More Notes From My Corner of the World

 Saturday notes from the weirder regions of my mind and daily experiences ....

• I share office space with someone who has a "positive cat" bobblehead on her desk. And I have extreme issues with excessive positivity, (especially from cats), so when she's away from her desk, and out of the corner of my eye I can't help but notice that thing is uncontrollably bobbing away, I've been rumored (allegedly) to use my index finger to obstruct and put a temporary stop to all positive bobblehead movement.
• I approach the treadmill with the thought: "Oh man, I really don't want to do this." But then once I get started, I don't want to stop. I'm like: "Keep going. Just ten more seconds ..... Just another tenth of a mile."
• It doesn't take much to get me thinking for five minutes that I'm a cool and hip dude. In this case all it took was replacing the battery in my bathroom scale and I'm suddenly feeling like the man who has everything.
• Walking around the out-of-town art fair and I come across these small clay sculptures. Here's two of the three that went home with me. Maybe I'll position them for a day directly across from the positive cat .....
  

Random Musings

 Notes and assorted random stuff ....

• I've been navigating the summer temps in long sleeve shirts because I'm embarrassed to show off my pale arms.
• Finding out each day that turning 70 years old is proving difficult to accept.
• A case of you snooze you lose. Saw an Archie Shepp record in the bins, went home to check it out, returned a day later having decided to purchase ...  and it was gone!!
• Is it weird to think that 3am is the best hour of the day? 
• I have a definite feeling that all these used vinyl records I've been discovering and buying at the bookstore came from the same collection .... and I want to meet the collector.
• Worked up a mighty sweat this evening doing 1.38 miles on the community treadmill. Feeling real progress being achieved the past few days. Even if my heart stops beating five minutes from now. T-shirt was like a throwback to a summer evening of basketball in a muggy 97-degree gym.

New Car

It's just strange seeing a new car in your driveway. Not sure how long it will take to feel like it's mine and that I'm not driving a rental or a stolen car. It's different from what I've driven before. More 'luxury' (if that's the proper word), than what I am accustomed to. And I can't help but wonder if I deserve a small slice of luxury? And there's a bit of a sense of loss present that comes with the absence of my old car. I mean, I was intending that day to drive it home to think about the potential purchase ..... and fifteen minutes later was transferring all my stuff to the new car. Maybe I should have kept it, but what reason would I ever have to drive it again? 

The Process

Went through one of the things I dread most in life .... the new car buying process. 

I decided a year ago that I was going to do this and a few months ago on what car I wanted.

Yet it took all that time to get to this point today where the process is completed and I'm thankful for the salesman being a little pushy and getting me through this process because had it been all left to me, I'd likely still be procrastinating for a few more days, weeks, months .... or even a year. 

And I didn't even mind the blowing smoke up my ass moment where the lady doing the paperwork told me that: "You'll be picking up girls all over town now with this car."

And not to sound morbid, I mean I am at an advanced age, but with a little luck this will be the last time I go through this process. Of course, I told myself the same thing after the previous adventure in new car buying. 

I seem to have established a pattern .... nine or ten years with a car and ready for change. Hopefully by the time I'm eighty though, we'll all be 'beaming up' to our destinations.  

This Weekend

Hoping that recent history repeats itself ..... Introduced online to a vinyl record that I now want in my collection. Hoping now to walk into the record store or antique shop and have it be the third album in the first bin that I flip through. 

This is the record. If any locals see it out there somewhere, please let me know. 😄 It's the kind of thing that I'd rather find 'in the wild' than just purchase online and wait for it to arrive. The level of excitement is different.

Driving down the road yesterday listening to NBA sports chatter on the radio when suddenly it's interrupted by one of those public service announcements for an extreme weather situation ..... a 'tornado warning.' Not exactly a common occurrence around here. Turned out that it was for twenty-five miles north but if the conditions were ripe that nearby, then there must be potential in the air here. At the very least it gets you to pay closer attention to the clouds and sky.

Make Music Salem

"Make Music Salem' took place today. I look forward to this event each year. I walked around downtown for a couple hours taking in the music and atmosphere. Would have liked to have made even more of a day of it but eventually I was done in by the first-day-of-summer warmth. I took home a haul of buttons and stickers .... because in the last five years I've become an absolute nerd for those kinds of things. Oh, and a free official event kazoo too .... a musical instrument that even I can manage.

I'm such a geek, even more so at age seventy .... and despite my introvert nature, didn't need to be encouraged twice to take one of each. There were two or three others not included here. 

I didn't know the guy featured in a couple of these stickers but from what I've read about him, seems like I would have greatly appreciated his community spirit and involvement. He was highly instrumental in getting this worldwide event off the ground locally a decade ago. Thank you, Mark.

Summer Solstice Weekend Notes

• I've reached a point in life where seemingly any sort of scheduled human interaction involving being in a certain place at an appointed time causes anxiety. This apparently includes the delivery of a new refrigerator. I'd almost rather continue life with the old noisy one than have to open the door and face people.
• Still torn .... Half the time I heartily embrace and am proud to admit to being 70 years old. And half the time I struggle with accepting it. Truth be told, maybe it's more like a 30/70 attitude split. 
• Too many adjustments happening right now. I dove in too deep this season. With the NBA playoffs just concluded, I wasn't prepared this time around for life without live basketball on television. I keep defaulting to: "I'll just turn on a game."

Yankee Odds and Blues

The Yankees leading 1-0 in the 6th inning and the starting pitcher with a pitch count of 92 so he won't be in much longer. The live game tracker on yahoo gives them a 77.6% chance of winning (In the time I typed that sentence, they gave up a run and now have a 57% chance of winning.

Where I was initially going though with the 77.6 number was that apparently, they don't factor in late inning bullpen performance with one run leads and three innings remaining to get through because if they did it would seemingly be something like a 8.3% chance of holding the lead and eventually winning. So I am overly confident that my Yankees will lose today.

Fear Factor

• There's nothing quite like the sense of sudden fear (if that's what it is) that washes over you when you walk out to the downtown spot where you think that you parked your car, and it's not there .....and then the relief felt when you look to the right and there it is. And on a day where I forgot to take my blood pressure meds until 11:00pm, I didn't need that sort of surprise.
• Received a promotion at work and I kind of want to tell the world and friends on facebook ..... but don't do so in order to avoid the usual 'maybe it's time to retire' comments that come out anytime I mention the w-word.  

Record For a Record

Saw something today that I've never seen before. In all my years of digging through bins and flipping through stacks of records, I've never come across a used (or new) record with a $360 price tag on it ..... and it wasn't a box set, .... it was a single record. Not behind the counter or displayed on the wall. It was right there in the common bins with the $8 and $10 records. (I bet they felt slighted.) Even with my senior discount applied, which I'm pretty sure I would have remembered to ask for, $324 would be far greater than the previous most expensive vinyl platter that I've ever come across. 

My heart damn near stopped beating for a few seconds today.

I was like: "Ooooh Ooooh!! .... until I saw the numbers to the right of the dollar sign.

And this was a used bookstore not an official record store. Since they started selling records a year or two ago, I haven't seen this sort of thing. But I think their vinyl buyer has discovered Discogs in the past month and is cross-referencing all the dead wax etchings. 

I'd go blind after reading five or ten of those. 

And now hours removed from the scene, I'm not even sure who the musician was. (It may have been Pharoah Sanders. It may have been Sonny Rollins.) They had several offerings from giant names in jazz on one of the elite jazz labels, 'Prestige', that hadn't been occupying space there previously. 

They had a $100 John Fahey record that I actually considered before walking away. 

I'm sure that todays $360 price sticker would be nothing in the eyes of some of the certified and verified freaks in the vinyl community, but it was a shocker to me. 

Hell, I'm embarrassed to admit that I spent $36 on a record today. 

And what if I did fall for it, made the purchase, got home and discovered that I already had it on cd?

The last time I experienced this level of shock was when I found 'Trace' by Son Volt for a quick glance $9.60 and took it to the checkout counter and heard, "That will be ninety-six dollars please." 

I used to think that my days on earth would likely end when I absent mindedly walked out into the street one day while looking east and got hit by a bus coming from the west, but now I think that sudden vinyl record price sticker shock is a heavy contender.