The brevity of my posts the last few days are a pretty good indication of where my head is. It’s not terrible, but I can see it from here.
Some people see the glass half full. Others see it half empty. I resent the fact you’re bothering me about how much liquid there is in a glass. If you can’t figure out out I don’t know why it’s my problem.
Here a cute picture of Mia and some stuffed animals that one of the cats dragged out. It might have been her, but they’ve all played with them enough that they’re all suspects. Every day she takes over just a little more and I love it. She’s a bright spot. The fact that I can still see bright spots is a good thing.
I spent a lot of the day trying to install a new radio into Carla’s car. It all seemed to be going smoothly until I hit the point where I powered it on. Nothing. Probably a bad connection in the wiring harness. Redo tomorrow.
Surprisingly little cussing.
Man card renewal pending.
(Truth be told I can think of more than a few women I know who would have gotten this done in one try. So consider my tongue firmly in cheek.)
I’ve never been anything resembling a morning person. I find more and more now that if I don’t get started on what I really need to get done in the morning it doesn’t get done. As the day goes on it’s like my head fills with cotton.
What I’m trying to say is that I had several things I wanted to do today and I didn’t get any of them done One of them was the post about the great brisket cook.
Here’s a nice picture of s sunrise I should reacquaint myself with these things.
It’s my birthday, so I’m not going to write a bunch. It’s been a very nice one. I’ll write up the particulars tomorrow, but for the moment believe me when I say the brisket was worth the effort.
I’m taking the rest of the day off. Except for burping.
It was Christmas break 1981. I was home from my first semester of college. I got a call from the box office of the Houston Summit where I worked part-time as a ticket seller, but usually only in the summer. The manager, whose name escapes me now, explained that it was a little half-house show and given how close it was to Christmas it was a little tough to get anyone to come in. I was on the list to work the Willie Nelson New Year’s Eve show, so she knew I was in town and figured I’d like to get another night in. And she was right.
I loved working the Summit Box Office. I’d gotten on there because a lot of the folks from the Astrodome Ticket Office also worked up there and they always needed sellers for the Ringling Brothers Circus every year. It was a fun bunch. It’s where I learned that the plexiglass on the front of a ticket booth isn’t to protect the seller from the public, it’s to protect the public from the seller. I will never forget as long as I live the night one of my co-workers — a very experienced guy — completely lost it with a customer and went up on the counter. We had to pull him off the top and drag him back. He was reaching up under the plexiglass screaming he was going to kill the guy. The hardest part? Not cracking up laughing as we were doing it. He was to the left of me. The guy two windows down never stopped selling. It was spectacular. It was also a couple of years after my current story.
So I get down there and buzzed into the office to get my drawer checked out. I passed a bunch of kids coming in and it was quite the fashion show. It wasn’t punk, really, but there was a lot of hair gel propping up structures that physics wouldn’t normally allow. It was a very androgynous. Somewhere along the line I picked up that the act was a “he.”
“Who is this guy?” I ask Rob, the assistant manager as I was checking out my drawer.
“I don’t know. Some guy named Prince.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, I never heard of him. Seems to be popular, though.”
Since it was only a half-house show we only opened one side of the box office. It wasn’t super busy. The kids came up, pushed their money over the counter and went on their way. There was a lot of time to make cracks about some of the outfits we saw. I was just out of high school myself, but what struck me was how young these kids coming to the show were.
There was a monitor in the main part of the office that showed what was being projected on the scoreboard in the arena. Right around the time the show was supposed to start the manager came out to put out the promoter return tickets. I doubt it’s still this way, but in those days it wasn’t a bad strategy to walk into a show right at showtime and get a ticket. If you got the right window there was a good chance that you’d get a ticket that the promoter didn’t give away for whatever reason. That’s one of the things that went away when Ticketmaster took over. Anyway, the show was just kicking off and she made a comment about how elaborate the stage was for a half-house show. As the first set went on we heard the sound on the monitor being turned up. Windows were being closed one at a time, but I could hear through the door that no one was leaving.
When I finally closed up about a half hour in I saw what all the commotion was about. The stage was packed with gear and people. The music was intense and full of energy. The backdrop behind the stage was backlit and there was a multilevel catwalk silhouetted against it. In the middle of it all there was this tiny guy with hair a lot like what we’d been seeing in the crowd all night. He was everywhere. He’d moved like a jungle cat. The guitar seemed to be nothing more than another appendage. He’d play it, then sling it around and walk to some keyboards that someone else was playing. They’d vacate and he’d take over without missing a beat. Then he’d go running up onto the catwalk. He’d disappear behind the backdrop and the backlights would come up. There would be silhouettes of women and men with him and there would be these sexually-charged dances that were utterly mesmerizing. He must have worn layers of costumes because there were times it appeared he’d discarded all his clothing, but when he popped out from behind the backdrop he was fully dressed. Well, mostly anyway. More than you thought he’d be. If I could use only one word it would be ‘kinetic.’ If I could use another I woudn’t and I’d just say ‘kinetic’ again.
A bunch of us wound up going up and watching a lot more of the show. I didn’t stay to the end because I hadn’t really wanted to work too late. I don’t really regret it because by the time I left my brain was pretty much overloaded. I knew at the time I’d seen something special. I have never seen a show anything like it since.
I’m actually doing a good bit better today. The downside is that I need to spend some time getting some writing done that I’d promised before the happy part of my brain went on walkabout. So here’s more funk, but the good kind.
It appears I have a sprained right wrist with a sprained middle finger as an added bonus. Nothing to say worth reading. Here’s a nice picture of Dunkel.
So my plan was to write a blog post about how I’m doing better. After I posted yesterday’s entry. It was going to be a nice post that talked about how I got to do something yesterday that I’d always wanted to do. And it was completely unexpected. When I posted yesterday’s entry I was at Cincinnati State because we’re a one-car family until this weekend and I needed to take Carla into work. For whatever reason traffic was hell leaving, so we came home via the Anderson Ferry. I always love taking the ferry, but they were running the little ferry yesterday. It’s called Boone No. 7 and I’ve wanted to ride it for years. It’s old and it doesn’t carry that many cars, so I figured there was no chance. They typically have two modern ferries running, but for whatever reason they were running Boone No. 7 yesterday. Maybe the other modern ferry is down for maintenance or something. Anyway, it timed out right and we got to ride the old one. It was cool. If WordPress doesn’t completely botch it, this is a picture:
Today I smoked a small underblade chuck roast. I want to make sure I have my SmoBoT mojo down for a brisket I want to do soon. I do.
So every thing is cool, right? Nope. Because any gains made today have been completely erased because WordPress pushed out an update that has apparently completely hosed my ability to do a post via iOS using images. This post? I’ve been working on it for more than two hours.
I need to avoid frustration when this is going on. Thanks WordPress. You completely fucked that up. I got a post up today despite you. I’m just going to hit ‘publish’ and hope something happens.
UPDATE FOR NERDS: I had to increase the max_execution_time in php.ini to 120 (from 30). Don’t know if the issue has to do with the WP4.5 update or something that changed on my hosting side. Either way it’s fixed now.
The best thing for me at the moment is to not think too much. There may not be a lot of evidence that what I write actually requires thought, but there is some. I don’t know how long this is going to last. I never do. I could get up tomorrow and everything could be peachy. There’s just no way to know.
So no apologies for a short post. It’s the best way to go now.
I’ve mentioned before that I know things are getting bad when nearly everything that happens frustrates me. This cartoon sums up a lot of how I’m feeling about the election. I just want to get through the KY primary and vote for Bernie. Then I really could’t give a crap what happens. There isn’t an option I like. It’s just bad and worse.
Just trying not to think too much about it. Or anything, really.
