Avoidance Activity

It’s a love profusion. Not from me, but Madonna. It’s the current tune playing in the iTune’s random selection list.

It’s been awhile since I've added to this blog. As I once pointed out, the intent of this blog was to provide exercise for the writing muscle.

The writing muscle. It almost sounds dirty; a dangling piece of flesh usually found in a dusty chamber located someplace between the ears. Mine has atrophied to the point where it has become a collection of disjointed sentences held together by commas. My purpose here today – to once again set it right.

“Isn’t Life Strange?” said the poet. Or was it the Moody Blues? My daughter has stolen my guitar from my hands. She attempts to pick a Link Wray classic tune (actually I think there is only one Link Wray classic. The rest are pretty much the same thing.) The song: The Rumble.

A Line in the Sand

When I say a line in the sand I actually mean sidewalk. And when I say sidewalk I actually mean a buckled piece of concrete poised to kill. In my defense it was dark when this incident occurred.

We were rushing to catch our train home. We had just exited the sold-out Paul McCartney concert. In fact, to beat the crowd we left three songs before the end of the show.

WHAT! Are you crazy? Leave before the end at what was one of the most amazing shows I’ve ever been to? (And I’ve been to at least one other amazing show!) I'd have to be nuts. I'm kidding. Of course we stayed until "The End". 

It’s hard to believe that some of the songs McCartney sang go back 50 years. I remember them like they were Yesterday (pun intended, and yes, he sang that too).So many of his songs  immediately bring to mind specific moments in my life. Hearing them presented in this way, well any context really, carries me back to those moments, with all the sights and smells of the time. In at least one sense McCartney’s music illustrates why a time machine could be a very bad idea. If I can be emotionally whelmed by just revisiting the memory of some long ago event triggered by a familiar song, I’d probably explode if transported back to the original event. (Important note: Grown men are not overwhelmed. It’s dust, not tears.)

Sir Paul is 71 years old and there are those who say that he’s lost some voice. No way, I say. Watch the 1980 film, “Rockshow”. It is a film of the last Wings concert of a very long tour. It was filmed in Seattle in (I think) 1976. Then grab some You Tube clips of his 2013 shows. His voice is at least as good as ever. To hear him sing “Maybe I’m Amazed”, “Hey Jude”, “Live and Let Die”, and especially when ripping into “Long Tall Sally”, and “Helter Skelter” and all within a non-stop three-hour show, all I can say is wow! When I'm 71 I'll be pleased to be able to go to a 2 hour movie and stay awake!

But back to the line in the sand as I originally called it, the line that was actually a break in a buckled sidewalk. We were rushing from the concert to our train when I hooked into a bit of concrete with the front of a my sandal and my big toe. I fell forward like a ballerina who’d been addicted to Big Macs for a long, long time. I like to that I fell with style, but maybe not so much. I landed on a forearm and thumb sliding a bit before coming to a full stop.

The funny thing about latching on to a piece of the sidewalk with your big toe while your propelling yourself forward at significant speed is. . . well there is no funny thing. It hurts like hell. When feet are driven into concrete, even with great force, concrete wins every time. Luckily, I was able to avoid any broken bones.  

Now that I’ve relived these horrible moments it occurs to me that the concrete protrusion was at least 6 inches if it was a 1/4 inch. I should sue the city! At the very least I should recover the cost of my ruined jeans. But I will NOT sue the city. It would mean having to admit that, at times, I don’t always listen to my wife who did say, “   “. (Well, I don’t know what she said, it was a large and noisy – in a joyous way - crowd.  She assures me however that she did try to warn me.)

The Death of Reading Re-Visited

Last time I wrote about reading I said that I was not finding Ray Bradbury very interesting. I was reading, among other things, “The Martian Chronicles.” I wonder if, perhaps, part of my problem with Bradbury is my inability to suspend disbelief about the possibility of life on Mars. It’s no longer the distant red planet with changing seasons, ice caps, canals, and all sorts of possibilities like it was when the Chronicles first appeared. It’s a rock with no more than a wisp of atmosphere. I still hold out hope for a “Total Recall”-like possibility, or, at the very least that some little critter or person will walk up to the Rover, peer into the lens and smile. If he/she/it should then open its mouth and chew the Rover apart with its powerful jaws, well, that would be disheartening but it would be something.

With all this talk of Bradbury, Mars, and “Total Recall” there is probably a general assumption that I’m some sort of geek and lifelong Star Trek fan. Well, maybe somewhat. When Star Trek first came on I was barely out of diapers – at least mentally, in dog years I guess I had been about 71 years out of diapers. In any event when I was a small boy, “My Favorite Martian” was one of my favorite television shows. This was followed by “Lost in Space” the ever so realistic adventures of the Robinson family and Dr. Smith. However, I can admit to a slight burgeoning-adolescent driven perspective shift that drove me to Star Trek, but not for the science fiction. 

At some point I had begun noticing that the women on Star Trek wore fewer clothes than on any other show on television – except maybe the Dean Martin Hour.  In what turned out to be a strange twist of good fortune we only had a black and white television. I had no idea that most of the women of Star Trek were blue or green.

As to book books, I’m currently reading World War Z.  I haven’t seen the movie but I suspect it is nothing like the book. I want to see it anyway.

And speaking of bad movies I’d like to see. I think I would also like to see Will Smith’s “After Earth”. I’m hedging a little only because it could also be called M.Night Shyamalan’s “After Earth”. M. Night hasn’t had a good track record lately.

I’m somewhat convinced that Shyamalan doesn’t really know what to do with more than two people in any scene. His best films, “The Sixth Sense” and “Unbreakable” have few, if any, scenes with more than two characters. In some films it appears that any third actor in a scene seldom moves, almost as if glued to the spot.

Still, even in the bad films there is a Shyamalan touch that works well. “After Earth”, appears to have only two characters throughout most of the film. This could be a very good Shyamalan movie.

And the last song on the iTunes playlist: (Yes, my guitar has been returned to its proper place) is, appropriately enough “Lullaby (Goodnight My Angel)” by Billy Joel.