According to wikipedia.org, the last time a solar eclipse was visible in the continental U.S. was nineteen seventy-nine. I figured a song from that era would be appropriate for today. Using Everyhit.com’s retrochart, I came up with Queen, “Don’t Stop Me Now.”
I mean, these lyrics. Come on. How can you resist these lyrics?
Yeah, I’m a rocket ship on my way to Mars
On a collision course
I am a satellite I’m out of control
I am a sex machine ready to reload
Like an atom bomb about to
Oh oh oh oh oh explode
I’m burnin’ through the sky yeah
Two hundred degrees
That’s why they call me Mister Fahrenheit
I’m trav’ling at the speed of light
I wanna make a supersonic woman of you
We’ve begun the countdown to the end of the world, also known as The Doritos Great American Eclipse of 2017. I’ll keep posting right up until the last possible moment. Hope you survive; hope to see you on the other side.
In many ways, this reminds me of the other times the world has ended during my lifetime. One, of course, was when the Beatles broke up. Another, of less significance, but highly important, was when Coke launched New Coke. Our taste buds were thrown into a fizzy tizzy. What a nightmare.
Third on my list must be Y2K. It was such a disaster. We didn’t even have an official sponsor, or a good website. Despite knowing about it for years ahead of time, when it finally happened, it was soul-crushing and chilling. We went for days hunkered in our homes, watching television and old movies, eating junk food and microwaved pizza while awaiting the all-clear.
You know, when that all-clear was finally sounded, and we stopped out of the television’s glow and into daylight, we went right out and got a real pizza, and celebrated.
I want to reassure you all that if we survived those events, you can survive this eclipse. To keep you from getting too hopeful, I’ll play a little ditty that’s sure to depress you. From nineteen sixty-five, here is Barry McGuire, with “Eve of Destruction.”
* That’s not true. Doritos has nothing to do with the eclipse. It’s fake news that I made up.
I find myself singing a song, and then consider when I heard it, and where I was when it was released. With this song today, I thought, oh, when did this come out? I was living in Mountain View, California, wasn’t I? But that means the late nineties.
That couldn’t be right, but I look it up, and confirm, yes, this song is twenty years old.
No way, I react. It seems so recent and fresh. But it says it on the net, on Wikipedia, so you know it’s true.
Songs, politics, and technology are my time markers. When this song came out in nineteen ninety-seven, my email account was on Hotmail. My computer was a Zenith. I’d graduated to a monster VGA monitor. My hard drive was twenty meg, and I had both three and a half inch and five and a quarter inch floppy drives, along with a R/W CD drive. I think we were running about twenty-five MHz, and Windows 3.1. Bill Clinton was the POTUS, and the economy was flying. As an aside, Must See TV, with Friends and Seinfeld, filled the top ten television shows.
The U.S.S.R. had collapsed, and the Berlin Wall had come down. There was talk about the Peace Dividend. We thought there was a glorious future ahead of us.
Twenty years. As everyone finds out, significant changes take place in twenty years.
This was an interesting oddity that I found on the net.
Thirteen years old, I was just getting into groups like Cream. Cream was Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Jack Bruce. I knew who Glen Campbell was, of course; being in America in nineteen sixty nine, Campbell was difficult to avoid. He was well-accomplished, with well-known hit songs like “Gentle On My Mind,” “By the Time I Get To Phoenix,” and “Wichita Lineman.” By sixty-nine, he was hosting television shows.
This video is of Glen Campbell hosting a show and introducing Cream in nineteen sixty-nine. I never saw this video before today, and it’s definitely a ride on the wayback machine. Cream, so accustomed to playing stadiums with deafening levels of sound, seem strangely muted here. The contrast between their long-haired hippie appearance and Glen Campbell’s look is striking, and can easily be a metaphor for the difference in the America that was, and the America that was coming. Look at the set’s simple production, as well. It’s a far cry from “American Idol.”
Take a look to moderately far back in modern America, to nineteen sixty-nine, with Glen Campbell, and Cream.
I didn’t understand it. I couldn’t see how a man would do it, and I didn’t understand the attraction. I later learned the man was drunk, and thought the sex was a female.
That’s the thing with picking fruit: you have time to think.
Information was exchanged yesterday that the blackberries were looking good, and there were a lot. We were welcome to come and pick. We took up the offer this morning, driving the short distance to the property on the border between Talent and Phoenix.
As mornings go, it was normal, and glorious with sunshine, blue skies, and budding clouds. Summer’s heat had withdrawn to re-organize and energize, so the air was a comfortable seventy degrees. Most of the area’s wildfire smoke had hitched a ride out of the valley on the wind.
I’d heard about the sex with the chain-link fence on the radio during the drive. Neighbors had it on video. Seeing the video isn’t on my bucket list.
Starting out your berry picking is about looking around to find a ripe offering, sampling them to confirm your visual assessment, and then embracing the mechanics. Like blueberries, the key is color, and its easy release. If the berry is ready to be picked there’s no effort. Just a slight tug, and it rolls off the bush and into your hand. If they don’t come off like this, the product is likely to be sour.
Differences arise between blackberries and blueberries. While I enjoy their sweet juiciness, the largest difference from a picking point of view is that blackberries are in thorny brambles. There are many gorgeous gems hanging there, but getting to them is challenging without sacrificing some blood. Unlike my wife, I’m not a person willing to reach for a berry too far. That’s probably why she’s a better picker than me, collecting about one hundred and fifty percent of the produce that I acquire in the same period.
I’m not jealous; she’s just a better picker. Besides, once we get home, they belong to us, and are shared.
Shouting, “You’ll never take me alive, picking man,” the blackberries sometimes leap to freedom as I approached. The blueberries do it the same, so I don’t take it personally.
Unfortunately, some strange streams empty into this vacant space of thoughts. We had three television stations in southern West Virginia, where I went to high school for my final three years. All three stations featured a show called “Hee Haw.” It may be my imagination, but “Hee Haw” seemed to be on thirty hours a day.
“Hee Haw” was a syndicated variety show that featured country and western music, buxom women, and corny puns and jokes. Roy Clark and Buck Owens were the show’s hosts. One segment was called, “Pickin’ and Grinnin’.” Naturally, out there, my mind invited the segment in: “I’m a pickin’,” Roy or Buck would say, and the other would reply, “And I’m a grinnin’.” Then they’d play some music, stopping for a joke before resuming. They’d do this three or four times.
My mind mercifully cut the stream off after a while. Thereafter, I turned resources toward scenes I was contemplating, character development, and pacing and plotting.
It was a short pick, about an hour. We ended up with twelve pints. Of course, it was the year’s second pick, so we’ll freeze them, and be set for at least a few months.
Joni Mitchell wrote it, and sang it, but I remember the cover by CSN&Y.
The year of nineteen sixty-nine found me a budding thirteen year old rocking hippie wannabe living in a suburb of Pittsburgh, PA. My pants were bell-bottoms, and my thick hair was shoulder-length. My mustache and goatee were coming in without any prodding (Mom thought my face was dirty), and I was drifting toward the counter-culture.
I had some problems, though; can you be counter-culture and madly love cars like the Corvette, Jaguar XK-E, Ford GT, and Cobra, or the Porsche 917s and Ferrari 512s racing at LeMans, and the Can-Am and Formula 1 racers? That seems counter-counter-culture, as does being a Pirates fan and idolizing Roberto Clemente. But then, isn’t what what thirteen is all about, expanding your thoughts about where you’re at, what you’re learning, and where you’re heading?
Besides being my thirteenth year, nineteen sixty-nine is more frequently remembered in America for the Vietnam War, protests against it, President Nixon, the moon landing, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Midnight Cowboy,” “Easy Rider,” “True Grit,” the Miracle Mets, and Woodstock, as in the Woodstock Music & Art Fair. I wasn’t there (at the fair), but I heard a helluva lot about it afterwards. Part of that was because of Joni’s song, so I offer it here to you, to remember or learn of that festival that began on August 15, forty-eight years ago.
The time currents are battling, splintering our hearts, minds, and senses. Would that we could do the time warp and find that place of comfort we think must exist.
Back in nineteen seventy-five, less than a blink of the galactic eye, pop culture was thrown into a spin by “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” They say it happened on August fourteenth of that year. If I could do the time warp, maybe I could ride a wave, return to there, verify that date, and breathe in the mood. On the other hand, a sliver of cerebellum thinks I’m still living and existing back then, feeding streams of knowledge across the void to me here and now. Alas, contributing to the confluence of confusion, multiple mes are feeding multiple mes, including this me, from multiple moments in my existence to create this big shiny moment that I think of now.
Oh, the hell with it. “Let’s Do The Time Warp Again.” It’s just a jump to the left, and a step to the right.
Today’s song was one I grew to enjoy because my wife enjoys it. Energetic and bouncy, it’s a fun tune from two thousand three by Outkast, called “Hey Ya!” I still know few of the lyrics beyond the chorus, but the song always gets me bopping in my seat.
I don’t get stoned, just buzzed on beer, wine, and coffee, sometimes simultaneously.
“Basket Case” by Green Day came out in nineteen ninety-four, the year before I retired from the Air Force. I instantly took to those lyrics, driving others crazy as I wandered around singing them. But you only live once, according to our current data set, so sing when you can. That’s my philosophy.
Michael Seidel, writer 