Last night I was unwinding after dinner and scrolling through YouTube when I came across a young-ish lady doing a reaction video for the song “Time Stand Still” by Rush. Lately I’ve been getting a kick out of seeing the younger gen’s reaction to classic rock songs, but the ones featuring Rush I find are particularly entertaining. That band seems to absolutely blow the minds of everyone under 40, and it’s fun to see. It reminds me of hearing them for the first time as a kid. I can still remember the first time I heard “Tom Sawyer” – it was the summer between 7th and 8th grade for me – and I was forever changed that day.
Out of curiosity, I clicked on the vid wondering what this youngster was going to think of this particular tune. I’ve watched a number of Rush reaction videos, but I’ve never seen one for that song. I don’t think I’ve even heard that song in a few decades. After the first measure of the song I was transported back in time…
When that record came out, I was 18 or 19, I can’t exactly recall. At the time I was working delivering pizzas (back when that was pretty much the only food you could get delivered to your door!) and just having the time of my life. I had a great group of friends, I was doing exceptionally well with the ladies, my band was picking up steam getting some radio play, a few write ups in the local weekly paper and good gigs, I was going to see other bands play or going out dancing a couple nights a week, going to parties, just living life like only a teenager with no real responsibility can. A lifetime of untold possibilities lay ahead of me. And eating all the pizza my heart desired! My “delivery van” was exactly that – a 1968 Dodge A100 van, with the old dependable slant-6 and 3-on-the- tree which I had outfitted with a cassette deck, a pair of speakers in the front doors and two 6×9 speakers in the back and that setup would sing! But I digress…
Anyhow, back to Rush…
I remember having that album on repeat (it was an “auto-reverse” cassette deck after all!) as I was driving around delivering pies until I nearly wore the cassette out. While no one would argue that was their best record, it was their latest at the time and I was a huge fan of the band so naturally I had to absorb every note, every rhythm, every drum fill. But what I never really paid any attention to was the lyrics.
Side note: I never really pay attention to lyrics. There are exceptions of course, but to my ears singing registers as a type of melodic percussion, like a piano or a xylophone would, and it really doesn’t matter to me WHAT they’re saying. Which is kinda ironic, as I wrote lyrics for my bands for a decade or more and but with rare exception I don’t really care for strictly instrumental music…
Now, this particular “Reactor” was really focused on the lyrics of the song and spoke at great length about them, dissecting the meaning, etc., and I gotta tell ya, the words to that song hit me like a ton of bricks. After the initial flashback I had hearing the music, the words – that I’d never paid any attention to over several hundred plays nearly 40 years ago – it was like my entire adult life flashed before my eyes.
I can understand why they’d be meaningless to a teenager. There is no context, no life experience to give meaning to the words. But as a Boring Old Man?!? Frankly, it was a little overwhelming. If I’m being totally honest and transparent, it made me “feel a certain way” as the kids say. It wasn’t just nostalgia. It made me look at my life through a completely different lens. It hit home. Hard.
Maybe it’s just me. Quite frankly my life has been a shit-show these last few years. Untold stresses, aging and ailing parents, job losses, losing friends to illness, or just distance, becoming more isolated, losing the “fire” that made life exciting and just trying to hold it all together without blowing a gasket… And looking back, wondering what that teenager with the old van and the blaring stereo would think of what “the real world” would turn out to be. Not that it’s been all bad, there have been some good times too. Most of them, at least over the last few years, have been recorded for posterity right here on this blog. It’s been an eye-opening experience, totally unexpected and honestly, not all that welcome.
They say growing old ain’t for sissies and I always took that as meaning when the knees go, and your back hurts and you gotta get up to pee in the middle of the night. But the worst pain? That’s gotta be regret. It’s an absolutely brutal affliction. There’s no turning back the clock and undoing what’s been done, and that’s a hard pill to swallow. And time seems to move faster with each and every passing day. As much as we might wish it were so, time cannot stand still.
Now, thanks to Geddy, Alex, Neil, and some random lady on YouTube I’m in a deeply introspective head space, one that I never would’ve guessed could possibly be brought on by a 40 year old, nearly forgotten song.
Life can be strange sometimes…
I turn my back to the wind To catch my breath, Before I start off again. Driven on Without a moment to spend To pass an evening With a drink and a friend
I let my skin get too thin I’d like to pause, No matter what I pretend Like some pilgrim — Who learns to transcend — Learns to live As if each step was the end
Time stand still — I’m not looking back — But I want to look around me now See more of the people And the places that surround me now
Freeze this moment A little bit longer Make each sensation A little bit stronger Experience slips away…
I turn my face to the sun Close my eyes, Let my defences down — All those wounds That I can’t get unwound
I let my past go too fast No time to pause — If I could slow it all down Like some captain, Whose ship runs aground — I can wait until the tide Comes around
Make each impression A little bit stronger Freeze this motion A little bit longer The innocence slips away…
Summer’s going fast– Nights growing colder Children growing up — old friends growing older Experience slips away…
As my readers know I’m a lifelong music fanatic and to this day I’m still trying to keep my finger on the pulse of the latest and greatest. On the one hand, with the advent of YouTube and Spotify, it’s never been easier to indulge in this practice. On the other hand, using these tools brings so much disappointment, so much faster than before!
Don’t get me wrong, there has always been musical disappointment in my life, this isn’t really anything new. I can remember hearing a song on the radio and being immediately hooked by it. Waiting days to hear it again. Maybe a couple weeks goes by, and a few more listens before you even find out who the artist is, because the DJ finally said the name over the air. Now you’re a few weeks in, you’ve got this great new song stuck in your head, you finally know who the artist/band is, so you head down to your local record store to snatch it up, only to find they don’t have it in stock. Maybe the album hasn’t been released yet, maybe they only had a few copies and it’s sold out so you have to wait a few more weeks. The anticipation builds and builds. You find yourself wishing they’d play it on the radio again, preferably when you’re at home so you can tape it from the radio to have something to tide you over until you can get your paws on the actual album. Then finally, FINALLY, after weeks of waiting and searching and waiting some more you finally find it in a store, slap down your hard-earned cash and now you’ve got your hands on the record. You race home to drop in on your turntable and listen to every song, every note, while devouring the album’s liner notes to find out everything you can about this new band…and after all that, it turns out the song from the radio, the song you love, is the ONLY good song on the record! Ugh! So much build up, so much excitement, and it all comes crashing down… It’s happened to me more than a few times, and the disappointment is great, but at the same time you’ve had an adventure, maybe spent time with your buddies trying to track it down. Maybe you got to talk to the cute girl working at the record store… It was all part of the game. And even if the record kinda sucked, you still had that one great song. The thrill of the hunt and whatnot… And, fortunately, the opposite was often true. You’d hear “that song”, go through all the rigamarole and find out the album is astounding. Sonic euphoria, from start to finish. And those moments my friends, made up for the few clunkers over the years.
But nowadays, things are much different. I still listen to “terrestrial radio” from time to time, but 99.9% of what I hear are the old familiar tunes. It’s been well over a decade since I’ve been turned on to a new band from the radio. I read different blogs that have a focus on music, I read a ton of articles from various musical publications to try and suss out what’s new and exciting. My wife and daughter are both music fans and I always take suggestions from them. And of course there is the almighty algorithm that knows what we’ve listened to before and makes suggestions as to what we might like… Nine times outta ten it’s not something I like, but every once in a while the algorithm strikes gold for me. And lately – say over the last 18 months – I’ve been reading a lot of threads on Reddit that are music-related (Side note – I can’t really “endorse” Reddit, there is so much on there that sickens me, but if you stay away from politics and “social issues”, there is actually a lot of entertaining and/or useful stuff there. All the threads I follow are either music, automotive or local-to-me stuff and I studiously avoid the rest of the bile…). Anyhow, I keep my eyes peeled for new bands that get a lot of notice and once I see a certain band or song mentioned more than a few times, I’ll go check them out for myself.
Now, I recognize that I’m a “boring old man”, and not everything is going to be to my liking. And frankly, being more from the alternative/punk world of music, I know there is going to be a lot of stuff that simply doesn’t do it for me. And that’s fine. But I’m also astute enough (as far as music is concerned at least) to pick up on things that are special, or impressive, or dare I say groundbreaking that leads to my understanding of why a certain artist or band is gaining notoriety.
A great example of this is the band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. If you were to believe the folks that post on Reddit, they are hands down the greatest band to ever pick up instruments. I have seen dozens upon dozens of posts extolling the virtues of this band, recommending them to anyone that has ears. Seriously, their fan base is RABID and all in. So naturally, I had to check them out. And while the music was not MY thing, I completely understand why a lot of people have gone mildly insane over them. Those guys can play! The music is quirky, kinda jam band meets jazz combo, meets psychedelic, with a little Zappa thrown in. It’s weird, it sounds like nobody else I’ve heard and I totally get it. I just don’t find myself sitting around listening to that style of music. I would however go see them live, I’m sure it’s an experience. And I’m thrilled that such a band exists in a world full of computerized, boring, unadventurous music. I hope that they achieve massive success and have a long, fruitful career. I sincerely mean that, even though I will rarely listen to them.
On the other hand, there is a relatively new band that I swear I see their name daily, a band called Geese. So after seeing them mentioned so many times for several months straight, I decided I needed to check them out. And I’m left shaking my head in disbelief. THIS? This is what has everyone in a tizzy these days? I honestly can’t think of a positive thing to say about them, and yet the “general public” hails them as the greatest band since the Beatles. I simply don’t get it. To me, calling them mediocre would be giving them more credit than they deserve. I went through their Top 10 songs on Spotify, each one of which has well over 5 million streams (one of them was over 20 million!) and I couldn’t get through more than a minute of any of them. Just messy, atonal dreck as far as I’m concerned. And yet, they are massively popular right now.
Then I jumped over to a song by Kendrick Lamar. I’ve known his name for a long time, I’ve heard him featured on other hip-hop artist’s tracks, and to me it was just… M’eh. Not horrible, but nothing special. But again, he’s hugely popular. Most of the kids my wife and daughter teach LOVE him. So anyways, I’m reading this gushing review of this one particular song, how it’s so amazing that the listener (and writer of that piece) is now inspired to seek out music in a whole other genre than hip hop, because this song just broke down barriers and made something completely new and ground breaking. So I’m thinking, OK, he’s been around a while, perhaps he’s grown as an artist, this sounds like something I need to hear. Uh, no. It was so flippin’ boring I couldn’t believe my ears. I’ve heard that “same” track a hundred times, and 20 of them did it better. There was nothing ground breaking. Stylistically it was the same regurgitated, uninspired nonsense that hip hop has devolved into over the last 2 decades. It was the Toyota Corolla of hip hop tracks.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Hip hop is NOT my main thing, I’m not nearly as well versed in that genre as I am in several others, but I do have a fair amount of it in my CD/record collection. I’ve been a drummer for a hip hop group, I’ve done recording sessions for another hip hop group, I would say that yes indeed, this late-50’s Northern Cali Anglo is indeed a fan of hip hop. But a lot of the very popular, successful hip hop artists leave me scratching my head. Jay-Z is arguably the most successful artist in the genre of all time, and I cannot stand his music. (FWIW, I can’t stand his wife’s music either!) I think Tupac is highly overrated. There are a great many artists that have become wildly successful that I think are terrible. This is nothing new. But it got me to thinking, is today’s music so dull because the kids and 20-somethings that are making today’s music had such terrible music to emulate and be inspired by?
I could be wrong, but it seems like the bands of the 60’s took their influences of say, Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly and the like, and pushed the boundaries into something wholly different and dare I say, better. If you listen to early Beatles or the Who, their music isn’t that far removed from “rock around the clock” type of tunes, but by the end of their respective run, they were putting out records that would’ve been unimaginable to Bill Haley and his cohorts. Or take the riff-heavy classic rock of Montrose and Deep Purple, add in some punk ethos and swagger and you get Soundgarden or Alice in Chains. Of course there were always middle-of-the-road bands that did their thing, but weren’t pushing the boundaries – say Foreigner or April Wine for example, but they still had talented musicians and solid songwriting and could put out a good, cheap thrill of a song on the regular. Nowadays, not so much.
I know for a fact that people get caught up in the era of music that defined their teen years. It’s scientifically proven. And I absolutely love the music of my generation, it will always and forever be special to me. But I kept gleaning onto new stuff for decades after my school years and hoped to do so forever, it just seems that music has lost a big part of what made it special over the last decade. Not that I haven’t discovered some great new bands in the last decade, I absolutely have and I am grateful for it! It’s just that the music that is getting so much attention these days would never have even seen the light of day back in the 80’s or 90’s. Musically, we seem to be in the Cream-of-Wheat era… Bland, bland, bland…
Music used to be exciting, sexy, somewhat dangerous maybe, it made you FEEL something. Most of today’s music just makes me feel bored. I’m excited by the fact that post-Covid people seemed to regain some interest in guitars and drums and actual instruments as opposed to computers, but we’ve lost that “it” factor for the most part. I hope this latest generation that is starting to put out records is just another starting point, and we see a resurgence of daring, exciting music. I’m encouraged by a lot of youngsters making “reaction” videos to classic rock and such, they seem genuinely blown away by much of what we took for granted growing up because it was as close as the FM dial on the radio. All day, every day. Will we ever see another band like the Who, or U2, Primus, or 311? Bands that took the past and all their influences, threw it in a blender and came up with something wholly unique and mesmerizing? I certainly hope so! It’s ironic that in an age where recording and releasing music has never been easier, when the Gatekeepers of the past are long gone, that musicianship and songwriting are at such a low point. If nothing else today’s artists need to pick it up to inspire those coming up behind them.
I’m not really sure where I’m going with all this. This piece kinda took a turn, and turned into a tangent with no real direction or resolution. I guess I should just consider it an “old man yells at clouds” post. If you’ve made it this far, I appreciate you. Please leave a comment with a band/artist/song from the last decade that knocked your socks off. I could use some inspiration!
Ok, right off the bat I will freely admit, this content is “stolen” from the interwebs. The term “class act” caught my eye, so I had to check it out. That was a common phrase “back in my day”, but I cannot recall the last time I ever heard it. Maybe because nowadays our society celebrates “CRASS acts”, and not CLASS acts. I’m looking at you Kardashians and “Real Housewives”… Anyhow, I think this list below is a good primer, a blueprint if you will, to direct us to be generally better people. Just imagine what our world would look like if HALF the people did even HALF the things on this list?!?In these days of everyone being out for themselves, a little decency, decorum and yes, class, would go a long way. I wish I could say that I do all these things, but like most of us, I am a work in progress. There are certainly several of these things that are ingrained in me, that I do without even thinking about it, but a number of them I do not, or have not done in a while. Anyhow, without further delay here is a brilliant instructional to being a Class Act. (I give credit to Budget Savvy Travelers @thebstravelers for this content – I don’t know if it is their original work or not, but that is who I lifted it from)
Want to be remembered as a classy SOB? Here are 25 ways to elevate everyday life:
1️⃣ Say hello first – Brighten someone’s day with a warm greeting.
2️⃣ Use and remember names – It shows respect and attentiveness.
3️⃣ Hold doors – Small gestures leave a big impact.
4️⃣ Let people merge in traffic – Courtesy goes a long way. Don’t stress over a few seconds.
5️⃣ Write thank-you notes – Handwritten is classy and memorable.
6️⃣ Don’t bad-mouth others – Integrity speaks louder than gossip.
I know this time of year can be difficult for many. For some it can be excruciating. We shouldn’t need to be reminded to be kind, but often we do. Myself included.
It’s been a rough year, no doubt. In my humble opinion the 2020’s have pretty much been a dumpster fire and we’re only halfway through them. But we can decide for ourselves to put all that aside for a minute and just be grateful. Grateful that we’re still upright. Still drawing breath. Not seeing our friends and loved ones through Plexiglas barriers and mandated face masks.
As hard as life has been – and again, mine is no exception – I still wish for peace on Earth and good will towards mankind. Now is not the time for grievance. Even if you’re not an “observer” of Christmas you can still choose to be kind, to set your differences aside for a moment or two. We’re all in this together and nobody gets out alive, so lets all make the best of it and be good to our fellow humans, shall we?
Thanks for stopping by, and a Merry Christmas to all!
Last week I started a new job. Not that I didn’t enjoy my last one – I very much did – but I simply couldn’t live on what I was making. No shade directed at the former boss/company, I was paid well for what I was doing, it was just that what I was doing didn’t have the same value as my old job(s). The 16 months, give or take, of working a low pressure job was considerably more valuable than the paycheck, but the reality of the situation is that I had no other choice than to get back doing what I do and pull in some additional coin to keep the head above water. My savings is gone, my precious metals sold off, I’m trying desperately to sell off as much musical gear as possible and the wolves are at the door, so to speak. And so here we are…
I’m back in a Director position, running a very large, and very high end property. Thankfully though, I’m no longer in a “Healthcare adjacent” position with mountains of regulations and regulators, and no longer catering to the whims of obscenely wealthy senior citizens. A welcome change, to be sure. Not that this new gig is gonna be easy. I’ve got several months of heavy lifting ahead of me to get this place back in shape.
I’m still in no position to pick up and prioritize the blog here, just dropping this in to keep track of my life as time flies and memories get cloudy…
I am extremely grateful for the new opportunity this job provides, but the personal side of things is very much in shambles still. The struggle is real, as the kids say. The last 5 years had me ground down to a nub. Mentally I have not been “right” for some time, which caused a severe withdrawal from living life. I’ve tried covering it up, the old “fake it til you make it” routine. Throwing band-aids on the situation, like concerts and trips and playing in a band… all those things I thought would “fix” the situation. They did not. All I did was distract myself from the real issues, which were left to fester and infect every other aspect of my life. I buried my head in the sand and soothed myself with “this too, shall pass”, but it didn’t pass. I was doing nothing more than kicking the can down the road. I let things go from bad to worse, to even worse than that. I saw rock bottom fast approaching and just kept throwing band-aids on rather than pulling the ‘chute until I crashed head first into rock bottom.
Don’t get me wrong, I know things *could* be worse. I’m still on the right side of the dirt, I still have all my limbs and I’m not relying on machines or pills to keep me alive. I know there are a lot of people out there worse off than me that didn’t just land a great new job. I’m trying (struggling, honestly) to be grateful for what I do have, to keep my chin up, to climb out of the pit of despair I dug for myself, to keep putting one foot in front of the other ’til I get to where I need to be. It is exhausting and it is bringing every weakness I possess to the forefront.
This is what happens to a man with no direction in life. I chose the path of least resistance, tried to not make waves, to go along to get along and be satisfied with whatever life sent my way. This has proven to be absolute folly on my part. Turns out the path of least resistance is in no way the path of NO resistance, I just let life choose my path rather than forging the path I wanted for myself. I didn’t design my life, I took what was handed to me and tried to make the best of it. Well, that was a lousy plan and I’m currently paying a hefty price for it.
I find myself at an age where I should be secure, where I should feel good about my accomplishments in life, where I should be a pillar of strength for my family, my friends, my community. I’m none of those things at the moment.
In a way I feel like I’m starting over. Which at 57 is NOT where I wanted to be. In a lot of ways it’s worse than when you’re just starting out as there is so much baggage to be carried and sorted out along the way. So many bad habits to correct, so many things to make up for. And so little time left…
There was a quote I read some 3 decades ago, that became my mantra: “It’s never too late to become what you might have been.” I FIRMLY believed that. I had it hung up on my office wall for years. It kept me going through years of ups and downs, it was my shining beacon of hope. But the reality of it is, it IS too late to accomplish many of the things I wanted to do in life. It has been extremely difficult to accept that I “peaked” in my mid-20’s and I’ve just been (barely) treading water for the last 30 years. That when faced with struggle and hardship, I resigned myself to just accept what was and not try harder. Things will work out, I constantly told myself.
Once upon a time I knew – didn’t think, KNEW – that I’d be a renowned drummer one day. I wasn’t after fame, but I wanted to be respected for my abilities in that world. I wanted kids to hear my playing and be inspired in the same way I was hearing all those heavy hitters from my early days. I put in untold hours practicing, over decades, I studied the greats, I developed a style completely unto myself, I put everything I had into it. I was good. Really good. I wanted to discover unknown bands and produce their records, have my own recording studio, maybe even open my own nightclub to help bring new music to world. I once had a dear friend tell a new acquaintance “If you could invest in bands like they were a startup, this guy (me) would make you rich!” I have an “ear” for the next-big-thing… What I got was a failed record deal, a series of boring cover bands that provided ZERO artistic satisfaction, a handful of students I taught and a whole lot of heartbreak and bitterness. And while I still play, my skill level is maybe 60% of what it was when I was truly dedicated to the craft. Now instead of really good, I’m just OK. And considering drumming is the thing I’ve absolutely been best at in my life, what my entire identity was formed around, I’m not OK with that!
I wanted to build my own house from my own designs (which I spent countless hours drafting and refining). My very own homestead where I could raise food, be close to nature and live in peace. Instead I’ve been in a crappy 4-plex for the last 20 years as inflation has far outpaced income and kept me hanging on for dear life.
I wanted to build custom cars that had every detail perfectly aligned with my vision… I had numerous ideas for inventions -nothing earth shattering or life changing necessarily, but what I thought were great ideas that certainly had a marketable value… I’ve started two screenplays and two novels I never finished… This blog here is my 3rd attempt at making something that might speak to someone, and yet I’m floundering here too.
In short, I’ve not really accomplished anything of note.
I spent a lot of time, a large portion of my life, feeling like a victim. Feeling like I was surrounded by bad luck. Like I was misunderstood. Like I “deserved better”. Why? I couldn’t tell you. It wasn’t until a few years ago I finally got to a place where I could accept my own faults. Where I realized that, for the most part, my place in the world had more to do with my bad decisions and either lack of initiative or lack of determination, than with the world being “unfair”. That, my friends, is a BITTER pill to swallow. And I’ve been choking on that bitter pill for a couple years now. I spent a lot of years convincing myself I was special, but when it comes down to it, I’m not. Not really. I’m a dreamer. Maybe in some regards even a visionary, but I let fear of the unknown stop me from giving it my all. I chose “safety” over doing something extraordinary. In the big game of Life it turns out I’m just another cog in the machine. This is NOT how I saw myself and I’m trying to reconcile who I thought I was with who I actually am.
Maybe I had too many interests. Maybe if I had just set my sights on one single thing and pursued it relentlessly things would be different. Maybe I just wanted too much. I didn’t grow up impoverished but we didn’t have much, and it seemed I was surrounded by folks that had so much more. And I wanted some of that life! To have a nice house, cool cars, to take vacations, to provide all the things to my kids that I never had. And sure, lots of people end up with better than they deserve, but it’s my own fault for holding myself up as a victim when that didn’t happen for me. I had no business thinking something great was coming my way, considering where I’d come from. The old saying is you’ve got to play the cards you’re dealt, and unfortunately when life dealt a crappy hand I folded. No one to blame but myself for not drawing more cards until I had a winning hand.
So here I am, rapidly approaching “retirement age”(Ha!!!), not only broke but deeply in debt, savings is gone, no assets but a 25 year old truck and some musical gear that I can’t seem to sell, a crumbling marriage, a strained relationship with my only child due to the marriage problems, and a deep sense of dread that I’ve squandered this life and my gifts. How does one turn that around?
Literally the only bright spot is the new job, which is in a career that chose me rather than vice versa and I only took out of sheer desperation and necessity. Yeah, a 57 year old whore. Let’s just call it what it is.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this. All I’d planned to do was drop a paragraph or two about getting a new job… The rest of it just shot out, stream of consciousness style. Way more personal than I am comfortable with or care to admit, much less “put out there” but maybe the fact that I wrote it means something. I don’t know what, but something. Maybe the reason none of my writing has impacted anyone is because I’ve been so guarded and reluctant to show the “real” me, warts and all. Maybe I need to let go of all that – the pride, the ego, the fear of being found out, and just let my flippin’ guard down for once in my life.
There is a dude on YouTube that got lodged in my algorithm, who is a real smart ass and likes to rip on people a lot for their complaints (deservedly so, more often than not) but one thing he says often is “You’re not allowed to quit”. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve needed to hear that these last few months. Not that I’m considering pushing my own delete button or anything that severe, but sometimes just getting out of bed to face the day ahead has seemed like an insurmountable task.
I realize this is coming off as poor me, self pity crap, though honestly that is not my intent. I’m trying to make sense of my circumstances and find a new path forward. The obstacle I’m facing is the destination. How do I forge a path if I don’t know where I’m going? Clearly, my lifelong goal of being a musician is out of the question, yet I don’t want to stop playing music. My job is too demanding and my personal life in too much upheaval to pursue a “serious” band or project in my spare time and my ego (as deflated as it currently is) won’t allow me to get into schlocky, amateur hour stuff. Good music, like any art, takes time and dedication in addition to skill and talent. And besides, the music business is going (has gone?!?) down the tubes, so even the idea of discovering or producing new bands appears to be a fruitless endeavor. There is simply no money in music anymore. I can pour myself into this new job, bust my hump and be the best I can possibly be, but in the end, it’s just a job. I have no love for the work, I just happen to be pretty good at it. Even if I were to become the greatest facilities director they’ve ever seen, if I got hit by a bus I’d be replaced within a couple weeks and life would go on as if I’d never been there. At this stage of my life, between my age and my financial situation I’ll never own a home, much less build one like I always dreamed of. And at the rate of marital decline, I may end up “living in a van down by the river” rather than even being under the thumb of a landlord.
I’m just gonna say it, my future looks bleak. If I ever needed a miracle or cosmic intervention, it’s now. Right. Now. I’ve seen the error of my ways, I accept responsibility for my many failings, and I’m willing to put in the work, but I NEED a direction. A purpose. I want a life worth living and I hope to leave something worthwhile behind.
I’ve taken a long fall and I have a long way to climb. As the old song goes, “I’ve got a long way to go, and a short time to get there”. It’s not easy reversing a life of bad habits and worse decisions. Reinventing oneself in the twilight years. All I know for certain, is I’m not allowed to quit.
Today I had an unusual experience. Not unusual like an alien abduction or a religious experience or anything fun like that. No, just a wave of nostalgia combined with a shock to the system based on current data and a tinge of a glimpse of a bizzaro world future dystopia.
Where, you might ask, did this odd interconnected experience happen? Why, “The Mall” of course!
As it happened on this fine Saturday, I was running around taking care of various odds and ends, and I happened to have about an hour to kill before my next engagement. It was hot, I needed to take a leak and I just happened to be a few blocks away from a shopping mall, so I figured I’d make a pit stop there rather than find some grody gas station bathroom and sit in my hot (black) pickup for an hour. And who knows, maybe treat myself to an Orange Julius drink – it’s been years!
Now this particular mall, now called “Westfield Valley Fair” has been around a long time. In fact, my personal history with the place goes back to some of my earliest memories as a child, when it was two separate shopping centers (Valley Fair and Stevens Creek Plaza) across the street from each other. The fondest memories of the place were going to the book store there – the book store had TWO floors – and when you’re 4/5 years old, that just seems to be an astounding amount of books! Both my parents read a lot, and often gifted books as presents, so that was a place we frequented. Though to be honest I was so young when we started going there I don’t even know what the name of the place was, we just called it “the bookstore”. The other very vivid memory I have from way back, is taking my paper route earnings, riding my bike the 4 miles or so down to the Macy’s at that mall and buying Levi’s 501 jeans and some store-brand knock-off “Polo” shirts, as it was my intention to re-invent myself as a “preppy” kid going into my Freshman year of High School. Yeah, that didn’t exactly work out for me, turns out lower-middle class kids from the “wrong side of the tracks” don’t exactly fit in that world. But that is a story for another day… I can still remember the 501’s were $12.50 then. The shirts were about 10 bucks. 3 pair of pants and two shirts – one red, one blue – cost me about $60, which is just a little less than I made in a month of schlepping newpapers. It’s weird how things like that stick in your mind. I guess when you’re 14, buying your back-to-school clothes with money you had to earn yourself, you pay more attention to what things cost. This would be the summer of 1982.
Fast forward a couple years and both those shopping centers were bought out by a big company and the place was “re-developed” into one, continuous, two story indoor mall now simply called Valley Fair. It re-opened in 1986 and it was the quintessential 80’s mall. Back then in my general area, which was essentially what we could reach on our bicycles, we had three malls. The one right down the street from my house – Westgate – was known amongst my cohorts as the “dirt mall”. Across town we had Valco, which was the “nice mall”, they had a McDonald’s AND an ice skating rink – the perfect place for kids to hang out back then. (And secretly, I LOVED to go into the Sears there and check out all the Craftsman tools!) But when Valley Fair reopened, it was quickly and decisively known as the “rich mall”. Naturally myself and my friends couldn’t BUY anything there, but we loved to hang out there, ‘cuz that’s where all the cute, rich girls hung out! Later, my bandmates and I would go down there and pass out fliers for our shows and bumper stickers to pretty girls that had “the look” of the type that might like our music… But I digress. I guess what I’m trying to say is I have some really fond memories of the place, going back to maybe 1972 or so.
Then from say 1988 until 2018 I only stepped foot in the place a handful of times, when I was after something very specific from a particular store. Usually a gift of some sort. Around 2020 I was driving by the place and noticed that once again they were doing a massive remodel of the mall, from one end to the other. The construction went on for I’d say at least 3 years. It was a massive undertaking. I hadn’t been there from at least 2018 until this past April, when once again I visited Macy’s to buy a suit for my daughter’s wedding. But at that time, I didn’t actually go in the mall, just Macy’s – in and out. That pretty much covers the nostalgia part of the tale.
Well today since I had an hour to kill, I decided to walk around just to see what the “new” mall is about. Holy. Crap.
As you might have guessed, I’m not exactly the mall type. Other than concerts, for which I will gladly suck it up, I am NOT a “crowds” kinda guy. They set me on edge, big time. And let me tell you this place was PACKED. Like, it’s 12 hours til Christmas morning, packed. It was unreal. And it was literally just a Saturday afternoon in August! I cannot imagine what that place would be like in a holiday shopping rush, but I don’t want to be within 5 miles of there from Thanksgiving til Valentines day!! It was beyond shocking, the sheer volume of people.
And the people? Look, I recognize my hometown (sadly) turned into Ground Zero of Silicon Valley and it’s always been “diverse”, but I’d be grossly exaggerating if I told you 10% of the people there were Anglo. My rough, purely non-scientific, off-the-cuff estimates based on my own observations – keeping in mind I didn’t venture into a single store or restaurant – would say the clientele was 70% Asian of one faction or another (I’m including Indian here), 15% Middle Eastern, 10% Hispanic, 4% Anglo and 1% black. It was wild. I’ve never seen such lopsided “diversity” in one place. And again, not being a mall kinda guy, I was really taken aback by the frenetic pace at which everything was moving. We used to go the the mall to hang out, to chill. There is NO chill left in the place. It reminded me of those crazy scenes you see in the movies of some bazaar in Calcutta or something. Everyone scurrying around, bumping into each other. Security guards evetywhere. And the din? Goodness gracious! It was SOOO flippin’ LOUD in there. The cacophony of dozens of different languages, each trying to be heard over rhe other, was dizzying. Like a mild roar, never ceasing, in the background. It was unsettling to say the least.
But the thing that really blew my mind was the stores in there nowadays. Like I said earlier, it was the “rich mall” even back in the day cuz they had a Macy’s and Nordstroms as opposed to the Sears at the nice mall or JC Penny at the dirt mall, but now it’s become some grotesque monument to consumption that honestly made me wonder if I’d slipped into another dimension. Every name-dropped brand name from every hip hop record in the last decade had a storefront. Gucci, Fendi, Balenciaga, Bvlgari, Burberry, Rolex, Cartier, Prada…the list goes on and on. All kinds of brands and stores I’ve never even heard of. Additionally there were a bunch of clearly Asian stores with names I couldn’t pronounce. I don’t know what to make of a place like that. This is flippin’ San Jose, not Beverly Hills or Manhattan. It was so alien and frankly grotesque to me. That kind of crass consumerism really gives me the creeps. And what really hit me was that earlier that day, less than a mile down the road from all this excess, I’d stopped at a 7-11 for a cup of coffee and had to dodge a homeless dude sleeping on the sidewalk while also being accosted by another for some money to “get something to eat”.
I’ll be the first to admit that I do not “fit in”, I’m one of the least tendy people you’ll ever meet, and not only do I not care about “name brands”, I’ll generally cut the labels off of everything (a holdover from my early punk rock days surely). I simply cannot understand the appeal of this type of “culture”. That so many people are drawn to this spectacle that absolutely repels me just boggles my mind. Hence, the shock to the system.
As for the dystopia? Aa I mentioned, the sheer volume of people and the frenetic pace was almost too much for this boring old man the bear…but what really troubles me is that within a couple miles if this place, in every direction, enormous, soulless housing developments are popping up. I don’t get to this part of town often, and driving around today I was really overwhelmed by how many of these monstrosities were under construction. Traffic around here has been absurd for a long time, wait times for everything from medical appointments to a haircut get worse year after year, the job market is BRUTAL, everywhere is just crowded, the homeless shanty towns are all over the place…and “they” are building thousands of new housing units and packing them in like sardines. I moved to this area just before my 5th birthday and spent my youth running around the orchards and open fields, which were around every corner. Even as things slowly developed, it was still a great place to live and we still had a sense of community. But the last 10 years have been like a runaway train and all this “progress” has turned my hometown into an overcrowded, disjointed, ugly mess with greater and greater disparity between the haves and have-nots, and I fear they’re just getting started. I’m reminded of the old song lyrics “We gotta get outta this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do!”.
And to add insult to injury, the mall doesn’t even have an Orange Julius anymore!
Found this on the interwebs and it’s too good not to share:
Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the much older lady that she should bring her own grocery bags, because plastic bags are not good for the environment,. The woman apologized to the young girl and explained, “We didn’t have this ‘green thing’ back in my earlier days.” The young clerk responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations.” The older lady said that she was right our generation didn’t have the “green thing” in its day. The older lady went on to explain: Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled. But we didn’t have the “green thing” back in our day. Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags that we reused for numerous things. Most memorable besides household garbage bags was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our school books. This was to ensure that public property (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribblings. Then we were able to personalize our books on the brown paper bags. But, too bad we didn’t do the “green thing” back then. We walked up stairs because we didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn’t have the “green thing” in our day. Back then we washed the baby’s diapers because we didn’t have the throw away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 220 volts. Wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right; we didn’t have the “green thing” back in our day. Back then we had one TV, or radio, in the house — not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana. In the kitchen we blended and stirred by hand because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn’t fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she’s right; we didn’t have the “green thing” back then. We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blade in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn’t have the “green thing” back then. Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service in the family’s $45,000 SUV or van, which cost what a whole house did before the “green thing.” We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn’t need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 23,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint. But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn’t have the “green thing” back then?
-borrowed
Now, as a Gen X person, I cannot say ALL these things were still around in my youth, but a lot of them were. We still had a ‘milk man’ that delivered milk, and the used glass bottles were returned for re-use with every delivery. I can remember taking soda bottles back to the store for money, with which I’d usually get enough for an ice cream cone, which was 15 cents at Thrifty’s. Can you imagine a 10 year old kid walking 10 blocks, pulling a wagon of glass bottles, for 15 cents nowadays? Can you imagine buying a single scoop of ice cream ANYWHERE for 15 cents? I was in high school before my family got a second car (and my mother got a driver’s license). I cannot recall a single time from elementary school through my Junior year of high school (where I ALWAYS used brown paper grocery bags to fabricate book covers!) where I was driven to school. In my senior year my Pops got a company truck, so I inherited his 12 year old International Scout and would drive myself. For a few years in elementary school I did take a school bus, but I walked a few blocks to the bus stop and then home again after drop off. When I needed to go somewhere as a kid, it was on two feet or later, on a bicycle – and of all the bikes I had growing up, only one of them were new, all the others were second-hand. And I used those second-hand bikes to deliver newspapers and to ride out to my Grandmother’s house to mow her lawn… In fact, pretty much every “recreational” thing I had growing up was second-hand. And it was not uncommon to wear hand-me-down clothes either. I didn’t have older siblings, but I got a lot of things passed on from my next door neighbor that was like an older brother to me. And when summer came around we didn’t go out and buy shorts, we cut the pant legs off last year’s school clothes and that was that. Once a month my Boy Scout troop would go door-to-door throughout the neighborhood collecting newspapers to be recycled into – you guessed it – newspaper for printing. We had one TV in the house until my high school days, and it wasn’t until then we had Cable TV. I don’t think my parents had a VCR until after I’d moved out at 19… I used “Thomas Guide” map books as a teenager delivering Pizzas and later as a legal courier. No cell phones, no GPS, just some paper (that never lost signal or ran out of power) and a little common sense.
I consider myself a nature lover and an old school “environmentalist” – as in, don’t litter, leave nothing but footprints, etc. – but this whole “green thing” is mostly hogwash. While some of it may be well intentioned, it is chock full of unintended consequences. As someone much smarter than me once opined – “when factories producing solar panels can run 100% of their production from solar power, I’ll believe it’s a viable, long term solution at scale.” Or something along those lines, that was years ago and Im paraphrasing. And as I far as I know, that has not come anywhere near a reality. Most of the physical waste comes from corporations trying to maximize profits (plastic vs. glass is a prime example) and most of the ‘solutions’ come from government trying to ‘create jobs’ and maximize revenues. After all, providing a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, or more likely was CREATED by government, is what government does best.
By all means, re-using and re-purposing are fantastic and I think everyone should do this. Walk more, drive less? Absolutely. And reusable grocery bags over plastic? Yeah, I don’t have a problem with that. I just think it would be swell if today’s “greenies” would get off their high horses and recognize that they don’t have all the answers either. In 25 years they will be getting slammed for all the toxic waste from lithium EV batteries, dead and depleted solar panels, poisoned water tables and the fact that our most fertile, food producing land was paved over for “multi-use commercial/residential buildings” in the name of “progress”. We all do the best we can with what we have to work with. Not all ideas are bad just because they’re old, and not all ideas are good just because they are new. In general, I think it’s a good idea to be less wateful and to take care of your things so you maximize their lifespan. Less consumption overall. Simple, right?
So, I found myself out of a job this week… Unexpected, and yet I’ve felt under the microscope for the last several months. Regardless of how much I did, regardless of the extra hours put in, nothing was ever good enough for TPTB. “So, you only completed 99 things today? What about that 100th thing?!?”
Word to the wise, if you want to keep your job, don’t tell the boss he’s being ridiculous when he’s being ridiculous. The ONLY thing coming from that is a nice big target in your back…
So this week I’ve been through all kinds of emotional crap, from bitterness to hostility, fear, self doubt…depression. It’s been a rough week to say the least.
To make matters worse, the Mrs. and our daughter have been on a Girl’s Trip all week, hundreds of miles and a few time zones away, so I’ve been left to my own devices and the voices in my head all week. Considering I’m my own harshest critic and my own worst enemy, this hasn’t been a good place to be. To say the least. I haven’t slept much or eaten much, but I DID completely avoid “the bottle” 100%. Now, I’m not much of a drinker – generally less than once a month, but dang! My old friend Mr. Jack Daniels has been calling to me repeatedly, especially in the dark of night when I couldn’t sleep.
Truth be told, I mostly hated my job. I was already looking around and putting out feelers, nonetheless getting sacked was a major shocker. I took my first “real” job (schedules and paycheck job) at 15 years old and I’m now 55 and I’ve NEVER been “fired” before. Still, I wanted it to be MY choice to leave that pressure cooker, not have it thrust upon me. I’ve been in essentially the same job, just at 3 different facilities, for 17 years and I’m BURNED. OUT. It wasn’t a career choice, it was something I fell ass-backward into all those years ago. And while I’ve learned a TON over the years, I have gained no satisfaction from it and in a way wished I’d never gotten into this line of work in the first place. I never had any love for it. No paycheck is worth the constant, unending stress my job entailed, I was just too scared to try something new – even when it was strongly suggested by my Doctor due to stress induced health issues. Yeah, that’s right. Rather than find a new career, I just stopped going to the doctor for about 8 years!
But now the choice was made for me. And all the fear aside, I’m actually relieved in a weird way.
But then, something amazing happened. I landed a new job! I start on MONDAY! The beauty of it is that the new gig is essentially doing the ONLY part of my old job(s) that I DID like! And NONE of the crap that I loathed! No more dealing with HR issues, no more accounting reports, no more dealing with City, State and Federal regulations and all that entails, no more corporate bullcrap. I almost can’t believe it! It sounds too good to be true, but it’s a company I have a long relationship with, I know the owners and they do outstanding work that I know I’ll be proud to be part of. They basically created a new position for me because they desperately need help and they know what I’m capable of. I gotta say, that feels pretty good.
So wish me luck! Things will probably be a little quiet on the ol’ blog while I get my bearings, but never fear, I’ll be back! Hopefully, better than ever now that I won’t be on-call 24/7/365 while trying to stave off an ulcer!
And the cherry on top is that the Mrs. comes home tonight!! Oh, how I’ve missed her! Six days apart is a LONG time when you’ve been with someone for 35 years!
Have a great weekend y’all. Thanks for stopping by!
Most everyone that knows me, and those few of you that have been reading here for a while, know that I’m a vocal and ardent advocate for preparedness.
There are a number of factors that led me there, starting with a family Patriarch that grew up in the Depression era and the Boy Scout years of my youth.
Anyhow, I started getting really serious about it around 2008 or so, and while I wouldn’t say it’s my “lifestyle”, it certainly has been a constant in my life.
There are a number of pillars to preparing for the unknown – food, water, shelter, medical and hygiene, energy and a means of self defense. The people that really go down the rabbit hole concentrate on a lot of other things too, but if you focus on the pillars, you’re going to be in much better shape than the vast majority of people, come what may.
When I first got serious about preparing, I was recently laid-off from a job, and while I found a new gig rather quickly, we were very much in the world of the working poor. Living check-to-check, no savings, nothing extra… barely squeaking by.
Nevertheless, I knew it was important and I was determined to build up food reserves, even if it was only a can or two a month.
I stuck to the sage advice I’d found online at the time – “store what you eat and eat what you store”. The idea being that you would rotate through the backup foods without them spoiling and also avoid sending your body into shock with an instant diet change, should disaster happen and you need to rely on your reserves.
So that’s what I did, a couple cans here, a couple cans there until I started feeling like we had a good start on things.
Fast forward a short while, the employment situation had improved, I wasn’t quite destitute and I started getting smarter about my buying. I would scour the weekly mailers from the 3 different grocery chains in our area and take advantage of the “loss leader” sales (big thanks to Jim “Lord Bison” Dakin for showing me that!) and then upped the ante even further with a Cosco membership so I could buy in bulk. Things were looking up in the food storage realm, to the point of needing new furniture to store it all in!
Then, as often happens in life, things change. We started trying to eat a little healthier, so we started going to farmer’s markets and avoided canned goods. And we were all working more hours and I was constantly stressed out from work so we started getting lazy and relying more and more on takeout food. When our daughter moved out, it seemed more of a hassle to cook and clean for just two so we got even lazier about cooking.
But in 2020 when “the Plague” hit, I really went off the deep end. I was buying food like a maniac, storing it away and we continued eating out as much as possible, with the thinking that “this was it” and we needed to hold on to our stored foods as long as possible because there might not be any foods to obtain in the next year… Or if there was, we might not be able to afford it. (Been there, done that!)
It seems foolish now, looking back, but the fear mongering propaganda was in hyper-drive at the time, so I was simply doing what I thought was prudent to make sure we could eat when everything fell apart.
Anyhow, that’s the (mostly) concise version that brings me up to the last couple weekends and a very important lesson that I learned the hard way.
As I said, I went off the deep end with the food buying AND we were cooking significantly less at home over the last 3+ years, and the Mrs. and I had determined that this year we were going to get back into cooking. I’m no slouch in the kitchen and the Mrs. is an AMAZING cook, plus it’s better for both our physical and financial health, so it seemed like a smart move. The problem was I had filled every nook and cranny in the kitchen, plus 6 or 7 large plastic crates and at least that many 5 gallon buckets on the periphery of the kitchen, so trying to find anything was an excersize in frustration. Keep in mind we live in a 650 square foot apartment!
It was time to clean house.
Over the last two weekends I spent close to 20 hours going through all the kitchen cabinets, checking expiration dates, looking for signs of deterioration or infestation and I threw out LOT of food. I do mean A LOT. So far six big Hefty bags, full to my limits of lifting them, have gone in the dumpster. It was painful. I felt like I was just flushing hard earned cash down the toilet.
But, I have no one to blame but myself. I was lazy about it. I didn’t bother with “proper” food storage techniques, thinking we’d use it all before we needed to bother with that stuff. As a consequence I had to throw out multiple bags of flour, boxes of pasta, cereal…all kinds of stuff that bugs got into over the years. I didn’t properly rotate canned goods, so I found dozens upon dozens of expired foods. Now, I’m not really a stickler for expiration dates, I’ll usually be comfortable with something a year or so out of date…but cans of tuna that expired 4 years ago? Canned beans with a “best by 2017”. Nah, I’m not gonna risk it.
In short, I feel like a moron. And what’s worse, I’ve been living with a false sense of security for a number of years. Thinking you’re squared away and actually, factually BEING squared away, are two different things.
I foolishly thought we had 6 months of food on hand, but after the cleanup, I’d guess we’re closer to 2 months. Nothing to sneeze at of course, but it’s a shock to the system to make this realization. I guess the silver lining is that I made the discovery BEFORE we needed to rely on it. And while I was beating myself up about the “lost” money after throwing so much away, I convinced myself to look at it as having paid an “insurance premium” and didn’t need to make a claim. For whatever reason that makes it easier to swallow.
I’m still a strong proponent of preparedness, don’t get me wrong. But take it from me, if you don’t do it with care it’s gonna cost you one way or another. Luckily it only cost me money, and you can nearly always make more of that. Much better than risking Botulism or something because the family is starving…
Right now with the world on edge and uncertainty and chaos around every corner, I feel that preparedness is more important than ever, but don’t do it like I did – be SMART about it. I’m out here learning lessons the hard way, so you don’t have to!
The Boring Old Man 