Flannel Shirt

I had a dream

I had a dream this morning. I was at a rock festival being held on a beach. The bands were all unknown to me. I lost my space right in front of the stage, it was an erected stand, and so I had to move to the side. I sat next to a couple. The guy was bragging that they'd been married for five years but the woman had cheating on her mind. She kept touching my leg and looking intently at me. The promoters sold hard liquor at this event. I had in my possession a model of a man buried in snow for a school project. The school resembled my high school back in New Jersey.

The first band was a roots blues band, okay. Lots of bendy notes. The second band was a large group of musicians, halfway between a funk band and a marching band. The fusion didn't seem to work. They marched through the audience.

The drinks were overpriced.

I woke up when my cat walked across my chest.

More waiting for babies

Joan and I were sitting watching the last episode of "The Wire" when one of her clients called last night. It sounded like the baby was beginning to make itself known. But this morning, alas, no more news, so there are still three babies out there waiting to be born.

I have to say, listening to Joan talking with the pregnant mother-to-be was quite impressive. I know she's an amazing woman, but now I've got a hint of why she's such a great doula.

Waiting for babies

Kind of an interesting week. Joan's got three doula jobs just about due, one actually due last week, another this week and another next week. So far they've been no-shows. You don't want them all at the same time. Plus, she's got classes, so she's hoping there's no conflict of schedule there either.

Meanwhile, we did what lots of old folks do. We went to the Social Security office. Joan wanted to change the date for hers to start. Me, I wanted some info. I'll find out more when I show up for an appointment in June. I won't be getting much because I fall under the "Windfall Elimination Provision." Because I worked most of my life under the old federal pension plan (Civil Service Retirement System) they use an arcane formula to hack away at what little I would get. Still, any little bit is better than nothing.

Anyway, today's errand day. I took some groceries to the Post Office for their food drive. And I went to the local veterinary clinic to ask about what I need to do to bring Arabella up to snuff for adoption. I'll be moving in with Joanie later this year and unfortunately, she's allergic to cats. Arabella is a very, very sweet little cat. She loves being petted and cuddles well. She seems to be in perfect health. She's getting older, maybe twelve years or so, and she's been my little sweetheart through some rough times. This may sound crazy, but I think she's actually made me a better person.

I got a list of phone numbers from the vet and will start making calls to pet adoption places. This is hard.

Going viral (continued)

Sex sells, especially when it's free.

It looks like the most popular video I've posted on You Tube is Sex Behind The Iron Curtain. Besides being seen in the U.S. it's also been viewed in Great Britain, Saudi Arabia (I hear guys there will look at anything with "sex" in the title) and Japan. Kinshasa is doing well in The Congo.

What Parrington Knew, a funky jazz piece that accompanies a quote by a 19th-early 20th Century historian, seems to be lagging behind.

Of course, everything's relative.

My stomach feels funny

Just saying.

Music Friday: My Most Beloved Song

Met Her On A Picket Line.

I was inspired by a picket line we had at the Post Office at 22nd and Irving in San Francisco. My song was performed by a labor singing group in Portland in 1988. It also was performed at a labor song festival in Washington, D.C. around the same time, and a shop steward from Santa Cruz used to sing it on picket lines down there.

Waiting for it to go viral

One night last week I was sitting around, waiting for Joan to come back from Denver and for my video "Sex Behind The Iron Curtain" to go viral and I was kind of tired and just sitting around watching junk TV. If I'm really tired I watch Guy Fieri playing around with food in restaurant kitchens, but if I have any kind of IQ left to waste I try to watch something historical or scientific. Not that historical shows are necessarily historical (Did the Knights Templar really bring the Holy Grail to Minnesota? Were the Vikings aliens from the Dog Star?), or scientific shows necessarily scientific. But for my taste it's better than watching people shooting gators, wrestling catfish with their hands, running pawn shops or bidding on abandoned storage spaces.

I stumbled upon a show where Robin Williams, noted celebrity substance abuser, runs four different drug abusers (abusing different drugs) through different contests of strength, dexterity, etc., while they are abusing their own drugs of choice.

What really caught my eye was that the first task was to put together a shelving unit from Ikea. A shelving unit that I myself put together. In fact, I put two of them together. Each contestant had twenty minutes to put the shelving together. The first one I put together had taken about an hour for me to construct, so I was expecting these abusers to show a lot of frustration.

The results were that the marijuana smoker spent lots of time saying "wow" and didn't finish the task. No surprise. The cocaine user finished on time but did it wrong. The methamphetamine user finished it within the twenty minutes but had a couple of parts he hadn't used. It looked sturdy, though. The heroin user actually was calm and she put the unit together just fine.

I'm not sure what to take from it. They all did it faster than I did. I don't think the moral of the story is that I should be taking drugs when I try to put together Ikea stuff. There's a scene from series "The Wire" where the McNulty character is drinking his Jameson's and trying to put together some Ikea furniture. He sorts of collapses in the middle of the parts. 

I guess Robin Williams is saying that you should be completely sober when tackling Ikea stuff. From my experience you probably need a drink after you put one of those Ikea things together. 

 

Light

In case you haven't found it yet, here is a link to an instrumental of mine, Light.

It's about light. Play it loud.

Music Friday: My Most Hated Song

If you follow the link you will find my most hated song, Sex Behind The Iron Curtain.

It came about twenty or so years back. My friend Lou Panagotopulos drove down from Massachusetts to visit me one weekend while I was back east in New Jersey visiting my mom. One cold, snowy evening we drove down to Asbury Park, maybe it was Long Branch, but down at the Jersey Shore to a coffee house named The Inkwell. At the time it was a hip little place to have your mocha and meditate on the day's events.

Lou confessed his lust for a certain ice skater from behind the Iron Curtain in a recent Olympics, so the two of us wrote the lyrics out. (We wrote a second song that night, "How Anna Began", but that's another story.)

It came out as a rap song. I am not a rap artist, so I'm pretty sure rap aficionados will be offended. But mostly everyone else was offended by the emphasis on SEX.

However, one must remember that this is an historical document, using the metaphor of sexual conquest for the Cold War and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. In fact, during the Cold War the Communist countries were all made out to be sexless, drab dictatorships. So in the plot the protagonist, a horny American, tries to seduce a Communist athlete. It's all symbolic.

We wrote four verses and Lou went back home to Massachusetts and I went back to California and then the Soviet Union collapsed, necessitating additional verses.

When you listen to it, please realize that the song is really about the struggle between two political systems throughout much of the 20th Century, except for the parts referring to sex.

Music Friday: Twofer

I post two more songs on You Tube this week, a blues and a kinda sorta Afrobeat-type thing.

The blues, Too Tight To Love, I wrote way back in the seventies. I took a few jazz guitar lessons and played some jazz with a doctor over at the VA Hospital, where I worked at the time, and I came up with the progression. I thought the idea of being "tight", or drunk is very much the opposite of what you actually are, you know, kinda floppy. This version I recorded in the mid-nineties, right before my repetitive stress in my hands made itself known. One more thing, that winter I had a terrible cold/respiratory illness of some sort that seemed to hang on forever, thus, the phlegmy delivery. I have since adopted phlegm as another singing style. I can now sing badly in many different manners.

Kinshasa was written a few years ago. I explain all you need to know about it in the video. Guitars, thumb pianos and percussion.