The Pain Scale

Sadly for most of us, the older we get, the more aches and pains become part of our daily existence. Lately I seem to have done some minor damage to a body part, and while healing I gave some thought to the "Pain Scale". Anyone who has been to a doctor for anything pain related has heard of it, or seen the chart. "On a scale of one to ten, how badly does it hurt?" is the way it goes. Supposedly this gives your health care provider an idea of how serious the pain is. But how effective is this?

First of all, how do we define the one and the ten? How do we quantify it? Is a sunburn worse than a stubbed toe? Is it a stabbing pain or a dull pain? Can they be compared? Personally, I have never been shot or stabbed, nor have I been severely burned, or given birth. I would imagine that those things would be up there on the ten side of the scale, but never having experienced them, how can I compare my toothache, or broken toe or pulled muscle to a gunshot wound?

Of course, even with similar injuries, people's perception of the pain associated with them are different. A boxer or martial artist, used to a certain degree of low-level injury, might become so used to pain that he ignores it, while the same injury might cause someone else to scream in agony. Some providers have linked descriptions to some of the numbers, I would find this to be pretty helpful since it puts quantifiable labels to the numbers.







Of course, there are still different types of pain. A heavy throbbing pressure can be as debilitating as feeling like a sharp object is being inserted into your eyeballs.




While writing this blog post I came across a new scale that might take off:

Classic Rock Bands with No Original Members

What makes a band? Is it the band members? The songs? Some combination? The Who's famous lyric: "I hope I die before I get old" came true for many rockers from the so-called Classic Rock Era, but many more of them are still out on the road filling arenas, or perhaps the wooden benches at various state fairs. For the purpose of this discussion I'm dividing those old bands into two categories. The first is the "solo artist". Typically the solo artist is the "star". Whether or not he or she wrote the songs that are being performed, that person is the one thing that doesn't change. The star hires sidemen, musicians who work for the star. Sidemen may work with a star for years, or they may change with every album or tour. Bill Joel can get rid of a guitarist on a whim, but only Billy Joel is Billy Joel.

The second category is "the band". A band may consist of 3, 4, or more, equal members or there may be a core membership with auxiliary members who be fired by the core. Some bands, like the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, once they settled on a stable membership (post Pete Best for the Beatles and post New Yardbirds for Led Zeppelin) they existed only as the familiar incarnation; Plant, Paige and Jones did not hire another drummer and the members of The Beatles never performed as The Beatles once they broke up. Other bands had no problem replacing members, nor did it appear that their fans had any problem. Deep Purple's most well-known and commercially successful incarnation did not include the original singer or bassist. Occasionally there are disagreements about who has the rights to use the band's name when the original members have gone separate ways. There were once briefly two versions of the progressive rock band Yes, each consisting of original members, and members from the not-original-but-most-well-known version. Eventually the courts decided who had the rights to use the name.

The rock groups that originated in the sixties and seventies are typically in their late sixties to late seventies. It's a regular occurrence to hear of some famous rocker dying of heart disease or some other malady associated with old age. Some of them are still touring, often with one original member! I recently made a comment about the Yardbirds that was not well-received by their current guitarist. The Yardbirds, if you are unfamiliar with them, were a short-lived blues-rock band in the late sixties. They are most well-known for the artists and bands that had their origins with the Yardbirds: Eric Clapton, The Jeff Beck Group, Led Zeppelin and Renaissance. Sometime in the nineties The Yardbirds reformed with drummer/songwriter Jim McCarty and guitarist/bassist Chris Dreja, who were original members joined by some younger musicians. A few years ago Dreja retired; the Yardbirds continued with McCarty the only tie to the Yardbirds' heyday. I made the comment that the Yardbirds were basically a Yardbirds tribute band. Now technically they're not a tribute band, due to the presence of that one original member, but what about them, other than the presence of one man, makes them The Yardbirds?

There are various things that make a band unique, that makes their sound stand out from everyone else. Often it's the singer. A frontman (or woman) in many cases defines a band. Can you imagine Aerosmith without Steven Tyler? Other times it's the guitarist. Rarely, however, does the uniqueness extend to the bassist and drummer, at least in the eyes of the run-of-the-mill fan. The heart, the core of a band is going to vary from band to band. But in my opinion, The Who ceases to be The Who after Keith Moon died, and even less so when John Entwistle passed. For me, John's bass and Keith's manic drumming were indispensable parts of the band.

I can understand why the lone survivor of a popular classic rock band might feel that the band name might draw more fans than their own name. Paul McCartney might be able to fill arenas without calling his band "The Beatles", but "Foreigner" surely has a better draw than "The Mick Jones Group" or "The Yardbirds" than "The Jim McCarty Band".

The bottom line regarding whether a band is the band from back "in the day" is whether it is accepted by the fans. For me, the decision to see a band that was popular in my youth where there is a dearth of original members would hinge on my own subjective views. Everyone else is welcome to their subjective views. Whatever works!

Frank

As I take my afternoon walk on work days, I pass a lot of apparently homeless people. A lot of them seem to have mental issues, talking to themselves or to unseen entities. Seeing one particular guy me me think of a man named Frank who used to shop at the store here I worked.

Frank was probably in his fifties. He often wore old faded army fatigues and had a heavy beard. I don't think Frank was homeless - he always seemed to have plenty of money, so if he was, he had a fairly reliable source of income. Frank, however, had some eccentricities.

Frank was convinced that the CIA was tracking him through the UPC codes on food packaging. After he made a purchase he would take a small pocketknife out and cut the UPCs off and throw them away. On a few occasions other customers would see him take out the knife and assumed that because he was talking to himself he was somehow a danger. No, only the UPC codes were in danger. Every once in a while he would use profanity when talking to his invisible friends. He would always apologize when I asked him to keep his language clean.

Frank also was very concerned with order. Some days we would find Frank taking tuna cans or Oscar Meyer bologna packages off a shelf, rotating them according to date, and turning all the labels the same way. The first time we saw him Loss Prevention followed him around for two hours thinking he as a shoplifter, but he was actually doing a service for us. Frank in a checkout lane was also a challenge. He always paid in cash with exact change. He would pull out a little change purse and root throw the coins, somehow perceiving that one specific nickel was preferable in a given exchange.

Frank was harmless; a little weird, but harmless. Nonetheless, he made a lot of people uncomfortable. He wasn't doing anything to overtly cause the discomfort, but some people's worldview didn't allow for people like Frank.

One day, which happened to be my day off, an employee reported to Loss Prevention that Frank was taking items out of the bulk food bins with his bare, unwashed hands. He was confronted by Loss Prevention, who threatened to throw him out of the store. Frank responded by saying that he would throw the Loss Prevention employee out of the store. Frank was banned from all the company's stores and I never saw him again.

But here's the odd thing. Frank was a germaphobe. Whenever he purchased anything from bulk foods he would wrap the scoop in a plastic bag, then put his hand inside another plastic bag, and only then would he scoop his purchase into a third plastic bag. There is no way that he was putting his bare hands in those bins. Frank was falsely accused because someone was unsettled by his difference from what they considered normal. And he was thrown out and banned on the basis of that false accusation and the overreaction of the person who confronted him. Would it even have been an issue if it had been one of the dozens of clean cut people who didn't talk to themselves or cut the UPC codes off? Obviously not, because that kind of behavior was and still is routinely ignored.

I think about Frank whenever I pass some of our downtown street people. I don't know their stories or how I they got to the place where they find themselves today. I didn't know Frank's story either, but I always treated him with respect and I work hard to suppress incipient judgement against these folks that I see downtown.