A Long Overdue Thank You

I am here today because there’s a post I need to write that’s going to make me sick if I don’t get it out of my head today, it’s been nagging at me so much since yesterday afternoon. If you happen to have arrived here before the next post is posted, then I’ve probably already spoiled it because you probably already have an idea what it’s about. Sorry for that. They probably both belong on the music blog instead, but I really need to post them here instead (don’t ask me why, like a lot of things it really makes no sense, but there ya go).

First, though, before I get to that post, I would probably be really remiss if I didn’t go back to about a month ago and admit to you all that the day the news came out that Doug Fieger, leader of The Knack, had passed away, I cried my fool head off that entire day and night.

This really didn’t make any sense on the surface. As a 13-year-old, I bought Get the Knack in 1979 just like most everyone else did and played it to death, “My Sharona” was a great tune, it was cool. All peachy.

But The Knack were never, like, one of my VERY favorites, you know. That’s a record that’s somewhat surprisingly stood the test of time, but it would have been far, far down the list of my stranded-on-a-desert-island picks. And goodness knows the music world has lost a bunch of my big heroes in the last several years – Joe Strummer, three of the four original Ramones, many many more. All of which made me sad, of course, but none of which left me incapacitated in tears and unable to do anything but drown my sorrows in YouTube for an entire day.

It finally dawned on me at some point during the course of all that misery why it was affecting me so. The more and more frequent occurrence of the heroes and idols of my youth passing away over the last several years had indeed been more and more disturbing and upsetting, and each one another reminder of how much older I myself was getting and that – since most of my musical heroes were far older than me when I was a preteen, teenager, college kid – I knew these depressing moments were going to happen more and more as time went on and as we all got older, sure.

This one hit HARD, though. Almost like losing a family member, because of the sheer importance of it all.

Importance? The Knack????

Scoff if you will. The Knack changed EVERYTHING – for some of us, anyway.

Oh sure, there was great, and greater, music around. The Ramones had been around for years by that time, The Clash, and dozens of other legendary bands springing up in New York City, on the West Coast, in the UK, lots of places, yes.

There was great music around somewhere. But you’ve likely no idea how hard it was to GET to that music in 1979, if you lived in small towns in West Tennessee. Probably would have been a little different had I grown up in Knoxville, Nashville, Memphis – but it still took a long time for a lot of that stuff to filter down to even those places. I’ve written numerous times over the years about how hard I had to scratch and scramble to get my hands on anything I read or found out about that wasn’t “mainstream”, and how I’d have been oblivious to most of it were it not for the fact that I was (A) a night owl and (B) rarely missed an airing of things like Saturday Night Live, Fridays, and Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert.

And you must remember as well – people still listened to radio back then. In the car, at home – wherever – radio was still pretty much king of the hill when it came to getting music to the masses. Yeah, I had a lot of records as a kid – but there were lots of times the choice was either radio, or no music at all.

Were it not for the fact that I was a major Cheap Trick fan from nearly the start, and a KISS fan, and the fact that The Cars put out their first two albums (which still didn’t get played on the radio down here all that much back in the day), I’d have been mostly 100% S.O.L. throughout the late 1970s because there was just so very much horrible crap on the radio. For years up to 1979, the radio airwaves were dominated by disco and so much easy-listening-type junk that even though I listened to it anyway – and even though I bought a lot of it at the time – it was really like a vast musical wasteland out there filled with stuff that might have been better than no music at all, but was thoroughly unexciting and barely tolerable.

There was one FM station in the area that wasn’t on around the clock and did play mostly progressive rock – a lot of which I didn’t like and still don’t, but some of which I did – but it was better than what was on the rest of the stations on the dial, so I’d listen to it when I could. But then we moved too far away in the beginning of the summer of 1979 for me to get the signal anymore, so there went that.

And to make matters even worse, bands I did like whose music made it to mainstream radio were releasing stuff I couldn’t stand, to fit in with the times. God knows I love The Rolling Stones and always have, but with the exception of “Shattered”, you can keep the Some Girls album. Then KISS goes all disco and releases the “I Was Made For Loving You” single and adds even more insult to injury. It just kept getting worse and worse.

That summer of 1979, The Knack saved mainstream radio. For those of us stuck out in the sticks (or almost), those of us who didn’t have easy access to all the cool stuff out of the norm that they didn’t play on our local radio stations and had to scramble to get anything like that – The Knack were a godsend. When “My Sharona” hit the top of the charts and stayed there and stayed there – ultimately becoming the top selling rock single of the entire decade of the Seventies – Doug Fieger and The Knack changed everything, for those of us who didn’t live in the cool cities like NYC and L.A., or even Memphis and Nashville and Knoxville.

The Knack opened the door for all those other bands that came after to get played on Small Town USA radio – some great or good, some not so good, some just plain bad – but they weren’t disco, and they weren’t all that soft rock-easy listening stuff that kind of put the entire nation to sleep, I think, for most of 1974 or 1975 to 1979. Finally there was something new and fresh and different to listen to on the radio – ‘cos listen, if you weren’t old enough to drive yet, you were still pretty dependent on whatever was on the radio for the most part back then.

And all those bands The Knack’s big hit opened up the door for made their way to MTV, when it began – but most of us outside of the cities didn’t have MTV, not for years. You’re reading the blog of someone who, for years, one of the big highlights and treats of going to visit friends and family in Memphis was getting to watch MTV while there, after all.

Radio became tolerable again – kind of funny NOW to think of being THAT dependent on what was being played on the radio – but you just didn’t have that much of a choice back then and, again, a lot of the time, it was radio or no music at all. And I started out growing up in one small town, but spent my teenage years in ones even smaller. My little hometown’s FM radio station would have probably still been playing disco and all-Eagles-all-the-time (nothing against the Eagles, but you get what I mean) by the time I was in high school. Instead, thanks to what happened the summer of 1979 and The Knack, that little radio station was the first place I heard things like Wall of Voodoo’s “Mexican Radio”, Billy Idol’s “White Wedding”, and any number of other tunes that might have never have had a shot on mainstream radio had they come out a few years before that.

John Cougar-before-he-was-Mellencamp, Bryan Adams, Loverboy, .38 Special – all those probably would have made it out there anyway, but I have doubts that things like Donnie Iris’ “Ah! Leah!” (still to this day one of my fave all time tunes) would have ever made it to Small Town USA airwaves without the overwhelming initial success of The Knack. Maybe so, who knows – but The Knack still started it all, and at the best possible time when it was desperately needed by those of us far from places like NYC and L.A.

So when I found out that Doug had passed away, I mourned, probably for many reasons. Here was another senseless cancer death, for someone who was really far too young to leave the world this early (he was 57). And the fact that, though The Knack were never a “top favorite” of mine, they were a band that was so instrumental and so important in such a very big change in the world of easily available music that was my youth. And then there was having to face the fact that it’d been now over 30 years since “My Sharona” was released, so that was kind of like the final nail in the coffin of my gloriously misspent youth (not that I don’ t know my youth has been gone a LONG time, but something like that just makes it oh-so-final and irreversible).

It’s hard to believe that was so long ago. If I close my eyes, I can remember a certain day that song was playing and see the radio it was playing on, the dresser the radio was sitting on, see the mountain view outside the window the dresser was next to, and almost – almost – hear the voices of the several people that were lounging around the room that day, most of whom were tapping a foot or fingers or bobbing their head along with the music. It’s that clear. It’s just one of those songs that can immediately whip me right back there to that very spot in time… if only for four minutes and 54 seconds.

Anyway, it was that long ago indeed. And it was just all so depressing and I felt so blah that I just cried my fool head off all day because it was really the only thing I felt like doing.

Which, again, was kind of odd, as Doug was someone I hadn’t really even thought about in a long time. I remember way back during the Kevorkian trials, noticing that the doctor’s attorney’s name was Geoffrey Fieger and thinking he sure did look an awful lot like the only other person named Fieger I’d ever heard of (and of course he does, he’s Doug’s older brother, as it turned out). That was probably the last time Doug Fieger’s name had crossed my mind, really, consciously anyway.

And in the course of that day of mourning, I also discovered that he was once married to actress Marin Kanter, who starred in one of my favorite music films of all time that nobody ever saw called Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains with Diane Lane, Laura Dern and Ray Winstone (along with Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols, Paul Simonon of The Clash, and Fee Waybill of The Tubes) – a film that finally won a DVD release in 2008 after years of clamoring for it by its cult following of fans, most of whom had only seen it back in the early 1980s when it ran on The Movie Channel and the like. Anyway, that was kind of a neat Easter egg to come across, something I didn’t know.

In any case, The Knack just changed everything for kids like me that were stuck out far away from the cities back in 1979, it was really as simple as that. If not for them, some other band might have come along and done it, sure  – but as it were, it was Doug Fieger and The Knack that saved radio for us. I’ll be ever grateful for that.

This was a neat video from 2008 I found that day on YouTube where Doug and a friend gave an impromptu performance of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” at a party (yet another one of those cool things I find from time to time that make me wish I’d had a video camera in the ’80s to capture some similar moments around Nashville back in the day).

On a final note, here’s a hint – the Get The Knack album is still really, really good. It’s a little dated, but it’s stood the test of time pretty well – you’ve got to get past “My Sharona” and listen to the whole thing to really get it (no pun intended), but I think it’s held up a lot better over time than many of the other big albums from that early New Wave era of rock & roll.

I kinda knew this a long time ago back in the mid-’80s when Greg and Joey and I started messing around musically and (in that honeymoon-like period when you are first getting to know people you’re playing music with really well and everything you discover you have in common is such a treat) we frequently found that the songs we all liked best and had spent time learning were usually the songs on various albums that were the “filler” tunes and ones other people often didn’t know or care about (and because of that, we’d often have to correct people who’d think it was one of Greg’s or Joey’s originals, but that’s another story).

Of the probably thousands of albums we pulled out (whether actually by hand or just talking about them) that summer of 1986, one of the tunes Greg started picking out softly on his guitar in my stupid little apartment north of the MTSU campus was this thing I immediately recognized and started singing the first line before he even opened his mouth, and it eventually became a staple and something people often thought Greg wrote, especially since we kinda indie’d and punked it up a little like we did most everything. This happened all the time – name an album, and whatever obscure “filler” track on that album one of us liked best almost always turned out to be the one the others liked best too. This one, too, was just another one of those “back of the album” tunes we all liked best on the album that most people never heard – along with other ones that weren’t “My Sharona” or “Good Girls Don’t”. It was The Knack’s “Your Number or Your Name”, and we just made it our own for a little while.

“My Sharona” was deservedly the hit for The Knack though – and that guitar solo is actually pretty awesome, and lord knows it sold bazillions of copies – but really when you listen to the album, the other single to me was really always the standout, brilliant one and the gem among it all. It was a favorite of KC’s, and when we were about 14 & 16 he once told me that all I really ever needed to know about teenage boys was in this song  (that was, of course, before The Replacements and before Paul W. wrote “Sixteen Blue”) – but this was always (no surprise) his favorite Knack song and really it was pretty brilliant in its straightforwardness and its simplicity. I was going to post the original video and then I found this semi- (or all?) live version of “Good Girls Don’t” from some appearance on VH-1 in the early ’80s. KC’d be happy with this one and he’d say this is the correct version (because it’s the dirty version, which obviously didn’t make the original video). ;)

In any case – even though I’m a month overdue in posting this – RIP Doug. Thanks for the music, the memories, and thanks especially for saving radio and making it tolerable again for us kids stuck out in the sticks and almost-sticks in the summer of 1979. For that, I will be always grateful.

Confessions of an Aging Beach Bunny

When most people think of the beach, they think of sunny Southern California, or Florida or other Gulf Coast beaches, and the like. When I say I grew up on the beach, people sometimes raise an eyebrow in response (whether literally or through the monitor).

This is not unlike the time Prince Charming made the mistake of calling me a “country girl”. I’ve never lived more than a half a mile outside of any city limits in my life, but my insistence at the time that I was a town girl elicited guffaws and floor-rolling paroxysms of laughter, and still to this day there will be the occasional side remark - “Oh, that’s right, you’re a town girl“ – followed by the kind of barely muffled snickers and chuckles that just make you want to kick the living daylights out of someone sometimes, just because they grew up in Knoxville (oh please, Knoxville is a small town disguised as a big city) and Columbus, Ohio and think that makes one ohhhh so worldly and metropolitan, hmpfh.

But truly I did spend most of my teenage years on the beach, and it maybe wasn’t as beach-y as the beaches of Southern California and Florida and the Gulf Coast, but it was a beach, no less. I spent a fair amount of my earlier childhood just a few miles up the river, where the occasional catfish would graze my ankles (Newscoma just died reading that) while I waded around searching for shells. I spent the teenage years as a beach bum at all hours of the day and night and in all four seasons (please don’t ask me what we did down there on dark winter nights, heh) – especially summers, of course, when I spent a good bit of that time perpetually failing to ever learn how to water ski despite about a hundred people’s attempts to successfully see that I did. I blame this on the same reasons I never successfully learned to roller skate or ice skate. My ankles couldn’t deal.

But ah, the beach.

And now that I’ve been out of high school 25 years, I can own up to the fact that yes indeed, Michelle and I absolutely did skip out of school almost every day of sixth period in the 11th grade to go to the beach – because we were teacher’s aides that period anyway, which basically that was the whole plan of snagging the teacher’s aide gig that year, of course. Senior year it didn’t matter ‘cos I got out of school at 1:00 anyway – presumably for work, but I didn’t have to go to work until 5:00.

Sweet? You bet.

Stuff You Just Wish You Could Take Back Sometimes

I’m sure there’s lots (LOTS) more than just this one, but I was thinking the other day about an unfortunate and awkward incident that’s been bugging me for a few years now, among the many other things I wish I could just hit a “restart” button on sometimes.

Prince Charming (the boyfriend) and I have this acquaintance who is a musician in a VERY famous band. In all actuality, I am only acquainted with this person via e-mail (as in the unfortunate and awkward incident mentioned above), but these two used to be very good friends. They grew up in the same neighborhood, went to school together, hung out in the same bunch as teenagers – etc. As time went on and as people do, they fell out of touch, though PC would sometimes hear stuff about his friend through the grapevine, as it were. Well, that and the fact you can pick up pretty much any music magazine or website and there’s this person – the band’s been around a long time at this point, but still hugely, hugely popular.

About, oh, I don’t know, six or so years ago when PC was going through a tough spell, I took it upon myself to get in touch with this person, with no other intention other than hoping maybe this person would be willing to send along a surprise postcard or something like that to PC – at that point, anything that might be a cheerer-upper of sorts. Things were pretty bleak and grim and I was just really grasping at straws for anything that might help and pull PC out of that depression a little.

The personal e-mail address for this person had just kinda landed in my lap, so I just thought I’d give it a shot. Since I’ve been acquainted over my years bumming around the music scene with various folks both famous and semi-famous, I knew how probably most contact from unknown people often comes across and didn’t really want to, you know, come across like some crazed fan – which I’m not really of this band anyway, I like ‘em just fine but they’re not one of my big favorites – I think I might have told this person that to begin with (heh), just for the sake of not appearing like some lunatic.

And the response was perfectly pleasant in the beginning. This person was, like, “hey, good to hear from you, what’s going on with (PC), if there’s something I can do to help, just let me know”.  So I did. Even though PC’s folks had moved out of the neighborhood where they all grew up and down the road a little ways, this person’s mom had remained friendly with PC’s mom, they’d run into each other at the grocery and such lots of times over the years, yada yada yada, so I knew this person wasn’t completely oblivious to some of the struggles there’d been over the years for PC, so I was pretty upfront about it all and was just like, you know, “any little thing, even just a postcard or something would be a big pick-me-up here”, and thanked this person, and left it at that.

Then nothing. I know people get busy, I know people mean to do something or other and then time just passes and passes and they never get around to doing whatever it is – I’m one of the world’s worst when it comes to things like that – but it was something small that would have meant so much at the time, and it just bugged me, still does. I didn’t tell PC what I’d done for about three years, and when I finally did, he wasn’t really bothered about the fact that this person had never responded past the first time, said I was sweet to have done what I did but to not let it bother me that there’d been no further response.

But it still does – bug me, that is. And maybe dude just got busy and forgot about it, or maybe I did come off looking like some crazed lunatic after all. I dunno.

Thing is I know one of these days, we’ll run into this person somewhere or another, and I’m sure it will be fine and all that. And PC will introduce us and I just hope dude doesn’t say something like, “Oh… YOU’RE the one who…”, ‘cos then I’ll have to bite my tongue to keep from saying “Yeah, and YOU never…”

Or maybe I’ll just say, “Yeah. Yep, I did,” and leave it at that. I just wish I had never done or said anything in the first place. How awkward.

And in truth, he probably had good intentions at the time and just forgot, but that one stupid moment really just broke my heart a little and shook up my faith in humanity a bit.

I Might Be Typing This in My Sleep, But Probably Not

Thursday was an odd day. First and foremost, it would have been my father’s 67th birthday, if he were alive.

The annual big Relay for Life event was in my hometown over the weekend, and the paper has been publishing the list of donations for luminarias as they come in for about the past month – donations made in memory of those who died from cancer or related illnesses, in honor of cancer survivors, and this year, in honor of caretakers. Well, Thursday was also the day that my father’s name appeared as one of those donated in memory of (by a relative of mine). Not so surprising, though somewhat ironic as far as what day it was.

The paper also publishes snippets of news from bygone days frequently – 25 years ago, 50 years ago, 75 years ago, and sometimes earlier. What was really kind of odd was that 50 years ago, on that same day, the paper showed him and a group of other young men from the county preparing to leave for Castle Heights Military Academy in Lebanon to attend that year’s Boys State session.

I don’t know. It was just kind of an odd day all around.

I want to thank everyone for the kind notes they’ve been leaving; I could never put into words how very much they are appreciated. There are several of you I have been meaning to e-mail personally for days now, but the kinds of hours I’ve been keeping, and time I’ve been spending lately scrambling around as I have trying to slow down this impending disaster – I sleep at weird times, and when I’m not asleep I’m usually snowed under, and my actual working schedule is usually overnights, so I’m usually awake when everyone else is not and vice versa. Except I also will just (when I’m not doing shift work) go for several hours, pass out for two or three or four hours, get up and go some more trying to get stuff done. But many of you will hear from me personally soon, I promise (and KathyT, I did e-mail you and hope you got it, sorry it took five days before I heard the voice mail, oops).

And thanks to many especially for the kind words about Dobie. He was here for so long, and still my “baby puppy” even when he was old and his health failing, and it’s still very hard to believe that he’s really gone. I have a very nice picture to share that my mom took at Christmas when I had to take him with me because of his failing condition, which has wound up being the last taken of so very many that were taken of him over fifteen years. But I can’t really look at it much yet, so I’ll save it for a day when I can.

I probably need to write some more about all the horrible stuff that’s going on and why things have disintegrated to the disastrous point they have, but I’m not really sure how to put it into words here because there’s really only so much I can say publicly – and for good reasons. But it sucks, because for those same reasons, I’ve sort of been stuck fighting this battle on my own almost, and with no one I could really be open with about the details other than my very closest family and friends.

But I will do all of that soon. Unfortunately a good bit of this week is going to be focused on probably selling what little I have left that is worth anything at all (not much, but a little) that is truly just mine – a few things that would have been, I guess you’d say, family heirloom-type stuff if I were leaving anything behind one day. Not that I’m likely going to have children or anything like that at this point, but you know – stuff I never dreamed I’d ever be forced to part with, not like this. I guess if I outlive my mom (doubtful), there’s still a houseful of family things – but nothing that’s just mine, except these few things it looks like I’m going to have to part with.

It’s not much – I guess that’s the worst joke of all about all this stuff, I’m not dealing with thousands upon thousands here and it’d probably be a whole lot easier to swallow if that were the case – but no, there’s only about a grand or two standing between me and complete disaster. Much less than 2K, really, more like about 1.5. That’s the part that really stinks, that in the grand scheme of things, it’s not really all that much. But the problem is now I’ve run out of time is all.

In trying to think things through – and coming to the conclusion there were really no more options anymore but the one thing I have tried for over a year now NOT to have to do – it’s occurred to me that no matter how tough things might be right now, that really doesn’t bother me nearly as much as thinking about how I’m going to feel about it all a year from now, or two years from now, or five or ten years from now – when presumably things will probably be better, but stuff that meant something to me – things bought with me in mind and given to me for very specific reasons – will be gone. And I just can’t even let myself think about all that right now.

Anyway, this week will be busy busy – and I need to get going now as it is, much to do and much to finish – but I’m going to try and keep at the blog again, even if it’s just stupid stuff. Aside from all the awfulness of late, there’s also some really funny stuff I’ve been saving up to share. And I’ll be trying to get some personal e-mailing done this week and next too, some of you I’d been meaning to touch base with anyway and either the constant need-to-do-this or constant passing out cold from exhaustion kept waylaying. So will speak to many of you soon, and will definitely be back here shortly, as soon as I wrap up one big project that has tied me up for months. ’til then…

The Usual, Unfortunately

Here’s yet another example of how rotten my luck is (and notably has been for some time).  I was getting ready to work on a project a couple of days ago that I badly needed to work on and finish before Christmas got much closer, and as I sat down at the computer all motivated and ready to get productive – the power went out.  Because at the house next door, they were chopping limbs off a tree… but had to get the utility company to kill my power line to do it.

The power was out for, I don’t know, seven or eight, maybe nine hours.  Just mine.  Not the house where the tree is.

In fact, the worker chopping the tree got through about 3:45, and had made several calls, but over two hours later, the utility company had yet to come back and put the (live) line back up.  So I called them too.  They finally showed up after 7 p.m., and by then it was really too late to do anything.

There’s something else I need to get done, but I need a large shipment of (free) Priority Mail boxes from the postal service to be able to do it.  I’ve been waiting a while.  I realize it’s the Christmas season and all with the mail, but just yet another monkey wrench thrown my way.  At this point, even though I badly need to get this done, I’m thinking maybe I’m better off waiting until after Christmas anyway.  Maybe people will have more money to spend on stuff they want but don’t necessarily need (which is what this project mainly consists of) by then.

In any case, I just can’t really catch a break lately.  There’s always something somewhere throwing a monkey wrench into everything.

I applied for a couple of jobs recently.  The very next week, both organizations announced major layoffs and a hiring freeze.

I’m very tired of things like having to choose between buying groceries or putting gas in the car.  Or whether to buy food to eat, or buy paper towels and toilet tissue.

It’s too bad I have to buy groceries at all, since it seems like nearly all the things I have to buy that are necessities have gone up 75-100% practically in the last few months.  Some of them have even gone up that much – yet the packaging has gotten smaller, there’s less of whatever it is in the package.  Other stuff is the same price but now, like, 11 ounces of whatever instead of 16.

Seems like I’ve been saying for months when will this all end?  Seems like it’s not going to.

People close to me will help, but by the time I’ve gotten another round or two of groceries and other necessities or bills paid, there’s nothing left and I’m sitting here trying to figure out how to make $1.49 or so stretch out for weeks again.  I need to put gas in the car again later this week and I’m thinking, OK, now how am I going to do that?

I eat maybe three, four times a week.  I know that’s not good.  But I do things like last week when I made the mistake, after having craved it for days and being hungry as heck anyway, of spending a little extra (less than ten bucks) on a spaghetti dinner from a fave joint around here.  Now I’m wishing I hadn’t and had that ten bucks back.

I have cut back virtually everything, pretty much, until there is no more.  The utilities are almost two months behind again, as that’s pretty much stayed for months now – it’ll get paid somehow.  I wouldn’t have Internet anymore I suppose, except since that’s my sole source of income I can’t very well not have that – of course if the utilities get cut off – well, you know.

Christmas?  I don’t get to participate in Christmas for the second year in a row.  I mean, we’ll have it, and it’ll be fine and nice and all that.  But I can’t buy anything for anyone, and just be opening presents I’ll wish nobody would have bought me since I can’t do anything myself.  I do have one thing for my sister that I just happened to wind up with, but I didn’t really intentionally go out and get it as a Christmas gift.  That’ll be it.

I’ve built up some residual recurring income.  It’s small now, but it will get better.  It’s just stuff that takes some time to grow and is going to continue to.  But it’s not going to solve any big problems right away, that’s for sure.

I do some work but there are issues with that too.  Always issues.  I’m actually constantly working, almost around the clock, sleep here and there when I finally crash, get up and get to work on something else again.  It’s some income, but not enough.  Working on other things too but again, more stuff that’s going to take time for anything to come of it.

I’m just really, really tired of it all.  Sorry.  I probably wouldn’t read here anymore for all the repetitive doom and gloom there’s been either.

Dobie is in such decline that I don’t really think we have much longer.  He is so frail and skinny now, it just breaks my heart.  And that in itself – him getting so frail and thin and pitiful, as well as blind – has posed all kinds of new problems, like today when he got stuck somewhere I wasn’t sure for a while I was going to be able to get him out of.  Last week he got a foot and claw stuck in the old furnace grill and I wasn’t sure I was going to get him loose from that either.  I keep thinking what if he does something like that sometime when I’m (rarely as I am) away from home and is stuck like that for hours?

He and the only other extremely elderly pet left are really throwing me for a loop.  Neither of them are eating as much as they should, although the cat is really doing all right otherwise for her 17 or so years.  It takes her hours to eat when she does eat, though, and she spends most of her time in there talking to her food.  Which is kind of funny, yes, but she’s always had this habit of talking to inanimate objects, starting with a roll of duct tape that was on the floor once years ago.

I always was big into Christmas.  I was thinking the other day of how nice it always used to be between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  We’d have the tree up and on every night, and my parents had all this Christmas music on a couple of reel-to-reel tapes that were usually playing every night, and I’d just hang out laying with my head under the Christmas tree listening to music and looking at the lights and ornaments most every night.

Back when people used to have time to enjoy stuff like that, anyway.

I’d do the same at my grandmother’s house.  I remember what all the Christmas decorations she used to pull out every year looked like – probably because I was always helping get them out and put them up – even though I haven’t seen most of them in 25 years.  I guess my aunt still has most of them, I don’t know.  I don’t think there’s really anything I wish I had of all that stuff, except for maybe the little lighted Christmas trees that probably actually originally belonged to my great-grandmother.  There were two of them – one was silver and one was green – they weren’t anything special, just aluminum or tin with a light inside, and colored cellophane or something that made them look like they had lights on them.  Probably from the Fifties or Forties, maybe earlier.  They always sat on the end tables in my grandmother’s living room which, before that, was my great-grandmother’s living room.

I’m older now than my mother was when I left home for college.  Have I already written that here before?  I can’t remember.

So, enough joy and good will to men from me for now.  Maybe sometime I’ll have something better or funny to write about, there just isn’t lately or I’m too busy anyway.

I was about to write that at least Tojo has been staying mostly out of trouble lately, but I just reached over to move him as he was standing over Maggie looking like he was about to jump on her (again), and he bit me (not hard).  So there’s that, too.

The Thanksgiving Crab

I don’t remember where I’m stealing the idea behind this post from – I think I read and responded to someone talking about it in someone’s comments somewhere last week – but I was in total agreement with it.

Why couldn’t the Pilgrims have looked to the sea, instead of the land, for their Thanksgiving feast?

I know, I know – I KNOW the answer to the question and the Indians and the harvest and being thankful and land and blah blah blah and all that.  I’m just saying I really, really wish the Pilgrims had done that instead.

They were right there by the danged sea.  There must have been lakes and rivers (and heck, ponds!) nearby.    Couldn’t the Indians have taught them how to fish instead?

I am not, and never have been, a big fan of turkey.  Most of the rest of the usual Thanksgiving fare, I like just fine, but the turkey is usually the least eaten thing on my plate.  Most of my favorite Thanksgiving dinners have been the ones where there was ham as well as the turkey.

And then there’s the dark meat thing.  Put any branch of my entire family together – there was only one person who liked the dark meat.  My father – who’s been gone many years now, and really, even before that, pretty much since my parents divorced twenty years ago, and I usually spent holidays with my Mom and family – there’s nobody to eat the dark meat.  It’s useless, except to give to the cats and dogs (obviously they like that idea).

Post-Thanksgiving turkey sandwiches (with lots of mayo) are fine – for about a day, maybe two, then I’m over it.  When I was a kid, I refused to eat the after Thanksgiving turkey sandwiches at all.

The turkey was fun the one year when dinner was over, and my Dad put the carcass and scraps out on the deck for all the then-outside cats we had at the time.

A few minutes later, we were a bit shocked to see the carcass appearing to walk by itself across the yard.  The female cat who was, over the years, often referred to as “The Turkey Monster” was a great deal smaller than the carcass, so that was a pretty hilarious sight.

But turkey – for me anyway – just sucks.  I know the difference between good turkey and mediocre turkey and bad turkey – but I could almost just about eat cardboard instead, really.

On the other hand, seafood – now THAT’S a Thanksgiving feast I could love.  Lobster, crab, salmon, scallops – yum.  There’s really no seafood I don’t adore, except clams.  I’m a little picky about fish, but most fish is okay.  Heck, give me a Thanksgiving catfish or a Christmas catfish!  That would be A-OK with me.  Thanksgiving catfish, Christmas lobster, Easter salmon – oh, yes!

So, I think that one day – if I ever evolve out of extended adolescence and actually become the kind of matriarch that is the cooker of all Thanksgiving (and Christmas and Easter) feasts – I will begin the tradition of the Thanksgiving crab.

In more ways than one, I’m sure.

(Although I really would have been even happier if the Mayflower had drifted down to the Gulf of Mexico and landed in far south Texas near the border instead.  Thanksgiving fajitas, Christmas quesadillas, and Easter tamales – that’s what I’m talkin’ about!)

(And no, I don’t know why I included Easter in the above.  Every good white Anglo-Saxon Protestant knows you have ham on Easter instead of turkey.)

Wanderlust

My friend Julie and I go back a long way. We went to high school together a class apart, then later shared an apartment for a while during college. She was already in Memphis when I moved down here in 1988, and not too long after that gave birth to her first child, which began a journey for her as a single mom that was always simply amazing to me how she hung in through some unbelievably difficult times, but she did it all like a pro.

Since then she’s become a mother twice more, the last born earlier this year, after she’s already been a grandmother for four years. It’s rather tickled me that she’s a year younger than me but the grandmother of a four-year-old (I should be shot, I know). She’s been out in Utah for about 17-18 years now. Many moons have passed since the days of our old apartment up at MTSU where we used to go to sleep at 6 a.m., get up about 6 p.m., watch MTV all night and throw empty beer cans at Martha Quinn whenever she was on.  Oh, and sometimes go to class.

Julie’s always been adventurous in a way I never dared to even think about being. After a period of living and working at Utah’s Seabase, she and hubby decided to pack up the kids, cats, and I dunno what all else in the camper and hit the road and just wander a while. The kids have always been homeschooled, and hubby has a job where he can telecommute, so they’ve been able to just wander as they please this summer. Most recently they’ve headed back to Salt Lake City (where she was forevah) so Julie could do a month-long stint volunteering at The Breastfeeding Cafe events and classes.

She’s been blogging her adventures from the road, and it’s been a really interesting read thus far. So meet my Gypsy friend – she’s taken some really cool photos along the way too.

Collectively Broken?

I know most of you probably read or heard about the church shooting in Knoxville this past Sunday. I’ve been trying to find the words to comment on it all week, but it’s really been difficult to put thoughts into words in this case.

Different people I have discussed it with have been most struck by different things about it. One was horrified that such a thing happened when children were on stage performing a play. Another has not been able to get the thought of the child who was covered in his mother’s blood out of her head. I was particularly disturbed by the irony that one of the victims wasn’t a member of the church, but of another church in the community, and had come to the church that day to see the kids’ play, and the fact that some of the other victims were visitors from out of town (I heard anyway).

And I guess one of the most disturbing things of all to many people is the fact that obviously you can’t even be sure you can feel safe in church anymore. Of all places.

I think of the church I grew up in – a small town church, but there are many big churches with large memberships in town and the town’s not all THAT small anyway – however, the church I grew up in was pretty small compared to most. Even with a full house, someone with a gun could have taken out the entire congregation and any visitors in a matter of minutes. That just makes my blood run cold and sends shivers down my spine.

As a kid, I spent literally hours in that church, and quite often by myself – with an adult on the grounds, yes, but not necessarily in the general vicinity where I was or even in the same building. But who wouldn’t have thought that wasn’t safe?

I also lived my entire life until I went off to college in houses that were never locked – not my home, not my grandparents’ – unless you went out of town on vacation, and maybe not even then, because it really didn’t matter. From around the second or third grade on, I walked home from school to a home that had been empty and unlocked all day long, and usually spent another two or three hours alone in the house until my parents got home from work. We didn’t lock our cars; we didn’t have to.

And nobody would have thought twice about the fact that I spent countless hours walking or bicycling around the neighborhood or all the way to downtown by myself, also from a pretty young age. Even when 8-year-old Cary Ann Medlin’s body was found raped and mutilated in the woods in a nearby town when I was 13 – a tragedy that Newscoma, my age and growing up in the next town over at the time, referred to the other day in her own thoughts about the Knoxville shootings – still I continued to hoof it around town by myself all the time, albeit with probably some stronger cautionary words about being careful and watching out for myself. Heck, at 13 years old, that was prime time for me walking downtown every week to spend my allowance at the music shop on records and that week’s issue of Rolling Stone.

But you really didn’t HAVE to worry about not being safe, not then, not there, and not even all that much even in the bigger cities. In 18 years, there was the Medlin case, there was the Marcia Trimble abduction and murder in Nashville that was such unusual and big news that, I guarantee you, every single native Tennesseean still alive that’s over the age of 40 not only remembers her name, but can probably tell you exactly what she looked like. Because stuff like that just didn’t happen, not as a rule.

And people in small towns didn’t go around killing each other. I recall one big nasty murder in the county when I was a child, and one when I was in high school. One was killed by someone who had previously worked for him, the other was shot and killed by a man he knew over some argument. Two – TWO – murders in two counties in 18 years.

And now there’ve been more murders than I can count in both those counties over the last ten, fifteen years – not every day, no, but far, far more than two in 18 years, and many of them seemingly arbitrary or random. Kids get abducted and sometimes wind up dead, and it’s still shocking, sure, but not like it once was. Another school shooting happens and you’re appropriately horrified, but no longer all that surprised.

And now people are walking into churches on Sunday mornings and shooting and killing people. If you can’t be sure you’re safe in school, or in church – where, then, can you feel safe?

Of course, now I live in a city where murders happen every week and I hear gunshots pretty much every day just about now, so I’m even more numbed and jaded by the constant influx of violence and crime. But that’s why the horrible things that keep happening back home – and even in Knoxville, which is not crime free, of course, but nowhere near the percentage Memphis is – that’s why these things bother me even more. Stuff happens here that’s not supposed to happen up there, or there.

Would the church shooting have been as shocking and people so horrified if it had happened in Memphis? Sure, of course it would have. But I don’t know that many would have been all that surprised, sad to say, especially the rest of our fellow Tennesseans. People from up yonder where I’m from, other than a very small handful, they don’t come to Memphis to shop or to see doctors or for entertainment like they used to. They go to Nashville instead, or even just to Jackson. It’s really pretty sad.

I am grateful that nobody I knew was at the church the other day in Knoxville, but plenty of folks I’m acquainted with did have friends or family that were there, and even one or two that are members that weren’t there that day. That doesn’t make it any less disturbing or sad.

And when I heard from someone in Knoxville about a comment someone they know made – someone who is a member of a large Baptist church in West Knoxville, and quite possibly the same one my future mother-in-law attends every Sunday – the comment being something along the lines of well, you know those people in that church practice witchcraft – I just felt sick.

My future mother-in-law – the Baptist churchgoer – used to be involved in programs that were held at the TVUU church weekly, and had just been telling me on the phone the day before what a nice church it was, and how lovely and wonderful all the people she knew there always had been. In fact, it turns out one of her other sons – one of my future brothers-in-law – used to be a member of that very church.  Maybe still is technically and still on their rolls, though he doesn’t really go anymore.

Witchcraft. I mean, please. Granted, it wasn’t the Baptists or the Methodists or the Presbyterians or a super well-known sect, and it wasn’t even the Catholics, who goodness knows have been accused of lots of whacked out things in thousands of years. But witchcraft? Don’t be stupid. Google before you go shooting off at the mouth. I mean, Wikipedia’s right there.

The ignorance in this country seems to be at an overall all-time high, and safety’s at a premium, obviously. If you can even say safety exists anymore, when you can’t be safe in church on Sunday.

People are having to choose between buying groceries and putting gas in their car, and at the same time, people are getting laid off from their jobs left and right, businesses are closing, and not too many that still have jobs are reporting that their salaries are going up along with the cost of everything else that’s going up.

When does it all end? Where does it stop?

There’s an election coming up, but is anybody who could really change things really going to do something about it all?

I wonder. Something’s got to give. When things break, you fix them. Are we, collectively, broken enough yet?

Oops

Apologies to all my readers who still insist on using Internet Explorer as a web browser. I guess y’all must have thought I’d lost my mind last week. I was alerted to the odd-lookingness of my blogs late last week by my mother, and at the time I blamed it on her web browser, which was technically true because if you use Firefox or most other browsers, you likely didn’t notice anything at all different.

But apparently a very small change in HTML I made last week sent Internet Explorer into the equivalent of a grand mal epileptic seizure. She & I had discussed the problem she was having viewing the blog again on the phone earlier, so I fired up IE myself to see what she was seeing, and yup, it was alllll messed up. After we got off the phone I thought about it for a while and poked around a bit, and then discovered the HTML culprit and promptly removed it.

So it’s all fixed now, and I removed a couple of other tinier things that apparently had an issue with Internet Explorer too, so now all you IE diehards should be seeing the same things on both blogs that everyone else does. This is why…

On another note, I saw something at Aunt B.’s today that made me think once again, as I often have in the past, that it’s probably a good thing that I am so ancient that we didn’t have webcams and other such video equipment so easily at our disposal when I was a teenager and in college, or cell phones with cameras and all those sorts of things, or most especially YouTube. Because I would have never gotten anything else done because I would have been making goofy videos or video blogs all the time, no doubt.

Of course, I might have been rich & famous by now, too, but that’s beside the point.

Not Just Almost Famous

I got nothing today, but in flitting around the Great Internet Void today I notice that my friend Travis L. Harmon and his comedy partner, Jonathan Shockley – these days known as the guys from Red State Update – were the cover story of the Nashville Scene a couple of weeks ago.

Travis and I hung in the same crowd back in my old college days in the ‘Boro, and I have on my bookshelves a VHS copy of an early video comedy effort he and some mutual friends made back when they were still in high school, so it’s been a big kick to watch his progression to now becoming nationally known. I wrote here on the Zone a while back about how our initial meeting way back in 1987 didn’t go so well, but in recent years we have caught up and chatted off and on and a nicer and more pleasant guy you couldn’t meet, so I’m doubly thrilled for his success. It’s awesome when good things happen to good people.

The Red State Update bits (all of which can be found on YouTube and the guys’ site) are what’s made them so famous now, but I leave you with one of my favorite Travis and Jonathan bits, Travis and Satchel, which both makes me laugh and creeps me out a little ‘cos Satchel both looks and sounds a little bit like one of my older male relatives (and dummies kinda freak me out anyway). Enjoy…