Jerry Jeff at his best - with weird photos, but they kinda go

Random Connections

 

Marti used to watch Perry Mason every day. It relaxed her, she said.  The judge in the last episode was Earl Stanley (Gardiner) himself. He died in 1970, so the last episode was run long before she was watching in 1971. He wrote hundreds of books. (A typist, someone said to me.) I did not watch these. I was rereading Isimov's "The Foundation Trilogy" then and wondering how I could have thought these books were so great just a few years before. It wasn't until I got back home and that summer in Bloomington before hitchhiking off I was reading "Sometimes A Great Notion." I recall talking about it to a cab driver who drove me to Charlie's (step-father) deathbed in the Bloomington hospital. 

Well, I finished "Sailor Song" You shouldn't bother unless you have read and like the other early books. I was ready for it to be done. Great writing, stupid story, stupid characters and everyone gets run over by a truck at the end. (As a friend once said of the ending to Hamlet.) Except for Ike and the hot tempered girl. Of course, if you want to learn how to write- go right ahead. The bones show which could be good or bad. I find, at least with the musicians I'm hanging out with, (and the age group- of 60 year olds) that everyone is recalling things from their early teen years and what their parents liked. They are all pulling out these songs that were on the hit parade in 1965. Are we really such sheep? Thank goodness, I had no parents with any awareness of popular culture, or any awareness at all for that matter. And most TV was crap. I managed to find my own crap.

The End (Part 1 of several life changing events)

It should be descending, shouldn't it?  With Marti, (the first one I married- at 18) it was dinner at the restaurant where I was working. She brought up that she was unhappy and I agreed that I was too. The discussion continued that perhaps we should separate, then about divorce and then how about I leave town. We had no physical relations. She had gone with me to a counselor once and refused to go again. I had betrayed her by not being entirely honest about my sexual experience. We spent no time together. We didn't talk. She went out drinking with a guy she had made friends with that was of drinking age (I wasn't). I wasn't particularly jealous of him- I knew he wouldn't get what he thought he was going to get. I had married her and didn't. So over a dinner of maybe an hour we negotiated the end of our two year relationship. If she had any feelings, she didn't show them. I had a melt down as I was packing up the car on the last day, but it was apparent she didn't want to see it, so I stuffed it away and left. Drove an old rebuilt Studebaker back across country to Indiana. 

After I left she filed for divorce with my consent and it was effortlessly over. I was supposed to pay part of the lawyers fee, but I never did.

I would never hide my feelings again. I would not be with anyone that made promises about what could be.
I learned to never mistake a photographic memory for intelligence.  I avoided girls who had the latest physical aliment (hers was hypoglycemia, which basically meant she slept a lot- as opposed to having symptoms of depression). I never ever got talked into anything I didn't want to do again.

Maybe she was having a fling with the guy, but if she was, she certainly wasn't the person I had thought I was marrying. Guilty parties are always the projection of ourselves.

More Singing

Sawtooth played another Convalescent Home (in Whittier) today. Great fun. The song below is one that Rhubarb Meringue Pie is learning to play.

One That I Sang To Every Baby I've Ever Rocked

Holes In My Mind

Mijoa Rho - Artist

http://www.mijoa.org/

I apologize to the gentleman that made a comment about my post about living way on top of the hill in Pacific Grove. The picture I posted was one I just stole off the internet because it reminded me of the view and another place I lived there before we moved to San Francisco. (Which I left out of my several part thing on places I've lived.) I looked on a map for the house on top the hill, but didn't quite find it. My commute to the San Carlos Hotel in downtown Monterey was by bicycle through the Presido, so my notion is warped of where it was. (I used to joke with people visiting Monterey and Pacific Grove, 'that yes, I did know how to get to a particular landmark, but I couldn't tell them how to get there themselves'- this is exactly what happened when my step-father drove me up there for the first time in his RV and we drove around and around looking for our campsite that nobody could quite give us directions to.) I know you left the top  of the Presido, passed a school and took a left and went a little further up hill.

I left out when the ex- and I went to find a place of our own because she hated one of my roommates. The first place was down on the south end of downtown Monterey, right on the truck route. It was cheap, but turned out to be noisy and perpetually dirty with soot from the trucks. We came back to Pacific Grove and lived in an apartment building just a few blocks above the downtown there. It was a nice place and quiet. I was working graveyard and the ex- was working swing shift I think. Pacific Grove was a dreamy place. If we had stayed things might have been different, but I couldn't. San Francisco was on the agenda when I came to California. Maybe the ex- was working graveyard as well by this point. We gave notice and the manager insisted on showing the apartment and we told him that the evening was the best time since we slept during the day. He was old and god knows what he was thinking, but he appears in our living room with a couple at 11:00 am. The ex- and I are in bed asleep. She wakes me up- there's someone in the apartment! I grab my jeans and go out to find the guy showing them our kitchen. The couple left immediately. The old man was upset with me that he had lost potential renters. 

We were married on Jack's Peak. It's too bad that I don't have pictures from that time. 

My Wife Thinks I'm Getting Morbid

I was reading a Wikipedia entry for David Foster Wallace and wondering if its worth it to dip into his novels and found and interesting site: http://www.findagrave.com/  which led me to this. This is in Bordentown where Richard was born. His father and one brother and Jeanette (his sister) are there too. For those that don't know, this is a major hobby horse: helenadekaygilder.org  I received email from a guy back east that had found the Helena site and was offering his info about the De Kay family and where her brother and father was buried as well as her grandfather (Famous Poet - Drake- "The Culprit Fay" early early American poetry)  The journal that Richard & Helena kept in the early years of their marriage (which I've finally found in readable form and have read) describe planting trees for the two of their dead children - one died before he was a year old and the second was stillborn- I guess it wasn't here at Bordentown (there were a few children that lived between these two deaths) .

Having found this, I went looking for Joseph Dwight Strong Jr. but had no luck thetruthabouttreasureisland.com He's got to be in San Francisco or Oakland, then I started looking for others and found my step-father but none of my own family. Then I realized that I'm to blame. The cemetery I owned for a brief time had no digital photos and I didn't take any. The records were all on Lotus Symphony (remember it was state of the art for accounting in the day) because that's what I had to transcribe it to from my father's restaurant napkin records. I just wasn't planning for the future.

Apparently, there are folks out there driving around taking photos of grave markers just like there are folks driving around taking pictures of whole neighborhoods for Goggle Maps drill downs at street level. My house how appears on Google Maps with a basketball hoop out front that hasn't been there for 4 years.

What to do while waiting for turkey.