A good week for using up and wearing out. I realized I don’t need my work boots any more. My first jungle boots were real Army surplus vintage 1973. A tag said to shake the scorpions out before putting them on. I got these in the ’80s.
Hey, I used all the ink in a Bic pen.
You may think I have a pair like this one in my drawer. I don’t. I have six or eight other mismatched pairs. These are loose at the top and thin in the bottom. It would be abuse to keep wearing them.
The simplest reason for Graham Nash, 81-year-old rocker about 50 years past his prime, to appear in stories in the New York Times and the New Yorker in the same week would have been his death. But you can’t always depend on the simplest explanation being the truth. Maybe I should have read the stories—turns out he is making a comeback. Man, old rockers make comebacks all the time—why should this be big news?
I really liked the Hollies, so I can say I cared about Carrie Anne and Carousel. Bus Stop is immortal. But later songs such as Marrakesh Express, Our House, Teach Your Children, Chicago/We Can Change the World, and Immigration Man (to name a few) run together in their mediocrity.
I remembered Stop, Stop, Stop was about a belly dancer. I looked it up—it’s a light-hearted tune about serial sexual assault. It’s no Stray Cat Blues, but I don’t imagine it gets much airplay today.
I read an obituary for a woman who thought it was okay to say vicious things if you were creative and funny. I was like that when I was a teenager, but I grew up. Cue the Rolling Stones: Don’t you think it’s sometimes wise not to grow up? What if …
I was in a meeting at work. The new boss shared something to make him seem human. [It was an act.] He told the group he had been born to a young unmarried mom. That was really touching. I was halfway out of my seat, ready to fire: I knew right away you were a son of a bitch, and now it turns out you’re a bastard too.
I didn’t say it. I got fired six weeks later anyway.
As Arlo Guthrie said to the sergeant at the draft board in New York City. Me, I’m saying it to Microsoft. My Word program just accused me of a comma fault. I will listen to Microsoft’s advice on English usage just as soon as they stop recognizing ‘miniscule’ as a word. It isn’t ‘mini-‘ anything, I say through clenched teeth; ‘minus’ is Latin for ‘less.’
I’m not stuck in the 1590s or the 1950s. For example, I think ‘minimart’ is a perfectly cromulent word.
If you weren’t following baseball in 1971, you might not believe the season Blue had. 39 starts, 24-8 record, 24 complete games, 8 shutouts, 301 strikeouts, 9 WAR. [Speaking of great seasons by a lefty, I have a Yogi story. Berra explained why he was skeptical that Koufax was 25-5 in 1963. After trying to hit Koufax in the World Series, he said he understood the 25 wins, it was the 5 losses he couldn’t see.]
Blue had a great name. I heard some people call him the Blue Blazer (with silver buttons, I presumed). Vida Yellow is a thoroughbred race horse. The announcer said the first word as if it were Spanish; the horse was livin’ the yellow life, whatever that would mean. Me, I say if you mix Vida Blue and Vida Yellow you get Vida Green.
I admire people who overcome drug addiction. Rest in peace, Vida.
He was 86. I have two of his albums—The Way I Feel (notable for the Canadian Railroad Trilogy, which said the railroads were bad for the environment and worse for the indigenous Canadians) and Lightfoot, which has many good songs. He did First Time, by Ewan McColl, Changes, by Phil Ochs, Pride of Man, by Hamilton Camp, Early Morning Rain, and That’s What You Get for Lovin’ Me. In Rich Man’s Spiritual, he said a dying rich man figures if he buys a long white robe, golden slippers, a smiling angel, and a poor man’s troubles he’d have checked all the boxes to get to heaven.
Lightfoot got long and positive reviews in his obituaries. I was afraid it would be all The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, a six-minute song that was played to death on CKLW (which was always looking for Canadian content). I’d never stopped to realize how many good songs Lightfoot did.
Bob Dylan
The first question: How can an artist who produced Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits put out this perfectly awful dreck a few years later? I thought the answer was that Columbia was in a dispute with Dylan about his earlier work that ultimately became the Basement Tapes. The record company put it out to embarrass Dylan and get some leverage. That might have been an urban legend at the time to shift the blame from Dylan. The explanation widely available these days on the innertubes is that Dylan was tired of being adored by his fans and put out crap—joke’s on you, record-buying public.
More questions: Why do I remember so little about it? I didn’t even remember it was a double-record set. Could I have left the second disk in the sleeve? Did I cut my losses and stop? It has my sister-in-law’s name on it. My guess is after she played it once, she gave it to her sister. My wife wouldn’t have wanted it either and made sure to mix it into my collection. It could be I never played it.
converselyspeaking 