Top 100

   Got on the ol' internet last night and explored the musical offerings. "Why not see what's out there?" I asked myself. "It's been awhile".
    Settled on a 'Billboard Top 100' songs (of 2018) You Tube playlist. Now whether this was the actual list compiled by Billboard magazine or something that a guy put together in his garage and posted on You Tube was questionable. You can't be sure anymore and it looked legit so what the heck I dived in. 
    Well......
    Somebody thought these were the top 100 songs but it certainly wasn't me. I was astounded at how utterly bland and repetitious just ten of them were and dreaded listening further. I tried to imagine myself duty-bound, like a guy sentenced to community service or something, in order to muster up the will to push through to the end but I could not find it in me to try and go all the way. 
   The first ten I viewed featured the likes of Drake, Ariana Grande, and some others who I can't remember the names of. Please don't think I'm some old fogey dissin' modern day music and pining for the old days because, brother, music is either listenable or it's not. Visual video fluff might dazzle you, and slick instrumental and voice (re)production might be a sign o' the times, but as far as bein' ear candy, this stuff is not. 
      I wanna plead with the young people that they're being duped and to turn away from this, because most of it is junk. But what the hell do I know? You oughta see the views these videos are compiling!

Now I know the 'artists' out there don't want to hear that their product is shoddy. They probably could care less because they're makin' bank on their ‘music’ and just like at any business, whether they put out good product or not, as long as people keep buying the stuff they'll make more of it. The music industry used to have quality control but man, those days are gone and now the masses are being fed some serious cattle fodder. 
There's good stuff out there somewhere but it's daunting to have to plow through tons of material to find it. A lot of the videos I watched and listened to had handsome lads and lithe ladies, the men were smooth crooners and the women songbirds, Ariana Grande seemed to be a nice person and Drake as well (he was handing out wads of cash in “God’s Plan”, bless him for that), but if I was blind and just listening to this I would be suffering. Young uns', it wasn't always this way!
There used to be mainly good stuff out there as a rule, and the bad stuff was kept on a shelf a fair distance away away from whatever device might be able to broadcast it. Safeguards were in place. They called that shelved kind of music 'B sides' and late night DJ's would only play it at two or three a.m.. 
Why did they do that? Advertisers! Audience! People listened to the radio because that's where the music came from and if it wasn't good, they'd turn to the next station or turn the damn thing off. But the system doesn't work like that anymore. You are now the filter, saddled with that onerous role, one in which you are asked to give the artist a thumbs up or down, a ranking, a 'like', or to subscribe to their feed, and man, that is work! Who wants to work at listening to music?

To be fair, and to silence any critics who say I haven't tried, I have tried. I've gotten on Spotify, searched You Tube, perused Pandora, and scanned the playlist of the best local (and very eclectic) radio station in town. In addition to that, I have tried in many other ways to seek out good music with the intention of restoring and refreshing my playlist but how much torment can a man stand? Song after bad song I suffered through the last time I went all the way through a top 100 list, thinking that at least ten of them might be good (I set my sights very low) and then at the end of that excruciating ordeal, none of the songs were deemed to be sufficiently satisfying enough to be worthy of being listened to again! (As far as building a playlist with marginal material, I have tried that before and have rued making that decision). Going all the way through that last ‘Top 100’ playlist and coming up dry was traumatizing and made me extraordinarily hesitant to attempt to (ha!) do what used to bring a great deal of joy to me, which was to spend hours filtering through albums and tapes and CD's.

Like a gold mine, coming across this (except for Feliciano!)

Joseph Pearson- Unsplash.com

    Maybe I just don't get it. Maybe I don't like the beat, rhythm structure, lyrics, or the voices that make up the peculiar flavor of modern music. But if that's so, how can I listen to Classical, Jazz, Funk, Rock, Pop, and Reggae stations on the radio and damn if not every song but every tenth or fifteenth song is good? 
  DJ's have saved me from having to filter, that's why! They have gone through the filtering process to the best of their ability and are presenting me with a playlist that they think is good, or good enough. It's a dirty job but somebody has to do it, they have to have a passion for music driving them because, music lover that I am, I have found that I’m just not up for that degree of sifting.  
You know, in some ways the internet has been a godsend. When it comes to doing research, finding out information on how to fix your make and model of car’s door handle, or checking out new recipes for a Keto diet, internet sites are invaluable but in other ways the portal has backslid on us and saddled us with unwanted and time consuming tasks. Seems that many times when I initiate a project on the internet and am using a new app or program that is proclaimed to be 'intuitive' and 'user friendly' it ends up being more painstaking an endeavor than building a highly detailed scale model of the H.M.S. Agincourt, complete with sails and rigging. 
   Music sifting is just one glaring example of this sort of backsliding. I'm frustrated as hell about it. But what comes to mind in dealing with this issue is an old Chinese saying:
  "Give a difficult job to a lazy man and he'll find an easier way to do it"

I’m that lazy man and I will find a way, because I can listen to my top 100 songs for only so long!

10/10 Again

I'm only going to write about this once.
I think.
10/10 was the birth day and month of one of my childhood friends, and yes, I was following astrology even then. Anybody remember Sydney Omarr? He was good. 
My Libra childhood friend and I hung out a lot with my other dysfunctional childhood friend, who I wrote about earlier. We never called each other by our real names, only by nicknames. My Libra friend's nickname was a name I clearly remember because it was a funny one. I can't repeat it here because I use it as a password. 
So let's call him Trippalicious, or 'Tripp', for short. 

October

Adrian Curiel- Unsplash.com

Tripp was a natural-born Fonzie, he was the coolest guy in the 'hood. I always enjoyed the times we hung out together, but those times weren't regular. It wasn't like you could call him and he would answer, or you could show up at his house. Ever. No, Tripp just appeared. 
He would show up and whenever he did the day had an almost magical quality around it, indeed it became a special day, because Tripp was part of it. He was liable to disappear as quickly as you could snap your fingers sometimes so you never knew how long he was going to stick around and be part of the scene. I never could figure the guy's M.O. out, where he was called to and what he did whenever he wasn't around. It was like the guy had a need to vanish. 
He might be gone for days on end then reappear as if nothing had happened. Girls really dug him and most guys thought him super cool, though he had his share of detractors. Jealous, they probably were. Tripp had an aura of mysterious just oozing from him, which is a quality impossible to imitate. Charisma, they call it. 

  One sunny Junior High or early High School afternoon, I can't remember specifically, me, Tripp, and my other dysfunctional friend were skipping school and hiding in a grove of pine trees. We were just hanging out, but on the verge of doing something that might get us in trouble, for there was always the hint of that when we got together. I remembered exactly where I knew Tripp from before right then, for I had been feeling a perplexing and persistent familiarity with him ever since we had first met. Due to some hand gestures he was making, or the lighting, or the forest setting we were in, I suddenly recalled that we had been dandies in Europe in the late 1920's. We had been rather splendid and monied fellows, but not gay- no way. A definite dose of double trouble for the ladies. Germany/Belgium/Copenhagen was the general area. 
Now I don't go around in life and have this sort of recognition happening with every person I meet so I know the difference, I know how it feels. With Tripp it was definite. I knew that I had known him before, and this event happened when I was a teen. Isn't that sort of miraculous?
  I think so. But even more miraculous than that was knowing, in a otherworldly juxtaposition of space/time, that we had been placed together again in a different time, with highly different parents, and not at all in anything approaching a highly urbane cosmopolitan setting. Tripp didn't get this, or maybe he did. Either way he wouldn't have talked about it. He wasn't the kind to spill the beans. Keep it forever mysterious was his way and roll with it. 

Anyway, fast forwarding here, Tripp was kind of on the same trajectory as my dysfunctional friend. He wasn't a born rule breaker like him, a crazy at times, almost nonsensical risk-taker-on-a-dare kind of guy. Tripp's issue was alcohol. He liked it but his system couldn't handle it very well, because unlike white guy me, Tripp was a Native American and did not possess an alcohol-seasoned set of genes. He was from a local band that had lived in the area before but was now mostly situated on a reservation about forty miles away. Few of his kind chose to live in town, but his family had taken a chance and relocated. 
Tripp's dad was a great guy who had ten kids, I heard a lot about him from other people I trusted. Tripp's mother and siblings I never met 'cept one, who was Tripp's older brother, and he was alright by me but I know that the entire family got discriminated against. There were places in town where they were not welcome. Not that anybody would outright say it, but you can tell when you get the cold shoulder and I think Tripp and his kind knew they would never fit in in certain social circles, never be let in. 

That's got to cause a lot of pain but Tripp never showed it. He and I were just teens placed in a setting where there was a lot of old stuff playing out amongst the settlers and natives but we didn't see color or race to be an issue.

I never went to Tripp's house, and he wasn’t at all welcome at mine, but I knew where he lived. I tried to call him on the phone a few times to hook up but whoever answered it always said "He's not here".

Tripp became over time (and to the dismay of his family, I'm sure) the likeable town drunk. He would literally drink until he passed out, but before he did, he was hours of fun to be around. He (a man now) could drink anybody under the table- don't even think about challenging him. His course in life seemed to be set. 
It was about at this time that we started gaining distance from each other. Life was calling me to explore different areas of town, and then the country. There came a moment when we saw each other for the last time and you’d think that would have been memorable or something but it wasn't. Just another hanging out session with Tripp, it probably was. 

Tenth

Ales Krivec- Unsplash.com

Then I really moved away and lost all contact until the early spring of 2009 when, during a raging blizzard that had suddenly sprung upon the town I had just moved to, I got word that Tripp had died. He had been found dead in his car after a night of drinking. All of 49 years old. Foul play was suspected, there might have been others around who could have saved him (it can get cold at night in my hometown at that time of year), but nothing ever came of any, and most likely halfhearted, investigation.

  I kind of thought something like that would happen to him but was surprised when it actually did because Tripp had cheated death more than a few times before.
  The news affected me a great deal. There are people in your life that have meant a lot to you, even though you never, ever said anything denoting caring to each other when you were together because that would have been a totally uncool thing to do. 
  So, here's to you, 'Tripp' old friend. Every year I remember your birthday. Not that it would have mattered to you- (or maybe it did?)- but it does to me. 

Anger!

I work in a customer service environment that gets pretty intense at times. The passions of the customers rise and fall and the things that they do have all of us scratching our heads because we HAVE seen it all yet they still manage to surprise us. And when they do surprise us, our passions rise because, hey, we'd like to get a little respect. Who wouldn't? I'm no monk but I try to be when things at work spin out of control so..... 

    ....today's thought is when it looks like everything is going south, I'm going to laugh. Make a conscious effort to laugh. Step back from my involvement in the situation, observe it as it is unfolding, and just laugh and laugh.

I 

Irons In The Fire

      I like to keep a lot of things cooking. Sometimes things I don't like to keep cooking keep cooking. So I always have multiple scenarios playing out. Right now I have my job, which is a temporary one, slowly winding to its end, I'm dealing with getting rid of an old car, and for some reason I have taken up drawing pictures with pencil and have been learning about that. Plus, there are others, but that sheds light enough on the subject.

    You could call all of these scenarios dramas. Big ones, small ones, the soap opera of my life playing out.
    And then, like in all dramas, there is suspense and wonder at how things pressing will play out, when, and with who. The "Why?" question will be answered in some cases, when the drama comes to its conclusion, and in some cases, I'll never get that answer.
     It's muddy, it's incomplete a lot of times, it's life, and it's messy.
      But I love it.

     In the absence of drama there is restlessness within me. Things get too quiet, my mind is still, and I become aware of bigger questions left unanswered, questions that have always been there, hiding behind all the mundane, worldly issues that have been vying for my attention. I shall explore these deeper issues here and there in upcoming posts, that seems likely, because I like to go there a lot. But not today. I have foreshadowed the scene, in writer's terms, but as to what exactly I will be bringing up I don't yet know.

    There. That feels like what I wanted to put forth this day. Cryptic? Perhaps. The time is not yet ripe to talk about these subjects, I feel, but that could change by tomorrow. Until then, adieu!