What a revelation. It just hit me this morning how much I love music.
Kidding. It has been an obsession since before I got my first faux Beatles album done by a group called “Brad Berwick and the Buggs”. (What were my parents thinking? Did they think that I wouldn’t notice that it wasn’t the Beatles?)
This song by Rufus is one of the most instantaneously joy expanding explosions of good vibes I know.
I can’t help but get happy when I hear it.
And that’s been a consistent condition since the very first time I heard the song.
That’s some power, huh? To record a song that’s capable of doing that for people is really kind of a “ministry”…kind of uplifting.
I don’t know what the future holds for any of us.
I don’t know what the day holds for me.
But if I can drive down the road and hear at least one piece of music that does for me what this song does….puts me in a funky and favorable frame of mind…I’ll be doing OK.
“Get a job…retire…and then you can have some fun….”
Here’s a guy who does a lot of adventuring…big adventures, long treks…and here he is talking about one of the biggest.
But what does he tell his wife when he walks out the kitchen door? What does he say to her when he leaves?
We have our own small adventures…the trip to a different Walmart in a new town…getting firewood and seeing an unfamiliar hawk…walks on the trail that they just opened down the road.
There are all sorts of adventures “out there”.
(I’m kidding about the Walmart trip….that’s kind of the antithesis of adventure…yuck.)
So what is it that allows a person to just step off and get going on trips like this? Do they know something that I don’t know? Probably. Do they know something that I can’t learn? Nah.
I could do this.
I could do anything.
Now, the real adventure is figuring out how to do anything like this with my family. That’s the real adventure.
That would really be something to write home about…how to do this with a 4-year-old and a newborn….outrunning a grizzly with a baby under my arm.
Maybe I need to just plan another Walmart trip? I don’t think I could outrun a grizzly.
I could do something like this with my family…I’d just need to dial it back a little. I shouldn’t do anything where a helicopter drops us off in the middle of the wilderness. I shouldn’t do anything where I need to call for a helicopter pickup when the trip is over.
I think we need to stick close to the car, thank you.
I don’t know that the fun part is being able to tell people about the adventure after everything ends well. Maybe that’s why we do most the things that we do…so we can talk about it later?
Nah…it’s just to “do”. We like to “do”.
You should see the teeth marks on my “bit”. I’m chomping, chomping, chomping at that bit for a little adventure…or a lot of adventure, if I can swing it.
I drive the same 65 mile route on the job every single day except for Sunday and a day off every two weeks.
I have a lot of time to think about adventures. Repetition stops being adventurous after a while…unless it’s really icy and I’m about to slide off the mountain.
Videos like this just feed the fire…accentuate the longing.
I shouldn’t watch videos like this.
They are my flame, though…this moth can’t stay away. I know what is out there. I’ve seen “Pareeeee”.
I think that’s the best thing that I could do for my family, though. I know it is.
To give them a lifetime of adventure…to instill that the unfamiliar isn’t something to be feared or avoided…that options aren’t limited to a yearly trip to Gatlinburg or Myrtle Beach…that the world is a big place…but small enough that anything is achievable.
Why’d my brain have such a long reach….stuck inside such a small skull?
Maybe, for now, I just need to figure out how to have our adventures on a small-scale?
Keep the scale “doable” but always have a big adventure on a back burner…like soup simmering for the big feast to come?
So here’s a song about coming back from Vietnam, a pilot with a unique and marketable skill set, and running drugs for a living.
What wouldn’t be inspiring about a song like that for a blog topic ?
Actually, when I heard this yesterday for the first time in a while, it was one line that really caught my attention and made the wheels start to turn.
It wasn’t that I thought about going to pilot’s school and figuring out a way to ramp up our income….start flying shipments into Colorado….maybe taking a load up to Washington state when I go to visit my relatives.
It wasn’t anything like that…although you do have to wonder what kind of trouble you’d get in if you flew into a state that had “sort of” legalized the weed.
Maybe you get in trouble for flying too low? What would I do for treetops in the Dakotas?
I don’t know.
I’m not going to go to pilot school….not even for entrepreneurial reasons.
But the line in the song that caught my attention was the one early in the song where he said, ” I don’t do business that don’t make me smile.”
HE SAYS “DON’T” TOO MANY TIMES IN THAT SENTENCE!!! THE SECOND “DON’T” SHOULD BE “DOESN’T”!!! HAH!!! STEPHEN STILLS DON’T KNOW GOOD ENGLISH TALKING!!!
Kidding….that wasn’t what caught my attention. That would be crazy.
It was the “smiling” and “business” connection.
What a great business model! That’s fantastic!
To be able to ask the question “Would it make me smile?” before taking on a job…and to be able to come up with an affirmative answer…sounds good to me.
Now, of course, that is kind of a luxury to only take jobs that make you smile.
Who has that kind of luxury in their lives?
Not many folks that I know, actually.
But here’s another big “what if”…and I guess that’s a luxury that I have at 5:00 AM that everyone has any time of the day…the ability to toss out a bunch of “what ifs”…so here’s the “what if” I was promising…..
“What if” it wasn’t so much about having the good fortune to only have job options that were so wonderful that you couldn’t help but smile…but instead of that it was a continuous situation where you carried your smile with you to any job that came your way?
What if your situation didn’t define your happiness?
What if your joy infected your environment…and not the other way around, where you were constantly disappointed and angry unless your situation seemed “just so”?
What if? What if?! What if?
I thought back to some of my “crummy” jobs…crazy jobs, leaf in the wind “how did I land here” jobs…and I thought about how hilarious most of them were.
Horrible entries on a résumé…but hilarious. I met some great folks along the way. I had a good time in spite of the job.
I had a good time doing a good job doing a job that wasn’t good.
It doesn’t get “mo’ bettah” than that.
Not even flying low over strange new treetops.
That does sound kind of cool and dangerous, though.
I love something random when it turns out to be finding out about someone as interesting as Ben Sollee.
“Random” is good when….random is good.
Listening to the radio yesterday (SIRIUS RADIO!!! I’d recommend it if you’re on the road a lot like I am….one of my good extravagances) I heard a short concert by Ben Sollee.
My daughter is a cellist, so when I heard “songwriter” and “cellist” in the same introductory sentence, my ears perked up.
Writing this now, I realized that if I was going to recap this video…describe what it was about…I might run the risk of repeating something.
When you put the video at the beginning of the post, I guess there’s always a chance that someone actually watched the video before they read the post.
I suppose there’s a good chance that people watch the video instead of reading the post.
Dang interesting video…you steal my thunder!
Ben Sollee learned to play the cello. He learned to play the cello very well…and then he bought a bicycle and started touring…2-wheel style.
In the video he says that he and his drummer have toured more than 3,600 miles by bicycle so far with their instruments.
That’s pretty darn impressive.
I hear so much music while I’m driving around. I listen to so much news. There’s so much noise out in the world.
I listen to it all.
Sometimes it pays off. Sometimes, in the middle of all the noise, a performer like Ben Sollee comes along who makes me say, “Oh. Oh! That’s what I was looking for….something good.”
When a child complains that there’s “nothing good on!!” as they surf through all the channels, maybe they aren’t so far from the truth.
An adult can always watch something like GOLF if they can’t find anything good to watch.
They can act like that was their intention all along…to stay inside on a nice day and watch some other men hit a little ball around on the grass….watch them play somewhere else where it was a nice day, too.
A child doesn’t have that ability to fool themselves into liking something mediocre….unless it’s a Hanna-Barbera cartoon that they’ve already watched 10 times.
What’s that called? “Ennui”?
Anyway, I digress. There’s nothing to apologize for when I watch Ben Sollee on YouTube.
He’s one of the “good ones”.
This world is huge. There is a lot going on in this big old world.
I’m glad there are people like Ben Sollee riding around on bikes….taking their cellos to another show.
I did a blog post yesterday about an old (Canadian) band called the Parachute Club.
In looking for a video of them, I ran across a video of the lead singer performing at a tribute to this man, Jack Layton, and then after doing a little more clicking on Youtube…I came across this video.
Of course, I understand that this video is really a commercial of sorts put together by people who cared about Jack Layton.
It’s a tribute.
I understand that.
But if you do a little bit of digging about this man…this politician…you’ll find that people really respected him.
That’s kind of unusual, I think. People really respected this politician. He was revered.
From the little bit I know about him, he seemed to be a pretty optimistic person. He was optimistic and acted on his optimism. He effected change where he could. He did what he could to make the world a better place.
What a legacy to leave behind.
I never know what I’ll see when I start poking around the web. Of course, some filters are necessary. You have to point carefully or you might bump up against something kind of rough if you aren’t careful.
Sometimes you accidentally bump up against something good, though.
Sometimes something good can happen.
I think that you really do find what you look for…and it’s the connections that the good things start that carry you through.
You begin with something good…and, in spite of the efforts of all the tricksters and the dark hearted souls who’d want to trap us on the side that’s not hopeful or right, for the most part….good leads to more good.
That’s as true of the internet as it is in anything in life.
Something that I’ve noticed that has to be guarded against is bumping up against the dark side when I’m nowhere near the computer.
We are victimized by the attitudes and comments of the people around us.
“The world is going straight to HELL” is a comment that probably does more damage than we know….no matter how ridiculous we know it to be.
And even if we can laugh it off…even if we have the presence of mind to know that it’s not true, that good things are still possible and plentiful, I think that some of it sticks to us…like excrement after walking around a snapping dog’s kennel to deliver a package.
A bad attitude isn’t something that attacks us on a microbial level. It’s not a germ or something carried on the wind or passed with a handshake.
It is shared, though. It’s shared freely and with great enthusiasm…like it was another kind of “calling”….like it was a responsibility to ride through the town like Paul Revere, yelling out, “BAD TIMES ARE COMING!!! BAD TIMES ARE COMING!!!”
I guess that how we “process” what we see and hear is the only real power we have.
What we allow in sometimes can’t be avoided…but what we allow to “move in” permanently is our choice. It’s usually something that we can avoid.
Sometimes, though, it’s a situation where your new tenant started out saying, “I’m just going to get one more thing from the car…I’ll only be a minute…” and then five years later, they’re still sleeping on your couch.
You can’t let bad attitudes sleep on your couch. You can’t do that.
I want to live in a way that would allow someone to feel even a small amount of hope when the day was done.
I don’t know how to be a healer.
I’m not always positive about what might happen in the future.
When I discovered that a station high up on the dial of my little black and white television was playing music videos back in the early 80’s, it was pretty exciting.
And what wasn’t something to be excited about? Look at the dancing…look at the balloons!
I don’t remember what was going on with channel 69 back in Atlanta, but to get to watch some of these music videos without having MTV in the house…without paying for MTV…was a weird victory.
I don’t remember why I was turning the knobs on the little television, either. Why would I crank on that thing until I’d hit the high 60’s? That’s a long way to go away from the lower numbers with their guaranteed channels. What would make me think that I should do that?
I was like some bored astronaut…exploring the outer reaches of the entertainment universe…when BINGO….the thing that I never expected I’d see flickered across the 13″ black and white screen….FREE MUSIC VIDEOS.
Can you imagine how amazing that was?
I remember standing in front of a big projection screen at Oz Records and Tapes on Highway 41 in Marietta…watching a concert film of Queen…and thinking that it had to be the coolest thing I’d ever seen.
“They let me come in here and watch this big show for FREE!!!”
It was pretty high technology to watch something like that.
I was easy to please. I didn’t know any different. Now I want hi-definition…digital transmission…high speed everything.
And “free” doesn’t amaze like it used to. You can find anything for free if you know how to use the GOOGLE.
If you just teach yourself how to use the GOOGLE.
This video is by a Canadian band called Parachute Club. I actually have this album that the song is on…bought at the pawn shop for a quarter.
This may have been their only hit.
But what a hit it was….and what a goofy video.
Mimes…balloons….dancing in the street.
I wonder how many young people were seduced into trying to get into the music business by videos like this that seemed to promise endless fun and a life of adventure?
It was a seductive siren call to be lured to Pleasure Island by bands like this one from Canada.
“Oz Records and Tapes”? That’s a business that was doomed to failure. I don’t even think that you can buy “records and tapes” anymore.
A couple of posts back, I was doing some “codgerizing” and celebrating how we used to discover new music.
I talked about how exciting it was to dig through boxes of used albums and come home with some strange new title…and what a victory it might be to discover something new and really cool.
At least I think that’s what I talked about.
If I didn’t talk about that, I should have. It sounds good, at least.
My friend John called me on what I was saying a little, and I’ll quote here without permission…
I, like you, have Stories of the fun of the bargain bin dive. Buying rarities on eBay has been fun too, but the ease of listening to something random for zero dollars is Good too. On YouTube you can listen to the early 60’s Scandinavian Rock. I dint know the Spotnicks existed. Look em up.
Ahhhhh….the wisdom.
The wisdom.
This guy, Mike Love, is one of those random finds.
I’d never hear him on the radio.
I wouldn’t see him on my television set ( I’m “codgerizing” again…no one calls a giant flat screen a “television set”).
I wouldn’t find him in a record bin in some pawn shop anymore.
But if I looked up Justin Young’s song “One Foot on Sand” on YouTube….watched it….and then glanced over to some of the other featured artists on the right hand side of the page…I might click on the one with the massive beard and the dreads and be happily surprised.
I might discover someone new that I enjoyed hearing.
That was almost too easy.
“Easy” can be good. Digging in a box of albums had it’s own memorable charms…that was, and could be again if I trusted my children not to screw with my turntable, a fun part of my life.
I enjoyed that. I like digging through boxes of anything that I can use to support another random collection of items that I really don’t need…but that I really want.
And there I am again…back to the topic of wants and needs.
I need to talk about that over and over. I want to talk about that.
I badly want to talk about that…and probably do it badly more often than not.
And I guess that’s what this song is talking/singing about…wants and needs….but he does it a little more eloquently than I do.
A couple of things about this video…
This guy looks like I think whatever is inside me looks. On the outside, I’m clean-shaven and balding ….no, “balding” means that I’m in the process of thinning out…my head is fuzzy but shiny on top…it’s beyond “balding”, it’s bald….on the outside. But inside, I’m sitting on a stool playing something cool…shaking out the dreads and brushing the food out of my massive beard. Don’t tell my wife that I said that….she likes me clean-shaven. It’s my secret….shhhhhhhhh.
I never would have found this without YouTube. My friend John is right…there’s no harm in wandering off the Luddite path every once in a while and learning a new trick.
“Easy” is good sometimes.
This YouTube station…channel….whatever YouTube calls it….”HiSessions” out of Hawaii…is pretty great. Lots of good mellow Hawaiian vibes. It’s easy to find…it’s good and easy. Check it out.
“Easy is good sometimes”. That’s a good revelation to start the day off with.
I got up at 5:30…on a Sunday…. feeling like my weird Norwegian farmer throwback internal clock has failed me because I “slept in” and didn’t get up at my usual 5:00…go out to my desk, power up the computer….and the clock on the screen says, “6:30”.
What the heck?
I’m kidding…I know what’s happening.
It’s just another example of the MAN trying to keep me down…messing with me.
It’s all just a little too arbitrary for my tastes….change the clocks?! Pheeeeewwwwww.
Yesterday, I complained in the blog about being upset because the letters they assign at the Post Office didn’t line up in my favor after the most recent mail count.
I was upset because I almost lost my one day off every two weeks.
But…by the end of the evening…I’d miraculously gotten it back after some recalculations at “headquarters”…so all was right again.
Yesterday, I spent my bimonthly day off repairing the little Toyota truck that my children have been driving.
Where is the wisdom in that? Spend part of my one day off greasy…covered in antifreeze and transmission fluid…trying to free up the water pump after I’ve gotten all the bolts removed (well, to be honest…most of the bolts…one reamed off with minimal torquing during the process) for the first time in 147,374 miles?
What made me think that doing that would be the best use of my precious day off?
I think I know the answer.
I think I’ve figured out the tragic flaw.
I’m the cheapest mechanic.
Isaac drives that truck to school. I noticed that his coolant levels were always low a couple of days after topping it back off.
I was adding about a quart of antifreeze every two days to the overflow tank….the front of the engine around the water pump was wet as it could be…greasy and wet, caked with goo.
It was time to do something.
So….in typical action man fashion….a month after we first noticed this sequence of events…I got on the problem.
I already had a radiator and a water pump…so I didn’t have to spend any money on that. They’d been sitting in the back room for a couple of years, throwbacks to the time when I was using the truck on the mail route and was desperate to figure out ways to keep it cool enough to make the 60 mile daily route without incident.
I had the parts already. In my head, the parts were free. They were just sitting there….waiting.
And my time is cheap. I go cheap.
Thinking about it now, I wonder if it was a good trade? These days go by…lickety-split…gone in a wink of my eye…and I’m outside tearing into the old truck like I was going to be the winner if I could do it myself and save some money.
But the day is gone…or at least part of the first sunny day we’ve had for a while. Part of the sunny day is gone….given over to trying to save some money fixing an old truck.
I like to fix the cars. I don’t have many places I can exert Viking force anymore…so when I can break a bolt off in the block trying to get an old water pump to just LET GO!!!! DANG YOU!!!! LET GO….URNNNNNNNGGGGGHHHHHH!!! …well, it feels like a real victory.
Sometimes I write about it as if puzzling it through by remembering the order of a bunch of letters will help me come to a stronger conclusion.
I desperately want to figure it all out.
It’s the key.
Having a good perspective on things is going to get me through this world.
We just finished what is called a “mail count” at work. A mail count is where we (and you probably guessed what is going on before I tell you) count all the mail…every letter and flat (magazine/catalog), every move we make, every package…and then the results are applied to something called the MATRIX and the folks who know assign a number and a letter to the route that determines how much we are paid…and more importantly to me, at least…how many days a week we have to work.
We finished our count and the results said that I was now an “H”.
That meant that instead of getting a day off every other week, that I was back to working 6 days a week.
I was HOT. It got warm in the office when I heard that news.
It was bad news.
So….it was a test of my perspective.
When I got home….it was like it should be. My little boy was happy to see me and wanted to show me his latest Lego creation.
My family greeted me warmly.
But in my head, the news I’d gotten was taking center stage.
What was wrong with me? Things at home were still great. But this news was too bad to ignore.
I was an “H”. How could this have happened to me? I was an H .
Do you know how it feels to be an “H”? Do you know how hard that is to suddenly be an “H”?
Do you know how sad it makes me that being assigned a letter for my contribution to the working part of my life is something that’s even on my radar?
So my perspective failed me. I was upset.
I have a great and loving family and I was upset about this “work news”.
What do the French say? I think it’s something like, “Le Pissed Offe”.
About the time I’d pulled it back to the “simmering volcano” level, my Postmaster called and told me some good news…
I was a “J” again.
I hadn’t gained anything because of the count…but I hadn’t lost anything either. I still had one day off every two weeks!
It seems that I should have been given credit for the extra work I was doing that before was being considered a freebie…so when they factored the real number for my contribution, the results were more favorable.
They’d determined that I should be given credit for the work I was doing!
And….Baddabingbam…I was a “J” again!
Imagine what that did for my perspective. My universe aligned and all was cool…just because the stupid letters were more to my favor.
Now, I could be depressed if I start thinking about this whole MATRIX thing and the letters and the rigidity of the Postal System.
I could be depressed if I started thinking about the Matrix… there’s something dark at work there, I think.
I’ve seen the movies…I know there are strange things behind the curtain.
But I’ll take what I can get if a letter means that I can get away from it every other week for a day.
At least that’s my perspective.
I’ll take what I can get.
And besides…there’s a Lego castle that I need to pay closer attention to all the time…..
There are consistent life events that I look forward to every morning.
The “plunge” is one of them.
It is a quiet pleasure to be able to push the plunger of the french press down into the murky coffee depths and enjoy my first cup of coffee of the morning.
It doesn’t get much simpler than that…unless I’m naked in a rainstorm and for some reason don’t have a care in the world.
That would be simpler…but it’s not going to happen, so I’ll go with this coffee thing that I’m working on.
It’s simple…it’s quiet…it’s early in the morning and I’m the only one up and….it’s quiet.
I love the quiet.
We went out to the West Coast a couple of summers ago, and after I’d used up my two weeks of vacation from the Post Office, I flew back from Denver while Jenny and the kids stayed in Colorado for an extra couple of weeks of visiting her family.
When I got back to the house, it was quiet.
It was so quiet.
Wheeeeeeeee! It’s quiet!! Alright….a whole two weeks of quiet!!! Wheeeeeeee!!
That lasted for about 5 minutes.
After 5 minutes, “wheeeeeeeee!!!!!” became “whoaaaaaaaaaaaa.”
It was too quiet. It was lonely quiet.
I didn’t like that quiet. I needed someone talking to me…I needed someone crawling into my lap for a story…I needed some “family noise”.
I missed them. It was really too quiet for my tastes.
Now, before I got married and we had our family, I lived alone.
I lived alone for quite a while.
I had a long time to get used to quiet.
I was a solitary man. I was a satellite. I orbited and never landed. I was alone.
And…I got used to quiet.
Solitude can be a good thing. It’s a time for quiet reflection. A person can really burrow into themselves if they have a chance. You can really work at struggling to figure things out.
And after you’ve struggled for a while with trying to come to an understanding of “what makes you tick”, sometimes you just give up and say, “Oh, what the heck?! I’m a kook.”
When you spend all your time with yourself, I think sometimes you’re like a guest who’s outlasted his welcome.
I can only stand so much self-absorption. Even I have my limits when it comes to self-absorption. Sometimes I need a distraction from myself.
So now this coffee’s ready to be plunged. Now this coffee is ready to be plunged and enjoyed.
I’m going to enjoy this coffee and also enjoy the realization that, even though I love my quiet time in the morning and I love my solitary coffee ritual, the thing that makes it enjoyable is that soon I’ll have the contrast of everybody being up and the day swinging into noisy gear.
If I didn’t have the thing I’ve grown used to…the thing that I think that I take pleasure in escaping for a moment before everybody gets up…if I didn’t have that to look forward to…
I think that the solitary “plunge” would drive me stir crazy.
