Eye Of The Beholder

   You know everyone doesn't love Raymond.  Me for one.  He and his show might be very funny but I'll never know, because I can't stand the way Ray Ramano looks.  Everybody has actors who are like that for them.

    Another for me is Billy Crystal, but unlike Raymond, I'll watch some things with Billy Crystal because of the quality of the whole.  And if I dont have to look at him, I think he's great, as in his narration of some of the Ken Burns baseball series.

     I used to feel that way about the guy from Home Improvement, which I never watched, but he's won me over--largely with his part in the fantasic film Galaxy Quest-- and I'm now OK with how he looks.  I wouldn't want my daughter to marry him and produce grandkids with his weird face genes, but I don't have to change the channel when he comes on anymore.

      This is purely personal preference.  Jack Palance and Don Ameche were weird looking, and I don't think this is a minority opinion, but somebody must have found their looks appealing or they wouldn't have got those leading men roles.  ( You'd have to pay me to watch City Slickers, which has both Billy Crystal and Jack Palance. )

       Some people feel this way about entertainers I like. Jerry Seinfield, OK, I can see that, but I know people who don't like to look at Meryl Streep.  She doesn't have a classic movie star face,  but I think she's beautiful.

       I have a friend who doesn't like to look at Cameron Diaz, and her eyes are a little weird, but he also doesn't like the looks of Uma Thurman.  Can't see how anybody could think that.

       There's only one female who comes to mind that I feel that way about, Kerri Russell. I wanted to watch that show she broke out in, Felicity, because the story line appealed to me, but I couldn't get past my distaste with her looks.

        The most outstanding example of this in my life involves a TV commercial.  At my house we always mute the commercials, but there was one for which my friends and I had to kill the visual as well.

        Said commercial came on during  Braves games a few years back.  I guess it was for some exercise program, because its spokesman was a large bare-chested man with a buldging torso on which sat a tiny head.  His image was so repulsive it was as if we were vampires and he  was a crucifix. Shouts of "Agh! Agh! Man tits!" were heard as we tried to find the remote with our hands over our eyes.

The Lost Boys and the Last Days off Wiffleball

                                                                                  

     Boys come to my house in the middle of the night. I call them boys. They're in their mid-twenties. They were boys when I met them, and boys they remain.

  

      They come in my bedroom at 2:00 A.M. exhorting Da to get up and play with them. Sometimes I do when I don't need to be up early. They consume everything consumable that they don't have to cook. When they leave it's as if a swarm of locusts has passed through, empty husks strewn everywhere.

       But to understand about the lost boys and why I call them such, you first need to know about.

                      THE LAST DAYS OF WIFFLEBALL:

                                      A LOVE STORY

         We played wiffleball at least once a week for three or four years. We started as soon as it was warm enough and continued until it was too cold. It was never too hot and it took a lot of rain to stop us.

        The players were me, my son and from three to twenty boys in their early twenties, occasionally a female or two.

       Some of them had spent a lot of time at my house; most I had known since they were little; all were and are my friends. I could bore you to tears explaining our game and its elaborate rules-- how to turn a double play, (Base runners were all imaginary. There was diving by intrepid defenders, but no base running in our game.) how the cedar tree in left center (the green monster) came into play, but suffice it to say that we kept meticulous statistics and published them weekly on the interweb.
         And we lived from one wiffleball day to the next.

         People regularly drove from Athens and Atlanta to play our game. I remember Daniel Lanford saying more than once that wiffleball was the only thing he looked forward to. He usually followed by saying how this showed that he had no life, but I knew at the time he meant he loved us and there was no place he'd rather be.
           We all felt that way.

           Until the very end, almost all the boys who played this game had grown up together, gone to school together, played rec ball together, climbed the water tower together. The last summer of wiffleball the game had grown by word of mouth to include boys some of us had never met, so many that no one got to play that much.

         We all thought, the original wiffleball "core" that is, that the next year we'd politely rid ourselves of the new kids and resume our old game. That was two years ago. There's been no game since. What happened was that most of them got jobs, went off to graduate school, got wives or demanding girlfriends that weren't of our circle, in short, grew up.

          We didn't realize then that that last summer was the end of childhood, that that summer was the last time this circle of friends would be together. Oh, a lot of them will still get together at Christmas holidays, but it will never be the same as the summers of wiffleball, more like a class reunion.

          They all grew up except the few who were left behind, the lost boys who raid my refrigerator in the night. They roam the Newton County night looking for what has been lost, and although I stay home and go to bed on time, I’m not blind to the fact that I’m also one of the lost and left behind.

More to follow

             Hello fans,
   As you can see, I've pretty much taken the summer off  from writing. I've been busy with other things and until lately without reliable help. (I don't type these things myself , short e-mails and texts constitute all my typing ).

          Look again next week,  there will be at least one new post.

                 THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE...... 

"Come Saturday Morning, I'm Going Away With My Friend"

     Jesus is coming Saturday. I know this to be true because I've read it in the newspaper, on the internet and even in "Doonesbury." Some preacher in California who's had people all packed to go before says his math was off last time but he's sure he's got it right this time.

     So what does that mean for you? Well kids you can stop doing your homework and skip school. For that matter, you can stop heeding those commercials warning you not to try meth even once.

     And your parents? Drop that plan to quit smoking. Take the rent money and spend it on crack.

     This advice is only good if, like me, you're a Baptist. Because, you see, we Baptists believe "once in grace, always in grace" and that's a wonderful doctrine.

      Methodists, Catholics and some other sects believe in "falling from grace." Thus they need to be on their really best behavior, get right with God if they're not real soon and go out and start proselytizing.

     Sample conversation between a Methodist and Baptist this week:

     Methodist: Brother, are you walking in grace? Would you like to kneel down and pray with me? The hour of his coming is nigh.

     Baptist: Don't think so. Want some crack?

Same Old Song

     Songs get recycled. Sometimes an artist will release a hit song and try to follow it with something that sounds much the same hoping to recapture that success. This was especially true when the recording company essentially owned the artist and called the shots.

     The Four Tops had a smash hit, the wonderful “Can’t Help Myself,” and followed it with the self-mockingly titled “Same Old Song,” which sounded a lot like the earlier song but not as good.

     Similarly, The Drifters’ “On the Boardwalk” was followed by “Up on the Roof.” I can just see the record company calling Tin Pan Alley and telling young Carole King, “Honey, we need you to write something for The Drifters which sounds like ‘On the Boardwalk.’”

     Jim Morrison kicked and screamed about it, but he was forced to follow The Doors’ single “Light My Fire” with “Love Me Two Times.”

     But what I really want to talk about is when people just copy an earlier tune and change the lyrics. Sometimes this is OK because it’s so obvious. Everybody has a “Bo Diddley.” Buddy Holly quickly followed it with “Not Fade Away.” The same song, but you can’t really sing “Bo Diddley” if you’re not Bo Diddley anyway. And just to cite one of many others: Springstein’s “She’s The One.”

     Other times songwriters just lift tunes and claim them as their own. Those bobbysoxers in the fifties had no idea Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender” (the only of his hits I know of that he “wrote”) is the Civil War ballad “Aura Lee” with substituted lyrics, but Elvis wasn’t trying to con anybody and the song was public domain.

     Not so with Gary Wright’s “Dream Weaver.” We’re not supposed to notice that the verses are Neil Young’s “Helpless”? This riles me. Neil only has about a dozen tunes which he recycles into hundreds of songs and this guy just rips one of them off?

      But Neil’s too nice a guy to sue.

     Not so the guy who wrote “He’s So Fine” for the Chiffons and sued George Harrison for “My Sweet Lord.” I must confess that I and nobody else I knew or heard of who grew up with “He’s So Fine” and walked around campus singing “My Sweet Lord” caught it. Maybe it was changing “doolang doolang” to “hare krishna” that threw us off, but once you know, it’s straight “He’s So Fine.”

     Sometimes, as with “My Sweet Lord,” the masking of the earlier tune is quite an accomplishment in itself. Have you ever noticed that the Indigo Girls only hit, “Closer to Fine,” is Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” slightly speeded up with some interesting harmonies? Beck’s “Loser” is sung over the “Midnight Rider” backbeat riff. And Gary Wright gets some measure of his due with Springstein’s “The Rising.” Sing the chorus of that song then the chorus of “My Love is Alive.” Where’s the difference?

(Readers are invited to cite similar instances in the “comments” section.)

Flip Side

     And then there are those who refuse to keep doing the same old song. I imagine one of the reasons the Beatles started Apple was to get out from under Capital Records pressure to keep producing songs that make you feel happy (clap, clap) inside.

     On the other hand, they were probably so big by then they could have called the shots anyway, like, say, Bob Dylan. The record companies were happy to get whatever Mr. Zimmerman had to offer, but he at now famous times infuriated nearsighted fans by producing radically different sounds. (I must admit I fell into that group when he went on the Jesus binge)

     Springstein had his first big selling LP with “Born to Run”—itself a major departure from the style of his earlier albums—but “The Promise,” a video/cd box set I highly recommend, shows him going to great lengths to produce an album that would sound distinctly different from “Born to Run.”

     Some others with the gumption to keep changing their sound: Beck, never the same thing twice; Elvis Costello and Paul Simon going from folk to salsa to gospel to Afro-beat.

     It’s not coincidence that the artists just listed are or were at some time at the head of the pack.

Solitaire

     For a couple of years, while I watched T.V. I played guitar and wrote songs. One day it started to seem like work and I stopped. Now I play solitaire.

     I’m something of a manic-depressive. They don’t use that term anymore. Now it’s bipolar. People seem to be proud of being diagnosed bipolar but nobody liked manic depression. Being bipolar, you have a condition, an excuse, but if you’re manic depressive there’s something wrong with you dude.

     Anyway, I go through streaks of giddy creativity interspersed with periods of lethargy. This solitaire phase corresponds with one of the latter.

     But even playing solitaire for hours on end can be rewarding. You have to shuffle cards a lot, and I find that soothing. “Fl-l-i-i-c-k-k-k, fl-u-u-u-m-m-m-p-p-p” a magical seven times.

     I’m developing a philosophy of life based on solitaire. First of all, obviously, you face it alone. That and the playing of the game are in a way like Zen meditation, something that’s always there, like your breath, on which you can focus attention and maybe free your mind.

     As with life, if you can pay attention in solitaire, see what’s coming and have a plan for dealing with it, your odds of success are much better. Of course you can just automatically play whatever card you can and sometimes win by dumb luck, but if the cards are stacked against you, if it’s not in the cards, your best just won’t be good enough.

     There are parallels between playing solitaire and being a criminal defense attorney, the most obvious being that you have to play the hand you’re dealt and the cards are usually stacked so that you cannot win. But if you pay attention to the way the cards are falling, occasionally there’s an opening to pull victory from defeat---if you can see it. And of course you can occasionally win by pure dumb luck.

     So, Da, isn’t this just a rationalization for spending a big chunk of your life doing nothing more productive than playing with yourself?

     Well yeah.