Walkabout Thoughts #87a

Thoughts & Stream of Consciousness, rough and ready...random but sane thoughts from an insane mind...from an award-winning filmmaker and author you’ve never heard of while walking off the feeble remains of long Covid, and listening to podcasts…walk day, Friday, June 21, 2024.

Weather for the day… nice day, starting out, 68° sun clear sky, 70° back at home. Walk day, Friday, June 21, 2024.

First Podcast Marc Maron WTF? finishing up Episode 1549 - Geezer Butler (Black Sabbath) from yesterday. Possibly my first hero band from when I was in 10th grade in 1970.

This is now the next day. I was craving sweets yesterday and got a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and overdosed on sugar, I guess. I had the worst sleep last night. My heart was beating too fast so I took some Benadryl and half a melatonin. Which I’ve been doing good on avoiding and have been sleeping better without it. The Benadryl didn’t seem to be working well which it almost always does for my blood pressure and heart rate which seems to be issues of histamines. So that didn't work and I realized I was slightly dehydrated so I drank some water and started feeling better.

All I've asked of people, esp., my kids, was to vote.

For the same reason as Heinlein's comment above to take a side.
The least a citizen can do is vote.
If you complain about our government but don't vote, you have no right to complain.
When you vote it should make you want to make an informed decision. 

That forces you to know what you believe, and to take a stand.

On SOMETHING.

That affects you.

It affects others.

It's important and to neutralize that by saying it doesn't work or do anything, is almost a non sequitur. 

The thing about health issues lately, especially with long Covid issues, is you cannot find cause and effect and that’s scary. I can handle just about anything if I can fathom the cause and effect, especially when I figure out how to alleviate the situation. 

I think that has a lot to do with conspiracy theories and in the paranormal, in what freaks people out. When you can’t find cause and effect, it’s pretty scary. I remember when I got those Conan books as a kid. That character in the books made it clear the only thing he was afraid of were ghosts and the paranormal. He was afraid of no man or monster. If it bleeds, you can kill it. If it doesn’t bleed, then what the fuck? And that’s scary even to Conan.

I thought I’d take the day off but here I am, walking my 3 miles and it’s already 68° and supposed to get up to like 86° today. I’m on my 1st mile at 8:35 AM and it’s already getting warm.

Marc says Metallica was a real Sabbath band in the way they thought about music and Geezer said yeah especially their Black album.

I can’t remember if I mentioned I that so far I've gotten to quarterfinalist in the Emerging Screenwriters contest for Suspense screenplays for my, "The Teenage Bodyguard". Cool.

Geezer said he did his solo stuff in the 1990s and he said GZR was the band. He said he just had to get some stuff out of him and he really enjoyed it, but he knew he wasn’t gonna make any money with it. I need to check that out. I think I knew about this but forgot about it. He said it was really heavy stuff and as far as his fans loving it, maybe not so much? And he laughed.

I iced my left knee when I got home yesterday and today it seems to be my right knee causing me grief. Good grief.

I’m very much enjoying the walk today. The sun beating down on me has me a little worried because I want to finish at least my 3 miles today. When I went to Ireland for my 60th birthday, with my youngest back in 2015, I don’t think I had walked that much in recent decades. I used to love backpacking and being out in nature. I loved walking through the oldness of Ireland.

It’s interesting how much I enjoyed connecting back in the 1970s and how old everything was when I was in Connecticutt. Our oldest cemeteries in the Pacific Northwest go back to like the 1800s. The East Coast obviously goes back much further. While Ireland goes back a hell of a lot further.

I remember talking to somebody from Ireland and hearing this a few times from different people in how they don’t appreciate their culture and history so much because they’re attracted to America and her newness and shininess. They're not so taken with the antiquity of a country like Ireland as they just see it as having grown up with old buildings that suck and they want the new. Well, the new to me is the old. I grew up with the new in America, especially in the PNW. So, I crave history?

Geezer is saying since he stopped "boozing" he finds it more difficult for inspiration since he used to sit in the studio and have wine or beer and that’s just what he’s used to. My thought is microdose mushrooms. I kid you not. You gotta do just enough that you feel it but the changes that make in your brain chemistry are better than what the booze did. And it may help you get off the booze.

Geezer said he had a nervous breakdown in 1999 and someone told him he was depressed. Maybe I was lucky that I think I had my nervous breakdown in 1972. I had a headache one day that was so bad I got taken to the emergency room. The doctors hit me with morphine but it didn’t stop the pain. So they said they would knock me out and gave me Demerol. I woke up in a hospital room much later.

After three days three neurosurgeons suggested I move out of my parent's house at 17, or figure out how to cope living there. Mom had told them what our life was like with my stepfather. They gave me a prescription to Valium and sent me on my way. Actually, that might’ve been in early '73. I stayed at home, having previously run off once from home months earlier. When mom dragged me back with threats of arresting the guy I was staying with who was an adult living in Bremerton, oddly enough.Since I live there now after a lifetime of never waning to live here. But, it's nice.

I remember graduating high school in May or June whenever it was you got out of school and then had graduation a few weeks later. it was at the UPS Fieldhouse in Tacoma. My sister gave me a sword she got in Hawaii as a flight attendant. Then when I graduated from university 11 years later, after the USAF, she gave me a pen and pencil set, and was embarrassed. But I said, "No it’s actually perfect because I’ve graduated to a higher purpose. You gave me a sword for high school graduation. Now consider the adage, "The pen is mightier than the sword." So as usual you gave the perfect gift. She looked at me a bit sideways and said, "Well, I’m glad you see it that way!" She always gave me great gifts growing up. I remember after she got her first job, the family wasn't doing well. It was the first Christmas I remember no toys. I was about 12. Mom said, "You're 12 now, too old for toys." Trying to make the best of a bad situation. I remember getting socks. Socks? Seriously? Then I got several gifts from my sister and they were a bunch of the much desired "Maj. Matt Mason" moon toys. I was beside myself that Christmas, especially after such a massive let down from our parents. 

After I moved out at 17 and rented an apartment in an old house from a really annoying old Jewish woman, my prescription for valium disappeared. Two weeks later it reappeared in my kitchen cupboard. I realized my landlady was going through my apartment when I wasn’t there.

Anyway, good to get your nervous breakdown out-of-the-way in your teens... maybe.

Geezer said his therapy had been writing music and the lyrics for songs and that the Sabbath album Sabotage was all about his depression. In the late 90s when they gave him Prozac, he said it wasn’t working at first and they told him you have to wait about six weeks. He said after those six weeks he started feeling like himself again and it was great. He details that in his book.

Well, sadly, that podcast is over so I switched over to Pod Save America, Trump Loses It Over Fox News Poll

Starting 2nd mile…

I would just like to say regarding this current controversy about Louisiana passing a law about putting the 10 Commandments in every school. How stupid is that?. One person who is pushing that said, "If you don’t like it, don’t look at them." OK? Now take that advice yourself about LGBTQ+ people.

Dumbass.

Switching to 3 miles every day instead of 5 miles every other day has caused me a backup with my blog. The last blog that went out took me all day to read through and finish. I read through it once, editing it, and then published having it go out the next morning at 6AM as normal. I can only do it for a couple of hours until I get bored and need to do something else, then return to it late which can take up much of the day. But it's getting easier as I do it more and is making me want to work on other things I've had on the back burning. Like finishing my film companion book for "Pvt. Ravel's Bolero". It's tough finishing things with no obvious reward but potential prospects.

So on the presidential debate next week...apparently the Biden team wants to win the coin toss for where the podium placement Is. The podcast is wondering if they are looking to get Biden’s good side to the camera? But somebody said, "No it’s probably to get Trump’s bad side toward the camera because that freaks him out."

Yeah, that’s brilliant, attack his weaknesses and what disrupts his mental processes because that’s what he’s been doing to everyone else since he started his ridiculousness about being POTUS. 

Again, Americans don’t elect convicted felons as president. And if you’re gonna be pushing this crap about the 10 Commandments, that’s really screwing up your candidate. Because he’s broken after all and I think he's broken every commandment except murder, and in the next few years, we may start hearing something about That. 

Maybe not that he actually had someone murdered, but that he failed in an attempt and therefore it's at least conspiracy. Actual conspiracy to murder. Remember. No matter how low you think Donald Trump can go? He will succeed to go ever lower.



Donald Trump: "CNN is fake news." That, from the Prophet of Fake News.

With Trump's bullshit that Biden has dementia (maybe Trump does), or his nonsense that Biden’s on drugs? I've said this before. I really think they need to do a drug test on the president and the ex-POTUS as they walk on stage for the debate.

Because I’m sure Biden isn’t doing anything. Other than old age meds like Trump is doing. But if anybody’s doing illegal drugs, it’s Donald Trump. Before he walks on stage, do a blood draw and tell him it’s gonna be tested for drugs, then you can give our the results before the end of the debate. See if Trump doesn’t refuse to go on stage or take the blood draw.

The problem with the absolute nonsense that Trump spews isn’t so much that he spews it and that IS a problem, but that MAGA gobbles it up so readily. This extremist right wing is so sad for America that there are no words for it. Though there are actually. Fascism. Authoritarianism. Theocracy.

Christian nationalism. White supremacism.

Considering the age of the candidates for the presidential debate, 90 seconds isn’t long enough for an answer and they should give them at least another 30 seconds

Starting my 3rd mile…

I started my walks this year wearing a fleece shirt. With the fuzzy stuff inside, insulated. And then to a lighter fleece shirt. Then to a short-sleeved shirt. Silk, one-color Hawaiian shirt type. Then a short-sleeved cotton shirt. Today a T-shirt, my University of Washington T-shirt. While I did not graduate there, I did take classes there and worked there for over seven years in the 80s and early 90s. I have worn my cargo shorts all year on these walks except for a few times on the first couple of walks this year, with jeans.

I do prefer summer and spring over fall or winter. When I was in high school I had a set of skis and a complete SCUBA set with dual 72 tanks. I had been surfing at 16 on the East Coast in Cape May, New Jersey. My younger cousin taught me. Who is conservative, who was an official in the carpenter's union and told me he hated Donald Trump because he’s dealt with him before and he always rips everybody off. He would never vote for him. That was in September of 2015 when I was returning from Ireland and spent a few days with him and his wife... in Florida. I have to say, weather wise (and Cuban sandwich-wise) I kind of loved Florida.

I used to say I was more of a surfer than a skier. I assume that had something to do with Civil Air Patrol search and rescue maneuvers in the sometimes freezing Cascade and Olympic mountains in our PNW because it would be just colder than Hell and I remember learning what it meant to be, "chilled to the bone". I learned about that term mid-junior high.

As a podcast is pointing out, there’s a huge desperate gap between the MAGA understanding of who the candidate Joe Biden is, and who the actual President Joe Biden is. It’s bizarre how such a conservative toxic fantasy is out there and how Republicans who support Trump are so unable to compare reality to their authoritarian paradigm.

Look it up. The authoritarian playbook states that you are a victim. You’re treated unfairly, journalism is dishonest and against you. Government institutions are bad. The country is failing. There is fear everywhere. There is "the other" after you, in our current American case that means immigrants, especially illegal immigrants. It’s a darkly spun fantasy.

All lies and conspiracy theories have a basis in truth the kernel of reality which they can use to spin rapidly away from it into a downward spiral of darkness. 

Conspiracy theories: "A conspiracy theory is a bunch of nonexistent connections between random events." - Criminal Minds

The podcast is referring to that video clip of President Biden in Europe, where there’s a parachutist display and conservative media (not crazed conservatives but actual conservative, professional media, supposed "journalists") clipped it so it looks like he is standing off to the side from the group talking to no one, when he’s actually talking to a parachutist on the ground with his parachute. This kind of stuff is not news. It’s outright disinformation in the greatest Russian style.

I do think we need some kind of organization or institution that monitors disinformation and corrects it. Yes, this is as dangerous as Hell, especially if the Trump administration, as government, did it. We need a truth in news and OpEd law. People need to be held accountable and stop lying to the public merely for purposes of money, power, greed, and politics. 

Sure, spin the hell out of something, but don’t lie, and don’t disinform. IF you misinform then you have to be held accountable and need to correct it to your audience ASAP. And suffer the consequences. Consequences and punishments... that hurt.

IF we're going to fail, let's fail for real, in reality, not because of fantasies.

That’s why I think Trump has earned capital punishment for his insurrection actions as POTUS45. A national leader gets away with this shit and we still have MAGA Republican insurrectionists and seditionists in Congress who need to be dealt with? Seriously?

Otherwise, we’re staged to do this all over again and if not with Trump then with someone who worked it out better and the next time, it succeeds.

But if the state executes Donald Trump for his actions, the next authoritarian dictator wannabe will think twice and just maybe, not do it.

Otherwise, we’re screwed.

I know you shouldn’t binge alcohol or sugar, both dealing with insulin levels, but I learned a long time ago if you’re craving a food, try to satisfy it and then move on to ignore it. Rather than just ignore it and keep craving it. I’ve been craving sweets lately. Which can be a lack of protein in your diet. But then you don’t want too much protein and start putting on fat. So I had my pint of Ben & Jerry’s yesterday and some whipped cream and... overdid it and didn’t sleep well. Had disturbing blood pressure & heart rate issues in trying to sleep last night, but today? I really don’t feel like eating any sugar for a while. So, I don’t know...mission accomplished?

Kids. My adult kids don’t always live up to my standards. But they’re adults. I give them their autonomy. I raised them the best I could, often at odds with their moms. Both of whom had problems. Yes, I know the central point of failure seems to be me here. And I surely had something to do with the issues. But sometimes you're just not really well matched up to your spouse. Why? You didn’t pay enough attention ahead of time. And I surely had other issues going on. Don't we all?

Anyway, my kids didn’t have that kind of structure I did growing up. I refused to, for one thing, whip them with a belt. They didn’t start Karate at the age when I did and fight in tournaments. Or get military training in junior high or a lot of other things. Or have the freedom I did in the '60s that I did. Though I was not a helicopter parent. I mean, I was, but I did it at a distance to where they couldn’t see me and thought they were on their own. Invisible helicopter parenting.

So it’s a little frustrating now when they don’t do something that I would do in the way I would do it. But I give them their freedom from parental harassment which does nothing but push your kids away further anyway.

They know I’m here for them, always. They know I love them. I know they love me. I know my youngest has said had I not existed in their life, they would’ve killed themselves in high school. Let’s just say their mom is a control freak. My oldest son’s mom was quite the opposite in not really wanting to be a mom. It must be weird to love your kid, but not really want to be a parent. When we split up, I believe her parents pushed her into taking our son and threatening me with money and lawyers. Which they had and my family never really did. So I took all the bills and would see him every other weekend. 

For those people who denigrate parents who only see their kids every other weekend, I know for me it was painful and wasn’t my choice. Especially when she moved with him to Portland. Yet I would drive halfway and to her benefit, she would meet me to drop him off and pick him back up. 

Honestly, I don’t think she did it so much to be a good mom, as to get the freedom to get drunk. Because as my son told me as an adult, which I hadn't learned till years later, she became an alcoholic after we split up. She was trying hard to be when we were married but I was there, our son was there and we were broke. When we separated I asked her friend about her behavior. One fo them kindly said, "Look, we all partied like her at college. But then we grew up after we graduated. She...can’t."

That affected our kid. But she only had him for 18 months, when she gave him back because she admitted she couldn’t handle it. Anyway, as a parent, it’s scary. You do the best you can. As someone told me back then, and I'm so very grateful for this advice: "As long as you love them and they know it, they’ll forgive you for a lot of your mistakes."

On that note, I’ll bid you adieu…

And leave you with that. It’s noon and time for lunch.

Cheers! Sláinte!

Walkabout Thoughts #87

Thoughts & Stream of Consciousness, rough and ready, from an award-winning filmmaker and author you’ve never heard of, while walking off long Covid, and listening to podcasts…walking day, Thursday, June 20, 2024

Weather for the day… nice day, starting out, 58° overcast cool breeze, 66° back at home.

First Podcast today WTF? with Marc Maron Podcast Episode 1549 - Geezer Butler, Possibly my first hero band from when I was in 10th grade in 1970. If you're a Black Sabbath fan, this is the podcast episode.

RIP Donald Sutherland

Who Are the late Donald Sutherland's Five Kids?

My first day walking the next day after a walk. I’ve been doing 5 miles every two days as a standard. But I couldn’t do more than 3 miles yesterday because it was warming up so much. Which is sad because once I could’ve just walked in the heat and sweat it out and it would’ve been great, but now, getting older, you've gotta be more careful. So I’ll try 3 miles today. It’s 8:33 AM and the sun's out, almost a slight cool breeze, no clouds, beautiful day, sun feels great. So I’ll try to do 3  today and 3 miles tomorrow and 3 miles every day rather than five every other day.

Two new episodes are available on BritBox for "Blue Lights". Yay! I’m still watching Shetland on BritBox. Really like that show and I’ve learned so much about what the hell Shetland is. I had no idea about that place. Northeast in the Arctic Circle up above Scotland. Interesting and fun series.

Last night, I watched the newest episode of Dark Matter on Apple+. I also really like that show. It’s getting pretty messed up. Fun seeing someone take physics and twist it around to show you what could happen.

What the hell is going on with Republicans anymore? We’ve got a domestic threat with Trump and his MAGA. We've got an international existential threat, certainly a potential one, with Putin‘s bullshit. Now he’s flying around to North Korea and Vietnam to make alliances. Russia needs to be destabilized and that laid at his feet, made obvious to his citizens that he's not good for them. So they'll yank his criminal ass out of office. And how is it he’s flying around the world and no one’s killed him yet? When is humanity going to get to a point of having had it with these people?

This is funny.

Maron’s complaining about how so many awesome bands were already done by the time he became aware of them in high school. I guess I lucked out there, that's one thing about being my age. I got to experience a lot of stuff in real-time back in the 60s and 70s. It does remind me of after I graduated from university and returned to Tacoma to work at Tower.

They had just opened Tower Video. My friend Mark managed it. I'd worked under him at Records when he supervised the cassettes section. While at Video, I would discover a new band and tell our assistant manager, Liz, who got to be a very good friend of mine, She's gone now for some years, sadly. Once a model, I had previously worked with her at Tower Records next door, back when she was married to a coworker, now a friend, who has long lived in London. Tower people, we were like family, certainly in the years after working together.

I would "discover" a band and be excited about it and tell Liz, who would say, "Broke up years ago." This was funnier because we had worked at records together. Now I was discovering bands because of MTV and on the music videos we'd play on the monitors in the video store. Then I'd find another "amazing" band and tell her and she'd say again, "Broke up! Almost TEN years ago!" It became a running joke that I found at times, depressing. Still, I learned of a lot of new (to me) bands.

I remember the first Beatles song that hit the radio waves in America in the early 60s. I remember it as 1962, but apparently it was March 1963.

  

 I had this small, red rocket radio that didn't require batteries which I found amazing. I guess they came out in the 1950s. You pulled the antenna out of the tip, then clipped a wire onto something metal for energy. I used to use our front yard wire fence. An amazing device in 1962 when I was in 2nd grade, and was so fascinated by it.

When Black Sabbath came out with their "Master of Reality" album (a name from the master tapes they recorded on and the lyrics were about reality, according to Geezer), with "Sweet Leaf" on it (about a special kind of normal cigarette, not cannabis, as we'd all assumed and played it in celebration of that). 

I got the album the week it came out and listened to it to death over that week. Couldn’t have had a better experience than that album as my first Black Sabbath album, aside from what I'd heard on the radio. But replaying that album all week, while reading the book "Dune", which I'd just received from my science fiction book club, while being sick and out of school for that week, and high on codeine cough syrup for my bronchitis. 

When you’re sick like that it sucks, because every time you cough your chest hurts really bad. Stepdad, when he was at home that week, would yell at me from in the living room downstairs, reading his newspaper and telling me to"stop making that damn noise!" While I would complain back to him that if there was any way I could avoid that cough, I would, because it hurt really, really bad. 

So on Monday that week, Mom went to the fairly new Tacoma Mall and got me what I had asked for. That new Black Sabbath album I had just heard about on the radio. Whenever we got sick, she would get us some kind of gift to raise our spirits. 

So I put the album on, lying in my bed, because she wouldn’t let me out of bed. "If you're too sick to go to school, you're too sick to be walking around the house." Which I never understood. Why can’t I go downstairs and watch TV? I mean, I did have a 13-inch TV in my room. But you get a little stir-crazy after a while. So I dug into my new Black Sabbath album and replayed it over and over, all day every day that week while reading "Dune" and high on codeine. Perfect mental state for both Dune and Black Sabbath.

Let me tell you, that was an amazing weeklong experience. Far more enjoyable than it should’ve been. Thank you, Frank Herbert. Thank you, Black Sabbath. Thank you, Ozzy Osbourne. Thank you family doctor for the cough syrup which tasted incredibly bad but made you feel very good and helped you to not cough.

I graduated high school in 1973, and kicked around for three years until I joined the USAF. I graduated from Tacoma's Lincoln High School, which used to be the “rail splitters" (referencing Abe Lincoln), when my mother would have gone there. Actually, she only got to the ninth grade. So it was where she would’ve gone. She did get to see Elvis play there in the "Lincoln Bowl" where we had football games and track meets. By the time I got to Lincoln (or my sister before me...our brother attended Mt. Tahoma HS as he grew up living separated from us with this dad), we were known as the Lincoln "Abes", which I always thought was stupid. "Rail Splitters" for me seemed much cooler.

"Lincoln High School in Tacoma, Washington, has had a few nicknames over the years, including the Lynx and the Railsplitters. The name change to “Abes,” which stands for “Absolutely Better Every Day,” reflects a modern, multicultural urban high school identity that emphasizes continuous improvement and excellence.1The nickname “Railsplitters” was historically associated with Abraham Lincoln, who was known as a rail-splitter in his youth, symbolizing honesty and hard work. However, the school’s current nickname, “Abes,” aligns with their commitment to fostering an environment where students strive to be better every day.1" I don't remember "Abes" being an acronym, but maybe so.

Lincoln was Tacoma's high school with inner city kids from downtown and the "Hilltop" kids (due to race riots, as kids we were forbidden to ever go near Hilltop), which was a mostly black community. There was Stadium HS but mostly "rich" kids there from the north end. Our school was populated by about a third with the Black kids. Which when I got there 1970 Black people were still pretty angry at that time in their self-actualization. And good for them. But for who I was as a short white kid starting 10th grade at the high high school in being terrified of going to high school to begin with, and only knew one black kid in junior high in that entire school...it was pretty damn intimidating. After about two weeks though, it wasn't so scary. Then again going from elementary school to junior high was perhaps even more intimidating. 

It was initially called Lincoln Park High School, as it adjoined city park property that was turned over to the school board without charge. We loved hitting the park for lunch on nice days.

The name was later changed to Lincoln High School shortly after the school opened.

The school’s architecture was designed in a classical Collegiate Gothic style by Frederick Heath, a prolific Tacoma school architect, to reflect a sense of timelessness and inspiration. Over the years, the school has become a model of the modern, multicultural urban high school, reflecting the diversity and dynamism of its student body. The name “Lincoln” serves as a reminder of the values of democracy, freedom, and equality that President Lincoln stood for and that the school aims to embody in its educational mission.

We also had the largest group of inner-city Black students and lower-income families. Though we also had some very well-off families. I thought we may have had one of the best over the spread of demographics in town. I remember people around Tacoma looking down on us in various ways. Though I didn't think we deserved a lot of that.

All the Black kids I actually got to meet or talk to were pretty cool and we got along. But if you didn’t know them. or when they were in a small group, they could be pretty intimidating, and purposely so. Though I’ve heard they were probably as scared as I was. I noticed they would group up a lot. While white kids just didn’t.

 So when a black and a white kid got into a fight, a bunch of black kids would jump in and help their friend. While any white kids standing around on the periphery never seemed to do a damn thing. You just couldn't count of them. I guess that’s an example of privilege. White kids unused to being ganged up on, while Black kids were more used to being oppressed or had more often had to face being harrassed. Or maybe inner-city kids were more used to getting in fights, or being around gangs while the white suburban kids were just, not.

I spent three years on the Rifle Team and got my sports "letter", my "L" because of it. Here is a photo of the 1972-73 team in my final senior year. In the photo is me and one of my friends who is a character (half of one anyway) in my true crime drama screenplay, "The Teenage Bodyguard".

I was kind of small as a kid and got bullied from time to time by bigger kids. Which is why I have such a severe dislike of bullies. And why in part I find Donald Trump so disgusting as the bully HE is. Though by the end of 10th grade, I was suddenly 6 feet tall and had lost some weight and fewer people would screw with me. Girls suddenly noticed me. Life was just different.

Marc‘s now naming a bunch of bands from the 70s he was introduced to by friends. How lucky  I was that my brother is seven years older and let me keep his albums while he toured the country on his Triumph motorcycle, in the late 60s. So I was introduced to the blues and a lot of stuff that my friends were not, who only listened to pop or rock music as they could find it on local radio stations. 

KTAC was a new format Tacoma station back then, based at the Tacoma Mall office building. I won some albums from them once. My cousin and I locked up their phone number by calling on two phones together (we had two numbers at that time at our home), disallowing other outside people to access them until they answered on the whatever, the 9th call maybe, and we'd win.

KJR was in Seattle and played some of the best rock on the Radio at the time and was around before KTAC. 

FM. I remember late one night at home I turned on the radio to FM. Somebody had told me about the FM stations which were new. Very new and not on all the time. I tuned into one with a DJ talking low, slow, and intimate (pretty conducive to stoners listening), who played some of the coolest music that you would never hear on AM radio. 2AM listening music that I found fascinating. I came to love FM. Greater fidelity. I really hated AM radio. The AM car radio fidelity sucked. And if you went into a tunnel, you lost the signal. It tended to be scratchy and mono and FM was usually stereo until FM stations became more popular and you could get them in your car.

But then one day FM stations spread in use until one day they qualitatively turned into AM stations with all the commercials, the too loud DJs, and utter ridiculousness. And that was the end of the cool FM era. But the AM style FM did have better general listening and higher quality radio from then on. I just missed the specialness of the original FM stations.

Starting my 2nd mile...

Apparently, Marc Maren graduated Highland High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1981. 

Marc is doing a rundown on the podcast about some of the other bands that came out around the time he was in high school and the shows he saw. This is probably a good place for me to add a link to my concerts/bands webpage I have on my website. There you go. I realized I was gonna forget some of the concerts I had seen when I was younger, or over my lifetime, so I made a page that, over the years, I would enhance and fill in as I found info or remembered things. Like the playlist for the night I saw a certain band play. 

I was looking at my website analytics page the other day and it seems that my band page is one of my most highly accessed pages. Well, that IS kind of cool.It used to be my old Martial Arts page on my old website which won a couple of awards in the early 2000s.

I guess my first concert was my brother and sister’s band back in the 60s. My first big concert was the Beatles at the Seattle Coliseum, the second time they came through Seattle. Apparently, my older brother got tickets but said he knew it was gonna be miserable because of all the screaming girls, so you couldn't hear the music. Which was true. In 1966, my sister was a young teenager in 9th grade (I was in 6th grade, about 9). I remember how mad she was at the girls screaming all around us and telling me "We could actually hear the music if they would stop screaming!" The entire Colosseum was screaming. We weren’t that far away from the Beatles on stage but you could barely hear their music. Just make it out enough that you’d recognize the song from having listened to it so many times on the radio.

I remember them not having very big amps on stage. Not for that size of a concert venue. I found photos of them playing. At the Colosseum. Overall, pretty cool for a first real concert. Many years later I came to own an awesome Vox Beatle SuperReverb amp. 

The image above is from the Beatles' first concert in Seattle in 1964. We were at their second visit in 1966. Another time, my sister and brother went to see Donovan at the Colosseum. I was dying to go. But nope, I was too young. I remember my brother wearing a Nehru jacket with a long gold chain and a cool gold ball. He was so proud of that outfit.

Marc‘s talking about the Rolling Stones Hot Rocks album he had. A double album with a castle on the cover. 

I had their original "Sticky Fingers" album with the actual real pants zipper on the cover which you couldn’t put with your other albums.

 I also had the original Jethro Tull "Thick as a Brick" fold-out with the newspaper inside and over the years I got rid of both of them. I highly regret that. However, about a year ago, Jethro Tull released their Thick as a Brick remaster with the newspaper inside. Because they dropped that after a while. So I now have that album again, anyway.

Back in the summer of '85, Mikey and I, who worked at Tower records where I had previously worked with him (when I was working at Video after graduating college, working at the new store in Tacoma), we went to record conventions and I sold my four apple crates full of albums. What a great lot of fun we had and then went home with some cash.

The break up with my girlfriend, who I had been with before, during, and briefly after college, really messed me up. I spent about 18 months trying to party myself to death, until I nearly succeeded until I realized one day, actually, I want to live! But that depression was multifaceted. 

I wasn't making much after getting a university degree. I was tired of lugging around all that vinyl and thought I could use the money. I had gotten stuck years before with 8-track tapes when cassettes came out. I didn’t want that to happen again when CDs came out. I thought this is just gonna waste vinyl, and I’m gonna get stuck again. I didn’t know about the discrete packing of the digital storage and loss of fidelity even though it sounded good to me. Lossless digital format years later did much toward fixing that. 

I do not now understand young people's desire for audio cassettes. I thought they were the worst medium. Easy to use, small (not 8-tracks) but your machine could eat them and there’s always that damn hiss. Even with metal tapes, which were much better, and Dolby sound, etc., etc..

I still have three cassette cases with about 60 tapes in each case. But they’re not vinyl. So a while back I started collecting vinyl again. When I was working on my World War I documentary, I bought the 1930 Polydor's first public recording with Ravel conducting his orchestra. I also bought a record player that you can digitally rip the music into a digital SD card.

And then there is the remastered Led Zeppelin II my youngest gave me for Christmas a few years ago, signed by Jimmy Page when he had visited the record store she worked on at Capitol Hill. He was there on his second day with his bodyguard and his girlfriend and my kid was assigned to help him. They had wanted to talk to him on the first day, but couldn’t get near him, but had this idea of getting me a signed album. Which happened on the second day. One of my greatest Christmas gifts ever, obviously.

I was just thinking of my weekly mileage of walking. Normally I would get in 20 or 25 miles walking per week. Depending on how the days fell. So one week 20 the next week 25 the next week 20 again, etc. Walking every day at 3 miles gives me 21 miles a week consistently.

So Geezer Butler is on Maron's podcast because he wrote his book, Into the Void: From Birth to Black Sabbath―And Beyond, which sounds like a hell of a read.

I do have a story about the first and only time I saw Black Sabbath. Let me correct that. I went to a Black Sabbath concert in Spokane, Washington. The story is on my website bads/concert page. To be brief, my (1st) wife and two friends from our shop on base in USAF went. I gave my wife a quarter ounce of Colombian dirt weed that wasn’t worthy of smoking. She put it in some brownies but didn’t stir it well enough. We each got a brownie and everybody loved them. Except me. Mine was like chewing 4 ounces of Colombian dirt weed.

So we got to the concert and they made me take a pipe hit (I refused but they said you have to take at least one at a concert), which put me over the edge. Reminds me of an evening decades later with my last wife and her friend who was pushing me to take one shot (after I'd drunk a 6 pack and drank 2 botles of wine with them). It didn't go well the rest of that night eight.

We stood up when Van Halen came on as the curtains opened, and Eddie jumped out by himself in the middle of the stage, hit a cord, and my eyes rolled up in my head (so I was told, it looked to me like the ceiling was rushing down into my face) and I passed out (my friends caught me from falling). The next thing I know, I’m talking to a cop in the side hallway, then I'm on a gurney, then I'm in an ambulance. I would have been just fine. I just got too high. But I missed the rest of the concert. They wouldn’t let me back in. Had I just not passed out, it would have been an amazing concert.

My friends almost didn’t get back in themselves, but they talked their way back in. They said that band Van Halen blew away Black Sabbath who seemed tired and as I understand it they had pretty much had it with Ozzie by that time.

So my wife and I ended up having sex on the waterbed the rest of that night. So not a wasted night.

Marc is finally now talking to Geezer and I’m starting my 3rd and last mile for the day...

It seems Geezer was a vegetarian all his life. So touring with Black Sabbath was a nightmare, especially in the beginning. He said now it’s much easier but in the 60s and 70s it was hard to find decent vegetarian food. Obviously. Now he says he gets a once a month, B12 shot and takes occasional vitamins. Marc said he’s probably the healthiest of the crew. And Geezer just laughed.

About this walk at 3 miles a day, now… After 3 miles I noticed my hands swelling and my sister had said that’s normal as you age. Just put them up above your head for a bit. But it occurred to me that this is probably somehow less stress on my body walking fewer miles. When I think of physical stress on my body, I think of a good workout. But at almost 69 you have to factor that age thing in. Wonderful.

This is interesting, Geezer says his family's from Dublin but they grew up near Birmingham. He and the other band members grew up around there and if you were Catholic you went to the Catholic school but if you were Protestant you went to the Protestant school. It was an area of immigrants and real workers. Nobody had a car.

Oh good, I just stepped down on my left foot and my knee seemed to bark a bit of pain at me and now I’m limping. Good grief.

This aging thing is bullshit. I do believe it’s a disease we could cure. I mean, even if we only lived to 150 but were functionally in our 30s until we drop dead? I’d be good with that. If you get old, you need to exercise for reasons you didn’t have to when you were younger. But when exercising becomes a problem, and as I went through with long Covid… you need to exercise to squash down the disease, but you have to feel good enough with the disease to be able to exercise, so it’s just a maddening cycle

Geezer is talking about how his dad would save up and every other year they would vacation at the family home of the grandparents in Dublin. One time his sister and he heard a noise and went down to see a shadow moving along the stairs. 

He had another dream years later about him and Tony Iommi being on tour and in an elevator. As they’re going down it stops and then it plummets, but stops just before they crash. Which is normally a built-in safety mechanism. So they’re he tells Tony about it and at some point while on tour, they get in an elevator. While they’re going down the elevator stops. They both look at each other like, "oh shit!" But then it started up again

Reminds me of my two kids when they were young. I was working on the computer at home in my bedroom. They came running in saying they saw a blue orb that passed through the youngest's room, into the hallway by the front door, into the living room, and then into the mirror above the fireplace.

At a lack of what to say, they drug me into the living room. My youngest never told lies and was always very accurate about things. Pathologically so. It was weird. My wife and I finally told her to stop telling on herself, it's just unnecessary. IF you do something wrong, recognize it, feel you should tattle on yourself, instead, just don't do it again and let it go. In fact, regarding our child's accuracy, my wife and I got used to being in the car and if our child had been with us previously, and then we got lost, our child could guide us to our destination, kind of like an organic navigator.

At first, I wanted to tell the kids they were just imagining things. Blue orbs of light? But they both said they saw it. They were adamant. And my youngest absolutely believed it, which kind of tipped the balance. So rather than shut them down like a lot of parents would or just explain it off, I said, "OK, let’s work this out."

I spent about 15 or 20 minutes talking to them about it, trying to work out what could’ve created that orb. Car headlights driving by? Nope. We never figured it out. But I also didn’t discount them. I tried to treat them like adults. It’s just how I raised my kids.

Well, damn. I just went back to the podcast and Geezer is saying “I was laying in bed and I looked up above my head and there was this orb… “ He said it was like a crystal ball and he could see himself in it wearing silver boots on stage. He said, well that's never going to happen. But this was before glam rockers and all that and one day, years later, he realized he actually was on stage and wearing silver boots. 

Geezer is saying he knew he wanted to be a musician the first time he heard the Beatles on the radio. It’s well known the BBC played old people's music on the radio. And so pirate radio appeared. Famous was the one on a ship outside the waters of Britain where a lot of people got their pop music. But he said he got his from Radio Luxembourg. I’ve not heard that before. He said he was 11 at the time. He got his first guitar from a kid at school who had a guitar with two strings that he sold to him for $.75. He learned all the Beatles songs on those two strings.

Well, that’s my 3 miles for the day. My knee is feeling better, but I think I’ll ice it.

I like walking the 5 miles but not when it’s hot because it does unpleasant things to me nowadays. I think back to my teens and 20s, when I went backpacking up in the Cascade Mountains and the Olympic Mountains, and in the Superstition Wilderness in Arizona. I’m glad I have those memories.

Interesting that Geezer got proficient on a two-string guitar and eventually became a bass player in one of the most famous bands in history. He said his brother used to bring his friends over to hear how good he could play Beatles songs on a two-string guitar. Then his other brother gave him money to get a real guitar.

Hey, just got home and saw that I made quarter-finalist for my screenplay, "The Teenage Bodyguard":

"Hello, and congratulations!
You are a Quarter Finalist in the Emerging Screenwriters Suspense Competition!"
For 'The Teenage Bodyguard' by JZ Murdock"

Awesome!

Then I saw this...Donald Sutherland, Star of ‘MASH,’ ‘Klute’ and ‘Hunger Games,’ Dies at 88 - Variety That makes me sad. I've loved his acting all my life. I think first noticing him in Kelly's Heroes.

On those special notes, I’ll bid you adieu…

And I’ll leave you with that. And it’s noon and time for lunch.

Cheers! Sláinte!

Walkabout Thoughts #85

Thoughts & Stream of Consciousness, rough and ready...

Random sane thoughts from an insane mind...from an award-winning filmmaker and author you’ve never heard of, while walking off the remains of long Covid, and listening to podcasts…

Weather for the day… nice day, starting out, 53° overcast cool breeze starting out, back at home 63° walking day Monday, June 17, 2024

First, Podcast Rachel Maddow presents Ultra Ep 2

Then, Marc Maron's WTF? Episode 1548 - Jude Law .

First up...Happy Juneteenth America, marking the day enslaved people in Galveston, Texas in 1865 found out they had been freed when some did nont wish them to be made aware of that. Shameful people, white people. Unbelievable. 

Two years AFTER Pres. Lincolns Emanipation Proclamation.

What the Hell humans...Americans?

Listening to Rachel Maddow's season two of her Ultra podcast. She’s talking about some of the Manhattan Project scientists on the radio back in 1950. One of them says towards the end of the broadcast that by tweaking the H bomb, which America was only starting to work on, they could wipe out an entire city in being 1000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb...tweaking the bomb's casing you would create a cobalt bomb that if exploded in the air, would put a layer of radioactivity around the world that would wipe out humanity. Nice Sunday afternoon talking point.

A very good/disturbing summary of the Trump campaign's orientation of what's going on with them, which hasn't so far made much sense, while his supporters like "this or that" about him, there's something more obvious going on:

Sarah Reese Jones @PoliticusSarah

Rachel #Maddow on the goal of the GOP, "In real politics, nothing is ever finished. You never take power once and for all. Your enemies are not vanquished. But they [Trump/MAGA] are not trying to win a political contest. They're trying to do away with political contests in the United States."

I posted a meme today about Epstein and Trump, and somebody responded to me telling me something I had not heard. That Trump had barred Epstein from Mar-a-Lago barred Epstein from Mar-a-Lago. I posted back to the guy. “interesting“, and I just now realized I was accepting it as fact. Because it sounded factual. And I decided I wouldn’t post more about Trump on Epstein things. On the other hand, is it true? He supplied a link that goes to a document of way too many references to Epstein. However Copilot offered me this:

"Yes, it is true that Donald Trump barred Jeffrey Epstein from Mar-a-Lago. According to a book entitled “The Grifter’s Club,” Trump banned Epstein after he hit on the teenage daughter of another member. This incident appears to have occurred before Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to state criminal charges in Florida, which included paying for sexual services from a 14-year-old girl. The banishment from the club seems to have happened after Epstein was charged with soliciting prostitution by a state grand jury but before his 2008 guilty plea.

"It’s important to note that while Trump did have a falling out with Epstein, he did not publicly reveal the reasons for it at the time. Trump stated that he had not spoken to Epstein for up to 15 years and that he was “not a fan” of his. Before their falling out, Trump and Epstein had been friends for years."

While authoritarianism and fascism are not mental illnesses per se, they are a form of mental illness, or psychosocial illness. as I prefer to refer to it. It’s not in the DSMx but we see it ourselves, clearly. We see it as it has infected MAGA. We see it as MAGA has infected the GOP.

I’ve been using melatonin to get to sleep for a while. I had tried using some pro brain vitamins a while back and needed melatonin to get to sleep. As a teenager, my mind was always racing and I couldn’t sleep at night. I do have ADHD, since birth obviously. So I stopped using those "enhance your brain" vitamins. They worked, by the way. 

But I don’t think you should use melatonin if you can avoid as it's a hormone your body produces from the sun through vitamin D. Which my doctor said I have a deficiency for so I have to take a vitamin D supplement. I just try to get sunlight. I'd read if you get 15 minutes a day, you’re good.

Starting my 2nd mile…

So my son, who manages health food store, is quite knowledgeable about a lot of things (esp., gaming, and physics). He has a logical mind and I trust what he has to say. Regardless I tend to vet my information, but he tends to be right most of the time. One doesn't vet info just to prove or disprove someone correct or not. You also do it to fill in any gaps in info. When you hear something, your mind should see options, and questions, and then go fill those in. That should then offer you connections to other stored information and make connections to a variety of other things. When that happens, it's pleasing. If it doesn't happen, you're not taking in enough information in life. Or haven't, but you can start at any time.

Apparently, he’s become a local CBD expert and doctor's offices will often refer people to him. He used to work at a cannabis store and read a lot. And.. he’s my kid. And... he’s smarter than I am. Anyway, so far the magnesium seems to be working. I may be noticing some other benefits from it, too. Which I’m keeping an eye on and trying to separate out and narrow down to figure out what’s going on. He had said to take it an hour before bedtime. So I did last night and it helped. Also, I started to feel better in other ways that I didn’t expect. My sinuses started to open up, which is unusual for me.

Anyway, he suggested that if I don’t want to take melatonin, he suggests to people to try magnesium glycinate but not its other forms (citrate, oxide, sulfate, etc.). Since 2020 my long Covid issue made it very problematic for me to try anything new. I'd tried fish oil supplement and it almost killed me. So I tried the magnesium over a few days. Realized maybe I could skip a day. I've done a bunch of things to see what the lowest functional levels were (not doctor-prescribed meds, although I found some are functional at lower levels and historically western medicine doesn't adjust appropriately or see that we're not all exactly the same). I like to take as little of anything as possible. We really need to aid our health in the quality of our human experience through food and exercise rather than synthetically manufactured meds. That's not extreme, it's just common sense.

Western medicine has done too much for many decades with synthetic and semi-synthetics drugs/medicines. So yes, it’s best to live clean and healthy.

Rachel's talking about a guy back in the '50s who used to attend "silver shirt" meetings, which was your basic Nazi meeting in America. Can’t help but correlate somehow "silver shirts" with the kind of disgusting insect you might see in a shower at some institution (gym) called a, "silverfish". No, I'm not saying those people are insects, I'm saying my mind word associates.

It’s good for us to know that leading up to World War II, there was an ultra right wing in America who didn’t want us to join in the war. Which would’ve been extremely bad for humanity. It’s interesting to know today we have an extreme right who doesn’t want us to help Ukraine, but instead support Putin. Humanit's new Russian "Nazi" apparently. Putin said he was going to invade Ukraine to help Russian people from the "Ukrainian Nazis", and then immediately, aside from having previously invaded Ukraine (with an ongoing war), became THE "Nazi" himself. So what does that make Americans who support him, who would argue they aren’t, but are not wanting to support Ukraine?

Considering also how Trump tried to blackmail Ukraine when he was president to dig up dirt on Biden, and he really didn’t care if it was falsified.

It’s interesting how dictatorships, authoritarians, and fascists just love claiming how "decadent" the West is while they have a spar economy and miserable human experience for their citizens while what we have to offer is just freedom and protection from our own government and leaders. While Donald Trump’s MAGA is in support of those dictators, authoritarians, and fascists, not so much the freedom of American or Western democratic citizens. Just those who see us as decadent, foul, or degenerate. 

This whole thing is pretty simple. The Trump side is negative. Those who oppose him are positive. Those attracted to negative support Trump and like him and some love him. And some worship him. And what the holy fuck is that about? That's not American. That's authoritarian. That's a cult. A cult of personality. It's...slimy.

Here’s an easy way to judge yourself. If your beliefs, or your tribe's beliefs, or your political party's beliefs, support the human experience of just you, or them and does not hold up supporting the human experience of all, you have a problem. You the a problem. Your “tribe “is the problem. And all claims made that it’s anyone else? Is just a mechanism, a tool to support the worst in human belief systems. Just sayin'...

Oh, I hope any fathers out there had a good Father’s Day. Both my kids called me and I got to talk to them. The one who I hear from almost daily, actually daily, lives furthest away. The married one, I don’t hear from or see much anymore. But they’re live stage performers and have jobs and I know they’re busy. For those who resent the fact that all they get from their kids is a phone call or a card, at least they care enough to do something. 

Just consider all those fathers (or mothers), who do deserve more from their kids and get nothing. Or their kids hate them or have mental illness or drug addiction, or are lost in things like psychosocial illnesses, like fascism, or MAGA. Then, of course, there’s those parents who don’t deserve anything from their kids, but instead owe their kids for how they raise them so poorly. It’s sad for those kids who still do stay in contact with them.

My mother was just too toxic to deal with in her later years (like the last half of her life). My siblings and I struggled to deal with her and would take turns dealing with her for a while until we couldn’t take it, then passed her off to another one of us. A nightmare round-robin of dealing with Mom. Part of that was her many years of practicing victimhood and taking heavy prescription drugs...opiates.

That round-robin thing went on until I got divorced in 2002. Before that, my wife and I were briefly seeing a therapist until she quit going. At some point, our therapist, listening to me about the situation with my mother and how I regretted my wife having to deal with any of it, told me, “You realize you can cut someone out of your life if they’re being toxic? “ I said, "No I don’t realize that. She’s my mother." And she said, "Look. I give you permission. You don't have to go through that." I just sat there, stunned.

I remember my wife sitting on the couch next to me. Just looking at me. I’d love to have known what she was thinking. But that was close to the last session she attended.

And so the next time my mother called me at work, about some imagined slight by someone or life, I explained it all to her and said, "I’m done." And I pretty much didn’t talk to her again until she died over 15 years later.

I remember once when our youngest brother was diagnosed with leukemia in 1974 (he actually had liver cancer, which they later correctly diagnosed and he died in Manhattan in June 1974). We left Mom and our brother in his hospital room at Tacoma's Children's Hospital and went down to the cafeteria for a break, a breather, some coffee. Sitting around a table talking, our sister summed it all up. She said none of us would ever be able to relax until both of our parents, mom, central to us all (as we had different dads) and her husband, our stepfather, and youngest brother's dad...both died.He died (with Alzheimer's) about 10 years ago a few miles from me at the Retsil Veteran's Home. She died about 6, in Tacoma. Our sister was there with her. And she had been right. Finally, we all felt relieved. 100%. Family is love, family is life. Family is pain. But we do, we can, have some control over that.

For those who are in toxic relationships that make you want to kill yourself, or the other person...don’t. Just eliminate them from your life. It’s not easy. But it’s doable.

I’ve been saying for years, regarding suicide, something that helped me in rough times, to think this whenever one wants to kill oneself, just consider walking out the door and never coming back. While your friends and loved ones will suffer from never hearing from you again, they’re gonna go through that anyway, and worse, if you kill yourself. In this way, in vanishing (leave a note or something though, this isn't a vindictive thing, you are caused pain, and you don't want them to be caused pain because of you), you'd do them a service, and by starting a new life, in moving out of state or whatever, you’ve done yourself and maybe humanity a service.

Starting 3rd mile…

I’m pretty tired of my only exercise being these walks. But there’s not much else to do and the weather has sucked. But it’s getting better. Haven’t felt great the past couple of days. So I thought this walk would start out kind of uncomfortable. But it’s been just fine. I’m getting enough of these 5 mile walks and I’m getting to an equilibrium or something. Feels good to get some exercise.

What the hell is a "hog's head" shaved haircut? Rachel just played a 1940s radio broadcast where the reporter was describing some Nazi's haircut. Looked it up, I can find nothing on it. Maybe it was just that reporter's affectation.

I’ve been thinking about this. I need to ask my friend Ash Black, who has an interview show on public access TV here. My friends, Kelly and Pat, and I were his first three interviews when he started his show. But I never see our reruns. I mean every so often he interviews two or three people. Then you see that new interview on. And they play that three or four times each, before the next new interview. But they haven’t been playing them from the beginning and sometimes his show is not on. So what’s with that? Run reruns. 

[so I asked him, but he had no response on the rerun issue. But he did get nominated for Best of Kitsap (our county) for several things, best citizens, best show ("Afternoons with Ash Black" on BKat TV)...so pretty damned cool!]

I had thought about going out for lunch yesterday for Father’s Day. I looked at some restaurants online. Thought about the menus. Thought about the cost, which isn’t a big issue with me, but having been raised with very little money, you know that is the rest of your life. Thought about how many people might be out taking their dad to lunch, and then I remembered I had a bag of themed salad that I had bought. Some Thai cashew salad. I had previously mentioned I was trying to lose weight. I’m recently at about 230 and need to knock off at least 10 pounds, pretty quick. Rough winter...

Anyway, I got that bag of salad out, threw in some frozen shrimp I had in the freezer from Costco, added some smoked cheese I had for a cheese, meat and crackers meal the other day, and some other things, and ended up with a pretty tasty Father’s Day lunch. 

I watched "Monkey Man" on Peacock+ streaming it was pretty good, different. I like that actor, Dev Patel. This time he helped write it and directed it. He’s come a long way from "Slumdog Millionaire". Which I thought was a good flick, though some people called poverty porn. Maybe so.

I couldn’t really get all that into the "Monkey Man" movie. I mean I watched it, it was good, had some very clever stuff in it. Rotten Tomatoes gave it 88%. after watching it, I went back to watching Shetland (84% on Rotten Tomatoes) on BritBox. I really like shows like that in Ireland or Scotland or on an island over there. Makes me wanna go back to Ireland. 

The other day I watched “Blue Lights “a police procedural set in Belfast. Sian Brooke, the lead female actor was the short-lived wife of the king in season one of House of the Dragon. Of which season two began the other night. Been looking forward to it. I just recently binged the entire first season again. And I don’t know, for some reason I thought it was a good opening series 2 episode. Either getting their stride or I was just lowering the bar because I wanted to see a new episode.

I had gotten a seven-day free trial with BritBox that I have to cancel or keep for $9/month. I don’t, know I could end up keeping it. There’s some great stuff on there.

About House of the Dragon, I will say that I never much cared for Matt Smith as Doctor Who. But I think he found his place on this series. He plays it perfectly.

Oh, I stumbled onto Le Mans yesterday. The live version as it was being streamed on Peacock+. They have so many cameras and stuff now it’s almost like watching a movie or a video game but it’s real and in the moment. If somebody dies you’re finding out with everybody else. I’m not much into watching cars go around a track but it’s pretty cool at that level. I had it on in the background as I was editing my last blog.

One driver's rearview mirror snapped on one side of its double brackets, holding it to the inside top of the cockpit. I thought, that’s not gonna work. He pulls in for a pitstop, but they couldn’t fix it. A new driver got in. They said it’s an LED screen so it’s not too bad, although it was vibrating, bouncing around a lot. About every other second, you can seethe driver look at the mirror and then out the windshield. I thought that was pretty cool that they’re using an LED screen on the rearview mirror. I never heard of that before. If it had been a mirror, it really would have been unusable.

On Rachel‘s podcast, she’s talking about a Nazi sympathizer who ended up on the Nazi Nuremberg trials of World War II. Even though his coworkers had complained to the FBI, he still got the job and went to Germany to work on the trial. This is a good example of, how things can happen. Donald Trump has, for his entire life, fallen through the cracks.

Fascism & authoritarianism can perpetually serve as a potential ‘grout’ within the framework of democracy. If not vigilantly guarded against, they possess the power to topple that very framework. Their most destructive actions, often occurring out of sight, to disable the system in unforeseen ways. Sadly, this is often misunderstood & unforeseen by those most committed to such ideological changes.

Starting mile four…

Also starting WTF? Marc Maron podcast episode with Jude Law.

As for Rachel’s podcast season 2 episode 2 of Ultra… Wow. It’s really important that pretty much everybody in America listens to this. It’s about our history in the 40s and 50s. But it’s extremely relevant when you look around today about what some people think is funny or not a big deal, but is actually a huge deal.

Marc said he finally won something. He won Cat Dad of the Year from PE TA.

Marc trying to figure out what his cat thinks when he’s gone... He’s up in Vancouver for I think four months total and he's back home on a break wondering what his cat thinks after he’s been gone a few days: "Well He’s dead and that’s over." He said, "I don’t think the cat's that sociopathic but I’m sure his brain processes differently." No doubt. I would say it’s more like when you leave your cat for a few days, it just notices an energy missing in the environment. And it adjusts. 

Then when you come home, it triggers that pattern and it’s an energy of familiarity and things that have been habituated. It feels this rush of energy in the house and a familiarity of returning energy and some habituation and processes that are familiar. I suspect they quickly get tired of it and go back to their normal routine. Which I guess makes them perfect pets for someone who comes and goes?

Just don’t get a parrot that lives 125 years where, if you don’t give it enough attention, it starts pulling out feathers and becoming neurotic. Or when you die and it goes to another owner, it can’t easily handle the replacement.

Marc talking about watching and re-watching movies. Every day on my DVR I scan, while having coffee in the morning, what's on the paid movie channels I have and what’s on local TV between 8 PM and 11 PM that night and select anything I find interesting.

The other day I came across the movie “The Quiet American“. I liked the 2002 remake with Michael Caine though I hadn't realized it was a remake. This one is with Audie Murphy filmed in 1958 about 1952 Saigon. Audie Murphy is labeled by the characters as a "young, very young man." He was 28. The actor. Michael Redgrave is the lead. I’ve only seen 16 minutes of it.

I see Michael Redgrave, I think Michael Rennie. Who was the alien "Klatuu" in the film I saw as a young kid, “The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951) on TV. Klatuu, with his robot Gort, and their planet's humanitarian extraterrestrial concept for Earth, saw us as dangerous. Because we are. We do seem to tend toward the self-destructive. People might remember that movie by its most famous catchphrase “Klaatu Barada Nikto“ which was spoken to the Gort to not destroy the planet when Klatuu got shot.

In the 1978 Fantastic Films article "The Language of Klaatu", Tauna Le Marbe, the magazine's Alien Linguistics Editor, attempted to translate the phrase. Her literal translation was "Stop Barbarism, (I have) death, bind;" and her free translation was "I die, repair me, do not retaliate".

Uh huh. Seems disingenuous. As Klatuu is the alien's name, seems more like the translation would be: "Klatuu (says) stand down."

Anyway, I’ve seen Rennie in a few other things, and I always had a fine place in my heart for him because of that movie. His character, actually. I once saw a really old interview of him on the set of some movie and I had to come to realize, he’s just an actor, not that wonderful character from that film.

As for "The Quiet American", it was a very interesting perspective of a 1958 Hollywood version of Saigon that looked a little too clean and Hollywoodish.

Apparently, Marc was in a movie about the talk show radio host who got murdered by some white supremacists decades ago. A guy named Alan Berg in Colorado was murdered by some idiot white supremacists from my Washington state. One of those criminals was tracked down on Whidbey Island and fought back, ending up burned up and dead. Eastern Washington has a higher concentration of conservatives who, along with Idaho and eastern Oregon, way too many white supremacists. Racists consider the dead murderer a martyr.

As for eastern Washington, when I was stationed at Fairchild Air Force Base 15 miles outside of Spokane, Washington, a lot of the guys who were hunters and had lived in the area for a while, refused to go hunting up north because of all the crazy people white supremacists.

I was taken back then by a recent acquaintance on base, to a white supremacist compound over in the Idaho Hills back in 1978 and it scared the hell out of my wife and myself. Especially when they bragged how the local police wouldn't come on their property. All very nice congenial racists, some of them wearing faux Nazi uniforms. Which one said, when I asked about that uniform, said, "No, they’re not Nazi uniforms, because those are a different color." Other than the color it all looked the same to me and they saluted like Nazis. Anyway, we didn’t go back. And the whole reason for the visit was to attend the guy's church. Which just turned out to be a church where they ranted about racist stuff.

So Marc said in playing that Jewish talk show host, most of his scenes were getting gunned down along with a few on-mic scenes. Jude Law is lead in it. Jude told Marc he’s seen it and it’s good. Marc was complaining he hadn’t seen it yet but is looking forward to seeing it on one of the movie channels or streaming networks, as soon as it comes out.

I want to see it too. A book came out about Alan Berg and those white supremacists back in 1987 when I read that book: Talked to Death: The Life and Murder of Alan Berg.

Good book. Eye-opener at the time. I was very unhappy to find out how many people from the south, after the confederacy fell, moved to the Pacific Northwest. Especially Idaho, Eastern Oregon and Eastern Washington. Apparently, there’s more than a few extreme-right up here in the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. That's up north from where I’m at. 

Sadly my adult trans offspring lives up there. They have some stories that aren’t fun to hear about minding their own business and being harassed. I don’t understand why people can’t just leave people alone. If you don’t like them, go somewhere else, look the other way, move on, and let it go. Let other citizens just live their lives. As they do you. Change the channel. Listen to a different radio station. 

Try not to get radicalized because… did you know fear lowers your IQ? Which the Republican Party, especially MAGA pushes out so much? Fear. Anger. Hatred. Bigotry. What did Trump say? "I love the uneducated." Why do you think?

It's not complicated

Marc says we can train our parents once an adult. Well sure. Unless there’s mental illness or drugs involved. But he said it’s worked for him. Didn’t work for me, or my siblings.

I remember getting into a big argument with my mom in the hallway upstairs at the house. I grew up in, at least since fifth grade. Before that we moved like every year around Tacoma, or to Spain, or to Philadelphia, or back to Tacoma in 1960.

She kept treating me like I was her young kid. She said, "I’m your mom and you’ll always be my kid to me." Hey, that’s fine but I’m an adult. I told her I graduated high school. I’d been in and out of the US Air Force. Responsible for a lot of government property and people's lives. I’d been married AND divorced. And still, she was treating me like I’m 12. It’s really annoying for an adult to have to deal with that.

Her response? "Well, you will always be my child." Kind of missing he point again, mom.

Sigh…

Starting my 5th mile…

Oh damn, Marc mentions the time his orthopedic surgeon father backed over his foot. This was after the ski trip where his top-of-the-line safety ski boot binders kept falling off his boots, so his dad tightened them down too much and he ended up getting a spiral fracture. So of course his dad gave him half body cast, and later a leg cast, which is what he remembers having when he saw George Carlin on stage.

I just mention that because my oldest (then in jr high) and I got home years ago and I was backing up the SUV and I heard a scream because apparently I had backed over his foot. I mean, it wasn’t my fault. He standing outside of the back of the SUV on the right and he had his foot behind the back tire. Either not smart or not very aware of his environment, which I raised my kids to be. Anyway, he yelled at me. I felt really bad and I apologized, but it wasn’t my fault. As I told him. Which didn't help the situation. He was fine, luckily. But he never had his foot under a car again.

Reminds me, we got our adult German Shepherd castrated because his aggression was getting too intense. He almost went through our back glass door one time because he saw another dog.

His scrotum swelled up for a  of days and my son came in during that, old enough at this point to drive the car, he had just been out somewhere and had come in and told me something and... accidentally stepped on the dog's swollen scrotum. So without thinking, the dog whips around and bites him on the hand. The dog would never have done that otherwise.

It put a couple of holes in that piece of flesh between your thumb and forefinger known as the purlicue,  the “thenar web space, or the "web of the thumb." Apparently, it hurt. His reaction was to want to punch the dog. He quickly stepped forward, really angry and in pain while the dog was sitting up by me near the couch, where I was sitting. I quickly put my arms around the dog's neck, with his head on my shoulder, and put my hand up to calm my son down and said, "Hey, don’t hurt the dog. It was an accident. He felt bad as soon as he did it." 

He backed off, quickly realizing what all had happened, and embarrassed, sort of yelled at me, "It really hurt!" I said, "Well, how would you feel if you just had your testicles cut off, your scrotum was swollen and somebody stepped on it? He didn’t mean to bite you." And  my son immediately realized he made a mistake. Actually, both of them had. It was a weird situation. Anyway, he calmed down. I sent him off to drive to the doctor. He came back later saying he was fine, and it was all OK. But it was an interesting experience.

Now Marc saying, "You've gotta find the good things of your parents that you inherited and lean into those."

I’ve always done that. But I’ve also tried to counter the bad things I received from my parents. When I was younger, my mom told me stories about my dad and how he could be jealous. I don't doubt somehow she may have, even if inadvertently, or innocently, aggravated that somehow. It led to some interesting stories she told me about him. They were divorced by the time I was three. So all through my teen years on, I was very aware of feeling jealous about or over a girlfriend. Or a wife.

Marc says he finally caved because of fans asking for him to do it, so he interviewed a guy from the band, Phish. So that’s upcoming.

This just in... Abortion is a human right!
Another's religion shouldn't govern everyone else.
Donald Trump's mother should have had that right too.
We need a time machine.

Marc's also talking about how his dad was manic at times and when he graduated (high school or college? I missed that), his dad didn’t show up because he was in one of those stages and it wasn’t a great day.

Which made me reflect on my high school and college graduations. My only close relative to graduate college was my cousin, my mom‘s sister‘s daughter who I’m three months older than her. She graduated from Eastern in I think Medical Lake, Washington. Just outside Spokane. We were there in/near Spokane together at the same time for a while when she was going to college and I was in the Air Force. So we hung out together a couple of times. 

I wondered if I went to her college graduation. During mine she was in Europe backpacking, as my youngest did decades later through Europe, twice. 

So this magnesium I’m taking to help me sleep. Since it’s good for your nerves, I mean your physical nerves in your body, I wonder if this would’ve helped during my long Covid in the worst part of it? The problem is I took some things that should’ve helped me and it made me feel like I was dying. Because that’s how weird long Covid can be.

Since I’m all over the place on this blog all the time… I mean, at least I use Podcasts as a founding element… maybe I should’ve titled or change it, since I’m pretty much over long Covid now, “random insane thoughts from a same mind“? Or adversely, "random thoughts from an insane mind“?
So now Marc's talking to Jude Law on the podcast and they’re talking about the film they were both in. Jude is singing Marc'c praises for the character he played in the legitimacy he brought to the role. Jude‘s latest movie, I think is "Firebrand", about him playing Henry the Eighth. I saw some video of it and it looks pretty interesting. Jude did some interesting things in playing that character. Trying to be authentic, he walks weird and he needed an obesity suit and a "stunt butt" as Marc puts it. Jude tells a story about going to a perfumer friend to have him make him up a really bad smell since, he said, at that stage in Henry the Eighth's life he had to have smelled bad from rotting flesh, or I don’t know what. He told the Director about it and the Director loved the idea so much, to evoke a response from the actors, he was spraying it everywhere.

I get the "method concept" of acting, but it just seems like abuse to the actors and the crew.

OK, my 5 miles completed for the day. My left foot aches a little bit, but I could hardly walk on it the last walk and overall I feel pretty great. so I think I may have gotten back up to my fitness level I was at last fall. Between where I live, my location, and the weather in the northwest, I tell you this is killing me trying to keep fit. I definitely wish I lived someplace by the ocean, with flater land, and nicer weather year-round. But all those locations have potable water issues or way too damn many people.

A couple years ago, my cousin‘s best friend and my ex-girlfriend from high school, drove her RV down to Tucson, Arizona and wanted to live there. And I said, "Yeah, I’ve lived in Phoenix before and it’s great down there. But too many crazy conservatives there… which she said where she was it wasn’t like that… I continued saying, "You do have to be aware of the water situation as it's getting bad down there and only gonna get worse." Next thing I knew she had moved to Missouri or Louisiana or somewhere. Now I think she’s back up here. So I think that pretty much says it all…

On that note, I’ll bid you adieu.
And leave you with that. 

And soon it's time for lunch.

Cheers! Sláinte!