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.

Talking Hoops

Talking to a co-worker / old city league basketball teammate ...... from the days when I was the old guy on the team and he was the youngish kid. 

Now I'm just 'the old guy' ....

And he's currently playing on an employer sponsored team where he's now assuming the role of the old guy on the team. And he's disgusted with all his younger teammates who just want to run to the three-point line and chuck up threes ....

And he's still of an old school mindset towards the game .....

And he's not too thrilled either by the leagues not keeping track of personal fouls on individuals. So a person can accumulate six or ten .... or twenty and the games can get a little overly rough on a fifty-five year old body .... 

(And we chuckle about this guy we used to play with who came from a football background and would tend to be in foul trouble two minutes into a game and how he'd have pounded away on people if they hadn't kept track of personal fouls in the old days and he had this no fouls tallied limit.)

And he tells me that I should be out there playing on their current team and I'm like: "Yeah right. A seventy year old man, toeing up to the three point line, trying to keep up with the way the game is played now."

And I can tell that he misses the days where as the 6'4" guy he'd post up three feet away from the basket and me with my wanna-be point guard mindset, would feed him the ball and he'd score at will over helpless shorter guys ....

But the game is not played that way anymore!!

And I always think about the time when we were teammates and he was absent on a random game night and my other friend, Steve B told me to get my ass down there and post up in that suddenly available three feet away from the basket spot and he fed me the ball and I was scoring at will over the helpless shorter guys to the total of 26 points just because with the one guy not present, there were a lot of shots in need of someone else taking.

Sunday Notes

Sunday notes of optimism, despair and wonder .....

• I'm thinking that my biological clock ..... my circadian rhythm is off. On workdays my alarm clock goes off at 5:45am. On this no work, no alarm Sunday, I wake up and inquire of Alexa the time..... "It's five forty-six am."
• I'm also thinking that turning seventy years old falls into that five stages of grief thing and I'm still in the denial stage.
• I'm getting really tired of all these commercials on both radio and tv for the upside app. Can't they, the upside app dorks, hear how tired their own little spiel is getting? .... "get cash back for the gas you're already buying anyway." .... repeated five or six times in each promo and a promo seemingly every fifteen minutes. If it was such a great deal, they wouldn't need all these ads. It's risen to my number one pet peeve status.

SuSu

I just stumbled across an obituary that an old friend from my earliest days working for the city, has passed away. The memories and flashbacks and sound of her voice are passing by tonight in a blur. I hadn't seen her in years and would wonder from time-to-time how she was doing. 

It's funny. When you're not around an old friend for the past twenty-five years, who for ten to fifteen years you were part of their circle almost daily, you just kind of assume that they stayed young. You don't realize ..... or it doesn't enter your mind, that they've been aging along with you. 

She was so full of life and a blast to be around. Rest in peace Susu.