Take a Load Off

I pulled into Nazareth, was feelin' about half past dead;
I just need some place where I can lay my head.
"Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?"
He just grinned and shook my hand, “no” was all he said.

The Weight – The Band

 

            I haven’t really watched the concert film, “The Last Waltz,” aside from the occasional stop for a minute or two while channel surfing.  I’ve heard most parts over the years, such as The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, Up on Cripple Creek, and The Weight.

            I heard the Talking Heads concert film, “Stop Making Sense” on a cassette years before I saw it.  In my very humble opinion, with admittedly a very small sampling, I think those are the two best concert films to have been made. Or maybe I’ve determined that the best way to watch a concert film is to not watch it.

            But between the two I’m going to stick with The Last Waltz because last Thursday Levon Helm; drummer, singer, and songwriter for The Band, passed away at the age of 71.  The Band music has always sounded a little worn around the edges to me.  Not polished with hours of studio remixing or adding Walls of Sound, but comfortable from the get go, and as American as a rusting Route 66 sign.  Although the only American in the band was Helm.

            Some songs make me stop and up the volume no matter when or where I hear them; Neil Young’s Helpless – which is featured on The Last Waltz – Pure Prairie League’s Amie, the Allman Brother’s Melissa, and The Weight from The Band.

            Years ago, when American Idol was mowing them down, there were a handful of copycat shows that came out.  On one a teenage boy sat down at a piano and simply played and sang The Weight.  When the song was over the audience jumped to their feet and the other contestants followed with a standing ovation of their own.  The British judge –why is there always a British judge? - thought it was excellent, the record exec judge said the kid was “on his way” and the female flavor-of-the-month-pop-singer judge asked, “Did you write that?”

            But writing is what that song was.  Look at the economy of words from the passage quoted above, "Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?
He just grinned and shook my hand, ‘no’ was all he said.”  Many writers might have said something about meeting a man, or even describing that man before the “Hey mister” quote.  Elmore Leonard, whose 10 rules for writing include “Avoid detailed descriptions of characters,” would have been proud.

            Levon Helm didn’t write The Weight, but he sang it, along with most of The Band’s other songs, while playing the drums.  Today’s pop divas cheerfully admit lip-syncing their hits because they can’t be expected to do all that dancing and still sing.  Have you ever seen a fat drummer?  So thanks Levon, and take a load off.

King Missile, Led Zeppelin, and The Salvation Army

“Then, as I walked down Second Avenue towards St. Mark's Place, where all those people sell used books and other junk on the street, I saw my penis lying on a blanket next to a broken toaster oven.  Some guy was selling it.”

                                                       Detachable Penis – King Missile

            Today we had a garage sale.  Our garage, while quite large, is proving inefficient when it comes to holding all our stuff.  Basically we have more stuff than garage, so we decided that part of our downsizing would include getting rid of things we don’t really need, don’t really use, and more often than I’d like to admit, didn’t really know we still had.      

The day for me started at 5:00 when I got up, pulled all this fine merchandise out into the driveway, and hoped people would find some of it worth giving us a couple of bucks for.  I remember when a good friend’s father had a yard sale in the classified, (pre craigslist you see) and people were banging on his front gate at 6:00, demanding to be let into his yard.  I wanted to be ready.

At six our first customers showed up.  They were the construction guys who were pouring a new patio for the guy across the street.  They bought a couple of things then started up the very large and very loud contraptions that would pump the wet concrete from the curb to wherever the patio was to be.  That lasted for about 2 hours and was like running a boutique in the engine room of the Titanic.

The sale went well.  While we didn’t make enough to retire on, we did make enough to be worth driving over to the bank to deposit and I actually sold a metal bed frame that I’m sure has moved with us at least three times.  More importantly, our garage only looks half full now.  Or half empty depending on your disposition and to many of my friends whether or not their meds are working.

As I was sitting there, waiting for the next customer to show up and contemplating having an “every thing is a dollar for the next 30 minutes” sale, I wondered if yard sales are strictly a suburban phenomenon or do urbanites occasionally throw handfuls of their junk out front and ask for money for it.  Then I remembered a song (quoted above) from years ago that mentioned people doing that exact thing on a steet on the way to St. Mark’s Place which is in Manhattan.  If you can't believe what a guy singing about his penis puts in a song, what can you believe?

            St. Mark’s Place also hosts a building that served as the cover of Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti album which in turn could have served as a description of what occupied my driveway this morning.  That graffiti has been cleaned up and all that wasn't sold went to the good people of the Salvation Army, which also was a short-lived band in the early eighties.

The Lost World

"I turned it over, and gave an exclamation of surprise. There was a full-page picture of the most extraordinary creature that I had ever seen."
Authur Conan Doyle - The Lost World

Spoiler alert!

The Tooth Fairy is dead, gone from the imaginings of both of my sons forever. With her loss, can Santa and the Easter Bunny’s last full measure be far behind? The most recent dislodged tooth from my youngest boy was still on his nightstand the following morning; cold and forgotten, a dried spot of blood on its roots. His mother and father, possessed by job-hunting, bill-paying, and the stress of moving for the seventh time since their marriage, had done something they had managed not to do before. While the boy drifted off with the excitement of knowing that a magical being would enter his room while he was asleep and trade a dollar for that tooth, his parents just drifted off.

The next morning it was the first thing out of his mouth since the tooth, “The Tooth Fairy forgot me.” The first thing out of dad’s mouth was, “Oops.”

We used to take a dollar and fold it into an origami square (Something else the Internet is good for). Somehow that seemed more magic than just leaving a bill there. But we had forgotten and that was simply that. Later I took a dollar to him in his room and when he asked, “There is no tooth fairy, is there?” I told him yes. He took the dollar, the final one, and I took the tooth. The king is dead there will be no more kings.

Every person has to face losing innocence and every parent has to face their child losing innocence. It’s not the end of the world for either of them, just the end of a world. It’s the end of world without the stresses and pressure of relationships, jobs, money, health, or death. It’s a world where you’re always taken care of, where fairies and jolly old elves are real and there are no consequences, only rewards. And those rewards often come in the form of chocolate.

The loss of anything is always painful, but the loss of an entire world can be impossible to get over. We are tempted to long for that world. Sometimes it’s where we leapt from bed on cold winter mornings and made a made dash to the living room to check under the tree, or a mad dash to the yard to hunt for colored eggs or chocolate leporids, or just rolled over and checked our nightstand. Sometimes it’s where we never had to lock our doors or we trusted strangers. The former world was imaginary and probably, so was the latter.

This longing probably contributed to Sherlock Holmes creator, Sir Author Conan Doyle, being taken in by a fairy discovery hoax, pictured above.

This Sunday will be the first Easter for my youngest since the revelation that the Tooth Fairy was his mom and dad. We don’t plan on a visit from the Easter Bunny. I hope he isn't planning on one either. But to sooth the way, there will be chocolate.

In the Bag

I’ve never been a big tool guy. The few tools I’ve had are a mishmash of screwdrivers, wrenches, pliers, and the strangest pair of wire cutters my dad use to use to cut the wire on bundles of newspapers, that I’ve collected, inherited, and purchased on impulse. By the time my wife gave me a San Francisco Giants tool bag, I had pretty much all I needed to put up a shelf, bend a nail, fix a flat on a bicycle, changed the oil in a car, or pry open a can of paint.

If manlyhoodness is judged by the size of a man’s tool belt or his relationship with the Snap-on truck driver, then I suppose my might come into question. Perhaps my saving grace was purchasing and cordless drill a few years back.

During our move from our big house to a smaller house, it seemed that whenever I was at one and needed a tool, I had left my tool bag at the other. So I started bringing it with me. On the second to the last trip, I had folded down the back seats of my car so I could have access to the trunk from the interior of the car and vice versa. This afforded me the ability to put longer items in a small car. I put my tool bag on the backs of the folded down seats, sort of half in and half out of the trunk. I did some painting and had used the largest flathead screwdriver to pry and old can open. I remember putting the screwdriver/paint can opener away and then locking up the house and driving to the new one. I don’t remember taking the tool bag out. I haven’t seen it since.

(As a side note; why do they still make flathead screws? I’ve never turned a flathead screw without having the screwdriver fling out of the screw and either gouge a channel in some piece of sheetrock or wood that I wanted to keep gouge free, or take the first 17 layers of skin off my thumb. Phillips seems like the wave of the future 50 years ago.)

So my tool bag is gone. Every screwdriver, except for the one pictured, every open, Crescent, socket, and Allen wrench, my vice grips, and wire cutters gone, all gone. I suppose it could be in the pile of “belongings” in our new garage, but I’ve looked and looked to no avail. Besides, having been in my car for one of the final loads, it would be on top of that pile. My fear is that it was stolen; taken from my car while I did a final walkthrough of the room were I touched up the paint.

I don’t blame the economy, people steal when the opportunity presents itself; say in the form of an open car with the final flotsam and jetsam of a family with really too much stuff. I’m not surprised whoever it was passed over the broken pole saw and the shards of terracotta pots and instead reached for the tool bag. Thoughtfully provided with a handle.

Now I must take stock of what tools I need to maintain a home and acquire new ones. I supposed I could scour yard sales, estate sales, and garage sales and put together a new (to me) set over time. Maybe I could go out to the Cherry Auction, if that’s still going on, and purchase a complete set at one time and low price. There’s always borrowing.

(Another side note: there should be a law that you can’t call it an estate sale if your inventory consists of just an old stationary bicycle, some VHS tapes, and a 14-year-old fax machine in your driveway.)

To the person who took my tool bag I just want to say, “I hope you needed it, or the money you got for selling it, more than I do. I hope you are a modern day Jean Valjean, in non-fictitious Les Miserables who only took it as a last resort to feed starving family members. I probably should have left some bread out instead.

Going Rouge

Let me ask you this outright: What do you think when you hear Fresno? Is your answer in the Podunk, middle-of-nowhere, or perhaps fly-over category? Do you see a wasteland where the only culture is in the yogurt, art left town with a museum that long ago was unable to pay its bills, and entertainment is something between Monster Trucks and that jumping/flipping motorcycle thing they do?

When Johnny Carson’s monolog was in danger of bombing he could always pull the crowd back with a Fresno barb. It’s been a punch line in Thelma and Louise, Monsters vs. Aliens, and Captain America. But is there a shred of another side to the Raisin Capitol of the World? A more sophisticated side?

Somewhere between the orange groves in the foothills and the vineyards on the west side, between the older homes with swamp coolers hanging from their windows and the newer McMansions with 8 ½ X 11 computer paper foreclosure notices taped to theirs, and between the Subaru’s of Old Fig Garden and the Suburbans of Clovis I stumbled into something I didn’t know existed in the town of my birth.

It’s called the Rouge Festival and it takes place over ten days in the Tower District in the center of town. The people who put it on call it a, “swirling circus of originality and creativity.” It’s basically a bunch of acts in different venues over 10 days.

Walking the sidewalks from venue to venue, crowded with people on their way to or from a show and performers passing out flyers was like being in another town. When I explained to one of our friends how when I was a kid we would wait in line to see Disney movies at the tower theater and when I found the New Deal WPA stamp in the sidewalk across from the Chicken Pie Shop it was like being in a different Fresno.

On Saturday we went to three shows, all comedies.

The first was called, “Confessions of a Church Organists.” It was true stories from a man who played the organ in a Catholic church, and at weddings and even the old Pizza and Pipes restaurant. It was nostalgic, somewhat vulgar, and most importantly; funny.

The second act was someone called Captain Scurvy. He was kind of like George Carlin with Christopher Walken’s voice. Again very funny. His “you might be in Fresno” bit got things rolling; “if you can see a DUI check point from another DUI check point, you might be in Fresno.”

The third act was an improve group made up of three twenty-somethings. Like Whose Line is it Anyway but local.

The Pièce de résistance, if you’ll pardon and recognize my French, was Sunday when we went and saw an act called The Sparrow and the Mouse. It was a one woman act where the performer, Melanie Gall, told stories about Edith Piaf and her best friend and half-sister Simone. But most importantly she sang, mostly in French, Piaf’s most famous songs. Her voice was beautiful and even though I probably recognize a total of 10 words in French, (omlette de fromage) in the dark and tiny club I could feel my eyes tearing up during certain songs. Must be the French blood.

So Fresno has some culture because we have history, we can laugh at ourselves, and we can recognize and appreciate true beauty even in a language we don’t understand.

Crunchy Phone

Praline: Lark's vomit?

Milton: Correct.

Praline: Well it don't say nothing about that here.

Milton: Oh yes it does, on the bottom of the box, after monosodium glutamate.

Praline: (looking) Well I hardly think this is good enough. I think it would be more appropriate if the box bore a large red label, “WARNING, LARK’S VOMIT.”

Milton: Our sales would plummet.

Crunchy Frog Sketch, Monty Python

Why do we put up with this?

Before mobile phones, cell phones, and smart phones, a telephone was a heavy device that sat on a counter or was mounted to a wall, usually in the kitchen or living room. It never, ever broke down. It worked even if the power went out. And not getting coverage meant there were no telephone poles in your neighborhood; you wouldn’t have to hold your phone up like an Olympic Torch and spin around waiting for coverage.

Now we have phones which are really computers. They browse the web, run a million different apps, take increasingly higher and higher resolution photographs, and even make calls. But there are tradeoffs for all these conveniences. The tradeoffs are things like the incomprehensible service restrictions, charges that change depending on your use and where you are when you use it, having no service from one place to another, and batteries that run out.

We wanted to get phones for our two boys, just for emergencies. We purchased two AT&T Go phones and $25 refill cards, that boasted “Unlimited talk, text &web; Nationwide.” We purchase a new refill card for one of the phones the other day but when I tried to load it, I got the message, “Sim not provisioned MM #2.”

I called AT&T and dutifully recited the above message. That message, as it turns out, means the SIM card in the phone has expired. When this happens you can no longer add minutes to the phone and must go out and purchase a new SIM card; at $25. That error message should read, “Phone is broken, go buy new stuff.” I’m beginning to think that either AT&T or I don’t understand the meaning of “unlimited.”

The phone when we purchased it only cost $15 and it came with this SIM card. The customer service rep asked me, “Did you read all the paperwork that came with the phone?” I said I didn’t and added that I doubted if anyone has read that small print, going all the way back to when the second “T” in AT&T stood for telegraph. If I had to guess, there is probably a line of text buried in that literature that says something like, “You’ll have to buy a new SIM card in awhile because this phone expires.” Like the avian vomit in the sketch above, the customer would be better served if it said that on the front of the phone, but AT&T's sales would probably take a hit.

Maybe it one of those you-get-what-you-pay-for things. Maybe spending $15 every couple of months – plus $25 for the refills – isn’t that big a deal. But I don’t know. Why can’t we just get a phone that works, continues to work, for X dollars a month? Maybe we can. To be perfectly honest we may be able to, but I find when I talk to a sales person about mobile phones, my mind starts to wander after about a minute or so and his/her droning on starts putting me in a coma.

Shingled White Male

An open letter to the makers or Tylenol:

Dear Sirs,

Your product does not work. It does not relieve the simplest of discomfort not to mention outright pain. It does nothing for headaches, sore muscles, joint pain, bumps or bruises, not to mention the pain associated with shingles for which your snake oil was prescribed to me. I was even given the version that is mixed with codeine which seemed like surrender on your part because isn’t codeine a pain reliever in its own right? But it matters not; it didn’t work either.

Congratulations on producing a product that does not work yet is recommended by medical professionals that must number in the millions. Kudos to your staff of lying-ass sales people and marketing pukes for fostering upon those of us who actually could use some relief something that works less often than a placebo. You must be very proud.

You guys are brilliant for making something that not only does not produce the results promised, but also something that you can never be called on for the obvious fakery of it all. Imagine if you produced airplanes that didn’t fly or fire extinguishers that didn’t put out fires. You’d be out of business in minutes and maybe even face jail time.

Well done and go to hell.

We thought it was poison oak. After all, about a week before we had been staying at a hotel on the Merced River just outside the Highway 140 entrance to Yosemite, and I’ll admit I went off the path once or twice during those two days, and even though poison oak bushes are leafless in January, I’ve caught it from the branches alone before. So Andrea put Biofreeze on the blisters/bumps sprinkled along the part in my hair, and I fully expected them to be just a memory in no time.

Then new ones showed up on the left side of my face. I remember reading a Sherlock Holmes story years ago where the detective said that the Latin root word for sinister (sinistra) also meant left, so it makes sense that the left side of my noodle would be the one to betray me.

The doctor introduced himself and before I could reply he said, “Shingles.” He prescribed ointment, anti-viral pills, and the aforementioned Tylenol with codeine, and said something about a “Month of Misery.” Then he sent me to an opthamologist who prescribed drops for my left eye.

The first week was the worst. I was exhausted all the time, the sun had become a hated enemy, and the “sinister” side of my face looked as if I had been bird hunting with Dick Cheney maybe a week before.

Nighttime is the worst of the worst. The Phanom-of-the-Opera affected area from the top of my scalp, down the left side of my face to just under my eye, pulses between pain, numbness, and itching if you can believe that. It’s just enough of each to keep me awake; the “stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself” of symptoms.

2012 actually started out pretty good. I had gone to City College to see what the quickest path to a degree was with the courses I’d already taken back when my future was still my future and Stevie Ray Vaughn hadn’t gotten on that helicopter. It turned out that I only needed four lousy classes to get an AA in English. Not an MBA from Harvard but much, much more than nothing to me. I would have to sit in though since it was late in the process an hope there was room to add. I sat in on an American Lit class during the day and a Creative Writing class at night. When the shingles hit, I couldn’t attend either so now I’ll have to wait until summer session.

A week later I had the best job interview since perhaps September. I never got a call back and if I did, I couldn’t have gone in for maybe two weeks, probably longer.

As if the 6 months of unemployment didn’t put a strain on my most important relationship, now my “not getting any better” added pressure to that strain. Before I just wasn’t a provider now I’m a take-away-er. Tempers are shorter, my interest in pretty much everything is dulled, and I’ve applied for a total of three jobs since the start of the year, whereas I applied for nearly 200 in the proceeding five months.

An open letter to God, or whomever:

To Whom It May Concern,

WTF?