The Kyphosis Inheritance

Dusty demons found hiding in my office

I often have to stifle a giggle  when I witness what is essentially an impromptu group photo of the obsession with cellphones. It is not like I suddenly noticed; the rock I live under does have windows after all.  I am talking about that moment when I just stop to observe; I marvel at the scope of this current cultural phenomenon. Age isn't a factor, nor is social strata. It manifests right in front of you, whether you’re cruising the aisles at Walmart looking for cheap crap you don’t need or strolling into a fancy office fronted by a receptionist with a $100 manicure. I’m talking about that obsession with our “cellulose” phones, those magical devices that convince a goodly portion of any group to stand around with their faces buried in the screen. I’m guilty too at times, though I force myself to stop walking when I ‘m writing a text, which occasionally does help the person on the receiving end. Anyone that receives texts from me on a regular basis can attest to the 3^rd degree eye slaughter that results from the “some language other than English” those texts frequently contain. And no, I don’t use auto-correct thank you; I can make perfectly nonsensical messages all by myself.

     I get that I can do lots of stuff on a phone. My question is why? I just don’t get the attraction of fiddling with Facebook, getting lost in a game or watching a movie on that little bitty screen. Nope, lost me there and no I don't want the app for that. I guess I should go out and come back in again.

     I'll catch myself standing there gawking when I‘m somewhere like a store or anywhere people tend to congregate, and I'll notice how so many folks have their heads bent over their phones. Sometimes I wonder what the teens and twenty something's of today will look like when they are my age or older. Will we have a whole segment of society populated by those afflicted with kyphosis? Scores of folks walking around with their head bent forward since they can’t lift it up because their back and neck is all whacked. I’m sure you've seen those little old folks in the grocery store, head bent over their grocery cart, shuffling along pretty much staring at their feet?  In addition, I envision a myriad of arthritic thumbs and index fingers bent in 6 different directions from sliding, tapping and texting. It doesn't sound pretty, then again I’m paying for my misspent youth too in some ways, so the invincible mindset managed to get passed down the line. Not that wasn't much of a surprise now was it?

 I’ll catch myself walking and texting and I make myself stop, finish my message and put the damn thing away. I see so many people out and about that walk with their face glued to the screen of their phone it makes me shake my head. I guess there is no great concern out there of walking in to a wall or the person in front of you, possibly trip over a curb, or just wander out in to the street. My question is, why the obsession with our cell phones and why do I see so many people doing it? Even If it’s in my pocket it's still sending me updates and such from text or email messages. It is somewhat like having a bunch of kids around when the ice cream man comes down the street; its just going to bug you until you take it out and respond to what it wants.

The changes in phones and how we use them has been quite amazing really, though I doubt the old land-line phone will disappear entirely. There are still a lot of areas where cell reception is bad, whether due to terrain or in cities where cell towers are not allowed for aesthetic reasons. I haven’t had a land-line phone in about 7 years and doubt I’ll go back to one unless the geography of my domicile deems it necessary. 

I have a love/ hate relationship with my phone even if it serves 3 functions fairly well.  First and foremost it's my alarm clock. No more pumpkin face luminous numbers staring back at me in the middle of the night; I don't own any electric clocks now. Second, it’s my watch since I don’t like wearing one. Lastly, it’s a phone, where it’s used sparingly as a talking device. Since I talk on the phone all day at work I sure as hell don't want to talk on it when my day is done. I probably use it the most for texting, and it only makes noise when the alarm goes off.  Oh and there is another thing I use it for occasionally and mainly outdoors. I used my current phone to take the picture at the top and was surprised it actually came out all right. It really sucks for taking inside picture, I almost need Klieg lights to get a decent picture. I leaned them against the lamp that sits on my desk, which is made out of an old coffee pot and voila! Wonders never cease.  

Now my dastardly companion will go to one side of my desk, where it resides most weekends until I need the alarm on Sunday night. Now if my thumbs would stop aching and I could just get rid of this stiff neck…

Actually, There is Something On

    Writing for me is often a bit like pulling a loose string on a shirt or a pair of pants, I’m not always sure where my intentions will lead me, though hopefully not too far from where I intended to go initially. Sometimes I start with an idea, then I have to go around the coffee cup a few times before I remember there is a handle, such is the delight of falling through the hole in the paper.  Yesterday’s entry for your perusal began as the back story to that handle I never managed to find before it was time to roll up the sidewalks for the night. Instead, the back story became the story when my keyboard and I jumped in and kept on falling for a while.  While I was reading it over, hoping there were no typos or sentences with the structural integrity of grape jelly, I realized I had left out what I had started to write about in the first place.  Thus again I have managed to make a short story long.  I’ve been talking and ofttimes living backwards since I was 5 so it’s not an earth shattering surprise to have done it again. My brief sojourn back in time, to the hysterically inefficient mess that is over-the-air broadcasting did result in a payoff that my wife and myself still enjoy to this day. 

     My wife admits to being a horse crazy girl growing up and I have seen first-hand how that feeling still lurks beneath her quiet demeanor, ready to be unleashed at the first scent of horse sweat.  Myself I had never spent much time around horses due to the circles I ran in and I haven’t ridden one in many a year.  The past few years have been a lot of fun spending time at horse shows and riding barns being around these amazing animals with a few bruises and a slobbered up hoody being well worth the price of admission.

     Late one Sunday during the cable hiatus we flipped the TV on at my house and saw a small herd of horses flash across the screen. ”Wait, stop, horses, what was that?” my honey exclaimed as her eyes grew big and her face lit up when the channel went past.  Of course we clicked back and stopped to watch and see what this was all about. Little did we know that chance happening would still resonate three years later since we are still watching the show.  We had discovered a little Canadian family drama called Heartland that is now in its 8^th season.  We made a point of watching on Sunday nights when we were near a TV and were a bit bummed when it disappeared from the local late night Sunday fare.  We have a stack of DVDs we don’t watch now and adding to the collection didn't make sense for us after pricing them online so we held out hope it would come back around again. Lo and behold our hope was rewarded, we happened to see it was playing on the UP Network and fired up the DVR. The best part was they were running it from the pilot right on through season 7; love my DVR.  

     I could say I don’t know what has drawn me to this series, though the truth is there are too many reasons to list why I like it. I've never considered myself a family drama fan, though I did enjoy crazy family sitcoms through the years starting with All in the Family., and wholesome would definitely not describe Archie Bunker. Simply put it’s a good show with great scenery, good writing and acting, some really good characters, and oh yeah horses, lots of horses.  I hesitate to type the word wholesome though the word is inescapable to describe it since it is just plan good family entertainment. This little show has all the stuff families live through day to day, the laughter and tears, the bickering, teasing and making up, success, failure, heartfelt moments and occasional fisticuffs, but no swearing since the network bleeps out even the word, Damn! That usually elicits a giggle from the couch.  It is definitely not sappy and takes on issues that each of us has either gone through at one time or another or we know someone who has. The backdrop is a 600 acre horse ranch in the middle of Alberta, Canada and to describe the scenery as fabulous doesn't do it justice, though the amazing camera work makes up for it.  It is back to being our Sunday night wind down to get ready for the week ahead thing to do. Anyone out there with a horse crazy sweetheart would be wise to check it out with no caveats since you’ll enjoy getting hooked yourself.

There's Still Nothing On

     After living in this house a few years I reached a point when I had to make some changes. I was working nights so paying for 150 channels with nothing on didn’t make a lot of sense.  Mainly because I wasn’t home to watch anything I was interested in and I didn’t have a way to record it at the time.  So I kicked loose from cable TV for almost 2 years, it was too costly for what I was getting out of it, though I kept the internet. I would just watch the shows I wanted online when I got home at night, plus I could pause it when I wanted to so it worked real well for a while.  With football season approaching I had to do something and decided to break down and get one of those TV signal converters plus a set of rabbit ears to see what I could pull in for TV. I could get the local network channels that carried football except the NBC affiliate, which wasn’t a great loss though I was surprised I couldn’t ever get the local PBS station. Reception ranged between pretty good and meh most of the time, though all bets were off during dust storms. I somehow managed to pull in, at least from the antennae’s point of view, a “total” of 63 channels, of which I watched about 7 or 8 if I could get them to come in. The rest consisted of a rather eclectic mess that for some interesting channel surfing if nothing else. There were 7 or 8 that were basically nothing more than the flea races with sound,  it was toss up about what you heard sound wise, sometimes they were in English, some times in Spanish.  Another group of a dozen or so consisted of religious or evangelical channels in various and sundry forms. Any one that has known me any length of time knows I’m about as religious as a bucket of paint and only darken the doors of a church for weddings and funerals, so they were pretty much out of my wheelhouse.  The remaining 30 odd stations were all in Spanish, some religion based others just regular TV and since my high school Spanish is very rusty at best I didn’t last long watching those and trying translate on the fly. My main TV fare consisted of ancient reruns from the fairly early days of television.

 

                                                             

 

     I’ve rarely met anyone that doesn’t recall the TV shows of their youth with some degree of fondness, though I‘ll tell ya watching these shows now it’s easy to notice how low budget they really were.  From a kid’s point of view this was cool stuff and I wonder how adults from that era thought about what was filling the small screen.  Catching some of the old shows here and there is a reminder of simpler times and simpletons. Seriously who grew up during the 60’s & 70’s and didn’t see every episode of Gilligan’s Island and Leave It to Beaver about 4,000 times. Watching all that TV I don’t know how I managed to read all the books I did, so maybe I‘m a little odd, just maybe. I remember as a kid we had a box on top of the TV we called the rotor that was connected to a motor up on the antenna. You had to turn the dial to specific points marked on it to get certain channels to come in. We only were able to get about 5 since we didn’t live in an area close enough to any of the UHF stations; those were the channel numbers above 13.  Cable didn't make an appearance in my area until I was heading to high school. The world has definitely moved on.

   

                                   

                 

 

    Into this epic conglomeration sitting atop my TV set walked the woman that is now my wife.  The first time she was at my house and we decided to watch TV she had a look of utter surprise that I didn’t have cable.  I exposed her to the joy that is over the air TV, she wasn’t impressed.  The typical offering late at night after Craig Ferguson ended was usually an infomercial and there weren’t a lot of other choices. The most palatable enough to watch usually consisted of Highway Patrol and Sea Hunt, with an occasional Mr. Ed or Bat Masterson thrown in.  Mr. Ed got a pass of course, he’s a horse and horses are cool, plus he is still funny after all these years.  The others left her wondering why I watched this stuff. I pointed out to her that these shows were from the late 50’s & early 60’s, essentially the stuff I grew up watching, when everything was in black & white and television as an industry wasn’t much more than a teenager.  Sophistication in TV land then wasn’t as important as just putting something on that folks may watch and sponsors could manage to try and sell stuff. I always liked it when Alfred Hitchcock groused and sighed about having to go to a commercial., just like we do now. We would watch and giggle over the impossible stuff that occurred in episode after episode. and the obvious low production sets. The PSAs at the end of Highway Patrol were always special,

“ Remember to give blood at the blood bank not on the freeway” and “ Leave the clowns at the circus don’t be one on the highway”  we’re our favorites.

                                                                          

                                                           

     As our relationship progressed we spent many a Sunday and Monday watching football at her place. She had cable and her TV wasn’t a refuge from the Clinton era.  When we made the decision to share living space she insisted that the rabbit ears go, which required very little arm twisting and not long after she parked her desk and her clothes in the third bedroom, the dish went up on the end of the trailer. NFL Sunday ticket is great way to OD on football in the fall, though we now have 200 channels and there’s still nothing on; thank the universe for the DVR.  We do still catch Mr. Ed from time to time.  After all, a horse is horse of course, of course.    

      

 

Find Yours

It has become a ritual around my house the last few years whenever I start to tell a story my wife will stop me short before I really get started and ask the all-important question: “Is this guy dead?” Apparently I know, well I knew a lot of people that are no longer with us and stories being what they are the people in them sometimes are just not around anymore. I don’t sit around contemplating why them and not me, I’m just glad I’m around to tell stories.  Well here goes another one, sort of.

I was watching one of the little tribute videos that have been plastered all over Facebook since Joan Rivers passed and was struck by something she said at the end of the one I watched. Joan Rivers kicked the door off its hinges to pave the way for the great woman comics that followed her. Just by being herself no matter what the subject she could be sarcastic, abrasive, and unflinchingly opinionated though she never apologized for who she was.  Not everyone appreciated her humor all the time, though I ‘m sure the biggest stuffed shirts laughed until they cried at many of her jokes. She mentioned in this little video that for a comic doing comedy was a calling and it is what we do, we make people laugh.  It was spoken in such a way that I knew it come from inside the heart of who she was. One should be so lucky to find a calling in that way, the internal knowledge of this is the way I go. I hope you find your calling and I thank you for taking some time to share mine with me.

 

 

 

 

 

Image: http://lifeisaforkintheroad.com/

 

Airheads & Egga Muffins

I just read that Longmire on A & E has not been renewed for a 4^th season and I’m pissed though not all that surprised with the state of the entertainment industry these days. Granted, fans like me of the show got 2 more seasons of Longmire than those of us who loved Firefly. Then again that was on the Fascists On Xanax network, so should we really have been that surprised?  As I remember A & E started out as the Arts & Entertainment network, though I think now it stands for Airheads & Egga Muffins, where we are treated to such gripping TV as Duck Dynasty & Storage Wars.  No, I don’t watch that s***, though I do see the promos for it when I fast forward through commercials on my DVR.  I really think the big execs in the entertainment industry see the majority of us a collection of morons. The “reality TV” that fills the airwaves is akin to a greasy burrito fart in a crowded elevator; you can’t get away from it; the endless promos show up no matter what you are watching. That type of show in prime time really got that engine rolling full bore when Survivor hit the airwaves. Is that still on?  The entire genre has snowballed out of control. I tried watching Jersey Shore once and couldn’t stop asking myself, “Why is this mess a TV show?” Maybe I’m a dinosaur, but I do remember when almost every show was only in black & white and TV was not very sophisticated for sure, though now it feels like we are regressing, to what I know not. I marvel, briefly mind you, at the offerings we gobble up as entertainment currently and wonder what is coming down the pike next. I’m sure TV execs are banging on the heads of their writing staff for a dazzling new schlock filled idea to draw on our collective addiction to living vicariously through our TV screens. I wonder, if the people we live with, and that includes ourselves, are we just not interesting enough anymore. How did we get so broken?  End of rant, time for a PB&J and a book.

 

 

 

Nanu Nanu

One of the world's great talents is gone. The how and the why will be speculated on and reported about ad nauseam for the next few days. I'm guilty as the next person who gets caught in the train wrecks that splash across the net on a day to day basis, though in this case none of that stuff matters. What matters is Robin Williams has moved on: we will no longer have him to entertain us. I heard a comedian say once, "That being funny all the time is hard work", for the life of me I can't remember who said it, but Robin Williams made it look easy. I've seen all the TV shows and movies he has done and though many of them were really good, to me where he really outshined other comedians and actors was when he did an interview. The interview would typically have some idea, thought or word that could turn on a dime into a riff or rant about something apparently nonsensical and at the same time be right on point, usually with an impression or an accent thrown in for emphasis. At that point the interviewer was totally off point and everyone was in rolling in the aisles with laughter, which I think was HIS point. He made the ad-lib an art form, that to me was his gift to us. Thank you Robin. You will be missed.

Bears with Dingleberries

I saw a commercial the other night that made me question evolution. Not the argument between Darwin’s ideas and the Creationists. No I’m talking about something much less volatile though of vital importance to each and everyone one of us. What set my mind adrift in the sea of contemplative nonsense was the evolution in the marketing of toilet paper.  This is big, we all use it many of us have our own special names for it. Some of you know it simply as TP, others are more self -conscious and whisper the words bath issue like they trying to avoid anyone knowing they use it.  Sometime the direct approach can work best so I imagine the words shit paper causes anyone a moments doubt about its use.  Then there are the odd family monikers that are borne from simply sharing space year after year. Often no one knows why it was given its household name, and becomes similar to that crazy aunt who lives in the attic and can only be talked about in code when company is around.  Growing up in my house we called it sheet music, the origin of its birth name lost in the pages of time, though the name still stands as a testament to tradition if nothing else.

I remember my mom telling stories about being the 9^th of 10 kids a in small Connecticut town in the decades after World War I. “We had 14 rooms and a path with the Sears Catalog hanging from a nail inside the door of the outhouse.  When only the shiny pages were left us kids would race to the mailbox when the mailman came hoping the new catalog had come in the mail and then fight over who would get it first.” Living through that period of severe lack during the 30’s she developed an appreciation for “modern” things like automatic washers and soft toilet paper.  

After watching toilet paper commercials for many years I ‘m still surprised that it’s never called that on TV, instead it’s always bath tissue, which to me has always been odd because it implies it’s tissue you use for a bath.  Anyone who has ever had the misfortune of dunking an entire roll knows that you are left with a big wet useless wad of gloppy mess. I’m sure there are some of us who remember how well wet balls of toilet paper stuck to anything and everything in junior high, the only drawback of course was getting caught flinging it. I grew up watching Mr. Whipple feeding his toilet paper squeezing fetish and shooing away anyone else that tried to satisfy theirs.  After many moons of trial and error for softer, fluffier and more absorbent sheets we have finally graduated.  Now to hawk those sheets of softness we have bears with dingleberries. One shudders to think, what would Mr. Whipple say?

 

I Want a Refund on My IQ points

My lovely wife was channel surfing on Saturday and she came across the SyFy channel showing the Sharknado movies back to back. We watched the last 15 minutes or so of the original and laughed our  asses off at how bad it was. Like ridiculously bad, like I will run out of adjectives to describe how bad and no I don't want to type all that mess either. It truly was a train wreck of epic proportion that we couldn't stop watching I'm sad to report. If they were going for a certain look when they made this waste of film they nailed it. I'm sure it will become a cult classic and like with most cults I feel the need to run away, far away. Fifteen minutes of watching this was like a condensed 6 hour Beavis and Butthead marathon, I just felt dumb as a jar of dirt for sitting through it. We looked at each other as the credits rolled and posed a question in stereo, "what the hell was that?  We came to a consensus that we wouldn't be able unsee that and we each had probably lost a few IQ points.  I want a refund.

Simple

I saw the news about another of the “70s icons of my youth passing on yesterday. I loved The Rockford Files with James Garner and watched it in reruns when it was still showing up in syndication.  I think the celebrities from my youth whether TV, sports or music still have a special place in memory because they remind me of a time when life seemed simpler, when we both were young and vibrant. After some of the things I done and seen I’m glad to still be vibrating. Of course maybe because I didn’t know shit back then and the stuff that I thought was important really wasn’t all that important and that is what made life seem simpler. Simpler isn’t about easier it’s just about less moving parts to get in the way or lose sight of. Being happy is pretty simple. Just be happy. Not a lot of parts to that and it took some work to see it in those terms. Truth in essence is pretty plain and simple it’s either true or not. The boxes or limitations we try to put on the people, things and conditions around us are what create grey areas. You know what I’m talking about, those grey areas that are created when you over think something and it messes with your harmony. Sometimes that can be a good thing for me because I find that I need to take a minute and look at some thing from another point of view. The other side to that is sometimes I have to make a stance for my Truth, how I live in the center of my being where Life really is simple when I pay attention. Not an easy thing to do some days, on other days it’s as simple as changing a thought. I’ve had a lot of practice with that and I still need to keep practicing because though I may be a bit older now I still don’t know shit but I’m working on it.

 

Rock n Roll Remembers

I read on the book of Face that Johnny Winter passed on today in Switzerland. I watched some of the videos that were posted in remembrance of him and it got me to thinking about how lucky I was to grow up during the time that I did. I saw The Beatles first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show and rocked out to Don Kirshner's Rock Concert on Friday nights and the King Biscuit Flour Hour on   FM radio on Sundays. Along the way I was fortunate enough to hear some of those iconic bands live and in person, though for most of those shows I know I was at there is no way I could begin to tell you the set list. Every time I scraped a few dollars together I was adding to me record collection, which got to be very large. It is all gone now, lost along the way for various and sundry reasons. I've replaced a decent chunk of it with CDs and though the music is the same vinyl just felt more permanent. It has been making a bit of a comeback, which didn't seem possible at one point. I still find newer artists that have come along in recent years that I really like, though if I'm just chillin' either gaming, reading or writing the old sounds just suit me more. Rest in peace Johnny and thanks for being a part of the best era in music.

Zombies R Us

I’ve made a point of separating myself from the fascination with everything zombie that has exploded on the scene the past few years.  I just never got it. The Dawn of the Dead series of movies, and the original Night of the Living Dead were train wrecks you almost couldn’t stop watching. I actually went see World War Z at the theater with a group of friends I hadn’t seen in a while because I wanted to see them, not because I gave a shit about the movie.  I left there thinking that was the first zombie move ever with a little intelligence to it, though I have to admit Shaun of the Dead was a great parody and really funny.  I remember seeing a brief article on the web about a town that had made preparations for a zombie apocalypse. Seriously, what the fuck is in the water there.

I’ve been a science fiction fan for many years and thoroughly enjoyed post-apocalypse novels like Dhalgren, Earth Abides and The Stand. Those were great stories for me because they were really about the relationships between individuals thrown together in the aftermath of epic catastrophe and their reactions to the stress of carrying on in the face of impossible odds.  Seeing how everyone found their own way to cope and manage to find enough inner strength to keep going really made for great reading. The line between good guy and bad guy definitely blurs, stretching the limits of things which we’d never believe ourselves capable in the quest to survive.

 I’ve seen all manner of zombie apocalypse related things popping up and I always had a feeling there was an allegory in there somewhere.  The typical zombie scenario of zombie bites or scratches someone, they die then turn into a zombie and the only way to stop them is take out the head one way or another. The hook is we all have that wondrous potential to be zombies. Makes me wonder where does it come from?  Zombies are rampant consumers of brains and flesh, mindless dedication to just consuming brains and or flesh.  No thought involved just gimme what I want, somewhat like our consumer driven society.  We are lead around by our internal noses for everything from the latest phone, electronic device, or game on the market.  Then we are given the option to live vicariously through lives of the Kardashians, The Housewives of (insert city here), or the collection of sad people that want to air their dirty laundry on the Jerry Springer show.  Seriously are we so unhappy that we have to watch someone’s life that is more ridiculous then owning a pet rock to make us feel better about ourselves?  Granted everyone is just finding their own way, whether on TV or in the living room watching it, though where do we draw the line on some of this stuff. If there wasn’t a market for it, it wouldn’t sell would it?  That is a rather disquieting thought to me, then again what do I know I ‘m just a dude with a blog.

This post started off about something else before that rant jumped in the way. So I’ll have to say I’ve surprised myself and actually gotten hooked on watching the Walking Dead.  It has a lot of the elements of some of the great cacotopian[1] society stuff like that I mentioned above.  The lines are blurred constantly for what good people will do in a bad situation.  Despite the fact that the storyline hits some flat spots and seems to move at a snail’s pace it is rather thought provoking story telling.

So that’s my two cents, well probably closer to 1.2 cents with the current inflation, though I do want to add something that made me laugh the first time I heard it many years ago. Enjoy.

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[1] ^ Beaumont, Matthew. (2006). Cacotopianism, the Paris Commune, and England's Anti-Communist Imaginary, 1870-1900. ELH, 73(2): 465-487.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yasin1ULLvI

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[1] ^ Beaumont, Matthew. (2006). Cacotopianism, the Paris Commune, and England's Anti-Communist Imaginary, 1870-1900. ELH, 73(2): 465-487.