They Ain't Heavy They're My Albums

Of The Girl glides through the room. Eddie and the Jam sounds good tonight. I'm busy re-alphabetizing all the LPs in the orange crates that made the final cut to Antelope, CA. Getting the place acoustically Thrasherized has been a longer task than I first thought it would be. When I think about it, about everything I do these days takes a lot longer than my brain registers initially.

 Just a little over a month ago, getting off the U-Haul truck and seeing my two sons easily haul the various book cases, boxes of dishes-books-art-memorabilia and the other various sundry items destined to reside in Condo-land until they came to the orange crated record albums made me smile. Yes, boys, they're heavy and they're fragile. Easy does it.

In many respects, the crates and their contents are the barnacles I carry with me like an old whale does with his necessary parasites. This year, and maybe by another circle around the sun, I might finally get them all transferred into my little pc with the itunes signature. I'm not sure what I'll do with most of them when I complete the task, but the goal is to transfer all the songs worth preserving on the discs to the current pc format in this era of of all-things-digital.

I started this journey back in 1975 when I felt after my first quarter at Cal I was staying up north and I needed my records with me to keep me sane during the long hours of school work and party work, or networking old style. Anyway, I hauled a pair of massive speakers, my tube amplifier, reel-to-reel tape deck, cassette deck and turntable with over 500 records to Berkeley to start this lifelong tune-travel adventure in America's first hatchback, the all powerful AMC Gremlin. I remember the tape decks and turntable riding shotgun with me up I-5 and being a bit worried about the weight in the car, but made the trek without a hitch.

Funny, remembering so vividly now a trip 39 years ago as the first of what has just become the 14th move for many of the albums still in my little collection. Each move brought me to new places meeting new faces along this twisted life journey of mine.

Each stop on the route was an easy set up of uniform RCA plugs, antennas and grounding wire into the jacks on the back of the trusty amplifier to get the sounds going. Not this last one. Call it the law of averages catching up to me, or just time marking decrepitude on the calendar for Johnny in 2014, but this latest audio/video hook up gave me fits from the outset.

I never lost a piece of electronic gear during a move. Lost several this time around. I always pack my electronics with great care . Did the same this time, making a separate trip strictly to bring computer and sound equipment in the comfy almost-new Hyundai sedan. The key equipment rides inside the cab, the more durable goods in the trunk on top of the clothes packed in big 45 gallon plastic bags to keep them clean and tidy, if a bit wrinkled at the end of the line. Makes a great shock absorber, or so the thinking goes, riding on all that cotton, wool and synthetic fiber.  

First night trying to get the internet going was cake, or so I assumed after making the very modest and easy hook-up of coax and telephone (ethernet) cables to the router. All was in the correct place, even took out the instructions and followed them to the letter. No connectivity. Hmmmm. Had to call my son. Came by checked the work, and then asked if I had contacted Comcast to activate the account. Hmmmm? In all my years of doing this the cable or phone was on after you established an account and you just plugged in using the jacks installed in the building. Not here. Dialed Comcast and set up the account and, voila, internet connectivity. Thanks, Winston!

Several days later after box unpacking, washing dishes forever, setting up/taking down wall art, rearranging furniture and generally nesting the place I was ready to watch some television and hooking up monitor, a/v receiver, speakers and dvd player was the order of the day.  No worries, even mixed a vodka cranberry cocktail to kick off the festivities in the early afternoon

PC Monitor will not work with either the amplifier or the cable box. Wrong pin socket size. Ooops. Have to stop at number one on the vodka-cran. Hmmm. Shopping now becomes the order of the day for a new monitor and cables. Head to Best Buy and get a friendly sales guy who I explain what is needed and he gets me a nice Samsung 32 inch television. Lots of connectivity in back. I also purchase a new Samsung Blue Ray DVD player to match my new tv.

While wandering the Best Buy aisles I run across a Sony turntable clearance priced that will plug directly into a pc via a USB connection. I decide this will be a great benefit in my new smaller space, which will allow me to directly record my vinyl right onto my hard drive. My old method required two pcs. One to upload the records and burn the CDRs and the second to upload the newly burned discs as MP3/MP4A digital files for pc and apple itunes play. I back the songs up on a terrabite unit in case my computer has a stroke. I'm a genius, and very lucky to have stumbled onto such a bargain.

Get home, and my genius status gets immediately revoked. The new television will produce no sound through my receiver and speakers. The only sound is through tinny sounding speakers built into the television.The cables the sales guy at Best Buy sold me are mostly worthless, because as I find out through the Samsung website the model television I was sold has only input jacks, no output jacks. Grrrr.

I decide to check my receiver before going back to Best Buy to swap for a different model, which of course, will cost a bit more. I plug in my fm antenna and dial up the tuner with headphones plugged in. No sound. I discover a loose bit of plastic on the floor and note my headphone 1/4" adapter plug has broken. I'm not having much luck, and decide to go to Fry's Electronics to look for a receiver, and will swap the television following this purchase back at Best Buy. I'll shelve the old receiver until I can figure out if it's actually kaput, or just riddled with demented guy bad juju.

Find the perfect solution for around $400 with a Bose unit that will serve as both sound system for television and DVD player, and act as the monitor stand to boot. The best part- it fits perfectly into my little wood entertainment center that came with my condo unit. I swap the television the following day at Best Buy. Thank the fates these new monitors are very light. If this was 10 years ago I would have herniated to death lifting all this electronic shit around for two days running. I'm now in gear with my video part of the home entertainment equation. Or so I thought. Beautiful DVD Blue Ray pictures and sound, but no cable signal coming through. Argggh. Call Winston to come and check. "Have you called Comcast?" "We did that last week."  "You might want to call and see if your cable has been activated."

Called and that was the ticket. Apparently you have to call to activate both sides of your Comcast package. Who thought that great idea up? A fucking marketing asshole, that's who. Oh well. Finally have the full audio/video meal ticket in place in John's Condo Hideaway. Thanks, Winston, for your patience and good sense. You did not get it from me.

So I now have two beautiful nightstands in my boudoir on either side of my bed. They are soundless Infinity 100 speakers from High Fidelity's golden age. A night lamp sits on one and my ancient Chinese Gong sits on the other. My receiver was toast. Still can't figure out what happened, but sometimes shit just happens. I have a new turntable that does work perfectly, but it took me a few days to figure the software out, and I did not have to bother my youngest son. The LPs sound great through my Sticks speakers driven by my pc.

The whole process took two weeks, and cost me about a grand. In every other move it would have taken two hours and cost me a neck ache. But, that's progress for you with competing electronic companies utilizing every weird type of connecter device for every new fangled gizmo that comes into our lives to make life easier.    

Thanks for stopping by for a read. Until next time, put Patsy Cline's Sweet Dreams on the turntable.





     

New Daze

All the unpacked boxes left my condo this week. The photos and memorabilia sit and hang in their new spots on different furniture and walls. The dishes, glasses, cutlery and kitchen aid utensils nestle in new cupboards and drawers. As I look at them in their new surroundings I find nearly all come from the area I've moved back to, just a 10 year void of lost to find the right place to show themselves off. Most of them were made to feel uncomfortable in the houses I occupied in Bakersfield, even the few old family photos of the dearly departed DNA providers.

I meant to write quite a bit about the process of Splitsville as it was unfolding in December and January. However, my ex voiced her discomfort at seeing my thought process in print at the time, and I was busy collecting my shit and getting new a place many miles away from the location where my immediate familial woes haunted me daily. And, maybe that was a good thing. Gives a guy a little perspective on matters, which helps avoid those instantaneous outbursts that always seem to come back and bite with ferocity.

Now, nearly 300 miles removed from the old homestead and the sentient beings I cared for during a lost 10 years in the southern San Joaquin Valley, nestled in my new modern facility here in Sacramento County with all the requisite appointments I dust off the old blog today.

I got lucky. In early January a chance hook-up at a mobile park facility in Rocklin, very close to my oldest son's apartment where I was crashing at night after spending the days searching for a new place to live, provided me a fabulous real estate agent.  I thought the sign in front of the mobile home was an office sign for a Century 21 real estate agent. The sign was much larger than most of the others planted before the properties in the park that were for sale, and I was finding trying out various agents by phone to meet up with at the many locations I had scouted was becoming more problematic and less fruitful by the day. I was getting low on patience, and decided to drive over to that office and meet this agent to handle my buyer's side of this business.

As I got out of the car and walked up to the mobile home a grey haired gentleman greeted me and put away his rake. He asked if I had come to see the place. I immediately realized my mistake in thinking this was an office, and that this was just another older mobile home on the market. Quandary. What to do now? I decided to go with the flow and take the tour.

Charlie showed me his landscaped yard with very large granite stones planted surrounding mature and well trimmed trees with the view of the park's community pool and the lush vegetation highlighting the western view from his porch. The porch was sturdy and level, constructed of solid wood planking. Charlie had done the work by himself, was good with tools and justifiably proud of getting the porch right. It was pleasant.

We went inside and took a look at his kitchen work and a large room right off the porch he always wanted as a bedroom with windows that offered just the right amount of breeze to cool off the hot summer days the valley is known for. That bedroom was never going to happen, he mentioned, now that he had to move to Wyoming and care for an ailing family member where his wife was currently doing the duty.  That was my cue to let him know that caring for an aged father was what probably helped bring my marriage to an inglorious end and why I was here searching for a new spot in the sun. Charlie commiserated. He'd been through divorce.

As we kicked around the problems of being responsible we entered a very large living room. You could tell a lot of the furniture had already been moved out by the imprints left in the carpet from where they sat for years. No amount of vacuum cleaner bristles motoring over that carpet was going to bring the spring back in those fibers. In the corner of the room I spied a banjo and a small amplifier, and offered up how difficult a stringed instrument the banjo was for me to play when I tried many years ago. All of a sudden we were discussing our guitars, old places and faces we both knew.

Charlie was a pro player, skilled in every Chet Atkins lick and then some. I've played for most of my life with a few friends and on my lonesome, but always stuck with it and always felt great whenever I played. He showed me his pride and joy, two top-of-the-line Gretsch Chet Atkins models from the 1950s that looked brand new and yet has obviously been played thoroughly over the years. His hands, rough from wood and mason work over the years still glided over the frets and strings as he showed off some fine chops. He let me play the two for a bit, and I fumbled and stumbled showing my little pulls, hammers and modest understanding of the Mel Bay chord book.

Had a great time in the little over an hour I spent with Charlie in his place, but had to go. He told me to contact his agent, DJ, and that the price on the place was flexible. Sometimes you don't want to think too hard on things. When the fates show you clear signals you just follow those signposts and you'll be alright. Here was a musician (house-flipper when a money crunch appeared on the scene) with an agent named DJ talking to a lost soul from Tower Records who had been a deejay in a galaxy far away now trying to find a new home.

I made the call to DJ, who offered to meet me on the following day at the mobile home park in Rocklin. One of the best calls I've ever made. We hit it off in the park. She's a few years older than I am, and has been in the real estate biz for over 20 years, which says something given the tremendous ups and downs the industry has seen over the past two decades. She clued me in, and most fortunately for me she actually sold houses, unlike about 75% of the agents who have their pictures on the various properties scattered throughout the vast real estate world of the US and have yet to close a deal. 

She told me to forget the mobile home parks and concentrate on something that will actually give a return on the investment I make. The mobile homes are like buying used cars. Once you've spent the money they depreciate faster than VHS tapes. You're a slave to the park's rents and can have the park sold and forced to move at a moment's notice. We now concentrated on condominiums and select single family homes in specific zip codes, which she felt had the best current value with an eye toward future appreciation.

I finally felt after two full months of trekking up the valley 300 miles to then drive all over the greater Sacramento area I was beginning to see something positive happen, and that my new place was right around the corner.  DJ put me in touch with Karl at Alpine Mortgage. He is a very bright and wonderful loan professional who covered all the mortgage aspects of my prospective move, and made me feel like human being throughout the long, and many times tedious road.

I mention this because I had gone to my bank in Bakersfield to get a pre-approval letter done in very early January, and the guy I talked with, who seemed very nice, never got back to me until the day I closed escrow on my new little home in mid-March. Sums up my time in Bakersfield quite well. Really, about the only thing I got out of my 10 years in Bakersfield was the money I got for selling my half of my parents old home to my ex after doing all the estate work and making sure my dad's ashes ended up in the niche next to my mom's. 

And so, this weekend marks 3 weeks in my new location here nestled north of Highway 80 and right next to Roseville. Not where I expected to be when I found out that living with me was such a hardship for the person I loved these past 20 years, but a big improvement on living in a mobile home on the grounds of a trailer-park paying rent on a space that is as high as my current fixed mortgage payment and HOA dues combined.

In days, weeks and months going forward I'll be be back at this blog outpost more frequently than the past couple of years have allowed me. Writing helps unwind a lot of the knots that I've been carrying around with me for awhile. Guitars help, too. If you're curious I'll share here. If not, there are lots of other spaces and places for good souls to seek out on the vast web.

As I close this small chapter, I sure miss my cats and dog, who were such loyal and devoted friends for all the turbulent years spent at the bottom of the Central Valley. Love you always, Bo Kitty, Darby, Weebs, Musette, Bob and Brin-Brin.     

Winter Solstice marks the official end of the year for me. I made it one more full circle around the sun. The boxes in the garage mark both the end and the beginning of both this year and a decade that began when I left beloved Tower Records with my soon to be ex-wife to care for my dad during his last years.

So many boxes a decade ago, not nearly so many today. There is a scene and speech by Al Pacino from an almost forgotten movie, Any Given Sunday, which describes loss, age and the toll it exacts while imploring the cast of football players the camera pans to find the resolve to fight for redemption inches at a time. The team gets the message in the movie. I thank Bill Simmons for providing the clip in his humor filled blog on his Grantland website this past week while doing his NFL picks, which apparently this year have hit bottom just like my marriage.

I'm one in a long line of examples living the message of what getting older means in this world. A lot of what has been gained has been lost, but the quest for understanding this dot in the galaxy, and my place in it, remains worth getting up everyday for, even if awareness comes inches at a time

I see the stars and watch the jets from Miramar, or maybe Edwards, leave vapor trails in the blue-black sky with a palm tree a few doors down silhouetted on the night canvas. Orion's belt hangs above the diffused eastern horizon light with its three main stars beginning the turn from vertical in these late hours of the day to a horizontal view I will catch at 5AM. Sleep seems to come to me in periodic patches during the course of most days, certainly not in the long stretches of time I was comfortable with in the world a moment in time ago. But sleep does come still, and the long dark hours in our 24 of winter help ease me into dreams and numbness.

She sleeps, and I hear her breath in our former shared bedroom. I napped earlier this evening with my old cat on our couch. I'll grab some shuteye again tonight in the guest room with Darby Dog and Bo Kitty squeezing me inside their slumber stretch on the bed. What are they thinking these days? The old man makes a nice breach and warm divide between our adversarial relationship you dipshit dog/cat you?

My dreams now turn from yesterdays mutated brain vision combinations of was and fantasy to possibilities of unknown rooms colored from advertising photos of property offers and old friendships to reawaken. A lot less baggage in the mind today. Hope for a future unexplored. Travel. New beds and breakfasts with familiar voices and faces for a day or two and then down the road for another reunion of hope and inspiration. The high way.

Thanks for stopping by. Peace.



  

   

Going Solo at The End Of The Line

 

I thought this year would be different, and funny enough the damn time signature turned out to be quite different. Just not the way I envisioned. I must remember to be more specific when making those wishes near the New Year. The cosmic genie always lurks, and apparently still works from time to time.

I became hooked on George R. R. Martin's "Game of Thrones" books, and television series, this year.  "Winter is coming." Even for Bakersfield, CA where very mild temperatures fill the autumn days, the growing dark hours and chilly nights sap the tree limbs of their juice and force the annual plummet of leaves to the ground. What once pulsed and thrived in green just yesterday turns to wet brown mulch so quickly. The dampness of the soil lingers throughout much of the day, and the six or eight legged little creatures have crawled back down deep below, or left as a last will and testament to their lives a hopeful promise of progeny attached to some wood or stone. The circular events in the northern hemisphere on a small round rock circling a star hurtle through space with wills of their own. 

Last year at this time my wife and I were celebrating a new car purchase. It was a gift from her to me.  We had a 2003 BMW 525i that ran well but had begun to suffer those annoying little traits that conspire to all parts in the universe with hoses, linings, belts, lights, pads and you-name-it beginning to wear out and need constant replacement. We've lived modestly here for our 10 years in this town, and the repairs on the Beamer were beginning to look like monthly car payments. So Vicky convinced me a new car, just for me, would be the ticket. She had the still sporty Celica, which she loves, to do the commute to her job a few miles round trip each day.  Her dream job as the executive director at a local non-profit was secure, and so we took home a new Hyundai Sonata after trading in the BMW. 

A year later the car and its purchase puzzle me because I find I will be, in the immortal words of Ray Davies, "Going Solo." So low.

All the emotions people confront when their personal universe shifts into brain chaos hit me these past several months trying to work through the relationship woes with the one I love. Everyone knows the three Gs- gut-wrench, guilt and grief when breakup calls. There are plenty of other descriptors anyone can freely apply to note abrupt individual change when it happens to them, but sadness mixed with confusion fits me best today. I made it past anger, finally.

Anger made the scene untenable at the end of the line. After 20 plus years of togetherness being told  four months ago that she did not think the relationship could go on caused all my synapses to fire every round in the their tanks, and put me at a total loss. After feeling so comfortable in my skin being around the love of my life for so long the new order, these past 100 days or so, has meant I now felt childish and unsure at every moment in the day. What to do? How to repair the damage? What the fuck has happened? And how did it get to this?

Different perspectives over time on issues personal and professional, which never resolved themselves, apparently ate away what I considered an unshakeable foundation.

I grew up with arguments. My parents argued with themselves frequently, and loudly on many an occasion. Most of my relatives argued with one another, and often. My grandmother once told my mom when she called one time to complain about a fight with my dad,  "If you don't have a fight with your partner from time to time there is no point in having a partner." She then hung up on my mother. Some people might be made for arguments, others not so much it appears.

It's not as though there were no clues in front of my senses over the past several years that maybe things were not all hunky-dory in our little couple world. The various physical ailments that afflicted my loving partner over our time in Bakersfield, CA were in all probability symptoms of stress, and although many conversations brought up that possibility these talks always ended without a resolution of the dis-eases, or unease of the soul to be more precise. My lingering unhappiness over the failure to land any meaningful work in the Bakersfield job market had to be a constant irritant, and even though I was mum on the subject for the past several years, let's face it a few years of unhappy bitter is hard to live with. 

We had, I thought, compromised on a one earner one stay-at-home lifestyle. All her efforts could be on pursuit of success in the job world, which she has achieved, while all work on the property and household would fall to me. The ten-buck-an-hour gigs that I was able to land seemed pointless to keep pursuing when we had a bunch of aging pets to maintain on top of large properties in a town where poverty was so prevalent and opportunity for home burglary ever present on every street. We just had different perspectives on how that would play out, I guess.

Cue the Traveling Willburys "End Of The Line" on our lives together. This is not, however, a boo-hoo pity party on this page. Just an acknowledgement it is one more time to change tracks with the hope that lessons learned will stick, and that complacency and inattentiveness never reside with me in the years to come. Time for new horizons.

Happy Holidays to friends and families everywhere.

When people become brands who can be schocked by the lies?

Dan Hicks had a great line many years ago, "How can I miss you when you won't go away?" He made a quirky song out of it.



This line always pops into my head when the bombast of world class liars and frauds intrudes too much into my little world.  The song has ebbed and flowed in my brain throughout the forty plus years I can remember first hearing it and then immediately thinking of Richard Nixon, and why he would just never go away. Until, finally, he did one late summer in 1974 just go away with a spastic wave before boarding a taxpayer funded helicopter to fly off into obscurity and exile. The awkward wave was almost Napoleonic in its bizarre parting gesture to a nation. The nation had had enough of Dick.

This first month of January in 2013 we have two characters filling the news pages with their tawdry stories of deceit, Lance Armstrong and Manti T'eo.  Lance utterly fails all attempts to categorize him as a human being. If you read any of the multitude of articles over the years and the many detailed accounts of the lengths his corporate goons went about attacking and ruining any person who actually spoke the truth you just want this guy to die instantly and disappear from recorded history. Sadly, this will not be the case. Lance just reaches the upper echelon of fakes during this age of money fueled  disinformation. Manti T'eo's story, although stupefying and a giant pie in the face to all who cover college football for a living, comes off as a stupid teen prank gone big-time bad for Notre Dame, and Manti T'eo. Of course, this hallmark university of all things college football can mourn a fake girl who died, but not one who committed suicide after getting the brush off from Notre Dame after accusing one of its football players of rape.

Here is a Rick Reilly column owning his swallowing hook, line and sinker every Lance lie. This could be the general media template for all upcoming articles of gullibility and no accountability by members of our illustrious advertising sponsor-paid press corps. The Daily Coyote has more journalistic integrity than nearly all the high paid talent working for big media and their advertisers today. No one pays this lady to spin a yarn a certain way. The photos are honest, not an advertiser's demand.

No rational person in the world should be surprised at these latest liars, just at how many there are these days. Let's be honest, we are still paying off the eight year misadventure called the Iraq War, which was waged on outright lies by the Bush Administration, and whose total cost can never be accurately measured. We have had the nation's key financial advisers fail to tell the truth regarding their casino exploits with credit swaps and mortgage securities bundled together as billion dollar investments not worth a thousand dollars. Major banks and lending institutions lied to their their borrowers repeatedly on what the true cost of the loans they sold would be for a decade. We lived through the 1990s where every baseball game was a fraud, and applauded for every home run until the juice story leaked through the muscled biceps of the armies of players injecting PEDs into their bodies. We have seen the lies at Penn State, and the awful repercussions of those victims, but Penn State certainly seems well enough after a short hiccup in the public consciousness. None in the major media outlets during any of these gargantuan frauds and abuses of power raised a finger to point out the truth, until way after the fact. And wasn't it just yesterday when we saw a different Tiger Woods and John Edwards?

The apologies are not even apologies today, just news cycle spin  filled with crocodile tears for the conglomerate media. The charlatans of today are now brands, incorporated piles of legal teams and media consultants. Sad day when people morphed into a brand of advertising piffle. I can't feel sorry for a brand. I feel pity for all those who swallow up whatever soap, fragrance or charity work the brand sells to make itself more powerful.