Good. Better. Best.

It’s Saturday. Time for amusements.

I think the Beatles were fine. It’s quite possible to learn how to play the guitar by getting the two volume set of music books “The Compleat Beatles” and learning all the songs in it. Please do not write to tell me that’s incorrect, because that’s exactly what I did. The books seem to be out of print now, which is generally how you find all useful written things when you look for them. I’m sure you can purchase compilations of Kanye West… um… lyrics… just about anywhere.

Don’t get the other Beatles songbooks because they do not have the songs in the original keys, which is daffy. They put them in the keys more convenient for the piano. I don’t know which end of a piano to blow in, so that is not useful. And let’s face it, it’s a guitar world, we just live in it. You can skip the last 50 pages of the second volume because it doesn’t matter if you can play all the orchestral stuff on the guitar. Learn Rain instead. And learn how to sing along with it too. So what if you can’t sing? Neither could John Lennon, Ringo, or George Harrison, when you get right down to it.

To be considered great, you must be the raw material for further greatness by others. If someone does a parody of you, every body should know who they’re talking about. It doesn’t really matter that Ed Sullivan was a bizarre, talentless, cadaverous stiff. He’s been dead for decades but my 11 year old can do a spot-on imitation of him. If he mattered, it was because whatever it was he was, he was; and all others weren’t.

I wrote that last sentence in that fashion so you’d have to parse it a couple of times because I’m a jerk.

So here it is, the mining of raw talent ore, and the further distillation of it into the the goofy and trivial and sublime all at the same time:
GOOD:

BETTER:

BEST:

No Clouds. No Rollers. No Worries.

“Jaysus. No clouds. No rollers. No worries.”

“No fish…”

“That’s your worry. Your good lady wife’s name’s on the boat, neh mine.”

“I’ll make you paddle back in the peapod if we don’t put the gunnels down by the foam soon.”

” You’re prayin’ in the wrong church or sittin’ in the wrong pew, Davey.”

“The fish will come if you sing. They always come. “

“OK then.”

As I roved by the dockside an evening so fair
To see the salt water and take in the sea air
I heard an old fisherman singin’ a song
Hey, take me away boys me time is not long

“Depressin’ the fish now, are we?

” It gets worse.”

Wrap me up in me oilskins and blankets
No more on the docks I’ll be seen
Just tell me old shipmates I’m takin’ a trip mates
And I’ll see you some day on Fiddlers Green

“The fish are dumb beasts, but they’re not likely to answer a call to your wake.”

Now, Fiddlers Green is a place I heard tell
There fishermen go if they don’t go to hell

“I fold. But please, continue as if I was all in…”

There the weather is fair and the dolphins do play
And the cold coast of Greenland is far, far away

“We bring the ice with us, you codger.”

Wrap me up in me oilskin and blankets
No more on the docks I’ll be seen
Just tell me old shipmates I’m takin’ a trip mates
I’ll see you some day on Fiddlers Green

“Oh jeez, he’s back to claimin’ he’s bait now. There’s no hope.”

Now, when you’re in dock and the the long trip is through
There’s pubs and there’s clubs and there’s lassies there too
The girls is all pretty and the beer is for free
And there’s bottles of rum growing on every tree

“Standin’ the fish to a pint is unlikely to help here either. I hear tell they’re all Presbyterians. Neither Presbyterians nor fish have pockets, so they stay out of the grog shops, generally”

Where the skies are all clear and there’s niver a gale
And the fish jump on board with one swish of their scales
You lie at your leisure, there’s no work to do
And the skipper’s below making tea for the crew

“Now we’re getting somewhere. Look at the gulls over there. They stoop.”

“You get the kettle goin’. I’ll have the fish here shortly.”

I Remember

I remember June 3rd 1965.

Edward H. White II was the first American to walk in space. I wonder if much of anybody remembers his name now. Even Neil Armstrong is getting to be a trivia question. Michael Collins always was. White gave his life to it all two years later, engulfed in flames inside his Apollo mission capsule during a training session.

They were all a certain kind of wild man type then. They were test pilots who drove things through the clouds that might disintegrate at any minute. They seemed to all be a little odd, and all in the same way. The gamut of things they had to know and do and endure made you end up with a kind of person smart enough to accomplish what was necessary and dumb enough to try it. The mixture of intense boredom and wild-eyed excitement seemed to attract a kind of laconic, self-regulating type. They’d endure all the foolishness required of them for a chance to strap a rocket on their back.

The NASA page where this picture is found mentions the gold plated visor he wore to protect him from the sun’s rays outside the atmosphere, but I remembered that anyway, from Walter Kronkite or Chet Huntley or someone else on the news. It is the odd details like that you remember across the decades, I guess.

I don’t remember anyone ever asking anybody involved what their political affiliation was, or mentioning it if it was known. You could pry a story out of jet jockeys like Chuck Yeager about hard drinking and trips to Mexico on their day off. But nobody drove 1000 miles wearing a diaper to kidnap another astronaut in some lamebrain love triangle, behavior that seems to indicate only that the job has become such a joke that just about anyone could do it now; and just about anyone is exactly what we’ve got.

The astronauts would stand in the Rose Garden and accept their baubles, and I don’t recall any of them using the occasion to make any vicious, partisan displays of pique over the politics of the fellow who lived there. They all just sort of stood around being American.

Me too. How about you? It is a marvelous thing to be.