I used to make mix tapes with songs of days of the week, was always surprised there were as many as there were for Tuesday. No one Thanks God It’s Tuesday, no one lives for Tuesday Night, it’s never Drunk Cliché night at the local dive on a Tuesday (come as your favorite cliché and no cover, I like going as ‘Sure is a lot of weather we been having’). It’s not Human Day eve, no coffee mug has Garfield emboldened on it with a caption Argh, it’s Tuesday!
Yet there are songs. Only two immediately spring to mind, Ruby Tuesday and Tuesday Dead (Stones and Cat respectively). I’m sure I know more, I’m sure I even know some written within the last decade. I just remember Tuesday was never a problem.
Used to make mix tapes for the rain. Wait; hold up, it’s been a while since I made a tape. Mix-tape is like calling a collection of songs an album. No vinyl no magnetic tape, just a collection of songs burned onto a disc, and though it’s round and looks like an album the sound isn’t, how to put this, chronological. I mean a disc stores data differently. That’s neither here nor there though. I was thinking more of the language.
And yes I’ve made mix for the opposite sex, but never as a seduction or ‘please, please, please go out on a date with me’. You see that a lot in the movies. Someone is trying to tell someone else that’s a bad idea or a good one, the receiver sometimes gets all nebbish about what the tape means. In real life, or, rather, my real life which may not constitute a standard of any kind, the exchange of musical discs usually has to do with turning people on to music they might not have heard. It means someone, perhaps me if on the receiving end, is going to hate half the shit, be indifferent to a quarter and love the other quarter.
Did I mention I’ve made a lot of Rain mix tapes? You need multiple discs, even if the songs are all four MB mp3’s for rain discs. There are a lot of rain songs. It’s pretty cliché to drive around Portland blasting rain songs from your mighty mighty jeep. Still, people will flock to a B-movie if it’s over the top cheesey and campy, go far enough uncool and you are cool again. But, ultimately, who the fuck cares?
Out of all the worlds religions come and gone (some gone with extreme prejudice, wiped out by the bloody righteous) and certainly among the world’s atheists, no one has ever believed that being cool was going to get you into heaven. There wasn’t even a Happy Days, a show willing to go to great lengths to stay on the air, with a dream sequence of Fonzi going to some stylized heaven, snapping his fingers and opening the pearly gates. Even if cool got you in, they call a forty year old hanging out at a high school malt shop something more, um, venal than cool. Shit, where’d cool come from --- oh, music, mix tapes, rain, Portland. Yeah, I don’t. Portland was a cool town. In my weepy homesick entries I talk about beauty and nostalgia and other such shit, on a social level, if you discount the miscreants and malcontents (who were my stock and trade) people for the most part tried being cool which by its very definition cannot be standardized. It meant, for instance, if there was a fad, you needed to get in early and get out or start pshawing it immediately (I know, pshaw is archaic, that’s why it would be cool).
Granted I’m being general. It’s just a town nestled in a lush valley, with two grand majestic rivers running through it, fog and craggy hills on the western horizon and mountains to the north and east. South the valley spreads for a few hundred miles. Populace wise cool is one of the things my daughter spews when she’s so homesick she can taste it and is trying to convince herself it’s better here or, at least, off-setting qualities make it a wash. She says they are pretentious in Portland. In general, and certainly compared to here, oh hell yes. On one level pretentious and cool are synonyms. If you have enough charisma and are indifferent to other peoples reaction that’s cool, sans the charisma and any impurity in the indifference; that’s pretentious.
Yes, I know, I’m rambling. I’m avoiding one of the home invaders. It’s what my mother and I called the home health care people last time. Even to the point where I forgot there are two different groups. One has actual RN’s and PA’s and MDs. They are the pain in the asses but their visits are few and far between. The other and I think we couldn’t get their services without the pain in the asses, are do gooders, they are the Peace Corp of Home health care. If I were running a med school that’s where I’d have my interns going for private practice as general practitioners work. In the home under home conditions.
I’m not saying the people who do good are not qualified, their organization has certain limits when it comes to needles or administration of drugs. Yesterday I had a long talk with one from the helpful group, no, a conversation, a give and take, a listening and responding. Any of y’all old enough to log on to a computer know how uncommon that is with medical personal. They either talk at you or mumble to their charts and god knows we’ve all heard or been the guy yelling ‘My right Shoulder hurts Please don’t remove my left leg!” I mean not to that extreme, and I’m surely not calling all docs quacks, just that they talk and proceed with what they said they would. It’s not a conversation. You know it’s a good day when, post diagnostic, someone in a white coat asks you if it hurts there (whilst poking the there and pretending that your screaming disturbs them to the point of remorse).
Funny how much remorse means. Hell punishment from courts and clerics often hinge on the perceived or stated degree of remorse. If I felt compelled to become a Mel Brooks style director of farce there’d be a scene where an assembly line of judges and priests ran through guys in striped “prison” pajamas that ended with an absolution and the guy saying “Sorry, but tanks for the redemption Jesus bunny bawk bawk!” right before the axe fell. Hmmm good thing I’ve been banned from movies. Making them, I’m still allowed to watch as long as I “shut my motherfucking mouth” according to the judge and pope.
Shit I have remorse for things I haven’t even done yet. I have remorse for the next mix tape I’m going to make. Remorse is so much easier than regret. I mean sincere remorse and sincere regret. The insincere versions should be awfully dang similar as far as level of difficulty goes. And since clichés reared their ugly heads earlier and I have a thing about symmetry --- I’d rather regret the things I done than the things I didn’t have the courage to do.
Oh, hey, a half written flash I lost it on --- aren’t you lucky? Here tis and I’m out;
“Would you call yourself brave James?”
“No”
“A coward then?”
“No sir.”
“If you had to pick one …”
“Neither.”
“If I asked you to pick one?”
James smiled, it took time to train a shrink, “I’d say I had a healthy dose of caution mixed in with pervasive ignorance, so, brave I guess.”
The shrink scribbled something on his pad.
“Two effs in self-effacing, um three if it’s one word.”
Come on, James thought, say it out loud, say why the fuck would think I’d be writing self-effacing. Or raise an eyebrow and thank me or ask why I would assume something.
“What about girls?” the shrink said.
“I’m in favor of them.”
The shrink opened his mouth then closed it.
“Mom?”
“In favor of them too.”
The shrink took off his glasses. It was the seventh time in a half an hour. James knew he’d pinch between his brows, look at his glasses and put them back on. This time he didn’t. He put down his pen and leaned back in his chair.
“Twenty minutes.” He said.
“Sit com.”
“What?”
“Noun.”
“Oh. Funny. Twenty minutes what do you want to do.”
“To fuck someone’s cowardly mother sir.”
“If one comes in have at it. I’m done.”
“I’m cured.”
“I don’t know if you were broken, there’s a lot of shit I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure I’m done.”
James didn’t say anything.
“I make two hundred bucks an hour. I’ve been doing this for twenty years. I don’t need the money. I could retire right the fuck now. Walk down the hall stripping off the god damned trappings of the gig, be buck naked and free before the elevator hit the ground floor, might be a bit hard hailing a cab …” he looked out the window “… but it’s a nice day for a walk.”
“I don’t make shit being crazy, but I’ve seen shrinks pull the indifference card, the crazy card, the serious card, I’ve seen the whole deck from skinner to the Austrian.”
“Ok, so?”
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