Nobody Likes Your Favorite Band

There's always a little bit of exaggeration, a little bit of creative fudging, of embroidering the facts in any good tale. This one contains slightly more imaginary parts than usual, but I won't tell you which parts!

Live music, there’s nothing like it! Music itself makes life a bit more pleasant, but live music is the habanero sauce on the red beans & rice of life. Early on, music was a relatively minor part of my life, Dad liked Dixieland jazz and Mom liked Engelbert Humperdink and I just listened to whatever came on the AM radio. Even as a high school freshman I was a bit behind the music curve, out of my depth while my fellow students discussed ‘The Who’, ‘The Guess Who’ and ‘Led Zeppelin’. Eventually I started listening to albums by the top groups of the time: Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, Yes, Emerson Lake & Palmer and others when during my junior year I fell in with a crowd that included some musicians, one of whom hosted Friday night beer drinking and music parties where I experienced the broad spectrum of rock music and lost my virginity.

One advantage of growing up in New York is the presence of Madison Square Garden, a destination for every arena-rock band. Another is the ubiquitous public transportation,[1] which abets concert going by teenagers. Rosedale, my home neighborhood, like many other neighborhoods in the borough of Queens boasted a Long Island Railroad (LIRR) station. Not to be confused with the subway, the LIRR was a bit more of an upscale railroad and was the commuting choice for many city workers who lived past the borders of New York City. Unlike the subway, where you used tokens to gain admittance to the platform, you either bought a ticket in advance or paid your fare while on the train, but you didn’t have to pay a fare just to get on the platform. This made the LIRR Rosedale station the cool hangout for bored pre-teens in the neighborhood. My buddies and I would walk up the concrete steps leading to the platform and watch the trains come and go. We also discovered a cave-like chamber underneath the platform that we turned into a clubhouse. As we got older (I almost said “matured” – but I’m still waiting for that to happen) the proximity of the station to the home of my buddy Alex, the unofficial jumping off point for our forays into the world of live music, made it an ideal mode of transportation from residential southeast Queens to the exciting world of “Da City”: Manhattan.

Back before there was Ozzfest, before chickens and bats lived in fear of having their heads bitten off, before Ozzie’s reality show, there was Black Sabbath.[2] Then, like now, Black Sabbath didn’t get much radio airplay, but there was a vast underground of Sabbath fans out there, my friends and I among them. Periodically Black Sabbath would appear live in concert at Madison Square Garden and early in our senior year in high school we’d gotten tickets to see our heroes. This show was to be the first concert of any kind that I would attend, and if I remember correctly, the tickets were $15 for seats in about the twentieth row. This was the most that I ever paid for a ticket in those days, but it was also the closest to the stage that I ever sat. A typical ticket, either in the nosebleed section, or even behind the stage, cost eight or ten dollars. The evening began with our gang of guys gathering at Alex’s house, from whence we walked the quarter mile to the LIRR station. At the foot of the stairs, next to the taxi stand, was an important stop on our journey: the liquor store.

Back in those days, when the memory of the 60’s was still fresh and disco began to raise its glittery head, the drinking age in most places was only eighteen. Even when we were as young as sixteen years old we still managed to walk into liquor stores and delis and buy our beer. This was due partly to the rather lax enforcement of the laws against selling to minors. In fact, for a time, while it was illegal for a minor to possess alcohol, there were no legal penalties for selling it to them, a little loophole in the law (long since closed) that left little incentive to pass up sales to the little tykes. The other factor was that prior to 1980 New York State drivers licenses did not have the operator’s picture on them. Not only that, but they were not laminated, were printed on cheap pasteboard and could be altered with ridiculous ease, facilitating I.D. swaps by those over eighteen to their under-eighteen buddies.

So here we are at the foot-of-the-LIRR stairs liquor store trying to decide who looks old enough to go in and buy. Usually it came down to either me or John M, (known for some unfathomable reason as “LaRuc”), mainly because we both sported long, bushy sideburns, giving the illusion that we were a few years older than we actually were. Now normally, the boys and I were beer drinkers, Budweiser[3] especially, which was usually was very effective at getting us drunk. But this was a special occasion, this was Black Sabbath! We were also going to be sneaking alcohol into Madison Square Garden, so a six-pack apiece wasn’t going to cut it, since MSG security didn’t allow you to bring alcohol into the venue and performed pat-downs to ensure compliance. For the occasion we had purchased what was then known as “wine sacks”, plastic bags covered in suede, made to sort of resemble a Middle Eastern goatskin, and purchased non-carbonated beverages such as Boone’s Farm wine and Tango (a pre-mixed screwdriver) so they wouldn’t expand and explode. The wine sacks had a cord attached which could be utilized to carry it over your shoulder; we slung them across our backs, concealing them under our shirts. Since we were also wearing jean jackets and down vests the sacks were well hidden. We had about twenty minutes before the train arrived so we invested in a few six packs to tide us over on the train station. A half hour train ride into Penn Station and we were in “The City”, ready to party. First on the agenda: a stop for dinner at “Burger & Brew” where we loaded up on burgers and salad and then headed over to The Garden.

Best seats I ever had for a concert, row 20 and here comes the opening act, a new band on the national scene called Aerosmith. We’ve finished our beer, are most of the way through our wine sacks, and did I mention the bag of weed? I can’t say that I remember too much about the concert, but I was having fun, and continued drinking and smoking throughout the intermission until…here they are…Black Sabbath! They started out with “Paranoid”, I remember that much; we were all standing on our chairs cheering for our heroes when the alcohol, the weed, the noise and other still unknown variables all came together resulting in severe dizziness and even more severe puking…all over the girl in front of me. The last thing that I remember before passing out was my buddies preventing her boyfriend from kicking my ass. Why we weren’t thrown out I’ll never know, but Alex, John, John, Anthony and Patrick carried me to the men’s room so that I could puke some more…and some more after that. After Patrick attempted to revive me by slapping me around they left me in the bathroom. I’ll never know why MSG security didn’t take me into custody, but I spent the rest of the concert there. So, after looking forward to this concert for weeks, I spent it in a toilet stall. Good friends that they were, the boys made sure that I got home, dragging me out of the bathroom, propping me up between two of them, getting me to the train and home to Rosedale.

Sometime the next morning, or more likely the next afternoon, I slowly awoke, inching back to the land of the living. When more or less fully awake, I noticed that my jean jacket, where I had secreted a  bag of weed, was gone. Had my mom picked it up from the floor and taken it to the laundry? Had my NYPD cop dad found it? Was I in trouble? I was pretty sure that I was until my brother Mike stuck his smirking face into the bedroom, waving the little bag that he had taken out of my pocket.

In addition to the “big events” at Madison Square Garden and other big venues, there were also our regular weekend outings at area bars such as Speaks,[4] Hammerhead’s, Oak Beach Inn and Beggar’s Opera. Most of these places featured cover bands such as Rat Race Choir, Swift Kick, and the soon-to-be famous Twisted Sister. Oak Beach Inn or OBI as it was affectionately known, was originally located on Oak Beach on Long Island’s south shore and soon spawned satellite locations, OBI West, North and East. OBI West, in Elmont neighborhood of Nassau County, right past the city limits of New York, went through numerous changes of ownership, from Oak Beach Inn West, to Hammerheads, to Popeye’s, but never changed the décor, so the name always had some kind of nautical theme! Just about every Saturday night, my friends and I would head out to one these bars to enjoy one of our favorite bands or to check out a new one. Alex, the unofficial leader of this particular pack, had a knack for picking good bands, and we usually deferred to his choices. The group of us: Alex, Anthony, John M (LaRuc), John H (Deadman) and I went to different schools and worked different jobs and each had our secondary circle of school and work friends with whom we shared our band selections; those friends in turn had their own circles to whom they passed on band recommendations, so that oftentimes a crowd at a Saturday night concert could in large part be traced back to Alex’s band choice. One particular evening when the band was on break one of us requested that the band play “Crossroads”, mainly because we were from Rosedale and the songs hook included the phrase “goin’ down to Rosedale…” The band didn’t want to play “Crossroads”, so Anthony suggested that when they took the stage they ask the audience how many had come to see them tonight at the recommendation of “The BudvMen from Rosedale” (Yes that was what we called ourselves – we consumed a lot of Budweiser). About ¾ of the people there raised their hands. They played “Crossroads” (badly, but they played it).

The BudMen and I were mainly hard rock guys, but I started branching out to other forms of music in those days. Ray was a co-worker at the hardware store where I worked and would bring his electric guitar with him and play it on breaks. He introduced me to the world of jazz-rock fusion with Heavy Weather, a Weather Report album; another work buddy started me listening to southern rock like The Outlaws and Lynyrd Skynyrd. My musical horizons were expanding and a few years later, when I moved to Nebraska, I was ready for KZUM Radio.

My first exposure to the world of non-profit community radio came on a Wednesday as I was trimming lettuce in the back room of the produce department of Food 4 Less. Spinning the radio dial [5]I came across the sounds of jazz fusion, and thinking that I had found a jazz station I continued to listen, later finding out that KZUM played not only jazz fusion, but blues, folk, reggae and other varieties of music that ordinarily weren’t played on the commercial stations. What I really fell in love with was the blues. While working overnight delivering newspapers I began to listen to Jim Anderson’s “midnight-Thursday-‘til-whenever-Friday-morning” blues show and realized that blues was more than just pickin’ and frownin’ – but it was the source for much of the music that I listened to back in the seventies. When I heard “Travelling Riverside Blues”, “Crossroads Blues” and “One Way Out” and it wasn’t Led Zeppelin, Cream or The Allman Brothers I was hooked. Eventually, after changing jobs and not working overnights, I started hanging out down at the KZUM studios with Jim and his beer-drinking crew.

“Nothin’ But the Blues” was an open invitation blues party that took place from midnight until at least 4:00AM every Thursday night into Friday morning. Bands from the nearby Zoo Bar would stop by after the bar closed, third shift workers would pop in after work and blues lovers from all over Lincoln made a point of being in the KZUM studios when it was all happening. Jim, the programmer (what KZUM called their disc jockeys) had a huge collection of vinyl that he dragged down to the station for his two blues shows, the other one being “Another Blue Monday” on Monday afternoons. Jim, who was fluent and literate in Russian, never seemed to have a paying job but always put his heart and soul into spinning blues records as well as educating us all about the music and the musicians. One of the attractions of hanging out at the studio during Jim’s shifts was being entrusted with reading PSA’s (Public Service Announcements) and SPA’s (Station Promotional Announcements) over the air. For me this was a great thrill. Back in high school I was part of a group that put together a mock radio station for English class and had a hankering to be an “on-air personality” someday. This was my introduction to the big time. Eventually I not only read PSA’s and SPA’s, but learned how to operate the equipment. One Thursday night, seeing Jim passed out in his chair as a record spun to a close, I took over. Seeing how easy this was, I soon applied for my own show, part two of “Another Blue Monday” from 4 – 6PM on Mondays, which I soon renamed “Old, New, Borrowed and Blue”.

Building on my earlier fascination with the modern rock renderings of old blues songs, pairings of originals and cover versions became the foundation of my show, liberally mixed with music influenced by the blues and contemporary blues bands. After a few months I moved to Sunday nights at 10:00PM and called the show “Shades of Blue”. For several years I got to introduce bands at The Zoo Bar, and interview travelling blues acts in the afternoons on the air.

Being a community, i.e. non-profit radio station we engaged in periodic fund-raising marathons, with minimal regular programming and a lot of on-air begging for money. Since my regular job was just a few blocks from the station and my home was a mere five minute’s drive from downtown, I participated on and off in the fundraising efforts during all hours of the day. One of the most interesting was with a high school senior by the name of Kyle Umland. [6]

My first encounter was during my first shift for a Sunday night blues show where I was to follow Kyle’s two-hour jazz program. Programmer etiquette dictated that you would end your show by playing a song long enough to let the person coming after you get into the studio, cue up his or her own first song so that there would be a smooth transition. If you wanted to say a last minute “goodbye” to your listeners you would allow the next programmer to set up and say your farewells from a secondary microphone while the new deejay presided from the main chair. On this particular night Kyle went right up to the last second, said his goodbyes and then got up and walked out of the studio, leaving the mike “live” and no music cued up! I raced in, threw a record on the turntable and ad-libbed my introductions. After I got everything going, I walked out into the common area where Kyle still hung around. At the time I wore my hair fairly long, had a thick beard and was dressed more or less like a biker. I let Kyle know in no uncertain terms that if he ever pulled a stunt like that again, he could be assured that I would, with great pleasure, seriously injure him. A week later I came to the station straight from work. I wore a jacket and tie, had trimmed by beard and my long hair was smoothed down and tied back in a ponytail. Due to my very different appearance Kyle did not recognize me. While preparing for the deejay handoff, cuing up a final song and switching chairs, he told me about the “nut-job” who had threatened him the week before, expressing his relief that I had showed up instead!

After this encounter Kyle and I got along very well, subbing for each other on occasion and helping each other out during fundraisers. During one particular fundraising “marathon”, we were an hour into his show with absolutely no calls. Now, just like NPR, KZUM would interrupt regular programming to berate our listeners with pitches designed to make them feel guilty and send us money. On this Monday night, the approach was just not working, so Kyle had the brilliant idea to be proactive and call people at home and ask them for pledges, rather than wait for them to call us. This was the era just before cell phones had almost completely replaced land lines, so there were many prominent people listed in the local phone book. We called dozens of them and received pledges from about half, including a generous donation from then City Councilman Mike Johanns, later mayor of Lincoln, governor of Nebraska, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and US Senator.

Another aspect of KZUM was its openness and the accessibility to the public, due largely to its volunteer nature. Fans of the various programs were always popping in to say hello and we often let some of these people make on-air announcements and help pick out records the way I got started). Most were not as wild and crazy as the aforementioned shows hosted by Jim Anderson, but there were some moments. It seems that no matter how minor a celebrity one is, no matter how small one’s fame is, there are always those who seek to latch on to it…groupies. Usually these people were pretty harmless, like the guy who was incarcerated at the state prison who wrote me letters every week making song requests, or the woman from eastern Europe who on my last night as a programmer gave me a painting as a thank you for years of enjoyable music. And then…there are the nut jobs.

Lorraine (not her real name) started out just calling in requests to a few (male) programmers. After a while, certain deejays could expect to hear from her every time they were on the air. Next she began flirting with us over the phone and began having long conversations that we could only end by pretending that the connection was cut. After a while Lorraine began coming up to the studios just before the building was locked down for the night and hanging around for hours. One night, during one of the semi-annual fundraisers, Kyle and I were again manning the phones and on the air pitching the glories of non-profit community radio when Lorraine, having having somehow entered the building, appeared in the studios. At first we put her to work answering the phone and making a few on-air pitches which seemed to keep her busy and out of trouble. Everything seemed fine until one of the breaks for music when I visited the restroom and Kyle left the air studio to pick out some additional music and we left Lorraine alone in the room. Kyle returned first and got halfway into the room before he realized that Lorraine was completely naked. He put the engineering console between him and the naked girl and started screaming for me. I came running in and spotted the trouble just as the record ended and we had to get back on the air and make another appeal for money. This did not go at all well, because in addition to the initial shock, Lorraine began doing things which I will euphemistically call distracting while Kyle and I tried to look at anything else. There were several problems with the whole scenario: I was married, we were reasonably sure that Lorraine was under aged and the prospect that some FCC regulation was being broken into little bits and crunched into dust was a distinct possibility. So we called for help.

Fortunately another KZUM programmer, a woman and a friend of ours, lived about a block from the KZUM studios, so we called her for assistance. Within five minutes she burst into the studios, picked up Lorraine’s pile of clothes, grabbed her by the arm and dragged her toward the elevators, favoring Kyle and me with a look that communicated her disdain for the problem-solving skills of men in general and us in particular. We were plagued for months with prank calls from other programmers requesting that we “play ‘Misty’ for them”.

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[1] It’s difficult to get too far away from public transportation in New York City. There are the subway and city busses and the Long island Railroad, as well as several private bus lines, like the Jamaica Bus Company. Most people were within a reasonable distance from a bus or train.

[2] One of the great ironies of life is that although Ozzie was fired from Black Sabbath, he went on to great mainstream fame, even among those who don’t know or like his music, while you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone outside of Sabbath fans who know the names of the other three original members of the band.

[3] We were serious about our Budweiser – we all could recite the slogan on the can that began with “This is the famous Budweiser beer…”

[4] Formerly a disco until disco died a merciful death. Speaks still had a giant mirror ball on the ceiling.

[5] In those days, before digital tuners radios had a literal dial, which could be “spun” to change stations.

[6] Kyle’s father wrote a book back in the seventies attempting to cash in on the “Ancient Astronauts” craze. The premise of his book was that the Mayans were space aliens. This is 100% true. It's called Mystery of the Ancients. It used to be in the downtown Lincoln library

Bespoke and Other Irritating Things

There are three things that have been irritating me lately: people who mindlessly re-post things on Facebook that are not true, people who post controversial things on Facebook and then either refuse to discuss their post or get offended that someone has a differing opinion, and third, the word "bespoke".

Let's start with the third: bespoke. There was a time when, if you wanted a suit (or anything else) made to your personal specifications, you'd say it was "custom", or "custom made" or made even "personalized" or "tailor made". "Bespoke" just sounds pretentious.

Now as to the other two, perhaps I shouldn't be too concerned about what shows up on Facebook and spend less time there, but the modes of interaction on Facebook are not somehow separate from "real" life, but are just one aspect of it.

One common aphorism that I disagree with is that you should not talk about religion or politics. I think that the reason most people believe this is that most people are too immature or opinionated to be able to have a respectful conversation with people with whom they disagree. This has always been true to a certain extent, but the instant "connectedness" of the internet has made it easier to insult those that are standing right in front of us. Why is it bad etiquette to have a discussion about comparative religious beliefs, to ask someone the reason for their beliefs? Why is it a a social faux pas to express an opinion about the current administration? Of course if your version of discussion and expression includes demonizing the other side of the political spectrum and belittling those who believe differently as heretics or mindless or "insert your favorite insult here" it would be socially awkward to have that discussion at Sally's birthday party. But surely two (or more) intelligent people can compare the pros and cons of any political issue without calling each other extreme and insulting names I've seen it done, I've done it myself. It's not that tough...if you respect the other person.

But in a weird kind of mirror universe way, people who would never utter a hateful, bigoted, opinionated word in the company of those who hold differing opinions think it's alright to post hateful, bigoted, opinionated words on Facebook where they are in virtual company with those who hold differing opinions. And then claim that they will not discuss, not debate, sometimes claiming that it's their page and telling others to back off. This is not isolated to some fringe group of Facebook users, but seems to be the prevailing culture. People want to trumpet their opinions, but don't want to be challenged, so what happens is people talk past each other. One person posts a meme about how squirrels are a menace to a free society, but those who love squirrels don't dare argue, but post their own memes in support of squirrels. No one listens to the other person, no one considers that there might be truth in the other's position, shots are just traded across the other's bows.

Add to this insularity is the propensity of many to just re-post something that backs up a pre-existing opinion, whether true or not. There is so much information available on the internet that it's pretty easy to determine whether something is factual or not, or at least to find out if there are differing points of view on a subject. One could spend all of one's time just debunking the crap that's easy to discredit, let alone the things that take a little time to research. And I'm not just talking about snopes.com, which some people mistakenly believe is bankrolled by some shadowy liberal cabal, but just some basic fact checking. It's frustrating.

This could all be fixed if I could just create a bespoke world.

Music is Alive

The last time I was in an arena of any kind for a musical performance Jimmy Carter was the president. Granted, I had some good times attending concerts in those cavernous spaces designed, not for music, but for basketball and hockey, enjoying performances by the mega-acts of my youth. I much more prefer my music in small, intimate settings. As for my choice of musicians, I'd rather see a local or regional group than a national act any day. More often than not when I tell acquaintances about a band that I went to see I encounter blank stares. Dweezil Zappa, Return to Forever, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, Chris Duarte, Tinsley Ellis, John Hiatt and Dave Alvin are all musicians that I have seen perform in recent years - I am astounded at how little their names are recognized. Now I still have affection for the bands of yesteryear, and some of the names I mentioned were popular in the past, but they are still thriving artists who are not just recycling their "hits", but still creating new material.

During a business trip with some colleagues we got to talking about music - several people complained about how they don't like it when a band they go to see plays "their new shit" instead of just sticking to the hits. Sad.

With so many artists of so many styles out there, why stick with the same old stuff all the time. Expand your musical horizons. Go to The Bourbon Theater, to The Zoo Bar; listen to KZUM; pick up Josh Hoyer's newest recording; fill your ears with some new stuff .

Music is alive, don't mummify it.

Home

The bar top was a replica of (or perhaps not) of an old-style shuffleboard table, of the type that one upon a time inhabited the bars, pubs and taverns of America. At semi-regular intervals, abandoned newspapers, dinosaur-like in their non-digitalness, sprawled sadly, crying for attention and relevance. Dick Dale, who also cried for attention and relevance, shredded surf-redolent notes from the jukebox. State of the art flat screen televisions, a counterpoint to the many Post-it Notes™ and handwritten signs, lit the interior with a ghostly light. Home, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

He sat at the bar, equidistant between the off-sale cooler, stacked high with beers-for-the masses, and the giant bag of popcorn which invited speculation about bacteria and mass-produced faux butter. It was close to empty, as it often was on a Thursday afternoon, populated only by the white guy who insisted that he was one quarter Cherokee (why is it that white people who claim Indian ancestry are always Cherokee?) and the guy in the waist-length black ponytail who announced at regular intervals that he was the illegitimate son of Anastasia Romanov. Regulars. At home. Like him.

Fairly easy it is to call a bar home when the usual definition doesn’t apply; after all, home is where you go when you’re done doing all the things that you have to do, where the day ends, where your stuff is. When you don’t have any stuff, when the day doesn’t ever really end, when it’s not just metaphorical, you enjoy your illusions wherever you can get ‘em. Especially when reality doesn’t quite measure up. And why should it? He knew that reality would kick in quite smartly at 2:00AM, when ready or not, it was time to leave his home and descend into the nightmare. Not exactly “livin’ the dream”.

What is madness? Some might say that it’s the recognition that the world isn’t what we want it to be…and it never will be. That it’s the railing against the unfairness of “the way things are” and the creation of a reality that fits our sense of right and wrong. That it’s a howling – knowing that “what’s real” will never, ever be the same as “what should be”. He knew madness, he knew the howling, he knew the emptiness.

Away from home, away from the nine-to-five, as the howling died down, reality was the back seat of an unheated car, wrapped in layers of goose-down and a woolen hat.

               

               

                

Million Muslim March

The "Million Muslim March", to paraphrase Voltaire's description of the Holy Roman Empire, was neither Muslim, a march and was quite short of a million. While the central organizing group was indeed the American Muslim Political Action Committee (AMPAC), the planned march was a "Truther" event. A "Truther", for those who don't know, is one of a variety of people who believe that we have not been given "The Truth" about the events of September 11, 2001. The so-called Truth includes claims that the United States government or perhaps one of the intelligence agencies set the whole thing up, or maybe it was Israel. There are assertions that the planes crashing into the World Trade Center could not have caused them to collapse and that explosives must have been planted from within. Truthers generally believe that the government, or elements thereof, caused the events of 9-11 in order to justify the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and to provide a pretext for curtailing civil liberties. Non-Muslim truther groups such as the DC Area 9/11 Truth Movement and Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth Movement were listed as partners in the event. Interestingly enough, AMPAC encourages it's followers to support Congressman Ron Paul and his son Senator Rand Paul. In addition to the Truther aspects of the Million Americans Against Fear (the new name for The Million Muslim March) - the event was to highlight the discrimination and targeting of Muslims by law enforcement that took place post 9-11 as well as the general discrimination by the public. 

So what was the big deal? A fringe group decides to stage their event on a significant day, yes a tragic day, in order to get attention. And get attention they did, despite their march turning into, as The Huffington Post called it, "A Few Hundred People Walking Down the Street". Without the outrage, and yes, the bigotry, that their event engendered, no one would have noticed them save the few tourists who happened to cross their path as they waited for the light to change. What was the big deal? If this had been a "Million Christian March", or if Glenn Beck had staged his event on 9/11/2010 instead of in late August, would there have been the anger, the anti-Muslim signs, the "patriotic" holding up traffic? 

And how about them bikers? How is riding around DC honoring the victims of 9-11, or the military or whoever they're supposed to be honoring? Sounds more like a visceral response to a group that they hate exercising their rights to free speech. Of course the somewhat-less-than-two-million bikers have the right as Americans to oppose a tiny-percentage-of-one-million Americans' exercise of their rights.

But just what are they protesting, these noble bikers? The message? I doubt they even know what it is. The fact that they're Muslims?

I guess in all of this I should be thankful that both groups got the opportunity to express their views.

Lughnasadh...halfway between life and death

Lughnasadh, the sabat that occurs at or near the first of August, has always been my favorite. I think the reason might be is that it was one that I had begun to research after I had begun to consider myself an adherent of the old religions. Most  of the other sabats  have been absorbed or co-opted by the larger culture and its religion. Samhain, of course has become Halloween, first transformed into All Souls and All Saints Day as Hallowmas and later into the kids celebration of Halloween. The Winter Solstice, Yule, most famously is recognized as Christmas. Imbolc is not as big a deal, but we still have Groundhog Day associated with it. The Spring Equinox shares many attributes and is reasonably close to Easter, which isn't tied to a single calendar date like the rest, and May Day is recognized in some areas. Of the other three, two, Midsummer and the Autumnal Equinox are solar observances, which leaves Lughnassadh. For some reason I wasn't as curious about the solar dates, but back when I was in a Christian religious cult I had done some research on the non-solar, or cross-quarter days in order to highlight their "evil" pagan origins, giving sermons on the focus on death at Halloween and the centrality of the goddess on May Day. I had noted that a third day corresponded to May Day, but at the time was stumped as to the significance of the mirror date of Imbolc...what was going on at the beginning of August?

This blog entry isn't going to be an exhaustive study of the history and customs of Lughnasadh, but just a few thoughts on what it means to me. Historically it was a harvest festival, the first of several harvests in the ancient Celtic world. It was also a festival of games and sport, with many competitions in honor of Taltiu, the god Lugh's foster-mother.

To me, I look at it in the context of the other cross-quarter days. Samhain is a day to honor and reflect on the dead and our own mortality. Samhain's opposite, its complement, May Day or Beltane, is a day to celebrate fertility, virility, growth, birth...life itself. I view the other two as combinations of life and death. Imbolc is the stirring of life under the cold crust of ice and snow, life springing up despite the appearance of death; Lughnasadh on the other hand is the shadow of death lurking around the corner despite the appearance of vitality. Now I don't see this as depressing or dark, but more a wake up call to leave something behind, to make the world a little better than I found it, much like the death of a plant leaves the world richer in the form of the harvest.

That's how I view Lughnasadh, a reminder that it's not all about me, but what seeds that I plant will grow into and how they will be harvested...the future without...me.

Drug Testing

With all the attention being paid to the Big Brother-ish activities of the government, not a lot of attention is being given to the intrusiveness of the corporate world. And when some attention is given to corporate “curiosity” it’s usually in reference to your boss reading your emails or listening to phone calls over company phone lines. What isn’t given much attention, and is in fact considered right and reasonable, is drug testing.

More and more companies use drug testing as some kind of screening, whether it be post-accident, pre-promotion, random,  or as a prerequisite for hiring. Several different arguments are used to justify this practice. The main rationales fall into several main categories: one of these categories is safety. It could be argued that drug use on the job could cause one to behave in an unsafe manner. For example, employees who drive fork lifts, use knives, or operate heavy machinery (including motor vehicles) could pose a danger to themselves and others if under the influence while at work. Another area would be productivity. An employee who is under the influence of drugs would in general be likely to move slower, and in many cases even think slower than someone who isn’t under the influence.  A third reason given for being concerned about drug use is the legal aspect. Marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine are all illegal. A company might assert that employees engaging in illegal activity are a priori exercising bad judgment and should be excluded from employment, or at least from positions of responsibility. Finally there is the moral argument, which in my observation isn't usually said out loud: the moral argument, i.e. drugs are bad.

Let’s look at these arguments, first, the moral. While privately held companies have the right to set their own standards, and the ethical and moral positions of the owners certainly have an impact on a company’s ethics and values, where does that end? There is without question a broad range of opinions on the ethics of drug use, especially regarding marijuana, so it surely cannot be argued that marijuana use is obviously a bad thing. A stronger argument could easily be made for morphine-derived drugs, or “meth”, but a 2012 study indicates that it is marijuana users who are most impacted by drug testing. [1] (More on that later) So with the often unspoken moral revulsion at drug use, we have allowed the values of some to dictate how the rest of us must behave.

            What about the fact that drug possession and use is illegal? This particular argument is usually used when drug testing for management personnel or employees in other positions of responsibility (cash handling, security) is involved. How can we trust someone who is engaged in an illegal activity? First, marijuana use isn't illegal everywhere. (From this point on I will be focusing primarily on pot) Second, if any illegal activity precludes one from a responsible position, why wouldn't tax avoidance and speeding be included? I know very few people who always drive at or under the speed limit. Many people practice the 5 mph grace period – believing erroneously that it is legal to drive up to 5 mph over the speed limit. This is not true; what is true is that most highway police don’t bother with speeding a few mph over the limit, but it is still illegal. I believe that it is the rare person who has never indulged in illegal activity of any kind. “But this is drugs! It’s different!” – That brings us back to the moral argument.

We can look at productivity and safety together, since the arguments for and against are somewhat similar. It is claimed that drug use on the job renders an employee less safe and less productive. With that I have absolutely no argument. Marijuana is by no means a performance enhancing drug…dude. Getting high before coming to work, or at lunch, or in the bathroom is going to slow you down and fog your mind to the point where you will be less safe. However, what is being tested is how much of the drug is still in your urine, or hair or whatever is being tested. Not whether that residual amount is affecting you in any way. An employee can smoke a joint or two at a party and test positive a week later. Someone can get high after work or on weekend and test positive 30-45 days after the last time they smoked. One can smoke themselves into oblivion on a Saturday night and still be sharp and ready to work on Monday morning.

And then, there’s alcohol. You can go out and get drunk every night, be hung over every morning and you’ll test out fine on any drug test. You can test well over the legal limit for alcohol and as long as you’re not actually drinking at work your job is safe. In fact, to fold in the previous arguments for drug testing, if you are above the limit in public or are driving, then you are engaged in illegal activity, if you are coming in hung over, then your productivity is significantly lower and you are likely not as aware of safety concerns as if you were not hung over.

And then there is the question of constitutionality. Is it really legal to turn over your bodily fluids without a court order if there is no suspicion of illegal activity? Aren’t we protected against unreasonable searches and seizures? (4^th Amendment). And how can we be compelled to in essence testify against ourselves? (5^th Amendment) I’m sure in many cases employees sign some paper authorizing the company to do this, but wouldn’t that be coercion? I can understand if there were some suspicion that an employee were under the influence, or to do a test after an accident. But to take and test people’s urine without due process and without real consent, is in my opinion not only unconstitutional, but illegal.

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[1] http://www.freedomisgreen.com/drug-testing-targets-marijuana-users/

Nobody Wants To Be the Creepy Old Guy

Single life: not what it’s cracked up to be. Several married guys expressed envy at the supposed carefree life that I was living during the four years between marriages, but it certainly was a bit less exciting and a bit more stressful than they thought it was. [1]

The first few months that I lived in The Hovel I didn’t have much time for a social life. In addition to my main job at Super Saver I had a second job as a rural paper carrier, getting started around 2:00 every morning and finishing up at about 6:00. It wasn’t a very difficult job, it fact it was refreshingly easy, no one looking over my shoulder; just delivering the papers. I’d drive about 130 miles every morning and after paying for gas and setting aside money for tires and taxes I was netting about $900 each month, which helped me start to get my huge debt paid off, as well as enable me to put aside some money for a vacation to the East Coast. Having to start work two hours after the bars closed didn’t allow for much late night carousing, although I did try it once or twice. One morning, after closing the bar and picking up my papers early, I got extremely sleepy and pulled off to the side of the road to "close my eyes for a few minutes". Six hours later, much more than the few minutes that I’d envisioned, I woke up and finished my route. Many customers were angry that morning. Even though I didn’t have any opportunity for late nights, I still managed to convince one woman to date me during my paper route days.

The Hovel had a washer and dryer on the ground level, but they both seemed to be on the indistinct border between appliance and habitat, so I did my laundry at “LaunDry Land” (that’s right, with the capital “D” right in the middle of the word “laundry”) a few blocks away. Marija, the clerk who ran the place in the evenings, and I hit it off (it seemed to me) after I correctly (i.e. luckily) guessed from her accent that she was from Ukraine, and not Russia or one of the other Slavic countries. Being 20 years removed from active dating[2], I mistook her friendliness for flirting until her husband started hanging around while she was working. I don’t know if she felt sorry for me or thought she was doing me a favor, but Marija set me up with Laura, another LaunDry Land customer. At this point in my dating career, I hadn’t quite developed anything resembling standards, and any primitive proto-standards that I may have had floating about my subconscious apparently didn’t include sanity. Continual ranting about the ex-husband who had thrown her out, the string of jobs that she had been fired from and her complete inability to stay focused on a subject for more than ten seconds should have been a clue that I was hooked up with someone with whom things could go horribly wrong. But I was so thrilled that someone was paying attention to me that I overlooked red flags that would have enraged a herd of bulls. After a couple of dinner-and-a-movie dates I quietly moved on when Laura suggested that she accompany me to New York, where I was going to visit family, in order to scout out ideas for her “business”, the details about which it never became clear. She also asked for me to “invest” in her business. Marija apologized to me profusely.

One of the problems with those paper route jobs is that its seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, no days off unless you find your own substitute. Since I had planned a trip to the East Coast in June of that summer I began looking for a sub for the route in early March, but without any success. Since I was using the paper route to make payments on my credit card debt I figured out, based on how much I was making each month, how much that I would have to save up so I could forgo a second job and figured that I could quit my route at the end of May and take off until August without missing any payments. So I started the month of June with only my main job, with my evenings pretty much free. I had Saturdays off and had been working 2:00 – 10:00PM on Sundays[3], so Friday and Saturday nights were now open, but first, a trip to the East Coast.

It had been eleven years since I had been to New York; I had nieces, nephews and in-laws that I had never met.  I hadn’t been too nice to my family while I had been in The Way; a few months before my trip I started putting together an itinerary that would allow me to visit not only my parents, but also my siblings who lived in other cities and reestablish relationships with them. At the time I was involved with an anti-Way website called Grease Spot Café, which got its name from a remark The Way’s leader made about people who left the organization, predicting that they’d be “grease spots by midnight” and I began working visits to some of my online buddies from Grease Spot into my trip. I left on a Monday afternoon and drove until about midnight, staying overnight in a hotel in Illinois. The Cavalier station wagon was gone, sold to my mechanic after getting in an accident some months earlier. With the insurance money I purchased another rust-bucket, a white 1986 Pontiac 6000. Just as rusty as the Cavalier, the Pontiac had a seemingly unsolvable problem: after driving at high speeds for a while, it would begin to buck and stall when coming to a stop, especially when stopping or slowing suddenly, like when exiting the interstate. Starting up immediately after it stalled was difficult, involving working the brake and gas pedals simultaneously until enough speed could be worked up. This made for constant anxiety regarding the prospects for the car starting each time it was shut off. Parallel parking was out of the question.

Arising early on Tuesday morning I proceeded to Dayton Ohio to spend the evening with some ex-Way folks who used to live in Omaha. Dave and Dana were the first ex-Way people that I had knew who, appeared to be living a normal, even a prosperous life. I had begun feeling like I was destined to live in “a hovel” and have no friends for the rest of my life, so ingrained had the condemnation from The Way and my ex-wife become. So meeting some people who had moved beyond Way-world was an important step in my evolution. I did drink too much coffee and had a hard time falling asleep in the little kid’s bunk bed that they had put me in.

On Wednesday morning, after a hearty breakfast, I drove across Ohio, a slice of West Virginia and most of Pennsylvania to arrive at the home of Gail, one of the WOW’s from my year in Sidney and Kearney over twenty years earlier. About ²/₃ of the way through Ohio the scenery begins to change from “flat” to “rolling” in preparation for “mountainous”, which describes most of the drive through Pennsylvania. This was a long drive. Accompanying me on this trek across the Quaker State was my trusty collection of cassette tapes. Yes, you read that correctly. Although this wasn’t all that many years ago, CD players in cars, while standard equipment in the newer vehicles, were not universally found in the vintage[4] vehicles that I drove. My habit, technologically speaking, is to stay a jump or two behind the curve, hence (that’s right, I said “hence”) a cassette deck when everybody else is laughing at how old fashioned CD’s are. Fortunately for me, the public library lends out CD’s, which I was able to record on to tape for my listening pleasure. So the long miles across Penn’s Woods were made more pleasurable by Mott the Hoople’s Greatest Hits, Dick Dale’s Tribal Thunder, The Who’s Quadrophenia, Oasis’ What’s the Story Morning Glory?, and Birds of Fire by The Mahavishnu Orchestra.

I had not seen Gail in over twenty years and we had only recently been corresponding through email. Gail greeted me at the door with a snarky remark about my car, informed me that she had to go to class and left me in the care of her husband and three daughters, none of whom had I ever met, and gave me permission to use her computer, which one of her daughters kicked me off five minutes later. After sitting around in uncomfortable silence for a while, Chuck (Gail’s husband) decided that what we needed to break the ice was grilled bratwurst, beer and cigars. So when Gail returned from class, there was Chuck and me, sitting out back with a couple of brews, a pair of cigars and with mustard stains on our teeth, deep into some serious male bonding.

After a diner breakfast and a brisk walk to work it off it was back in the car to meet Cindy[5] and her kids in Trenton New Jersey, dinner at Burger King and then off to Jersey City. I spent the night in a cheap motel so that I could be up before dawn on Friday morning to visit lower Manhattan and the location of the World Trade Center. The 9-11 attacks had taken place about nine months previously and the WTC site was still a mess. The enormity of what had happened hit me the night before as I was heading east across New Jersey. At one time the New York skyline, dominated on the south end by the Twin Towers, was visible for many miles to the west. But now, as the lighted skyscrapers hove into view, a prominent gap stood where the steel and glass once soared into the sky. I had to pull off to side of the road; the tears in my eyes made it difficult to drive.

It was still dark the next morning as I made my way across the bridge into Manhattan to visit Ground Zero. It’s fascinating to see New York City in the early morning hours before all the office workers show up. Delivery guys unloading trucks, restaurants firing up the grills, newspaper stands opening up; it’s a different world. It was without a doubt a really different world with the open wound of Ground Zero so prominent a part of Lower Manhattan. With the attacks less than a year in the past, the improvised memorials were still up, photos and notes and flags stuck to light poles and churchyard fences. The atmosphere was at once a great miasma of sadness and a fierce pugnacity and pride that “The City” was still standing, still reveling in its in-your-faceness.

After a few hours I jumped in the car and headed out to Port Jefferson Station, my parents’ home, arriving on Friday afternoon. I had never been to their post retirement home, several hours west of the neighborhood where I spent by childhood, Rosedale, in the borough of Queens. Previous visits, the most recent which had been eleven years before, found me sleeping in the bedroom that I occupied from the age of six to when I moved out at twenty, eating at the little table in the yellow-walled kitchen with the poorly repaired hole where I had once thrown a chair at my brother Mike [6] [7]and grilling burgers on the concrete patio behind the slate blue house on 255^th Street. About a year after my last visit my parents sold the two-family house that I grew up in and moved out to Long Island. Virtually everything else had changed as well. My brother Jim, whose wedding had been the occasion of my last visit, now lived in Rochester and was the father of two rambunctious boys; my baby sister Maryann was married, had a daughter and was pregnant with a second; Mike had gotten a divorce from his first wife and was the proud dad of two girls with his second wife Jean. Patty had also divorced her first husband and remarried as well. Most of my cousins were married and had children also. The family had gotten huge while I was out in Nebraska.

One thing about family that I’ve heard said is that they’re the people who have to take you in, no matter what. I don’t know how literally true that is, but I found my family incredibly open and forgiving, even though I hadn’t treated them very nicely over the past few decades. It inspired me to be more forgiving towards those who I perceived had wronged me.

I stayed until Monday morning on Long Island and headed to New England via the Port Jefferson ferry on that morning. I met another Grease Spot participant for lunch and then continued to Hingham to meet Uncle Tim for dinner and stayed in his guest house, leaving for Rochester on Tuesday morning. Tuesday night I stayed with another Cindy, an old friend from Long Island, and her husband Richard. Wednesday morning I drove up to Niagara Falls an hour away, stopped to see another GS buddy and then to my brother Jim’s. I stayed two nights there and then headed across southern Ontario[8] to Lansing Michigan Friday morning to spend two nights with my friends Leah and John. On Sunday morning I was on the road home, stopping in Illinois or Sunday night before arriving back in Lincoln on Monday, two weeks after I set out.

The crossing back into the United States from Canada was interesting. After waiting in an endless line I was interviewed by a Border patrol officer who asked what my point of origin was, as well as my destination. After telling him that I had started the day in Rochester New York and was headed for Lansing Michigan, he squinted at my Nebraska plates and asked me if I realized that I was exiting Canada. Suppressing my natural tendency to make a smart-assed remark, I explained that yes, I was aware that I was exiting Canada. He once again squinted at me and asked why, if I was leaving one U.S. city for another, I was now leaving Canada. All I could tell him was that AAA had recommended it. I avoided the rectal exam and strip search and went about my business.

It was at this point that I started to develop a social life of sorts. I still had my full-time position at the grocery store, but wouldn’t pick up a second job until late August, and even then it was a one day a week job delivering the free Tuesday afternoon paper; at the store I had Saturdays off and due to my previous gig delivering papers I worked on Sunday starting at 2:00 in the afternoon, so I was free to “socialize” on both Friday and Saturday nights, and made frequent, if not all-night appearances at the local bars during the week. O’Rourke’s, my favorite tavern, attracted a diverse demographic, all ages, multiple income levels, ethnic groups, you name it, and it became like a second home to me. Newly freed from the need to go to bed early in order to deliver newspapers, I often headed down to O’Rourke’s right after work at 4:00PM for a beer or two, going home or to a local eatery for dinner, and then back at 9:00PM for a few more beers and in the sack by midnight. Some of O’Rourke’s regular “old guys” became my buddies and drinking companions. There was Doug, a retired postal worker who sported his long white “cool old guy” hair in a ponytail, and who fancied himself a ladies’ man; Kevin, who became one of my closest friends during this time period; Rob, a fellow New Yorker who spent most of his time whining about how his mother wouldn’t send him money; the two Scotts: “Smart Scott”, one of the most intelligent people I’d ever met, and “Lyin’ Scott”, who always had a tall tale to tell; Clarence, then known as Butch, a local newspaper reporter, as well as many other characters.

Now that I was out and about more, I started meeting more people, including women. Something that I found out relatively quickly was that when you’re in your forties, the dating pool is relatively shallow. So there I was on a weekday afternoon seated at the bar in O’Rourke’s, with a reasonably attractive woman who seemed to know everyone seated beside me complaining about not being able to find anyone to go out with her. Since at this point my dating experience was about on par with your average 16 year old boy with a bad case of acne I innocently snapped at the bait; I struck up a conversation and we made a date for dinner for later that week. I say “innocently” because while looking back I’m sure she was throwing that line about no one going out with her in my direction, I was totally unaware of her intentions and ignorant of the come on. I arrived at Sheila’s (not her real name) home to pick her up at the appointed time, but she wasn’t there. After an extended period knocking on the door, ringing the bell and peaking in the windows I decided to head on down to O’Rourke’s and found her there. No explanation, no apology. When I asked her if we had crossed wires in our communication, she simply said that she’d had a big lunch and was feeling kind of full! I should have run away right then and there, but hadn’t yet developed the bad relationship radar and continued to pursue her.

With the 20/20 vision that hindsight bestows, I believe that I was (again) simply besotted by being paid attention to, by being viewed as a desirable companion after years of being the source of all evil in the world. After a very brief time, things just blew up. Early on in our relationship, I got a glimpse of Sheila’s jealous streak when she got very publicly angry over a conversation that I was having with a woman at the bar. [9] A second, more dramatic display of jealousy, this time in a series of answering machine messages, put an end to our relationship. She attempted to apologize and get back together, but I knew that I had to have some standards and that I no longer had to “just settle”.

Oddly enough, the younger man with whom Sheila flirted, a musician/poet named Drew, became a good friend during this time. It was primarily through Drew that I met Pam. (We met Drew and Pam in an earlier chapter involving buying pot) Drew was dating Pam at the time, despite a twenty year gap in their ages. Drew was about 25 years old, tall and thin and rock-star good looking, Pam was in her early forties and was kind of a latter day hippie, working only as much as she had to and living in a commune south of town. For a while I spent much of my after-work time with them, discussing books, music, poetry and Celtic spirituality. Feeling burned by my experience with Sheila, and valuing my freedom more than desiring any kind of relationship, I spent the rest of my social time hanging out with “the boys” or enjoying live music at some of the local venues, avoiding any attachments with women.

“Surprised” is a huge understatement to describe my feelings when Pam grabbed me in a parking garage one night and kissed me. The three of us were supposed to attend a show at the Zoo Bar, but Drew did not show up, so Pam and I attended without him. I suppose that I should have seen it coming; in the weeks leading up to this the two of them fought frequently, each coming to me to complain about the other, especially Pam, who seemed to be looking for excuses to spend more and more time with me. We both pretended that it hadn’t happened, but shortly thereafter Drew and Pam broke up and we confronted the feelings we had (or thought we had) for each other.

There is a short list of people who I consider to have helped me stay sane during the years when I was living alone, and Pam is close to the top of that list. She is one of the key links in my ever-changing spiritual quest and was instrumental in helping me define what I believed and what kind of person that I wanted to be. The first time that I ever saw a set of tarot cards was a hand painted set that Pam had made, and when I started reading cards myself several years later, I still remember that short one-card reading that she did for me in O’Rourke’s one night that came true several hours later. Pam was one of the few people who did and said exactly what she thought and felt. She made of fun of what she called my “molester moustache”, laughed at the image of the baby on the diaper pail turned dirty sock bucket in my bathroom, and was not shy about telling me that Quadrophenia by The Who, one of my favorite albums, just wasn’t that good. We wrote erotic haikus together, made fun of people and eventually moved apart.

Despite all that we had in common and the affection that we had for each other, it just wasn’t “meant to be”. I was still insistent that I didn’t want to be part of a relationship and wanted to put myself first, still in my “selfish” phase. For me, the biggest obstacle to a relationship was her inability to understand how and why I had gotten involved and stayed involved in a religious cult. This lack of understanding would become the biggest contribution to keeping us apart; I could not give my heart to someone who lacked a basic understanding of who I was and why I was the person that I had become. Eventually we drifted apart and I saw her seldom until she developed a cancer that slowly killed her in the spring of 2008. Another friend let me know that she was dying in a hospice; I managed to see her a few hours before she passed on, one of the last things she said to me was that she was glad that I had shaved off “that molester moustache”.

With a short hiatus to date a woman my own age in the early part of 2003, I moved into a phase where I alternated between “safe old guy” and “creepy old guy”. The hiatus involved a woman who had worked at Super Saver when I first moved to the Cornhusker Highway location. Denise attended the company’s annual holiday party in January 2003 as a guest, having left the company the summer before. During a break in the festivities, as I stood in the hallway smoking a cigar she approached me in order to verify that I was not there with a date, which I wasn’t. We ended up dancing and talking, and left the party to go to O’Rourke’s. I drove her home, both of us aware that there was an attraction and set up a time to meet the next night. While part of me was still in the “selfish” mode and not interested in a relationship, I quickly became caught up with Denise, being told after just a few days that I was “her man”[10], meeting her parents and married daughter, socializing with her friends and without realizing that it was happening, involved in the relationship that I hadn’t wanted, which had become serious on all levels. In a few short months Denise, frustrated by my aversion to commitment and concerned that I would get back with my ex-wife, dumped me in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again.

The “safe/creepy old guy phase” started before and continued after my time with Denise. One of my observations as a single guy in his forties was that with few exceptions, young women view men several decades older than them predominantly in three fashions. The first and by far the most widespread is the invisible old guy. Most of my single guy buddies realized that to college girls, men our age were simply invisible. We would even play a game where we would attempt to make eye contact with attractive young ladies, and when we failed, this confirmed our invisibility. Another type was the safe old guy. This is the guy who women view as a nice guy, easy to talk to, but who is non-threatening, like a father or uncle…or grandfather. This is the guy who young women talk to about their boyfriends, who feel comfortable revealing personal details, even about sex. Women walk up to safe old guy in bars, hug them, kiss them on the cheek and otherwise flirt with them. Sometimes the safe old guy recognizes this situation for what it is and is at peace with it, other times the safe old guy believes that he is really being seriously flirted with. In any case, the attention is flattering. A guy becomes the creepy old guy when he doesn’t understand that he is the safe old guy and starts hitting on the young girls. The creepy old guys are overwhelmed by their non-invisibility and often are confused by it. Often they are in denial about the “old guy” part of the description! Sometimes they just start out as the creepy old guy, flirting with women who hadn’t yet been born when they graduated from college, usually with a distorted view of their own attractiveness. They look in the mirror and see a version of themselves that hasn’t existed for quite a while, if ever. This malady can afflict any guy, but most of us snap out of it, the seriously deluded, however, do walk among us.

I was one of those who started out as seriously invisible and eventually, after becoming visible, morphed into the safe old guy, with brief stints as the creepy old guy. Mainly my transformation to “visible” was due to dating Sheila, who a lot of the college aged girls knew, as well as my transition to an O’Rourke’s regular, which meant that all the bartenders knew me, signaling “safe” to the girls.

During this time I was undergoing some internal transformations. I had learned some lessons from the women that I dated, to have standards, to go slow and not rush into “the next level”, to not put myself at the center, yet to be aware of what I needed as well. I learned that running around with women my daughter’s age was not productive. That despite having a brief fling with a much younger woman, to most of them, whatever my own self-image, I was either the invisible old guy, the safe old guy, or the creepy old guy, but what all these descriptions had in common was old.

At this point I had decided that I was ready for something serious, that I was done with hitting on women in bars, that I was done with settling, done with being selfish. It was at that point, when I had gotten all manner of bad relationships out of my system, I met Susie, who I would marry two years later.

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[1] The grass is always greener, isn’t it?

[2] Which pretty much means I reverted to having the social skills of a teenager

[3] Typically the assistant store director came in at 6:00am on Sundays, but since I couldn’t get my paper route done in time I switched shifts with another manager. After quitting the route I retained the Sunday late shift.

[4] Unlike fine wine, cars usually don’t improve with age.

[5] Cindy was another ex-Way Grease Spot Café regular who had fled an abusive husband from somewhere down south to be with a guy she met on Grease Spot who in no way wanted to have a relationship with her (or four kids). At the time of this trip she was preparing to move to Chicago to marry another guy that she met on Grease Spot, who had left his wife…it all worked out; they got married and are still happily together. (That was true when I first wrote this - they have both since passed away

[6] After throwing the chair at him and seeing the hole, we dropped our disagreement and worked together to repair and paint over the hole, which our parents never found out about.

[7] Years later two of my sons got in a fight and put a much larger hole in the laundry room wall. They could not repair it, but did pay for the dry wall guy to fix it.

[8] I usually gauge the time of my trips by figuring an average speed of 60 miles per hour; so if I have 120 miles to my destination, then I know it will probably take 2 hours. I was thrown off by the signs in kilometers, until I figured that 60 mph is roughly 100 kilometers per hour.

[9] The woman with whom I was conversing was much, much younger. Sheila’s response was to very publicly flirt with a much younger man, who eventually became a good friend of mine. (In the editing phase I realized that this footnote was redundant - but decided to keep it to not mess up the numbering)

[10] This was a surprise to me, especially since on the night we met at that party Denise was living with a guy and had me drop her off a block from her home so he wouldn’t see her.