TubaOrNotTuba

In my world music is important. We even have songs about music. Like when the music died. And no it did not. Let me tell you a little story. I was still a teenager and I received an invitation from my cousin. She will remain nameless by her own choice by my funny summer afternoon a Sunday I believe I was invited to come along to an outdoor concert. In the big city. I cannot remember how I ended up there but sometime around supper time we headed off to the event site and got a place to sit in the field. Eventually on stage a young man appeared. I only remember one song from his repertoire and that was because the the song became part of our culture. This isn’t a reference to an American Pie when I heard the song it was already famous. A lot of airplay on the radio. I had not bought the vinyl but I was really interested to see how famous people performed. This was something that I had very little experience with. And so we watched the concert and we sang along at the appropriate times and then we went home very low key if you will no huge crowds just some people sitting in the grass listening to an artist that for us was familiar. Because of that one song. I have never seen him since but at least I was there once at a time when his fame was new not yet a subject for Rolling Stone magazine I could probably find the real date of the concert but why bother it changes nothing about such a short story I can tell you that I was there when Don performed for Canada and I still remember it decades later a good musical moment this afternoon. I watched the documentary about when he started in the music business. He rode a bicycle and delivered newspapers he had no plans of being a famous singer when he started out.  

The debate was held before the election. That might be the only good thing in the whole plan. It seems that the debate that I did not watch last night went poorly for all involved. Remember these are trained professionals and yet they can’t seem to get the act together. Either one. There are still months to go before the election and that will give the majority of people time to forget. And they will because that’s one thing about the voting public. Their memory span is short. Even if the media goes out of its way to journalize what happened the average person will not go back to watch a debate from months before. Some things are just too painful I guess. Meanwhile up here in the north we’re years away from our next election and the loss of a single seat earlier this week was still news although the 500 votes separating the two should have been more of a detail than it was. You see this was a safe seat, until it was lost. Now it is just roadkill on that long path to the next government. I live in a part of the country were such things rarely happen. We have very well trained electors and they always vote the way the parties want. Not so much in the big city where the crowd changes continually. I mean I was surprised when somebody had told me how I was going to vote because of how my grand father had voted. People believe such things. Elsewhere in the world elections come and go but in North America we think they’re important. Democracy. Rarely do we actually look at the underlying trends or the same people hang around for decades. Seriously. When was the last time we actually had a new government. We tend to recycle our ideas over and over again. Recycle should not mean reuse but it does in electoral terms. And so I am able to sit back and check out the results of that big debate from yesterday knowing that it matters very little. Besides, I will not be voting. Another country. I will watch only for the comedy and there is some. If one of the debaters can barely speak and the other can only tell lies you end up with results that change very little of the actual news stream. It would be magical if they suddenly found new candidates at the last minute. I suppose we can hope.

Although my travel expectations are limited I do like to be informed about the possibilities. The world has changed a great deal over the last few centuries. We no longer need to mark our maps with a legend of «Beyond this point lie dragons ». We have checked it out and most things are reasonably safe. With one exception. I had learned a couple of years ago well following a blog about a couple traveling from north to south along the edge of the continents that there was a road that would take me all the way from Alaska to Argentina. I have no expectations of ever taking that road but I was enchanted to know the possibility existed and then I learned that it existed with one small exception. There is a gap. Found in the jungles of South America or Central America it turns out that you can only go so far in your vehicle. The highway stops being a highway and becomes a recipe for disaster. And so today I watched a documentary on just that place. Yes there are dragons in this sense. Although the number of people trying to get from north to south has increased. I will leave you to do your own research. You may go and you may die. So I have revisited my own expectations. I will not try to drive from Alaska to the South. Instead I will continue to watch videos and realize that you can be in a worse place than you think. I will continue to enjoy my own country. Still a lot to visit. I do not need to share the road with people who are desperate. And I will take one moment to congratulate son #2 who has returned from a long bicycle trek through Norway. He is home and all of his baggage made it with him.

For several afternoons now my telephone seems to ring almost continuously . No big deal I know how to answer the phone but I am somewhat puzzled. Is this an uptake because we are at the end of a month? Do these callera have to make a quota? Let’s look at some of the positions they offer me. Should I be worried that there’s been a telephone ordered in my name from a famous online dealer. I can return it you know. And if my social number has been compromised does that mean I no longer have to pay taxes? Sounds like a plus to me. Oddly none of the callers seem to have answers to my questions. Also I am trying to figure out what they hope they can learn from me when I say I want to cancel an order. Is this some sort of weird ritual to test whether or not selling things to people via the Internet is a good business model? I think that one has been proven. You may wonder why I even bother to answer the phone and that answer is simple. The ring sound it’s not as much fun as you might imagine. It breaks my silent reverie. Perhaps I need a new telephone with a different ringtone. I have stayed on the line to the point where the line hangs up. I have asked questions from anyone that will talk to me. And I have never received are good answer for what information they really want me to give them. I mean, if you have my phone number and credit card number go ahead. Charge me for that fake phone but stop with the incessant phone calls that go on from morning to night. You have to pay those employees. I work for free. And so far you have not made much money from my side of the ledger. I will keep trying to figure it out though because I am really curious. And there you have it.

When you have a limited budget you have to learn to think outside the box. And that includes using the box I assume. I remember the first time I checked the assignment given to a friend who was in basic engineering. The title was 100 uses for the common nail and that has never left my memory. I have not yet discovered all of the uses that you can have for certain things. I’ve been watching videos where people show off nifty gadgets they have found to be used while camping. There are generalized themes but the number of individual items seems to be without limit. Thank you Amazon. If you can think of it then someone else has probably done it before you and marketed a cheap tool to get the job done. Seriously. Go onto any of the channels and those who live in an RV for example can you meet immediately struck by the number of ways that people get around common difficulties. Without spending much money. Who knew that having a hook in your pocket to hang over the shower door at the campground could be so utilitarian. And what about ways to deploy your anti bug stuff. Sure beats holding everything in your hand. To be fair mankind is often relied on the hand as a way to get things done but you only have a maximum of two of them. Having some ways to accessorize can make your day go by with much less stress and pain. And minor burns I suppose. I mean we can’t spend our lives training the dog to do jobs for us. Or cat if that’s possible. Or younger siblings because they tend to grow up I learned that their lives can be better spent serving themselves. Just take the time to look around your house and see how many ways you have avoided purchasing something unnecessary. Yes you have a brain. And yes you have ways of thinking the problem through from start to finish. Like that engineering assignment I mentioned. I mean, who knew that plastic bags had so many uses. Until the stores stopped providing them and then we hit a wall.

A short video that I watched today remind me of how my travels through literature were sometimes controlled by others. Yes there was a school library but I also had to read the things that had been chosen in the curriculum. For example, books by Mark Twain. I have to wonder why the school board was willing to take those on while ignoring the obvious choices of books about the Drew and Hardy for the children. Or the Bobbsey twins. I would like to think that school boards put a lot of time into making curriculum choices but this is probably not so. Rather book choices were made at a higher level in order to fulfill enormous book orders. Much better to buy several thousand copies of a paperback then to go through the hassles of single orders for thousands of children. I cannot remember the first time I visited a real bookstore. Probably much later in life. Instead we received small flyers that gave us access to a curated list of books for people of our own age. Often reduced in content to fit it into a chosen book size. As for the textbooks in my school they were designed to last forever. Or so it seemed. Rooms filled with stacks of books purchased at an earlier date. We paid no attention to the date of printing. We had no choice. When you learned which Shakespeare play would be on the curriculum for a given grade level everything else seemed to fall into place beside it. I realize that the plays by famous authors that were given as choices were anything but. There was a plan. Why else have us read some of those books. I think back to a book called «Cue for treason» which was hardly political. Instead it gave the school a chance to present us with an alternative view to history. Opening our minds to greater things. I tricked them because I then turned around and went to the library and read most of the other books by that author. Breaking out of the mold I guess. And have I ever offered any of those early pieces of fiction to my own children? I hardly think so. By the time my children could read they had also learned that there were places to get pretty much anything you wanted. Good libraries for example. It would be easier to have a book where all of the questions had been pre decided by a committee but that was not how things went.

Most of us can agree that the weather is changing. Where things come apart is when we try to define how much. This morning on the news I learned that there are more hurricanes and tornadoes than ever in our part of the world. Hurricanes are easy to spot. Tornadoes, not so much. I think you actually have to be there to see one go by. And there is the rub. We are now better at spotting such activity. As a result the quantity has gone up. Makes sense. But when we learn that the centre of activity has moved from one part of the country to another we must bring into the equation that we are now more alert. Not just in the sense of sirens howling. Or alarms on our telephone. We now watch for subjectivity and we try to predict subjectivity whereas a century ago not so much. For example I live in a part of the country that almost never experiences tornado action. I do remember a moment 50 years ago when the wind hit a level in summer that dropped people to the ground. I was there. But was it a tornado? I will probably never know. I did go back into the archives of the climate people and there the answer was mitigated. Once more equate question of if you don’t see it did it happen. I confirm that in my own backyard there have been no tornadoes since I arrived here. Will that change? I do not know. After all I was trained to observe weather not predict weather. I think you need a mainframe computer for such things and although I could buy something large enough to fill a house, I will be unable to program it effectively. So, I to turn to those who know about such things. But back to the idea that the number of tornadoes has gone up. I can remember some scary moments in Ontario. Those were when I was in the area when something came through. Seeing a small shed be lifted from my sisters backyard to the neighbour’s is one thing, seeing the roof of a building made out of brick cutaway is quite another and that shopping cart that we watch dancing. Those are all isolated incidents so I am not going to say Oh yes the number has risen. I will accept that if you don’t see it it might have happened.

Please do not laugh. It has taken me until now to figure out how to lock the RV. With the remote. It all seems rather simple in retrospect and I had learned how to unlock it by pushing buttons. Randomly. But when I tried to re-lock it I seemed to be stymied. So of course I tried the other remote and the results were identical. Makes sense because the remote’s are identical other than the usual battery problems but I wanted to know where I was falling short. So I got myself into better light and I noticed one of those symbols they had until then eluded me a very prominent lock symbol beside one of the buttons I had not yet pressed. All is now good and I can move on to other nonexistent problems. And yes I tried using the key and no that did not do it I will learn more about that at another time. As I notice I have been watching others who actually live in their RV. There are so many of them. And the reason for all the videos is that each group has a different set of difficulties. What I hope from watching all these videos is to cover my basis. Avoid the simple things. No this is not an announcement that I plan to move in the RV full time. I am quite comfortable in my own home but I want to know what my possibilities would be if we decided to go on a trip that lasted for more than a few weeks. We have so many places we have not yet gone to. I’m thinking South a little, the temperatures there are off the charts right now. Even at home we’re using the air conditioner slash chiller more and more often. In the beginning it was a novelty. Then a luxury. And now quite frankly a necessity. And we’re still not out of the month of June. I suspect that this summer is going to be a real test of my ability to enjoy too much heat. The other day when I went outside it reminded me of standing in front of an open oven. Not something I do often but that i have done in past. Things are warmer than they used to be.

My level of research is cursory at best. But if you want to be remembered in a small place I suggest that you die, not in your own bed. Go for something that is violent and fast. Things like lost at sea or killed by a falling tree. Again I need to do more research but I was struck today listening to a neighbour talk about an incident where a fishing boat had been lost coming back into the harbor. The point that struck me was not the boat had been lost but that had happened fully 40 years ago and that the details were still remembered. Now why would anyone want to be remembered? No idea. I doubt that I will be other than as a name that someone heard in passing but there are still a lot of people who goes through our lives and who all tend to disappear eventually. Go ahead. Recall your classmates from a lifetime ago. You probably can do a fairly good list and it strikes me that most of them if you reach a certain age are gone. Forever. Still remembered though. No need to wander through the graveyard and fight off the mosquitoes. Just talked to someone else who has reached a certain age they all remember. I think we are hardwired that way. Difficult to write a ballad if you have no names. The characters can’t all be named John and Mary over many have tried. I am in a small community and there has been a sudden loss and even though the newspapers have not yet given us the details you only have to ask around most people already have the story. Fits in well in a world where newspapers are almost a passing trend. To be fair I have not purchased a newspaper in a long time. Maybe things have changed greatly over half a century. But I doubt it. Too many people and not enough time to tell all the stories. So we cherry pick.