Just. So. Much
Too much, and we ignore it at our peril, which is why I absorb as much as I can everyday. I refuse to be caught unawares.
A friend of a friend reading the Story and Pictures zine recently liked the content, BUT, sent a message stating they didn’t want to read any ‘political stuff.’ To that end, I’ve moved a few sentences to the end of this issue, so that anyone with that same perspective can move through everything else and then simply choose to skip the last, um, let's call it an editorial.
We now resume our regular programming (which may still may include, from time to time, something about the Hubris of Ignorance and Ego emanating from Tramp (whatshisnameorangeface), his minions, and the danger of it all).
Moving on. There’s Music History, a Tribute to a Loyal, Four-Wheeled Friend, Open Tabs, and Photographs.
Music and Concert Anniversaries
April and May have some personally significant music-related dates, a welcome benefit of the Internet, even though there are plenty of dates across the years that are slightly off or missing from the archive sites. For example, I know that only a couple of days after I first met Journey and Bubba, their road manager, at the Waukegan Ice Arena in Illinois, I accepted Bubba’s invite to see the band open for Elvin Bishop in Milwaukee, Wisconsin a couple of nights later. But despite diligent ‘net sleuthing I haven’t found that show listed in any concert history sites.
April 9, 1977, Journey played the Palladium in New York, the day Bubba flew me and Gonzo in and offered us full-time crew positions. Before that, ’76 to ’77, we’d worked as many of the band’s midwest shows as we could, without pay but usually also with a blanket and a space on a motel room floor, and at the end of our time a hundred dollar bill each out of Bubba’s pocket (yeah, we loved the band).
Street Talk, Steve Perry’s first solo album, is released on April 13, 1984.
Steve and I were close back then (he lived just a few minutes up the road from me). I met his co-writer Randy Goodrum when I was working a gig in L.A. and Steve had me come over to the house he was in as he and Goodrum worked on Street Talk’s song lyrics.
I also remember sitting in his living room in Marin getting a sneak peak of the Oh Sherrie music video before it was released, and Steve pointing out the CBS/Columbia Records execs who had cameos in it.
And the all important anniversary, May 3, 1976, meeting Bubba and Journey for the first time, the aforementioned Waukegan Ice Arena, which eventually led to a decade of holy shit how the hell was I lucky enough to wind up here.
Goodbye to a four-wheeled friend
The truck, and tall trees beyond the chimney, still exist, but everything else in this old Google Maps picture is gone. The 2017 wildfire fire took it all.
I had moved the truck about 50 yards away, close to our neighborhood’s emergency access (the end of our small neighborhood’s no-outlet street), so I could still get out if everything around me began to burn (my wife had driven to her office hours before, 3:00 a.m.-ish, expecting me to be right behind her). I eventually drove away from what still remained of our tiny neighborhood the next morning, somewhere between 7:30 and 8:00.
Now the truck still exists but I have had to let it go, donated to a nonprofit of which I am closely aligned. It is the end of our time together and I am a bit melancholy, deservedly so, I think.
I never named the truck, not because I don’t believe inanimate objects shouldn’t be named, but simply because it just never occurred. For me, ’naming’ something happens as an organic process, something that comes to me as opposed to something I select after compiling a list of possibles. It, a 1999 Ford F150, was simply ‘my truck.’ It began as my wife’s truck when we purchased it in 2001, a steal at just under seven grand with barely 6,000 miles on it, served her and her equine pursuits well but was replaced through necessity by a different vehicle for her six years later. I drove it until last November when, except for moving it around a tiny bit, I retired it to the driveway and planned to sell it..
It had a only few semi-serious mechanical issues, nothing horrible, and was a great truck, especially for one that eventually amassed 218,000 miles. In these last few years though, its clutch had weakened to the point that steep inclines forward and slight inclines in reverse had to be limited. Several sets of dog toenails left scars and holes on the front bench seat. But the brakes wore well, it kept its pep, needed only a few sets of tires. In its last year the cab leaked in rainy weather, the clutch got worse, and a few other issues began to pile on.
There are a couple of philosophical beliefs, panpsychism and hylozoism, that regard everything, more or less, as having some form of consciousness or self-awareness. Without getting too ephemeral or sorting through the specifics, there is (was…) a connection between me and the truck, but for me it’s not about whether the truck has some form of awareness. Somewhere in the past +70 years I picked up on someone’s explanation that symbols, likenesses, and other forms representing spiritual-religious-existential followings, like the Om Sanskrit symbol that I wear around my neck, aren’t magic talismans, but instead provide a reminder to behave or adhere to the tenets of the represented belief. My Om pendant, for instance, reminds me of a foundational Buddhist perspective: is what I am about to do, say, or decide at any given moment in harmony with the universe? And it doesn’t judge me when harmony evades me.
The truck represents two decades or so of personal history, things that came to mind, manifested memories when I looked at it, climbed into it, drove it. That history is chock full of wonderful, not so wonderful, and mundane things. But many of those things were significant, topped undoubtedly by the 2017 night of hell.
In the end it is simply a truck that couldn’t do a few things I needed it to do, including ferry our 80-pound dog around (he’s too big to share the front seat with me). It served us better than we could have ever imagined. I can’t help but get a little emotional when I think about it. There are late evenings when I walk out of the garage onto the tiny, short street we live on, look at our (rebuilt) house and see that night, see Tim’s and Tony’s homes fully engulfed to my left, Maria’s fully engulfed on my right, and our house in between, its fate certain when the side of the house began to bubble, then joining with the infernos on both sides of it before before I walked to my truck and drove away from our neighborhood that we wouldn’t live in again for 27 months.
Up until last week, I would do that every now and then nightly remembrance, my truck in the driveway like a victorious representation of our return. There’s another truck in its place now, pretty good truck, and it is my truck.
But it’s not ‘the’ truck. That’s okay, that is life, everything reaches an end, and it may sound a little sappy, but I miss my four-wheeled friend. I’m thinking I might have to make my own little talisman tribute to it. It deserves it.
Open Tabs
I haven’t made it to a place to see the aurora with mine own eyes, but now I at least know the ‘why’ of its colors.
Gosh, thank you Samsung, for making sure that I never again miss a text while I’m vacuuming…
Regular readers here know how much the current measles situation maddens me (because, simply, there shouldn't be a measles resurgence). By now there are close to 900 measles cases in US, almost 1,200 in Canada (significant exposures occurred via unvaccinated mennonites attending a large gathering in Ontario), and now, inventive people have come up with ways you can give them money in exchange for information and products that won’t do a damn thing to prevent you getting measles or to make sure you almost die from it.
Sandstorm? Dropped your iPhone in the ocean? Whatever may come, Apple works hard, in Ireland, to keep your iPhone working
I know, I know, I said the political stuff is at the end, but sometimes it can’t be helped, I’m tellin’ ya now, some of these are about the current, um, situation rippling out of Washington D.C.
Domestic violence and guns. How’s that for an opener. Subscribers who’ve known me for awhile are aware that my last book, Move to Fire, is the true story of a little boy shot and paralyzed by a defectively designed gun and his legal victory a decade after the accident. And for those who didn’t know, now ya’ do.
One of many significant elements of that story is that the defective gun came from a gunmaker who, because of a domestic violence conviction, was himself not allowed to own a gun, initially because the domestic violence conviction was a felony (the incident included him breaking his then wife’s jaw). His charge was later reduced to a misdemeanor, but when the gunmaker appealed to the ATF for clearance to have a gun, based on the change to misdemeanor, the ATF denied it because it was a domestic violence charge.
Seems right, doesn’t it? That’s the way it is, if you abuse and smack your partner around, which under any objective rationale denotes a serious inability to control your emotions and actions, there ain’t no reason on any god’s earth why you should be allowed to have a gun.
From the This is Not a Joke Department…aw man, I can’t even use words to describe this, you have to click the link to the WTF-est thing that you’ll see.
This is one of those Open Tabs that needs no intro from me, just the title: My dinner with Hitler. (if you’re not aware of the Bill Maher and Pres Tramp thing, check this out before you go to the Larry David link
Here’s a pict to make you feel, um, like a speck — thousands of galaxies captured from looking at a slim slice of the sky
https://esawebb.org/images/potm2504a/
Ed Yong is a personable scientist and very successful author with a keen interest in birds and birding. He puts out an easy to read and enjoy newsletter, and he recently included a couple of great paragraphs about current events and birding. This link will only take you to the signup page for his free newsletter (I encourage you to sign up), and since I can’t get you directly to the current newsletter, I’m including these excerpts because, well, hell, because they're so, so good:
“We are suffering the rule of people so piteous that they can only exist in the world by concocting their own false version of it, and then imprinting that lie onto everyone else. America’s educational infrastructure and scientific enterprise are being sledgehammered to death. Government sites are now prime sources of disinformation. Doublespeak abounds. The attacks, and the feelings of overwhelm they engender, are relentless by design. Against that backdrop, I have found birding—and spring migration, in particular—to be a salve. At a time of chaos, it offers consistency. Amid a sea of lies, it offers reality.
“Last week, I stood in a woodland just off the Texas coast, watching songbirds stream in after a long flight over the Gulf of Mexico—a reminder of the connectedness of the world and the utterly arbitrary nature of borders. And despite the slow season, I’ve largely found the birds I wanted to find in the places, times, and habitats in which I expected to find them—a reminder that the world is knowable, understandable, at least partly predictable, and all the more beautiful and wondrous for all of those things. When I scan the news, nothing makes sense. When I step outside and raise my binoculars to the sky, everything does.”
That Political Stuff: “No, sir, it’s supposed to be a visual… oh, never mind."
Current times are not about American politics, they’re about the hubris and vindictiveness of a megalomanic, race purity billionaire.
People close to me have decided for the sake of their own day to day sanity to shut out the noise, the images, and the news about Tramp and the swirl of everything of which he’s the catalyst.
I get that, and I judge not. If anyone asks about something related to the ongoing mess, I share what I know, and if they prefer not to know, that’s fine. But I have an innate need to know how things (how everything) work(s). I’ve been this way for as long as I can remember (as has my sister, both of us getting that from our dad, I’m certain), wanting to know something, to read about it, to examine, explore, and better understand it. I’ve always done that more on my own than in a formal, educational way, in large part because as a youngster I struggled to learn things in a classroom environment. That resolved a bit as I aged, to the point that I now occasionally teach in a classroom environment.
There is now, though, another compelling reason to subject myself to the noise and continuous battering of health, science, business, rights, free speech, war, and immigration news: I do not want to get caught by surprise.
I want to know as much as I can about the who and what, the timing of things, the dangerous ridiculousness of this all, and I want to know it as soon as possible. To do that, to have a notion about what may happen next, I’m willing to suffer the WTF emotions that accompany the majority of news and information about what’s going on.
I won’t always include or write about it here, but it’s difficult to not mention it in some way when much of it is sooooo serious. And it is so, sooooo serious.
There have been other men in charge who had a distinct role in underhanded, less than humanitarian, minority and/or disenfranchised action decisions, but I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed an American president actually create ‘evidence’ to justify an action; better said, to justify a kidnapping.
An aside (because it’s me, gotta have a few of those), when I first used Photoshop it was version two. Very early ‘90s, I think. Point is, I know my Photoshop, and digital imaging sh*t.
Along comes Tramp, in a message to the masses, displaying an 8”x10” photo of a young man’s tattooed fingers and knuckles in support of the contention that the man is a member of a particular gang, said gang having been targeted by Tramp for deportation. This story, the roundup and deportation of gang members is known everywhere by everyone, even people who don’t follow news. The photo I reference here, held by the President for a photo op of the photo of the man’s hands, got fairly wide but not massive exposure, and then received more exposure the other night after an ABC News interviewer and the President had a long, “nasty” (one of Tramp’s favorite adjectives when responding to a question he doesn’t like being asked) yes it is/no it isn’t on camera tete a tete.
Tramp insisted the photo is “evidence” of the young man’s membership in the gang. The interviewer responded with “it’s Photoshop,” and after a prolonged back and forth about it Tramp asked, “do you want to see the picture?” Because, apparently, that would show…I’m not sure what.
Without going into lengthy backstory, many gang members are tattooed in very specific ways, one element of verifying that they’re the real deal. In the image, the four different tattoos, one on each of the young man’s fingers, supposedly represent four things: two letters and two numbers, MS13, a specific, particularly violent foreign gang.
In the photo, those letters and numerals — MS13 — are seen above the tattoos, near the knuckles. Even to non-digital image-aware people, the difference between the look of the tattoos and look of the letters is apparent, and the look is different because, indeed, the letters have been digitally incorporated into the picture. I, and every other user of digital imaging tools, would bet on it.
But Tramp is having none of that. They are not only tattooed onto the young man’s hands, they are “evidence” he is a member of that gang (evidence is in quotes because it’s the word Tramp said repeatedly in the interview).
While I have no evidence myself of how this all came about, I can give you my hypothesis, which is in large part based on my communications design experiences. The other ‘part’ is based on how Tramp, reportedly, does things.
Yep, the letters were placed digitally. No question. And, in my opinion, placed there with the intention of showing what the actual tattoos supposedly represent, a visual aid to show, “see, the marijuana leaf tattoo on the index finger represents marijuana, ‘M’; the tat on the second finger represents ’S’; the….” and so on.
It was a visual aid, initially, meant to inform people of the tats' meaning.
When given the photo, Tramp, whether he did what he did on purpose or because he wouldn’t/didn’t/couldn’t listen to what it was actually meant to show, struck a bitch-face pose holding the photo and put the whole thing out there as “evidence.”
It doesn’t matter now if he didn’t understand or missed the how and why of its creation, because he decided the moment he looked at it that this could show the stupid masses out there (meaning us) how the media and nonbelievers were stupid and wrong,
And now no one in his circle is going to tell him he got it wrong, that the purpose was to explain with a visual aid, not convict, and the result is that an American president created a falsehood to support an unverified, un-investigated accusation that a man is something he may or may not be.
Photographs and End Notes
Here are some images and whatnot with no purpose other than to leave y'all with something nice, or fun, or, from a Zen perspective, just are. I always appreciate the time you spend at Story and Pictures, and hope you find it worthwhile to be here, and you can always drop me a line via the Contact page and tell me that. Or tell me something else. Speaking of telling, if you like what you find here, do please tell your friends about it. And if you're new, check out some of the earlier stories. Stay sane, stay safe, and find some peace wherever you may be, literally and figuratively.
MWH
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