting the leaves in plastic bags. Then into plastic bags marked as yard waste. Now it's in biodegradable paper ones meant for composting. I don't feel too “green” when I have to do this. Soon it'll be, “Maple leaves here, oak ones there..and NO dogwood! Dogwood must be transported and composted by YOU in Westerly, RI.”

So, we'll see how guilted I get into raking.

*****

If you care to listen to small town Irish radio station, in the town my grandmother was born, click this picture and hit "Listen Live."

 

Notice How they Drive on the Wrong Side of the Street?

 



The problem I find with most traditional Irish music is that it comes in either lamentable ballads meant to make you depressed like Skibbereen,

...the landlord and the bailiff came to drive us all away.

They set the roof on fire with their cursed English flame,

And that's another reason why I left old Skibbereen.

Or, the other style of music is the rousing, IRA marching music.

Kill the Prots!

Kill the Prots!

Shoot them in the face

Stomp on their feet

Split open their knees!

We are proud to be Fenian bastards!

Anyway, the radio broadcasts in English, sort of, if you can get past the thick accent they speak in. If you're lucky, you can catch it as they play local punk Irish bands. If you're unlucky, you'll hear an hour long program on soccer.

I,
I wish you could swim,
Like the dolphins.
Like dolphins can swim.
Though nothing
Will keep us together.
We can beat them
For ever and ever.
Oh we can be Heroes.
Just for one day.

 

 

 

 

 

I did something I haven't done in a few decades and that was to see my parent's childhood homes and neighborhoods. I needed to get some shopping done and since I abhor paying more than I have to, I took a jog over to the only Job Lot that's near me, the one on Pawtucket Ave that leads south into Providence.

I stocked up on some winter supplies, found some great wool socks as my feet turn to ice every winter and as I was about to drive home, I realized I was a few blocks over from the home my Dad grew up in. As I drove down it, I saw that it was a poor neighborhood populated by mostly Hispanics now. Back then in the 30's, it was a poor Irish slum. Not much changes but the tenants it seems.

I found the house and recognized it from some old picture of my Dad when he was ten years old standing outside of it. I didn't stay long as I probably looked suspicious as hell. Here is a picture of it below. A typical three-decker home for families who all worked in the mills back then.

 

My Mom's house isn't that far way from Trenton. She grew up in a house on Sterry St and I swung by that. I didn't have much hope that it would be still there but there it was, the smallest shack on the street. It's still painted a dull blue color and I was surprised to realize just how small it was. My Uncle had inherited it from his parents and lived in it till the 80's. This is the house where all the Christmas Eve parties happened and after seeing it today, I can't imagine how they managed to stuff that many people in it. My Uncle raised four kids in that cottage. Today, it's in the same demographic region, Hispanic and poor. But like my Dad's back then, it was all poor Irish Catholic.

 

And again, since I was in the area I swung by the graveyard. I haven't been there in years since my brother has passed. I found all of them and it hit me. There's a lot of bodies from my family here. When I did visit it on a seemingly regular basis...like every two years apart, I'd see the stones and calculate just how long both my parents have been gone. Then leave. What can you do at a cemetery?

Today, I did something different. I saw all three there and I had a quiet mental conversation with all three. It's so typically human though, talk to long gone relatives. But this was a first for me.

“We once were a family, ya know” I said. “There were once some nice times a family enjoys, the beach, holidays and such.”

That was then over run by the dark stuff, as every family is never perfect. We had both, good and bad.

I looked at my Dad's name, realizing the trampy Irish neighborhood he came from and said, “You made it...You made it. You scraped like a dog to climb a corporate ladder, you got out of that mill life that was pretty much the destiny of many of your friends there on Trenton St...You were also a martinet whose sons regularly rebelled like al Queada behind your back! Ah...we had to if we were going to carve out our own personalities.”

My Mom's there alongside her husband. I liked her better as every kid has a favorite parent, and every parent has a favorite child...it goes both ways! The good and the bad memories came up about her as well. She was the kinder of the two and more “human” and approachable vs. Dad. She, like all woman, are the better half of a marriage. She had her faults too, like being an awful cook! And a memory of signing her batshit crazy ass into Butler Hospital all those years ago came up too. Major Depression was the diagnosis an it is completely destructive. I'll speak of that sometime maybe.

Here's where they all “live” now.

 

I came home, dumped my winter supplies onto the table and looked around. There is just one piece of furniture that was here when everyone was alive, the kitchen table. I walked around the house and realized how much has changed since those times. The carpets, other furniture, wallpaper, paint and everything else that makes a home have pretty much evolved and changed as the years flew by. Both of my parents would be aghast at how I turned the living room into a small auditorium, with audio components being the focus and cables snaking all around.

Time marches on as they way and things do change. This is natural.

A memory sticks with me though, one from 1972. I was seven then and the entire family was whole. We were piling the car full of supplies to head to Scarborough beach on a hot Saturday morning then. We were all in good moods. Our neighborhood had a hint of that Leave it to Beaver friendliness as neighbors chatted us up about what beaches they liked. The sun seemed brighter too in my mind. The cheezy AM radio in my Dad's Impala was set to WPRO 930 playing the top 40 of that time.

This isn't some 30 Days of Thankfulness thingy. I didn't mean it to be this but I am thankful that we did own, for a while, happier times when we were all here. Instead of watching terminal illness take us one by one and having to manage that and leaving me the last man standing, I'm left with a summer memory that's nicer. I do know we were all once “Heroes, Just for One Day,” as the song goes.

 

 

The Last One Standing Now Lives Here

 

 

 

 

 

"C'mon, Take Only a Teensy-Weensy Little Puff..

Me On The Smallest Puff

I really shouldn't smoke pot. I shouldn't. I'm useless if I'm stoned. There's a reason why they sometimes called Thai stick, "Mekong MindFuck."

I've stated here before my reasons why I don't but I slipped. I was a party in Duxbury, playing Cards Against Humanity when someone handed me a joint. I've caved into peer pressure before and taken ONE hit of it and most times, noting at all happens. Not this time. Not that night.

I'm not sure of the type I hit on that night but it wasn't what we called “ditch weed” when I was younger a hundred years ago. Whatever it was it came from a very well cared for plant with some controlled genetics. It was probably cured by a Master Cuban Cigar Maker under strict humidity controls too.

One Hit. No joke. I'm that much of a lightweight. I was sent past Pluto.

I thought something was wrong, I could feel reality twisting in me and I told myself, “Oh, you are sooo fucked.” Within ten minutes, I was climbing fast and my personality shifted into defense mode.

As Steven was explaining the rules to Cards Against Humanity, I sat there and clammed right up. I figured the less I do, shift in my seat, talk or even smoke a cigarette, the better. I tried to listen to the rules, but my brain decided a trip to the Enchanted Forest was better. The rules, as I understood them at the moment, were just a shotgun spray of words.

Here were some of my thoughts.

“You oughta pipe up and ask what the hell it going on....No! Don't! If you do that, you invite a re-telling of the rules and they'll just go in one ear and slither out the other for all to see. Better just sit and watch everyone else.”

As the high hit it's apex, this is my mind while stoned.

“Shit.IhavetothrowdownacardandIdon'tknowwhichonestothrow.IfIthrowdown”Auschwizt”and

”innocentbabies”everyonewillthinkI'masickfuck.”

And...

Dammit.I'msohighthatifItrytodrivehometonightI'llbepulledoverbyaStatieandhe'llknowinaninstantthat

I'mtotallyhighandI'llbechargedwithDWIandthey'lltowmycarandI'llgotocourtandI'lllosemylicense

andthenI'llneedtopayforalawyerandpaytogetmycaroutandpayfinesandmylifewillsuck.

I overheard someone say to another, “Yeah, look at him, he's destroyed.” 

I was. On one toke.

I hear that the most potent strain out there is called Purple Haze and if it's grown hydroponically, if it's life is spent in cooled, cycled fertilized water without soil and radiated with 1000w sodium lights, the plant produces the strongest TCH available.

If I had that, I'd be catatonic. Call 911.

This reminds me of a girl that crashed into me at a Dylan concert once. We were about 20 feet from the stage and the show hadn't started yet. So, I'm scanning the crowd, the equipment on stage and the such when I then think I recognize someone in front of me. I see a guy with naturally curly hair, almost an Afro with grey mixed in it. He's wearing a tweed jacket with those lovely elbow patches on the arms. I lean around some and realize it's Dr. Thomas Cousins, a psychologist from Rhode Island College's Psych. Department. I think, “Well, why wouldn't he be here, this music is more from his generation than mine."

I don't wave hi to him or try to get his attention though.

As I was standing there, a girl comes charging through the crowd and body slams me in a full frontal assault. This wasn't on purpose, just a huge misstep on her part. She threw her arms around my neck for thirty seconds and I look right into her face. Here eyes were swimming in her head and I could tell she had ingested her drugs way too early for the show as she was peaking now. She then disentangled herself from me and charged the other way and crashed into Dr Cousins.

 

The girl did the same with him, she threw her arms around his neck, but collapsed and was held up by Cousins. As he held her he had this total look of shock on his face. This middle-class, staid, respected Professor of Statistical Psychological research now had this drooling teen girl hanging on his arms. The poor guy just looked around the crowd with a “Would someone please help me? I don't know what to do with this sick girl as I'm too geeky to know what to do next?”

A couple of bouncers finally came and rescued Dr Cousins. They carried her out the side door easily as she probably weighed 95 pounds. She looked like a loose rag doll and completely out of it.

Dr. Cousins brushed himself off, stood erect and finally regained that sober respect once again.

I thought. “What incredible luck, to pass out from drugs into the arms of licensed, practicing psychologist.”

I don't want to come near to passing out as I did that in my teens with cheap Popov vodka, never mind doing that now with all these sophisticated pills the kids have today.

Hell, I'm such a featherweight that simple pot can wreck me.

I better stick to that watery Budweiser, even though the owner at the Celtic has rolled his eyes when I ordered one.

“For Fuck's Sake Ronnie...I have plenty of choices from Ireland and you drink that piss?”

That “piss” keeps my brain from leaking out my ears. I guess the older I get the more easy it is to turn me into mush.

And if I hear, “Ronnie, this shit's from British Columbia! It's hydroponic White Widow/AK47! A cross-strain....Outrageous!” If I hear this, I'm running.