So, That Just Happened

A few minutes ago, I was sitting at the desk in my office. It’s a spectacular day here in western Maine. High seventies, sun and clouds, flowers starting to bloom in earnest, modest breeze. My office is faceted. It has four big windows facing four different directions. All of them are open wide.

The street is only steps away from our front door. This used to be the main road into town, but they built a state highway out back by the river decades back, and our road got sleepy.

A car just cruised past with all its windows down. It was playing music loud enough for me to hear it. Summer music dopplering past out of a  moving car can be a jolly sound.  Depends on what it is. Thrash metal and rap, not so much. When it’s a recording of your sons playing Yesterdays, your life achieves a kind of perfection, I tell you what.

Drum Lessons With Levon Helm: Sangin’ Is Youseyulie A Full-Tahm Jahb, ‘n Drummin’ Is Youseyulie A Full-Tahm Jahb

Levon’s battle is over. You can still get drum lessons from him, though.

My children get all sorts of information from YouTube. They teach themselves, mostly. It’s an astonishingly effective teaching resource if you learn to wade through the dross and pick out the gems. I’m not surprised that public schools hand out laptops, but then try various schemes to block YouTube. Careful. you might learn something. Why not just update your Facebook page all day, kids?

All social media and communication devices are double-edged swords. They’re just enormous time-wasters for the majority of the population, and the rest see their possibilities and use them to add activity to their days by subtracting the friction that used to be endemic in finding information and getting a hold of people and purchasing things. If you’re as old as I am, you’ve seen an enormous transformation of what’s possible. You’re reading this, ain’tchoo? Maybe on a phone.

If you’re like me, you’ve also scratched your head as the gains in what’s possible are squandered by many, if not most, people. But the medium has no opinion. YouTube probably wouldn’t care if everyone watched Levon Helm instructional videos instead of Kardashian shimmy updates. You’ve got to save yourself, brothers and sisters. Can I get an #Amen?
 
I defy you to find anyone that can sing along with their own drumming, with no other accompaniment, and sound like that. Life is a carnival, and Levon Helm was a one-man circus. And you can join the circus if you can get YouTube.

Day: June 3, 2013

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