Dummies Talking to Each Other

After my grandfather's funeral, I was standing at the cemetery waiting for a ride back down the hill. My younger brother had gotten ill halfway up and I had to carry him the rest of the way. There was a truck giving people rides back down and I was going to be on that truck one way or the other.

As I sat there waiting, two of my grandfather's brothers were nearby having a conversation. A third brother approached and by way of greeting said, "One dummy talking to another." My grandfather and his brothers were boisterous, fun-loving men. This was just a playful greeting, not intended to be taken seriously. I laughed and thought about how brothers are brothers no matter how old or young.

I've often thought of that greeting as I see people talking, especially if they are particularly dumb.

It's even more relevant now in the digital age. The internet, particularly social media, is full of dummies talking to each other, oftentimes passionately arguing over things about which they have little or no actual knowledge.

If people made an effort to think before they post, we'd have a lot less cyber noise. The problem is everyone has a soapbox. While some people use Facebook, Twitter and other social channels as a method for staying in touch and sharing news and photos about themselves and their families, others have decided that every two-bit cheesy photo with a dopey quote should be shared liberally. They seem to think every half-formed thought is worth sharing.

I'll admit to being guilty of trying to be funnier than I actually am and sharing way too many photos of my dogs. I do try to think about what I post before posting it. That's more than some people seem to do.

Parades

I don't know why I never noticed it before, but the holiday season is bookended by two parades: The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Rose Parade. Admittedly, the I've always paid less attention to the Rose Parade because it marks the end of something good, rather than the beginning. Still, it's always fun to check in and see some of the floats.

Macy's Parade has the benefit of being on Thanksgiving and ushering in the Christmas season. As a kid, I'd get so excited to see the giant Underdog float:

There's no need to fear!

The other float I always associate with the Macy's Parade was Snoopy:

If you can make to the end, the best part of the Macy's Parade is seeing Santa at the end. Of course, with DVRs now, it's way easier to watch the parade and skip the stuff that you don't care about. In my case, it's the endless Broadway numbers. I don't mind one or two, but it's enough already. 

So as I watch the Rose Parade today, I bid farewell to the 2012 Holiday Season. Happy New Year!

Beach

Lately, I've been really wanting to go the beach. We went last year and the year before to Avon, N.C. which is where we usually go with our friends and family. It's more fun to go with a group because there's always someone to talk to on the beach. Prior to that, it had been two years since we'd been there. But for some reason, all summer long, I've been thinking about going to the beach. I see cars loaded for a trip and assume that's where they're headed, especially if they have an OBX sticker on the window.

Growing up, beach trips were always the high point of my summers. Even though the Carolinas (where we usually went) weren't far away, it was always so exciting to watch the landscape change as we got closer to the coast. One of my earliest memories is being at Myrtle Beach, S.C. with my parents and my mom's cousin's family. I got salt water up my nose for possibly the first, but not the last time on that trip. I was probably three, maybe four years old. 

At some point, my dad decided that Myrtle Beach was too commercial. So he decided we would go instead to Holden Beach, N.C. about 50 miles north of Myrtle. Dad liked it because it was quiet, you could fish or be on the beach and not be surrounded by millions of people. The bad part part for me was there was nothing else to do. If it rained, there was not a shopping plaza nearby. There were no amusement parks. Nothing. Then one year, he picked a house with no TV. So I couldn't even pass the time that way. The next time we went there, we had a house with a TV at least, so that was good for nights and during times when we couldn't go out to the beach. Holden Beach is a small island and our house was on the Inland Waterway which cuts the island off from the mainland. We had a dock and a little private sand area where I spent hours chasing Fiddler Crabs. 

Meanwhile, Dad's sister had her own beach house in Myrtle Beach. You might think that would translate to our using it frequently or even sometimes. You would be wrong about that. I don't know if my parents felt awkward asking or if it simply wasn't available. Whatever the reason, we only visited twice. One time, we went down and found out there was a hurricane warning for the area. This was before the days of iPhone weather apps or live radar maps on the Internet. I don't know how much the weather forecast was looking at Myrtle Beach as the hurricane point, but we arrived on a Friday night. My mom got so worked up about the hurricane that by morning, she was practically in hysterics. It was already raining and she wanted to get the heck out of there. For some reason, Dad gave up and we left that morning. My brother and I were beyond disappointed. Our vacation had originally been planned for one week at the beach and one week visiting family in West Virginia. Given mom's mini breakdown, we spending the entire vacation in West Virginia. To add insult to injury, we saw a weather report on TV that confirmed the storm had indeed amounted to nothing and sunny skies were expected for the week.

The only good thing that came from our 24 hours at the beach was fireworks. In Virginia and West Virginia, you couldn't get real fireworks. But as a consolation prize for our aborted trip, my dad let us stop at one of the fireworks stores in South Carolina. This was unlike anyplace I'd ever seen at the time. It was like a massive supermarket filled with fireworks of every kind. I bought bottle rockets, Roman Candles and these little mini rockets called "Zizzz Birds." They were so named because of the "zizzzz" sound they made when they took off. We shot them all off in my grandmother's yard when we got to West Virginia. One of the Zizzz Birds took a strange turn and headed straight for the porch where the grownups were watching, much to all the kids' amusement. 

There was one other high point of that trip. As we were driving, Dad tuned to a radio station playing a Beatles retrospective with interviews and live clips. For a Beatle-head like me, it was close to heaven. We kept listening as long as the station's signal allowed. It was also on that trip that I heard the band Queen on the radio for the first time. It was Killer Queen and I thought it was beyond amazing.

The next time we went to the aunt's beach house, we went with our cousins. These weren't the cousins who owned the house. This was my dad's other sister. Their kids were the same age as me and Doug, except they had a third son who was doomed to be left our and/or picked on his entire childhood. I was super excited because hanging out with my cousin Steve was second only to Christmas and my birthday on my internal kid calendar. We planned all the cool stuff we were going to do without the nosy supervision of our parents. I spoiled it all by walking in front of a car on the street on the first day we got there. My uncle Edgar pulled me out of the way just in time, but Dad was so mad at me that I was grounded for the rest of the trip. This meant no bike ride expeditions through Myrtle Beach. No trips to the arcade or beach without adult supervision. Nothing. 

Meanwhile my stupid brother Doug and my older cousin Randy were permitted to come and go as the pleased. They tortured us with stories of their (likely invented) adventures around Myrtle Beach. 

Steve, Mark and I on one of our expeditions.
Note my hand full of Polaroids.

Steve and I were just starting to really notice girls and I had a new camera. We spent a lot of time trying to surreptitiously snap shots of the women sunbathing. Unfortunately, the camera was a Polaroid. It was one of those noisy ones which spit the picture out immediately and you could watch it develop, so there was no real way to be sneaky about it. I think I still have the photos somewhere too. If you squint, you might see a bikini.

Fifteen Guitarists

Fifteen guitarists that will always stick with you\\

The rules:  Don't take too long to think about it.  Fifteen guitarists that stick and maybe had something to do with how you play.  List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.  Tag fifteen friends, including me, because I'm interested in seeing what guitarists my friends choose. 

Mick Jones

John Lennon

George Harrison

Glenn Tilbrook

Jimi Hendrix

Pete Townshend

Stevie Ray Vaughan

Steve Jones

Neil Finn

Keith Richards

Davey Johnstone

Eric Clapton

Angus Young

Chuck Berry

Dale Garrard/George Carlston

Music Library A-Z

1. Go to your music library on your computer or music player, and put all of your songs in alphabetical order.

2. For each letter of the alphabet, list the first song that appears for that letter.  If you have no songs for a letter, list "none" or skip. 

A.T.H.F. (Aqua Teen Hunger Force) - Danger Doom

B-I-Bickey-Bi-Bo-Bo-Go - Jeff Beck and the Big Town Playboys

C Moon - Paul McCartney & Wings

D'yer Mak'er - Led Zeppelin

E Too D - The Small Faces

F-Hole - Squeeze

G-Song - Supergrass

Hackensack - Fountains of Wayne

I - Petra Haden

Jack Champagne - The Muffs

K.C. Moan - Memphis Jug Band

L.A. Woman - The Doors

M.O.R. - Blur

N.I.B. - Black Sabbath

O Girlfriend - Weezer

P.S. I Love You - The Beatles

Quadrophenia - The Who

Rabbit, The Bat & The Reindeer - Dr. Dog

S.O.F.T. Elastica

T.N.T. - AC/DC

Ubangi Stomp - Warren Smith

V. Thirteen - Big Audio Dynamite

Wack M.C.'s - Del Tha Funkee Homosapien

X - none

Ya Ya - John Lennon

Zak and Sara - Ben Folds

Dog Strategies III

I have a dog who is a little too smart for his own good (or mine). I've written before here and then again here about how he works out sneaky ways to get toys and bones away from his sister. Now he's trying to pull a fast one on us. One of his bad habits is eating tissues. He'll get them any way he can. He's smart enough to know he isn't allowed to do this, so like any addict, he's modified his tactics in order to get his fix. When he finds a tissue he either tries to grab two or he tears the one he does find in half. Then he keeps one tissue in his mouth hidden, and allows the other one to be visible.

On two separate occasions, we have caught him with a tissue and told him to spit it out ("leave it!" is our command for this) which he dutifully does. After I disposed of the first tissue, I noticed he had a second one he was just finishing up. He pulled the same con on Shauna today. I don't know whether to be annoyed or proud. :-)

Riding on a bus

Before I was old enough to drive, I took the bus everywhere. We lived in a little country town called Sissonville in southern West Virginia. The big town was Charleston, about 15 or so minutes away. My parents had a print shop and were usually in town. So in the summer, I was either going to be stranded or I could take the bus into Charleston.

Because I had a kind of base of operations in the guise of my parents' print shop, I felt pretty comfortable going downtown by myself. I had a summer bus pass so I could ride up and back as much as I wanted.

When I rode the bus into town, I spent a lot of time in the library. The main branch of the Kanawha County Public Library in downtown Charleston is a huge stone building. From the outside, it looks like a courthouse or museum. It’s just a magnificent old structure. I would spend hours reading books of all different types. I think there were three or four floors worth of books there. In the summer it was always cool and quiet.

Next to the library was a little nook with a tobacco shop, a tailor and a place called the Arcade News and Book store. It was a neat little place that had an entire wall full of magazines as well as a great selection of books.

Of course in those days, downtown Charleston was a thriving place with four department stores (Montgomery Ward, Sears, JC Penney and Stone & Thomas) and a lot of other shops so there were plenty of options if I got tired of books. There were a couple of record stores, one of which was called Budget Tapes & Records. They had a great music selection and a lot of drug paraphernalia, which was lost on me as a younger person. There also were at least two “real” movie theaters rather than the multiplexes they have now. These were the kind with big marquees and balconies.

It felt like a lot of freedom to walk around town unaccompanied, going wherever I wanted back then. I loved it, despite being periodically accosted by strange men trying to sell me pot.

The bus, though not as convenient as driving, was the next best thing to having a car for someone as young as I was. I continued to use it regularly up until I got my license. One of my favorite high school memories took place on a bus ride between Sissonville and Charleston.

I was in 10^th grade and was part of our school’s production of Fiddler on the Roof. One of the girls playing one of the main female roles was a senior named Tonja. I didn’t know her very well. Most of the lead parts were filled by people in the choir, of which I was a member, so I knew those kids. She wasn't in the choir, despite having an absolutely beautiful voice. The play was a joint effort between the choir director and the drama teacher, so there was bound to be some political maneuvering involved. I seem to recall the drama teacher being annoyed with so many choir people getting the big parts, despite the fact that in our small school there was a significant cross over between the two groups. Tonja was in the drama club and was a fantastic singer, so she made the cut.

During all the rehearsals and after school time, we kind of got to know each another. I had a minor role. My character had a name, Avrum the Bookseller, but only one or two lines. Mostly I served to fill out the crowd and chorus scenes. So I had a lot of time to socialize and hang around with my fellow cast members which was how I got to know her.

Before I knew what was going on, I developed a huge crush on her. Because she was a senior and I was a sophomore with absolutely no game, I never made a move. After all, what would she want with a lowly sophomore anyway? Nevertheless, I pined from afar and enjoyed our times talking and laughing at rehearsal and occasionally before school and at lunchtime.

One day, I was on the bus headed for town and was thinking about her. I knew approximately where she lived and knew that it was on the bus route, but not the exact location. I was kind of daydreaming about her thinking how cool it would be if she rode the bus, but realizing that a girl of 18 was bound to have a driver’s license.

The brakes hissed as the bus pulled to a stop to admit another passenger. I looked up just in time to see Tonja board. She wore the expression everyone has when they get on the bus with a bunch of strangers: Kind of a desperate searching for a place that isn’t (a) next to a weirdo and (b) not too far in the back, where most weirdos like to gather.

Funnily enough, I was sitting in the back alone, sans weirdos unless you count me. When she spotted me, I caught the flash of recognition as I waved tentatively to her. Then the biggest smile I had ever seen spread across her face. She came to the back and sat with me for the rest of the ride into town.

I wish I could remember what we talked about, but it’s lost to me now. What I do recall is that for me, the bus was the best place in the world that afternoon.