TubaOrNotTuba

I watched a concert this afternoon. A celebration of life for a friend. And what really surprised me was the people on stage. Not that there were people on stage but that I knew so many of them. People that I had performed with in a long distant period of my life. Anyhow. The rabbit hole on YouTube dragged me in another direction this afternoon as well I learned about driving a 1928 model A Ford for several days. The back story was very interesting. The new owner had purchased it on eBay by accident. And then he felt obliged to get it back home. Not on a trailer like most people would do. Instead, he opted to get the motor running and then drive it for as far as he could. Spoiler alert: he made it home. Along the way I learned a lot about how old motors work. If I showed, you my knuckles the first thing you would notice is the lack of scar tissue. I have never owned a car, nor have I worked to keep it going for long periods of time with a handful of wrenches. I think it takes a different set of knowledge than I have. However, given my advancing age I have been around other people with cars for most of my life. And car owners talk. Incessantly. I will not claim to have heard it all, but I’ve heard more than my share. As I watched this new owner repack a bearing or figure out how to advance his spark I was not lost. Puzzled, but not lost. I think that when you own a car the knowledge you acquire is added to a mental library. And the next time you have a card that breaks down you dig deep into the archives and figure out what to do next. This car was seriously old. Forget those new gadgets that allow you to plug in and see what’s going on with the motor. Here you listen and watch and decide what is dripping out of that particular section. Old cars had a lot of fluids. And along the way this driver had replaced most of them over and over again. I may go back and re-watch the video just to see how many times he came close to not getting any further down the road. Back in that time did vehicles die along the side of the highway. Probably. It explains why we have so many garages or at least used to. I am not going to post a link here. Your search skills are probably superior to my own. Just look for someone driving an old model A Ford for too long with far too many problems. When you find him, you will understand.

I admit it. I wanted to know. After months of targeted ads on YouTube which insisted that I needed a better sweater, I followed the link. No wonder they advertise on social media because their product is expensive. I have to assume that they believe a buyer is going to do this out of impulse. Ask yourself. How many pockets does the average person need. That many? Not a chance a pocket is an invitation to carry too much stuff with you and like it easily see this sweater weighing in and half my body weight before I ever left the house. I have saved my money and my profile. But what other ads out there trying to attract my attention? There are many. Would I be willing to have my groceries delivered to me in pre measured portions in a cardboard box? No, not even to my doorstep. Do I need a different truck or car? Again no. If you’re posting ads you probably want money in return. That is where our paths diverge. I am trying to think if I’ve seen any other ads that really caught my attention that would turn me into an artist based upon 200-year-old technology the answer is no. I lump those ads in with certain references to politicians who believe they can tell me anything they want because I am silly. Do I really think that that man with a bad accent in both English and French is going to make my life better? No. I hope his party comes around to that decision soon. Get the leadership campaign out of the way before the next round of elections. But they won’t. They get their advice from people who are lost in space. Political space. Instead, I will stay entertained buy news. Some of it is shocking but once in a while I get a true giggle. Like that person who claims that the pension fund of Canadians needs to be cut in half with the larger portion given to her and friends. Not naming names here you can do your own research, but I sometimes wonder are there any sane people out there. Other than members of my own household. Oh well. I can always go back to network TV and watch programs that do not concern me in the least. The antithesis of a news broadcast. Or I can go looking for books. Not looking actually. Listening my new way of coping with the world.

It all comes down to your culture. For millions the abject pleasure in watching for example a hockey game can absorb all of their spare time. They will tell you over and over again how entertaining it is to see the play by play. Some will even listen to it on the radio when video is not available. Seeing that whole game in their head. I have never been drawn into this web. However, I take great joy in watching what happens on the news. In particular political news. We are now years deep into the big game coming from South of the border. Each week brings new details to a story that seems to be taking a very long time to unfold. However, we’re all waiting for the big goal to be scored. And it’s getting closer. I can only wonder how this all will play out. Will they get the game finished before the next big election? Probably not. Too many twists and turns. But for those who think that hockey is exciting, I invite you to tune in to the news. You can dress in your fame favourite team sweater if you wish. I don’t have one. Nor do I need to visit the arena and smell stale beer and popcorn. I can just sit back and watch the news. And I am not alone. I am sure that the number of people being drawn into the deep dark corners of political intrigue far outnumber those who get caught up in a single hockey game. Or baseball game. We are drawn into the big show and from where I sit, no game is more interesting than that of watching the rich and the powerful politicians go at it. Stick handling galore. If ever I get a chance to own a sweater maybe I will. Not necessary but it could be a nice keepsake. I wonder what colours will be involved. Probably red, white and blue.

Recently we have noted that our refrigerator is trying to talk to us. A subtle little ping or plop I really don’t speak appliance so I can only guess it was trying to tell me someone made the guess that it’s getting set to die but I have a more optimistic view. Maybe it’s getting set to give birth. We could have a tiny refrigerator running around the house. They do run you know. There is an older model out in the garage, but it makes too much noise to be brought into polite company. It could save for those moments in summer when our sons need an overflow place for beer. I guess that’s why everyone keeps an extra fridge around the house. There are other appliances to make noises. For a while there we were convinced that the ping or plop was coming from the cuckoo. Maybe it was getting set to lay an egg but nothing has been found. For now, most other appliances have been behaving. I am not I’m not ready to begin that long March to replace things. Yes, I know it is inevitable, but couldn’t we have something like the good old days when your refrigerator ran until you died? Or, how about something like that dryer that my mother bought that continued to heat up and rattle the clothes around for decades. My guess is that the original company went out of business that’s not a good business model. Anyhow I keep an old manual can open around just in case. With a bit of hot water, I can live on canned beans. Not great nutrition but in case of an urgency. Anyhow I’m getting ready for the next thing to give up. And it had best not be me.

There are many things that I do not understand. I will not bore you with a list but I will give you one. People who scream during the quiet moments of a concert. This is not the period of The Beatles when they were very young. We’re talking now and so many concert videos over the top of the artist you can hear the idiots. If I was a keen businessman, I would make them pay extra for their tickets. Then they might have something to scream about. How about if we invent a microphone that cancelled screaming? With all this talk of AI it should be possible. After all, we do auto tune. Just a tiny tweak and those who try to ruin the moment for others would be cancelled. Silenced. I wonder if I will live long enough to see it happen. Think about it. We have concert of an orchestra with people screaming in the background. Have they lost their collective minds? I would leave the screaming to someone who does not play their clarinet property. Just a thought for a great day before winter. We went camping last night. Not far away. Out in the driveway in the RV. The thermometer dipped into single digits, and I wrapped my sleeping bag one more turn around my head. Even a cold nose is hard to handle unless you were a dog. We both lasted until dawn. It takes a long time for the sun to warm up things at this time of year. And we might go out again tonight. Proving to ourselves that we are tougher than the weather. Yes there was a small heater running but it was on a thermostat and it did not make the trailer all that warm. A feeble effort. Seriously my sleeping bag does a good job. But we are no longer in.

The world of metrics. I like being able to measure things. When the new van came with a feature called TPMS I was over the top. No more getting out with a gauge to measure tire pressures. Just look at the console. And I’m thinking, how practical that would have been say 20 years ago. Imagine if I had been able to simply look at a console and see what my optical pressures were. Imagine all the problems I could have saved myself from. But that’s not how it works. Anyhow today I went down to the big city for a checkup. In the same way that you take your car to a garage for checkups I go to a clinic with a doctor and he takes care of checking my eye pressures. There within limits right now and they continually monitor the situation. It is almost like a day of games. Really awful video games. But you do what you can. It did get me out of the house for the day and we did some minor shopping and even though it rained and blew wind all afternoon I did not care. I find that now I remember on a regular basis the names of my eye drops. That in itself is a victory. And I hold firm with the idea that for almost 20 years I’ve managed to get the drops in place each day. No laziness there. But I still think, how practical it would have been to have had pressure management back when this all started. Oh well. I can let others know that they should check their pressures even if it requires getting the help of highly trained medical staff. You do not get a second go around.

From time to time, I come across videos that show off ghost towns. Nothing to do with phantoms. These are small towns that have been abandoned by their inhabitants for any number of reasons. I started thinking with that in the context of Canada and although most provinces have small, abandoned towns this province does not. The closest we’ve come is the town where the ferry used to dock. Even there the local stayed in place and found other things to do. It does make me think though. If I go around here, I can find abandoned houses. Some of them quite old. But no towns. This is a part of the country where the population is always needed to use the land. We run things densely. And if you already have a road and a clear piece of land then put another house in place. Hence no ghost towns. There are a few churches but even they tend to get bought up by tourists with too much money on their hands. I imagine that insulating those large windows costs more than I would want to have to do. And if you ever been to church you know the furnace never quite kept up with the need. But so be it. We were at a different point and the idea of a tent city is never far from people’s minds. It does not take much to pitch a tent and wait for the police to roll by. Often, they’re too busy to be concerned with your humble needs. And although we are surrounded by water, I have not heard of anybody taking up residence in a boat. Oh well. I will continue to watch videos and dream of what might have been.

The hint comes up again and again in different discussions about history particularly family history. If you have old photographs take the time to identify the people in the pictures while there is still a chance to do so. In the same way that images fade so do memories. Worse not everyone was there the day the photo was taken. You might have the only remaining clue someone looked like. Right now, my family is gathering old photos and posting them on social media and for the main part the photos are not identified. Some of the photos will have to remain a mystery. I do not see them and apparently making up answers is not a good idea. Others are quick to believe. And for the record I am not better. Somewhere downstairs there is a box containing close to 15,000 photographs. Unidentified other than the time. I was there for the photos, and I used to know who they all were but that is failing at some point that section of the memory of society will be lost. I will not take the blame for this. There are so many others who’ve done exactly the same thing. Go ahead. Take a daily newspaper and remove the identifying marks. There. A mystery for the ages. I do wonder why my family is posting all these pictures. I am sure that they do not have the identifying marks either. If you ask them when someone was married and to who and when and where. Crickets. I guess there is a comfort in the whole thing, and it makes more sense than bring you old cookies. Just as valuable and probably more nutritious but it does not work that way. It has been asked if I would like to see those photos and the answer is that I would love to see those photos that’s from a different time. A different life if you will. And so, I will stay here quietly amused by the whole thing. Probably good but remember if you have photos and they’re not identified that is your bad. Not the people in the photos. I’m sure that they never imagined a moment when someone no longer recognized them.

Today, I became proactive. I went into the swamp known as Facebook and edited my membership in different interest groups. Given that I’ve been around there for about two decades the list was long and reflected a lot of interest that I have put aside. I really do not need to learn about railway systems that no longer exist in other provinces that I visited A decade ago. There i said it. Our needs change and Facebook is a place where things go to decay. Not die. The groups will do just fine without me. However, it reminds me that there’s a wide world out there and that for many years the only place to meet like-minded people what about going into an interest group and reading the letters each day. Yes, I can still learn but until Facebook changes the colour scheme, I refuse to read pale grey text on a white screen. Their bad, not mine. I do take great comfort and remembering that I learned a lot of interesting things along the way. Things that interest me for the main part, but we all do that. Life cannot be just a reflection of what others want to know. And given the way that things do not disappear, I can probably return at any point. Meanwhile I get rid of that nagging red pop up that says I have 52 unvisited groups. It now should only be a handful. In any case, the Face knows where I live if they miss me too much, they can put it all back in a heartbeat. A shorter period of time than people think. Is this a way of looking forward to winter? Probably. And if I’m really curious of what happened at my old high school that no longer exists, I can ask a sibling. After all that’s where I go for news at the end of the day.

For supper this evening I had a sandwich. To be fair I was offered a sandwich in preparation for the person in charge of the kitchen being away. And, proud of my own abilities I answered that I could probably handle that task. And I did. However there will be no photos. If you’ve been to a sandwich store you may have seen the term sandwich artist. In the right situation a sandwich can be a work of art. In my case it was something less. I had imagined the materials are available and they reacted inconsequence. I did slice my bread into roughly equal pieces. Length wise. And I did find the mayo and the cheese. One slice of prepared cheese. However, if you cut it carefully you can turn one larger piece into several smaller strips excellent for making a sandwich. I am not a total novice so I did give most of the mayo where it should go on the bread. And then, there was the meat. Prepared meat. Ham, possibly. In prepared packaging. Now I appreciate the efforts made by different Packers to keep their food away from the common person. If I had not found the scissors things could have gone much worse. My sandwich lacked variety. There were two kinds of cheese and there was ham and there was mayonnaise and there is bread. But nothing that will cause people to force me to open my own restaurant. It was, if you will a survival sandwich. I have eaten and I will not go to bed hungry but the next time I receive an offer for a properly made sandwich I will set my pride aside and go for something a little more if you will artistic. And as for other things like vegetables, well we won’t go there will we, this was a ham sandwich. I am so thankful there are no photos.