I don’t know what to do with myself. I write. It’s what I do when I don’t know what to do with myself. It’d be cool if it was like playing tennis. It’d be cool if it was like playing a flute, a guitar, piano. If you play tennis or flute or guitar or piano when you don’t know what to do with yourself you become better at tennis and flute, guitar, piano. Of course then you’d know what to do with yourself.
If I only wrote things that needed to be written, maybe it would be like playing tennis. Sometimes people work on their backhand all day though. When you write the same thing over and over all day people question your sanity. Unless you don’t show it to them. That’d be weird though. Filling pages of; All work and no play makes Jacks back-hand shitty, and then hiding the pages. That’d be weird.
I suppose in one very small respect that’s why I keep an online journal; because it’d be weird to write the things I do write and then hide them in a drawer. A closest too, a closest would be weird. Hiding them in someone else’s space would be weird too, unless you asked them. If they said you could hide your writing back hand in their place then some of the weirdness would be theirs too. If you got into an argument they would probably blame you for allowing them to assume some of your weirdness. They’d have a point. Not a very good one, but a point.
It’s better to know your weirdness than to have to guess about it. A person could be obsessed with guessing what made them weird. They could try asking other people. Other people would tell them “Asking me what makes you weird is your weirdness”. Although that might be true it’s not all true. You were weird before that, asking was curiosity. It’s a weird way to be curious, but it’s not the answer you were looking for. It’s like holding a gun to someone’s head and asking them why they are afraid of you. They’ll say it’s because you are holding a gun to their head. You might have meant why were they afraid of you before that. Or you might just be stupid. In the United States you don’t need to take an IQ test to own a gun.
See what I mean? I don’t know what to do with myself. My backhand sucks. I lost my tennis racket over thirty years ago. I used to play a game called sog ball. That’s when you play tennis in the pouring rain. What’s cool about sog ball is you can whack the shit out of a wet tennis ball and it won’t go over the fence. When I was a kid I played a lot of games where you whacked the shit out of a ball. In tennis you lose a point for whacking the ball over the fence. You lose fifteen points, but really it’s only one. In baseball you get a point for knocking it over the fence as long as it’s a fence in front of you and not one behind you.
Golf is sort of like that too. At the beginning of each hole, well, most of them, you want to whack the shit out of the ball, as long as it’s in the right direction it‘s good. In tennis it’s a really bouncy ball and it has to drop inside the lines. You can whack the shit out of it but it has to go downwards once it’s cleared the net. In sog ball you just whack the shit out of it. There’s more laughing in sog ball than regular tennis too. There isn’t much laughing in golf. Even if you make a really nice shot you aren’t supposed to laugh in tennis or golf. In football you can laugh and dance if you make a touchdown, but too much laughing and dancing and they give your whole team a fifteen yard penalty. You are allowed to laugh in hockey but you have to spit out a tooth. That’s why Canadians always make sure something is funny before laughing. I would let Canadians play sog ball with me. Usually you leave a game of sog ball with as many teeth as you started with no matter how much you laugh.
Tennis outfits are sexier than hockey outfits. You can wear whatever you’d like to play sog ball. You could even play sog field hockey if you wanted too. In regular hockey though you can whack the shit out of the puck so sog hockey is kind of redundant. Sog Backgammon would be silly, that’d just be playing backgammon in the rain. It would save you the trouble of asking people what your weirdness was. It’s not in the rules of backgammon but most people play backgammon indoors when it’s raining outside.
It’s sort of like writing. Most people assume that it’s going to happen indoors. That’s why they don’t have laptop umbrellas. I could make a lot of money designing a laptop umbrella if people preferred to write in the rain. Someone would have probably already invented one. I could make a lot of money inventing a wheel; they make cars roll much easier. Someone already invented the wheel, even before the car. Kind of makes you wonder what they were thinking though. “Hmmm, a round thing that rolls would be really cool.” That’s someone who didn’t need to ask what their weirdness was. I don’t know what that person’s name was, the person who invented the wheel. I bet you don’t either. We know the name of the guy(s) who invented the car (there are some different opinions about this, but none of them are that the guy was anonymous. Here in mid-Michigan there is a museum with a bunch of stuff from Henry Ford and from Thomas Edison. No one says Ford invented the car. He invented the assembly line. The thing is without the wheel the car would be pretty useless and the assembly line would be weird. Who’d want to make more noisy boxes that burned dead dinosaurs and just sat there? People would want a way of making less.
I did invent something today. I don’t think it will make me much money. Hmmm, maybe I invented it earlier this week. I mix key lime and coconut nicotine juices together and get a tart and nutty flavored smoke. I sing that one song too. No, not “I went down to the crossroads, took my rider by my side” Why would you think I’d sing that? You can stop asking people about your weirdness now too. No, I sing “You put de lime in de coconut and drink it all up; you put de lime in de coconut and call me in the morning”. I’m not saying it’s a better song than crossroads. I don’t think I’d like the flavor of crossroads smoke though. Jellyroll might be a good flavor smoke. Jellyroll as a jazz/blues term doesn’t mean the pastry though. It means fucking, to fuck, a fucker.
Most things in older jazz and blues don’t mean what they sound like. Most of it was code. Even though black people were set free from bondage they still weren’t treated very well. White people aren’t treated well either, but it was different. So the music that black people played and listened too had to hide things like “I don’t like get beat up and hung and cheated out of my pay” because saying that could get you beat up or hung or cheated out of your pay even if you weren’t in bondage. So they sang things like “My baby done me wrong, I hang my head and cry” which sometimes meant “If you try to hang me or cheat me I will cut you”.
Although people don’t get along any better now than they used to it’s for different reasons. So mostly if a blues song says “my baby done me wrong, I hang my head and cry” that’s what it means. Sort of. They don’t mean an infant. Infant are always doing you wrong. They pee and poop wherever they like and they puke on your shoulder and they cry while you are trying to sleep. It seems like people would want to hang babies or cheat them out of their pay, but they don’t. Babies don’t play the blues. They are kind of stupid and don’t even know how to speak for the first year or two, mostly their hands are too small to make chords on a guitar or a bass or a piano. It helps not to have teeth to play the harmonica, or the “Blues harp” as it’s sometimes called, but even if a baby puts the right end in their mouth and blows they aren’t very good and they don’t know any songs. Bob Dylan isn’t very good at playing the harmonica either, but he knows words and chords and, according to that one counting crows song, everybody loves him and, allegedly, that’s about as funky as you can be.
Funk is what jazz/blues is called when it has a lot more rhythm than it does melody. Funky sometimes means “smells bad”. Babies can be very funky. Puppies learn where to pee and poop and how to speak dog when they are very young. They learn how to walk and run while human babies still can’t hold up their own head or stop drooling. There are no blues song that go “My dog done me wrong, I hang my tail and cry”. It’s because dogs are good animals. Babies aren’t. Most of them don’t grow up to be very good either. A lot of dogs grow up to be good. Dogs don’t care what’s on the radio either; they are equally ok with jazz. Blues, rock, country, sitar, bongos, Thai elephants who randomly crash into percussive instruments hanging in trees. Most of you know what I’m talking about. It’s weird that Thai elephants crashing into percussive instruments tied in trees is not weird. I don’t think it would less weird if they were Indian or African elephants. If they were human babies the trees would have to be a lot shorter.
Ok. So, my backhand still sucks. Someone might read all this. It won’t be me, though; I might have to if someone leaves a note saying “Such in such is so much like so and so. Thank you, and do you remember that one thing?” Mostly that doesn’t happen. Mostly I get private notes professing love or lust or threatening my life. I kid. Mostly I’m ignored altogether, primarily by myself. If I had to read these things I write when I don’t know what to do with myself I would not write anywhere near as many of them.
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