Other people's albums

Last night I came home from the bar (sounds so much better than I came home from work) and there, on my front doorstep, was a package from Texas. Since my birthday is coming up I figured it must be related to that event. I have always greeted packages from distant relatives with some trepidation because they don't really know what I need or my taste in things. For years I was punished with boxes of Hickory Farms meats for a remark I made to my brother many years before. I was simply passing along the comment Mother had made that Hickory Farms was bad for her blood pressure and after that he sent me Hickory Farms packages in the mail every year.

Now with my brother in the great engineering conference in Heaven, I have received some of his old albums. I guess I am the only one in the family who still can play those things. Some of them are not bad. I haven't heard "Cassius Love vs. Sonny Wilson" in forty years since I played my brother's copy of Shut Down Volume 2 when he was home from college.  You do wonder though about other people's taste. Why Ian an Sylvia? The From Russian with Love soundtrack? 18 Yellow Roses by Bobby Darin? What was he thinking?

Still I now have Peter Paul and Mary's Greatest hits and some classical things. You can tell by the amount of scratches in a record whether it was played or not.You can't say that about cd's. Now that it's almost December, it's time to sit around, crank up the old turntable, and play albums.

Editor's note: Speaking of turntables, I've found a new music related blog that isn't bad.

My insect friend

I attempt to grow something edible on my porch every summer and one of the unwelcome side effects of this hobby is that come fall, one of the tomato bugs always manages to sneak into the condo. When I first see my new roommate, I am always a bit startled, but I have learned to accept having a fall companion  for a few weeks. The insect seems to like some tv shows more than others. I know he always seems to appear when I am watching Turner Classic Movies.

As the days get colder he becomes slower and slower in his movements. Still, this year he did not die of natural causes. I guess I am not what you would call a morning person and he got me at the wrong time. I was in a hurry to get ready for work and was bolting down my coffee when I spotted him on my kitchen chair. I marched over to the bathroom and got some Green Works Natural bathroom cleaner and sprayed it on his backside.

The following Saturday I swept him up when I was cleaning the kitchen floor. He caught me when I was in a bad mood. Just goes to show you can't trust people.


Editor's note: Patti Smith on Lou Reed.

Of apples and cider

Yesterday I ate the best apple I have eaten in twenty years. It was a Winesap apple that I bought at the Capital City Farmer's Market in beautiful downtown Trenton. Hard, crisp, a little sour. How about them apples.

It made me a little nostalgic for when the family would take its annual jaunt up to Tice Farms. We would get into the Ford, and drive through Upper Saddle River while Mother would gawk at all the houses she couldn't afford to live in. Then we'd get to Tice Farms. I remember you could buy a cup for a dime and drink all the cider you wanted. Some years me and my brother would share a cup, which was frowned upon. Then the old man would buy Winesap and Macintosh apples, more cider and maybe a pumpkin.

Tice Farms is now long gone, a victim of Bergen County real estate speculators. Upper Saddle River is still there and even more expensive today.

My summer job

Just reading Amy Poehler's article in the New Yorker on her summer job. Cute. It reminded me of my summer job. I got a job with the Board of Ed. I had the lowly job, that first summer, of scraping gum out of desks. It sucked, but the pay wasn't that bad ($2.50 an hour). It took a political connection to get me the job. 

For years a man we will call Dick lived behind us in Hackensack. He liked to cut through my parent's driveway on the way to O'Neals tavern and he often stopped by and visited with dear old Dad. Years later my father admitted he never cared much for Dick but he put up with him for the sake of my summer job. 

The things my father did for his children. 

7:30 AM was starting time. That was the most painful part of the job I think. I was assigned to the high school, the same place from which I had just graduated. When I arrived, they looked my skinny frame up and down. I would not be helping carry sheet rock for the construction crew. I would not be carrying the boards to repair the seats in the football field. I was assigned to the janitresses (lady custodians), given a putty knife, and told that my job was to scrape gum out of the bottom of desks for all the desks in the school. One of the teachers recognized me and wanted to hijack me. He wanted me to take his car for inspection. He was told where to get off. 

I got along with the janitresses. I didn't fib on them when they snuck into the girls rooms for smokes. I kept to myself and my gum. I scraped a lot of gum out of desks that summer. The last two weeks I got to clean desks, and as a reward, go to help put the liquid finish on them. By Labor Day the desks were ready for a new group of scholars. And I was ready for college. 

In the Senatorial debates, Lonegan talked about how he, unlike Cory Booker, worked when he went to college. I guess I can run for Senate, if that is the requirement. 

Life without the federal government

Right now they are fighting the Second Civil War in Washington. The Republicans, led by the Tea Party, want to get rid of Obamacare and are willing to shut down the federal government to do it. Later in October they will try to block the debt ceiling so no American debts will be paid. They claim they want America to remain free while others want health insurance, food stamps,student aid, and other things a man should provide for himself.

It would be strange to imagine life without a federal government. Of course there would be state and municipal governments but they would lose federal funding so be able to do less things.

I do get a taste of life without government on the way to work every morning. Since Trenton can't afford police cars to monitor traffic, you do have a sense of freedom driving to work. You can drive whatever speed you like and go through red lights if that is your wish. What a burst of euphoria that creates.

Of course you can see a country where people plunder farms to eat and where justice comes at the hand of a gun. Free men, armed, walking around the streets, safe because of their skills with firearms. Churches happily feeding the poor. Doctors joyfully treating those with no money, like they did a hundred years ago. Oh to go back to those wonderful good olde days.  

Girls season 2

Ray and Adam and dog

Thanks to Netflix, I have now season 2 of Girls. The seasons are only ten shows long, but that's modern TV I suppose. Some of you may remember when I reviewed Season 1. Season 2 is actually quite good. In an unexpected shift, the men, at least some of them, seem to have matured into real characters, while the women have shown themselves to be needy and problematic. I would definitely say this was the season of the men.

Ever since watching last season my self esteem has suffered. I have always defined life through television situation comedies and most of them lately seem to show men as being either weak or as assholes.  Today, according to Girls, it's okay to be a man again. I feel so much better about myself now.

Traditionally, in old movies, the solution to the problem of what do single girls do when they get to New York has always been solved by marriage to well heeled men. Ginger Rogers lived in a crappy room for most of the movie but married Prince Charming in the end. Such conclusions were played with in Season 2. All of the leads in one way or another got involved with older, richer men and seemed happy for a while but things fell through in the end. In classic movieland they would have married and lived happily ever after. It would be funny if in the series finale, Girls ends with marriage to men with good careers, suburbs, and babies.

The Interstings

Similar in subject matter to Jonathon Franzen's Freedom but gentler and more fun, the Interestings is a book that describes a generation of privileged youngsters, slightly post boomer but pre Generation x that came of age in the 70's. It begins in a garden of Eden like summer camp and ends with the problems of middle age. It's a journey of forty years for a group of people who go through bohemianism, yuppie-ism, comparative poverty, parenthood, cult religion,  mental illness, disabled sons,  and disease. Sort of like us, but more privileged.  They lived in Manhattan while we lived in Hoboken and Denver. They had wealthy, hip parents who sent them to the artsy Camp in the Woods while we went to Boy Scout Camp. I can't imagine my parents sending me to the Camp in the Woods.

The characters in the novel also are touched by celebrity. Ethan becomes a famous animator and Jonah's mother is a famous folksinger (my guess is someone like Sandy Denny) and is given drugs by someone like Don MacLean.

As a friend once said about Thirty Something, "it's sort of true to life but the women are better looking." So many of us tried to join the interesting crowd when we were young and this is how one lady managed to get into and thrive amongst the interestings. This may well be the novel that people in centuries to come will use to teach students in Twentieth Century Culture about the lives of a certain class and generation of young, now middle aged Caucasians. Wonder what the movie will be like. 

Editor's note: When this blogger has nothing else to say, he may occasionally do a book review. We'll see how it goes.