We attended a party for our niece’s graduation yesterday. They had a band perform. They were maybe 21 years old. They all play their instruments better than I ever did. They had the look of dishevelment that takes more time in the bathroom with sprays and unguents than my sister ever took to leave the house when I was young. They were completely indifferent to the need to entertain the audience. They were so self-absorbed I was wondering if they even care what each other is doing, never mind the audience. The average nascent rock band inflicts themselves on any captive audience they can find.
When they were done, their father carried their stuff out.
My junior-high vintage son works in the shop sometimes. He saved his money for a long time and bought a guitar and amplifier. He teaches himself guitar by watching videos on the Intertunnel.
I have little advice for my son about this topic. I would advise him, if he asked, that for a while, if he actually tries to entertain the audience in front of him, disinterested in rigid boundaries of what’s trendy, he will be ridiculed by the self-absorbed cool kids. Eventually, the cool kids’ girlfriends will wave to them from the passenger seat of your car.
But there I was, I was taken to a place, the hall of the mountain kings
I stood high upon a mountain top, naked to the world
In front of every kind of girl, there was
black ones, round ones, big ones, crazy ones…
Out of the middle came a lady
She whispered in my ear something crazy
She said:
(First offered in 2006. I’m closer to needing diapers than the little kid is now. Such is life.)
I remember when Friday meant something. It’ s a fuzzy, dim memory, like differential equations or the theme song to The Joey Bishop Show. But it was real, once.
You got paid on Friday. A check that you brought to the bank after work. A slip of paper that represented a fiduciary obligation on the part of your employer; you remember, that sort of thing. You’d go to the bank… no, I’m not kidding, you’d actually go there and wait in a line between velvet ropes depending in caternary curves from chrome stanchions, like it’s an opening night on Broadway and not a crummy line to get beer money; you’d stare at the clock and the neck of the person in front of you and remember lame jokes you saw on the Tonight Show about the little chain on the pen at all the stand up desks. Why, those jokes were funnier than airline peanuts, I’m tellin’ ya.
And you’d have that slip filled out to go with your paycheck– but never correctly; always with your deposit on the first line until you noticed that line was labeled “cash” or “currency,” and you’d scratch it out and fill it in a line lower, and then wonder if it was OK to have scratched out stuff written on a DEPOSIT SLIP. It’s like a legal document and all, and you can’t just have a do-over on that, can you? So you’d make out another and put the info on the second line, like a good doobie, until you noticed the “cash” line you avoided has a check box with it. The first one was correct all along, and now you’ve got one with the first line inexplicably left blank; and you’ do it over but you’re last in line again already and you need to get out of there — It’s FRIDAY!
After you wait and wait, the clerk behind the bullet proof glass that doesn’t even go up to the ceiling barely even looks at what you wrote, they just read the check and push a few twenties back and grunt at you anyway.
But it’s Friday! You don’t care. You need to find clean clothes that match. That’s only two variables. Why do you still end up inspecting your second clothes hamper — the floor –for stuff only lightly worn that looks slightly better than the Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax tee shirt that’s the only clean thing in your drawer? Who cares? It smoky in the bar anyway, and it’s Friday!.
Oh. You can’t go to that bar. She’ll be there, and you took her number and didn’t call it. You meant to… no you didn’t.
Who cares? It’s Friday! There’s many other places with a common victualler’s license, ain’t there? Your friends all have dates — or geez poor Steve got married fer crissakes — but you’ll find someone you know at the Irish Bar, won’t you? Yeah, but maybe it’ll be that guy you impaled with the dart two weeks ago. You keep asking yourself the same two questions about that place: Who walks in front of a guy throwing darts? That, and: What kind of person wears a sheetrock knife on his belt in an Irish Bar on… yup: Friday night!
What’s on TV? Remington Steele. Blecch. A repeat at that. Hello Domino’s? No anchovies. No; no anchovies. The little fishes. No, I don’t want extra anchovies. I WANT EXTRA NO ANCHOVIES.
(fast forward)
It’s so much easier now. Friday! is still the best day of the week. There’s always clean clothes. They still don’t match, but you’re old and you don’t care. Who are you going to impress? Your wife? She bought you those clothes. The money is already in the bank of course. You only go to the bank to sign mortgage papers once every ten years now. The rest is just keystrokes. Where is the bank, exactly? You haven’t had money in your pocket for ten years. What would you do with money? Get pennies handed back to you. Who wants those? Even my children want quarters. Pay the plastic bill when it comes. Keystrokes. Stamps? What are those?
But it’s still Friday! and Friday! is still wonderful, because Friday! is the day you take the six plastic bags that have been lurking at the bottom of the stairs all week to the end of the driveway. Yeah, those bags. The ones with the diapers in them.
Is there a spot in your world suitable for quiet contemplation?
I find it’s become a rare thing. You don’t have to be away from the whole world to achieve it. Just the opposite. Being all alone out in the wilderness is not restful. Even a tiny urban dooryard used to have the potential to serve the purpose I’m referring to, or the small parks that would dot the urban landscape. But exterior spaces are mostly too busy or barren, and so suburb or city or exurb, they don’t serve the purpose anymore.
There are fads. Decks, hot tubs, elaborate grilling devices, pools, tennis courts, swingsets, treeforts, bocce, horseshoes… I could keep going, but you get the picture. There’s a great deal of hardscaping in the exterior world these days. I am mostly ambivalent about most of those things. They are either useful or not according to taste. But they are not what I am talking about.
I’m talking about a place that is designed to place a person at ease outdoors, sheltered enough from hubbub to stop for a moment and contemplate the outdoors and your place in it.
I am not often on the lookout for things to do. I have too many things to do. I am looking for a place to do not much of anything for a pleasant moment.
Put a garden in your yard. Put a seat in your garden. Enclose it enough to be private. Give it a view through to something else that is pleasant to look at from a distance. Open it to the sky but dapple the sunlight. Get out of the wind, invite a breeze. Stay on the ground if you can, but get out of the dirt.
Keep the fun out of there. It’s too much like work.
(Curtis Mayfield, June 3rd, 1942 – December 26th 1999)
I was a child in the sixties, a teenager in the seventies. The natural trajectory for a young man in the suburbs would be to embrace rock music. I never really did.
They were too much like me, perhaps, the arena power chorders. Aerosmith used to play in my high school gym, after all. I wouldn’t change the channel if Bachman Turner Overdrive came on, and I had a well worn copy of Frampton Comes Alive, just like everybody else, but that was about it.
There was a jukebox in the lunchroom at our public high school. It was a revelation to me after spending my grammar school years in Catholic School. The nuns would have no more brought in a juke box than a Wiccan into our lunchroom. Upon reflection, it’s the nuns that got it right. It was a symptom of the profound unseriousness of the place that the public high school supplied the same soundtrack a teenager demanded in his non-school life to muddle through it.
I could probably list every single song in that jukebox, down to the most obscure, and it was over thirty years ago. Not much of it was very good. But it was generally fun and disposable, like popular entertainment should be, but rarely is, any more. There was:
Led Zeppelin
Harry Nilsson
Dr John
Hollies
Beatles
Rolling Stones
Eric Clapton
The Beach Boys
Badfinger
Moody Blues
More Led Zeppelin
Grand Funk Railroad
Elton John
Wings
Billy Paul
Billy Preston
Earth Wind and Fire
Still more Led Zeppelin
Gilbert O’Sullivan
Looking Glass
Marvin Gaye
Aerosmith
The Rasberries…
Well, you get the picture. Nothing much recorded at La Scala. Nothing much recorded in a gospel church. Now having enough money to put into a jukebox was a foreign concept to me. The thing would play anyway, and you’d hear everyhing in it no matter what, eventually. I recall the only time an insurrection against the thing was mounted, when some wisenheimer pumped a buck or two into the thing and selected “Dogs Barking Christmas Carols” 15 straight times. After about five minutes, a grim and resolute shop teacher marched over, pulled the enormous contraption away from the wall, and yanked the plug. I’m certain it’s the only cheer the prickly old fellow ever heard from his charges.
This one comes back to me though, and kindly:
The man, and the topic, was a world away from me. I was unlikely to adopt his huggybear/trotsky cap or his owlish glasses. But really, to a fifteen year old, looking into a world of dead ends, who could say it better, and funkier, than Curtis Mayfield?
Ask him his dream
What does it mean?
He wouldn’t know…
Month: June 2009
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
Recent Comments