A drive-by commenter left this appended to one of my old posts:
Anonymous said…
Hello – don’t blog myself, not sure I know anyone who does (I’m an Internet guy) – but stumbled across your thoughts while tracking down the Sippican River. Liked Sei Shonagon, liked Procol Harum on YouTube, liked the general ambience & line of thought. What more can one say? Hope you’re enjoying life, and good luck with the fine furniture.
“Hope you’re enjoying life, and good luck with the fine furniture.”
Heh.
Ladies and gentlemen — my business card, raison d’etre, rallying cry, slogan, business plan, home self-help study course.
And eventually, my headstone.
Update: ( How exciting. I’ve never updated anything before.) My fellow Massachusetti and self described “reader but not commenter” Jill sent me this:
Now I can die in piece. Or if I get sleepy at the tablesaw, in pieces.
When you are a performer, you need to give people a compelling reason to pay attention to you. There is no other advice in the world of entertainment. That’s it.
Jackie Wilson was not in need of this advice.
One of the great failings of Rock and Roll music is that it is more or less based on a great fraud in performance: it tries to make that which is easy appear hard. When you see guitar players grimacing over simple little barre chords, and singers acting as if they are being subjected to pein forte et dure because they’re mumbling, off-key, that they are dissatisfied with their current state of affairs, it’s all nonsense. Rock music is really simple to write, sing, and play; and for the most part, the actual execution of the notes on electrified instruments is kind of a delicate and decidely unenergetic affair. The windmilling arms and bashing is nonsense. It’s the misdirection play, imported from football. They’re thrashing around like that because nothing much is going on, and they’re very afraid you’ll catch on to that eventually.
Jackie Wilson personifies the obverse. That which is NOT decidedly easy is made to seem effortless. It’s hard to sing like Jackie Wilson. It enters the realm of metaphysical impossibility to sing and dance like that. And it brushes up against the margins of human alchemy to do it all with that kind of projected insouciance. He’s smiling the whole time he’s running a marathon, while carrying a big heavy bucket of art the whole way.
Get yourself some music that looks easy, but is very difficult indeed. Eschew the music that is made to look hard, but is essentially of the caliber of a chicken pecking a toy piano. Jackie Wilson is as good a place to start as any.
I used to hear about bad luck and trouble a lot when I supervised many people. After the total of persons who are supposed to call you when they can’t come to work that day reaches about a dozen, pretty much every day you get at least one telling you about bad luck and trouble.
I’m a soft touch in action, and have a very hard heart in my very hard heart. That is to say, I’m likely to give a bum five bucks, and think he doesn’t deserve it the whole time. It ain’t about deservin’.
Bad luck means something different to me than other people, I gather. Bad luck to them appears to mean that the eminently predictable results of their endless foolish behavior is impinging -finally- on their 24/7 self-gratification. To me, bad luck is being hit by a meteorite.
I was hit by a meteorite once, sorta. I was driving to a job I had. I drove a van. I was driving on a large highway early in the winter night, doing the speed limit with my seat belt buckled. My vehicle was in good repair. I was paying attention. I was sober.
On the other side of the road, a battered pick-up truck was approaching. It was not in good repair. The driver, who was not sober, was likely not driving in a safe manner. And his left rear wheel left his axle. Not the tire. The whole wheel.
Now, I know he was drunk because he fled the scene on foot, and the policeman and I found a whisky bottle on the front seat of the truck. But what maneuver he was trying that elicited the loss of a wheel from the axle beggars imagination.
Anyway, that wheel kept rolling along at 65 MPH, right across the grass median strip, and straight down the lane I was in. It was dark, and the tire was black, of course. Do you think you’d see that coming? Since I was going 65 MPH in the opposite direction, I imagine it was coming at me at around 120 MPH. A meteorite.
I’m a funny person. I have a tendency to freak out over small annoyances, and yet am calm generally when all others are panicked. A character defect of some sort. And seeing that object at the last second before I hit it, or it hit me, didn’t faze me. I didn’t swerve — just as well, as it was too late and my truck would surely have overturned. I didn’t do much of anything, as there was nothing to be done. I held on to the wheel, and whoop-de-do.
I remember distinctly what seemed like a long time spent in the air, the nose of the truck finally arcing to face the windshield down at the pavement, the wry feeling of watching the pavement pass by on the glass like movie credits. Then the front hit the ground again, and I was suspended in the seatbelt like a parachutist, the huge yellow and purple welt already rising across my shoulder from the strap stopping me from being launched through the windshield to be mashed between the truck and the pavement. I held the wheel straight, and thought: if the airbag goes off, I’m dead.
I bounced down the road like a hobby horse for a good long while, the heel/toe gyrations slowly abating, until all four wheels were under me again, and I drove to the breakdown lane and sat for a minute to collect myself.
A policeman came, and asked me why I was just sitting there. I told him to look at the front of my truck. The truck looked fine from three sides, but on the front, there was a sort of trench burrowed out of the undercarriage from bumper to bumper where the wheel had hit and I’d rolled over it.
We walked across the highway to where the three wheeled pickup truck was, and saw the whisky bottle on the front seat. The policeman declined to pursue the driver who had run away on foot.
The policeman inspected my driver’s license and registration for any flaws, and finding none, insisted that I make arrangements to remove my truck before I could leave. I called AAA, and my wife.
They arrived about the same time. I loaded my equipment into her car, watched the wrecker hook up my truck, and I went to work.
I have no doubt, the driver of the other truck called his boss the next day -late- and told him all about his bad luck.
This song predates my interest in it. It’s from 1967. But it was still immensely popular in 1975, when we were dancing in the gym to it. The girls wore dusters and had turd curl hairdos and smoked cigarettes. The guys wore farmer pants and had Vinnie Barbarino hair and bummed cigarettes off the girls. And they’d play “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” without fail, and mercifully allow us to dance with the girls close and slow for a moment.
I’m not a nostalgia freak. I talk about old things a lot, but that’s not the same thing. I’m not generally wistful for things of my youth. I’ve always been an oceangoing shark. You must always swim forward or you perish. My salad days are tomorrow. Always.
I am occasionally asked in an exasperated tone right here on my blog: ” How old are you?” when I wax poetic about Miles Davis in the fifties or Louis Prima in the forties or lumber yards in the thirties or some other anachronistic thing that caught my eye. The whole world is my high school yearbook, the way I see it.
But I’m only human. I was rooting around on YouTube, and I listened to this little trifle, and I found myself transported back a little in time, and I didn’t mind. It won’t last. Nothing ever does. And I don’t want to purchase it, or carry it around and jam it in my head through waxy earbuds. I don’t want to go to a Procol Harum reunion concert. I certainly don’t want to write a thousand word essay on how meaningful and important it is. It’s a trifle. That’s the point.
If it came on the radio, I wouldn’t change the channel. My highest praise, that.
When we went out to vote on November 7th, my wife and I had to drive by our son’s elementary school. We were mildly amused to spy him, out for recess, playing football in the schoolyard with his classmates.
We parked across the street and watched for a few precious minutes. Since we were not a butterfly, or a jet contrail, or a candy wrapper, or a penny, he didn’t notice us there, so we got to see him in that rarest of settings: “somewhere else,” without his parents or guardians present.
The football activity was hilarious. It alternatingly resembled an algae bloom and an ayatollah’s funeral– first a kind of milling around in an amorphous blob, then a kind of wild melee over a leathery old totem. We watched them drift back and forth for a pleasant minute, with the odd missile launch of the forward pass rocketing rudderless out of the scrum and landing any old place but that most rarified of targets: a teammate.
It was wry to consider that playing tag is verboten at his school. I’m not joking.
The school is getting comical in this regard. They were terrified of the food the little ones were eating, so they tinkered endlessly with the school lunch menu to make it so healthy that no one purchased it anymore. Now everybody eats fluffernutters they bring themselves.
They built an elaborate and very expensive handicapped playground. That’s a kind and thoughtful gesture. But it is merely a gesture, as there are no handicapped children to enjoy it. There just aren’t that many children of any kind in a little town like ours.
And no tag. Someone could get hurt. Someone could be left out. Someone could sue is the real reason, and the powers that be always point that out right up front.
Tag isn’t allowed, so one of the kids brings a football, and they play that. And football isn’t banned, because no one thought of it yet. And the absurdity of allowing mobs of pre-teens to chase one another if one is holding a ball, but not if their hands are empty, seems to be lost on the school administration. At least for now. And I, for one, am glad of it.
I’m not as worried about my son being injured playing football as I am in contemplating the little straitjacket world he’s being fitted for. Those children decided on the rules, supplied their equipment –a ball– and played their game without any adult supervision; and I saw a lot less kvetching among them than at any organized sporting event they participate in. I’m leery of them being told that someone will always tell them exactly what to do, and simultaneously unerringly protect them from not only from harm, but hurt feelings. One aspect of that tandem of supervision is repugnant, and the other unlikely.
I’m living in a strange world where people for whom I have no regard draw finely calculated and ultimately meaningless distinctions about everything down to the scope of activities allowed for pedophiles to roam the earth, at the same time they ban children playing tag in the schoolyard. Such distinctions are meaningless because anyone who is prepared to commit a great offense is not concerned about the rules governing small ones.
I dread the day, which is on the horizon now, not over it, when I’m forced to tell my children that the only sensible course of action is to ignore the rules, as there are so many of them that they become gibberish. And what the hell, the rules only seem to apply to those who wish to live worthwhile lives anyway –who never needed them in the first place.
Month: November 2006
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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