Goodbye for now

I've decided to fast from the internet except for e-mail for an indeterminate amount of time. It has occurred to me that one can be far more honest in a private journal than a public one, and thus I'm going to get me some paper and a writing implement of some kind and try that for a while.

How long is a while? I'm guessing 2-12 months.

I'm also hoping that this will give me more time to work on the real aspects of my relationships rather than the virtual ones.

Dreaming of Work

Last night I dreamed I was working at the post office and we had this new program where we were delivering breakfast sandwiches in addition to the mail. Everyone was complaining about how dumb the new program was. Then the dream morphed and I was at McDonalds. McDonalds had this new program where they were selling a variety of new services. One poor fellow tried out a McDonald's haircut- with disastrous results.

This dream is a result of my anxiety over the security of the post office. I remember in the mid 90's telling my co-workers that it wouldn't surprise me at all if the post office folded in about 20 years. At that time, the stock reply was, "There will always be a post office." People aren't saying that any more. Now the stock answer is, "I think there will always be a post office, but it won't look like what it does today." What they mean is that the post office will morph into a package delivery service, or some such thing.

Like maybe a breakfast sandwich delivery service.

For my part, I think that this is just wishful thinking. People in the post office are used to having a very secure job. Congress will take care of us. The more likely scenario is that at some point Congress will simply legislate us out of existense.

Friday was really bad. At one point I walked past six houses without delivering a single letter. Where have all the letters gone?/ They've gone to e-mail, every one. What would I do if I lost my job tomorrow? I'm pushing 50 with no discernable skills except the ability to play piano arrangements of Barbara Streisand tunes during cocktail hour. Last time I checked, cocktail hour did not last 40 hours a week. Then I had the thought that I could at least substitute teach. This always gives me some comfort when I have such thoughts.

I'm actually 48 but I like "pushing 50" better. The reason is my level of tiredness. I'm much too tired to be "40 something" but perhaps tired enough to be "pushing 50." Nancy and I have discussions occasionally as to why I am so tired. Part of the problem is that I had such abundant energy when I was in my 30's. I could work 10 or 11 hours in the post office and then go play the piano for 3 or 4 hours, no prob. Or, if it weren't a gig night I could spend all night reading or computing or practicing or whatever. At any rate, I doubt I am more tired than the average 48 year old- it just looks bad by comparison to past achievements.

The main problem I think is a creepign depression about my work. It used to be that I came home from the post office feeling that I had actually done something. When you have a day like last Friday, when the bulk of the mail was J & B Dollar Stretchers, it can be pretty discouraging.

Be More Chill

I'm reading this book Be More Chill by Ned Vizzini. The New York Times book review describes it this way:

Vizzini anatomizes high school lust and social scheming without any condescending reassurance. If it weren't so funny, his first novel might be to painful to read.

Indeed.

The hero of Vizzini's novel is a high school kid who wants to be cool. I've wanted to be cool my whole life, and never have been. For years I thought the key to being cool was to have a rare talent. It is this this misconception that drives lots of schoolyard kids to eat bugs. Eating bugs without gagging is a rare talent after all. Too late the bugeaters realize that the cool kids have talents (or attributes) that are not only rare but desirable. When I was younger I would spend ridiculous amounts of time trying to acquire talents or attributes that I thought would make me cool amongst my peer group.

I was pretty happy in my old church with my level of coolness because I am able to play lots of Barbara Streisand and Barry Manilow stuff on the piano. My old church is so square that this ability was considered pretty cool. Then I changed churches. I'm just starting to realize that amongst my new peer group my musical abilities are considered rare, but more in a "did you see how many bugs that kid just ate" kind of way.

If I was younger I might immediately concentrate on my jazz skills. In my new church, piano playing is cool if you play jazz. But I'm too old and lazy or don't care enough about my coolness factor to do that right now- although I have considered buying a beret and a pack of cigarettes. I'll bet that learning to droop a cigarette out of your mouth at a nearly 90 degree angle to the ground is an easier skill to learn than learning to play jazz well. Then I'd at least look like an old jazz musician when I played the piano, and cigarettes are cool as long as you don't actually smoke them.

One reason I haven't learned how to play jazz well yet (actually I do cover some jazz stuff but in a very basic way) is that, very slowly, I have learned that real coolness has to do with not particularly caring if other people think you are cool. Neil Young is like that. Years ago I realized that amongst my peer group playing the guitar was considered cool- especially if you played an electric guitar. I was getting discouraged because after several months of playing I still was having trouble with bar chords (or barre chords as the cool guitarists call them). Lots of the songs I wanted to play used B minor, and I just couldn't switch to it fast enough. Then I saw the movie Rust Never Sleeps. Wow, was a revelation! Apparently either Neil Young couldn't play a bar chord either- or just didn't worry about it. He just draped his thumb over the fretboard to cover- get this- not just one string but two! That was wild stuff, man! Every guitar teacher I ever had said that this was uncool. Yet here was this very popular guy doing it and even making a movie about it! OK- not really about that- but it was very obvious nonetheless. He wasn't even trying to hide the fact that he wasn't a very cool guitarist. At one point in the movie he even played a guitar solo using just one note. Very uncool.

Many years later I came home one night after playing Melissa Manchester and Neil Diamond covers in the restaurant and my wife was watching the benefit that several musicians did after 9-11. I asked her who was in the lineup and she mentioned one guy that she didn't know, but who was very ugly and sang terribly. I had an idea who it was. And sure enough, there he was- my old hero Neil Young. He was moving uncontrollably to the beat of America The Beautiful.

That is so uncool, it's cool.

The One On The Right Is On The Left

There once was a musical troupe
A pickin' singin' folk group
They sang the mountain ballads
And the folk songs of our land

They were long on musical ability
Folks thought they would go far
But political incompatibility led to their downfall

Well, the one on the right was on the left
And the one in the middle was on the right
And the one on the left was in the middle
And the guy in the rear was a Methodist

This musical aggregation toured the entire nation
Singing the traditional ballads
And the folk songs of our land
They performed with great virtuosity
And soon they were the rage
But political animosity prevailed upon the stage

Well, the one on the right was on the left
And the one in the middle was on the right
And the one on the left was in the middle
And the guy in the rear burned his driver's license

Well the curtain had ascended
A hush fell on the crowd
As thousands there were gathered to hear
The folk songs of our land
But they took their politics seriously
And that night at the concert hall
As the audience watched deliriously
They had a free-for-all

Well, the one on the right was on the bottom
And the one in the middle was on the top
And the one on the left got a broken arm
And the guy in the rear, said, "Oh dear"

Now this should be a lesson if you plan to start a folk group
Don't go mixin' politics with the folk songs of our land
Just work on harmony and diction
Play your banjo well
And if you have political convictions keep them to yourself

Now, the one on the left works in a bank
And the one in the middle drives a truck
The one on the right's an all-night deejay
And the guy in the rear got drafted

- Johnny Cash

Yesterday I heard this song for the first time. You know what I love most about it? It comes from a time when everybody naturally understood that if you answer the question, "What are your politics?" by saying, "I'm a Methodist," then you are loony tunes. Loony tunes enough to think that burning your driver's licence is a political statement.

After enduring for years the Falwellite Heresy (as future generations may call it) I think we may have learned as a culture that it is loony tunes to think that the statement "I am a Christian" necessarily carries with it a certain well defined partisan political position.

But I may be

Saleing- takes me away to where I'm going

This monophonic microgroove recording cannot become obsolete. It has been carefully engineered to provide the finest monophonic performance from any phonograph- old or new, monophonic or stereophonic.

-From the cover notes to Sold Out by The Kingston Trio- ©1960

The vast majority of City Carrier positions in the Post Office have a rotating day-off schedule. For example- week one the carrier is off Monday, week two on Tuesday, etc. The system is set up so that the end of the week is Friday. So, once every six weeks a carrier is off Friday-Saturday-Sunday. (Of course, this is offset by coming back and working Monday through Saturday following the three day weekend.)

The past three days were my weekend off.

Nancy and I had already planned to spend a good chunk of this time yard saleing. She has been looking for end tables for our bed. Knowing I would have no interest whatsoever in this endeavor, she bribed me by pointing out a yard sale on W California that had a bunch of vinyl. Of course, I could not resist, and, yes, she found her endtables.

And they are, by the way, are very cool endtables.

The vinyl turned out to also produce a good haul, but what was equally cool was that the W California yard sale had a couple of bonus items in addition to the vinyl- specifically a set of computer speakers much nicer than our current ones for $1 and an old D. J. mixer for $3.

The catch on the mixer was that it didn't have the original power adapter and (of course) there was no guarantee that the thing worked. Hey, but isn't that worth taking a chance on? As it turned out- yes- although it was a bit of a hassle getting the power adapter. I ended up having to spend about $30 on various bits and pieces at Rat Shack as well as enduring the I-know-so-much-more-than-you attitude that seems to be a prerequisite for being an electronic retail clerks. God! I hate that so much! But at the end of the day for about $33 I have a perfectly operational D. J. mixer with two (count em'- two!) phono preamps that are much less noisy than the el cheapo preamp I had been using before.This, of course, is a great help to my ongoing project of transferring records which "cannot become obsolete" into digital format. It also has a handful of sound effects (snare, bomb, video gun, laser, phone, ufo) which, surprisingly, are not completely cheesy. I guess if I ever want to get into the D. J. business, I have a good start.

I've been giving a more than casual listen to The Kingston Trio as well as other banjoers because I have added to my other recreational endeavors learning to play the 4 string banjo. The impetus for this has been the ongoing project that Central Vineyard has undertaken (undertook?) at Bryden house. Teddy had the idea of doing old-timey music there, and since he already has the guitar part covered, it was up to me to find an old-timey kind of instrument to go along with it. I was really hoping to dig up a mandolin somewhere, as I actually have a bit of experience playingmandolins. But the best I was able to come up with was dad's old banjo:



An interesting C. V. connection to this banjo is that dad told me that he got it through Paul Robinson, who is the father of Amy Paxton. 'Course, dad is getting on, and his memory may not be completely accurate in this case. At any rate, this banjo was originally a 5-string Kalamazoo banjo- Kalamazoo being one of The Gibson company's pre-war second brands. I suppose it might actually be worth something if it had the original neck, but dad removed that to put a tenor neck on it. This is the reverse of the usual process, in which people take old tenor banjos and convert them to 5-strings to use for bluegrass.Does anybody actually still play a 4-string banjo? Apparently so! I found this page on the internet which gave me a lot of useful information. There is a slight chance after all that I will not totally embarrass myself at Bryden house.

What is a conservative?

The conventional definition of a political conservative is somebody who resists change- who wants to "conserve" something rather than see it change. For quite a while I thought that this was a bogus definition- or at least overly simplistic. Political conservatives after all often proclaim loudly that things are really bad and they need to change. But the more I think about the definition, the more sense it makes to me.

My pet definition for the past couple of years has been that a conservative is a person who thinks that the rich are good and the poor are evil. I ran this idea past a liberal I know at work and he scoffed at my idea. His personal opinion was that a conservative is a person that glorifies individual good over societal good. And I in turn scoffed at his idea. Then one day I was listening to one of those radio morning talk shows and they were talking about drug-addicted people. The host kept saying, "You just don't get it. If someone gets drug addicted, they have to take responsibility for their actions."

And it hit me what a conservative statement this was.

So I modified my co-worker's definition just a little to come up with this: a conservative is a person who emphasizes the importance of individual rights and responsibility over the importance of societal rights and responsibilities.

Yet another idea I found (when I asked the internet its opinion) is that a conservative is comfortable with contradiction while a liberal is not. I disagree with this.

I believe that the Bible has its own conservative/liberal divide known as "the law and the prophets." I was talking recently to somebody whose field is human development, and she told me that there are two basic concepts that we all learn. First of all we learn that there are rules that have to be followed (such as "don't play in the street" and "don't touch a hot stove"). Secondly we learn that there is something greater than our individual selves- whether we conceive of this in a spiritual way or a more naturalistic way, such as "community" or "country." The learning of rules parallels what the Bible calls "the law," while the larger than self realization parallels what the Bible calls "the prophets." "The prophets" is the liberal (or progressive or forward looking) arm of God.

The Prophetic does more than simply expand or reexplain the law. The Prophetic shows the law to be inadequate, redefines, and contradicts the law. For example, the prophetic says, "Sacrifices and burnt offerings You do not desire" although the law commands that they be made.

Of course, it makes sense to pair the prophetic with liberal. The prophetic (as it is normally thought of) is forward looking. Political liberalism opposes the value of conserving what is in the present and has been in the past, and therefore is also forward looking. This also explains why liberals can be so easily accused of having no plan other than to criticize conservatives. The future is always fuzzy and not easily defined in concrete terms- in other words- in terms of law. If it were, it would be subject to "the law" and fall in the realm of the conservative rather than the liberal.

"The Prophets" as it is understood in the Bible is not exactly comparable to liberalism as we understand the political concept. If one can define a pure conservative as one that always upholds existing rules, a pure liberal always seeks to overturn existing rules. Thus a liberal's behavior becomes just as predictable as the conservative's. This explains why people who commit to either political conservatism or liberalism seem so sure of themselves: both groups are dedicated to a logical system which makes no allowances for the possibility that their rules may not always apply. Most of us live in between- we understand that there are occasions where the rulebook must be thrown out in a way unpredictable by logical analysis.

Who needs an exercise program
When you carry mail for the post office?
Clintonville-you are my stairmaster