Thursday 11/7/24
Shake some action--it's what you need.
The Animals do a great cover of Sam Cooke's "Shake," on what was essentially their Animals-last-stand album, Animalism. Some of the toughest English rhythm and blues ever cut.
As a boy, I was really into the show Emergency! If you came over our house, I was going to give you a check-up/save your life with this toy medicine kit I had. I insisted. I tapped your knee, took your blood pressure, and pretty much stopped you from dying. My services were free.
Paradoxically, my fear of doctors makes me anxious when I watch Emergency! now.
I knew Robert Vaughn as a kid. I like seeing him in old Westerns in which he's always excellent. He's very good as a preacher with some things to learn in an episode of Wagon Train with Claude Akins. Also an episode of The Rifleman as a substitute sheriff who gets in over his head and overrates his ability with the gun.
People are very dramatic. They're like water when you pour that water into a glass. The water goes all the way across the bottom. It doesn't stay on the one side. Pour people into the glass, and they'll take up as much space with drama as they can.
You see how weak just about everyone is by the size of their overreactions. They have so little perspective. They'd also much rather hear an echo of what they're saying than have what they're saying be correct even if listening for the sound of that echo keeps them from the truth--all the more so, actually.
Americans excel at theatricality like the people of no other country. I saw the following this morning:
"My daughter informed me today she & her husband have made the decision not to have kids in light of recent events and while I commend her for that decision, I grieve the loss for her because she did want to be a mother. She told me today, 'I'm sad about it because because I do feel like I would've been a good mom'...Heartbroken (followed by broken heart emoji)"
How do you not laugh at that? Are you being serious? What melodrama and theatricality. If that even happened, what you're saying is that someone made a lifetime decision because of the results of an election and when there's going to be another one in four years? "Fitty" is more than five years old. Then this mother thinks this is a wise course?
The staging, the grandstanding. The emotional pomp.
Americans aren't serious people. I've seen a lot of comments from people in other countries reacting to the likes of this with derision as to how so many Americans are. They're like brats trying to get attention by making things up and pouting.
I also saw this: "I'm literally scared to go to the grocery store because I don't know who I can trust anymore."
Again, you laugh. I don't care who you voted for, if you're a serious adult, you have to laugh. So many comments of this nature.
Are there people who don't know how the grocery store works? One person stands there and picks up a loaf of bread and puts it into their cart, and someone ten feet away picks up a package of peppers and puts it into theirs. It's not a trust exercise. You don't even talk to anyone save the cashier, if the cashier even talks to you beyond "How are you?" and "Do you need bags?"
Do people really walk around thinking they trust all of those they see at other times? How many people can you really trust over the duration of your life?
What's amusing about this, too, is actual trust requires vulnerability, and hardly anyone in America is brave enough to be vulnerable at any time in their lives, which is among the plethora of reasons so many Americans are alone and alone in the larger sense that they don't even have themselves because they don't know themselves and they don't honestly deal in and accept who they are. They are strangers to themselves. In other words, they don't even have trust within. But they think they should trust all of the people they don't know at the grocery store who probably don't notice them at all?
My four-year-old buddy Amelia has been boasting that she outsmarted me with the macaroni and cheese guessing game challenge from the other day. I'm told she has cackled with delight. It's a source of pleasure for her. Her brother and sister had Tuesday off because of the election, so Amelia was the only on who went to school. Good. Kids need school, not days off from it. I texted that she was such a big girl. That's my buddy. No one had a choice in any of this, but still.
Celtics lost at home lost night to Golden State. I'm underwhelmed by the Celtics so far this season. I thought they'd be better than this and we were looking at maybe one of those all-time great type of years.
Sympathy and empathy are very different things. Far fewer people are capable of empathy because it requires more imagination and a bigger expenditure of effort. Also time and decision-making. You decide to try to go into someone else's life imaginatively. "Okay, this is what I'm going to do now..." a person thinks, and then clears their mind of other things. Empathy is more like a task, an activity. It has to be consciously undertaken.
I wish more people cared solely about what is inside of other people. Nothing else. Nothing else matters. Everything else is bullshit. Who are you on the inside? You can take all of that outside stuff and stick it up your ass. All of it. Every last bit. All of the terms and descriptors. Stick it up your ass. Who are you on the inside?
I didn't do a good job yesterday with anything. I need to do much better in all areas.
I've been thinking about the best Peel sessions and making a list. It occurred to me that there's a great book to be written about live music on the radio. Don't you think? You could go back to the 1930s with the Basie band with Lester Young and Hershel Evans and then go through all of the decades since. Some of the best music I know was performed live on the radio. Speaking of John Peel: It's not hard to favor the versions of the songs that many bands cut on his program over their official counterparts. You can point to a given band--and I mean some great bands--and suggest that their finest work came from a Peel session.
Comments