Working for the Weekend

NSP Meditations

I was out laboring outdoors under the morning sun, mowing here and there, hauling this and that, when Loverboy’s “Working for the Weekend” jolted into my mind.

Why do certain songs such as this one materialize in my mind while performing physical labor? They certainly don’t show up during white collar work.

I started singing the song with gusto. It was like the goddamn Sound of Music and running down the hill! I surprised myself by knowing all the lyrics, not just the chorus.

You wanna a piece of my heart?

You got it right from the start…

I remembered my one and only personal moment connected to this song, a somewhat strange assignation with a girl named L 37 years ago! She went wild to the song, or insane might be a better word.

“Working for the Weekend” is a song without a shred of irony. Everyone is working for the weekend in America (although Loverboy was a Canadian band!) and when they survive to the weekend they are going to partaaaaaaaaay down—hard! The song is a party anthem. It has a great bridge. It’s fun. It’s sexy in an 80s way.

But why did it come to me while performing physical labor in nature? I certainly wasn’t working for the weekend, although the weekend was coming (it was a Thursday). What is a weekend? I haven’t known for years.

Oregon Tavern Age: Hunter Biden

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age

The country was drowning deep in shit, people were dying of the virus, losing their homes in the wake of financial catastrophe, whipping up absurd conspiracy after absurd conspiracy, a toxic campaign of historic proportions was underway, the Republicans were scheming to block citizens from voting and ramming a religious nut through to a seat on the Supreme Court, and an Oregon Tavern Age man in Oregon Tavern Age country was railing against Hunter Biden’s and his laptop that undoubtedly contained secrets that would bring down his old man’s campaign. Hunter Biden! Hunter Biden! The OTA man went from railing to frothing and then beyond frothing to wherever this is, most likely to an institution.

I watched his performance from a table while I sipped a local IPA. Nothing like an IPA to watch a farce of a human mind parroting exactly what he had seen earlier that morning on Fox News. Not even a couple beers could slow him down. This is what passes for conservative intellectual thought these days. It didn’t used to be that way.

I know the OTA man. He’s a nice guy and a kindly pool shark. We’ve infrequently talked politics. We agreed on the bipartisanship nature or protecting the right to vote and making it easier to vote. We agreed until later he said the mail balloting he’d used the past 30 years in Oregon suddenly was riddled with fraud because it was all over the news. Everything he knows is derived from Fox News which means he knows less than nothing. It was so easy to be filled up with gas.

I was about ready to ask him if they should reopen the investigation into Hilary’s server and Benghazi before the election, but I didn’t. I was about ready to ask him about Trump’s corruption connected to the Teapot Dome scandal. There is one you know, I can send you a link to it that proves the connection.

Hunter Biden! Hunter Biden! I couldn’t take his ravings anymore and left. I walked out of the joint and saw my friend Tupac riding his unicycle and smoking the world’s largest blunt right out there in public. No one cared because America was falling apart and it was all Hunter Biden’s fault.

Hope is Kindled (The Kids Might Be Alright)

NSP Meditations

It was noon on Friday. I sat in a library reading periodicals. I noticed a boy, ten or so, with his brother, seven or eight, standing at the counter checking out something. The librarian returned from a back room holding a Monopoly board game! She placed it in a bag and handed it to the boy. He produced his library card and checked it out. Another librarian emerged from the back room with two small pizza boxes and a 32-ounce bottle of root beer. I guessed it was some kind of initiative to feed kids and get them to visit the library. The younger brother loaded up his bag with the pizzas and root beer. They slung their bags across their backs and walked out of the library, into the sunshine, and presumably to home to play Monopoly, eat pizza and drink root beer that afternoon, and how knows, maybe all night. A Monopoly marathon!

To paraphrase an immortal line from The Who, the kids might be alright.

Secret Coast Radio #23

NSP Meditations, secret coast radio , ,

Welcome to the Secret Coast Radio podcast broadcasting somewhere on the Secret Coast

Let us begin by saying:

We prefer the first person plural over the singular.

We prefer mystery over journalism.

We prefer similes such as “She had a face like a Sunday school picnic,” over “My life is like a roller coaster.”

We prefer elation over depression, ecstasy over dread, dreadlocks over buzz cuts, erudition over stupidity.

We prefer one-off movies over seven seasons of bloated streaming shows.

We prefer directness over digressions, dumbbells for exercising over dumb shits in congress.

Returning a phone call over pretending someone didn’t call.

We prefer guitars slung over shoulders over rifles.

We prefer the language of change be couched without jargon and academic balderdash or change will not happen.

We prefer Kurt Vonnegut over The New Testament but would really prefer if these two works of literature could be mixed and mashed together. What a book that would be!

We prefer turning people on with enlightened smut over turning them off with sordid politics.

We prefer creeks over cricks, the movie Reds over rednecks, mindfully blowing up dams over mindlessly blowing up in judgment.

We prefer RV names like Vixen and Wolf Pup over Intent and Attitude. Think of it this way: which rock band would you rather see live—Vixen and the Wolf Pup or Attitude with Intent?

We prefer people actually believe public health experts over believing in tooth fairies.

We prefer silence to gab, books over bootstraps, otters over opacity, Gore Vidal over televised gore.

What is this podcast about? Who are we?

Like we said, mystery over journalism.

Let show number 23 begin.

The link to the show is:

http://www.buzzsprout.com/385945

Corona Virus Thoughts #18

Corona Virus Thoughts, NSP Meditations

Continued strange movement along 101. The latest: a bedraggled man of the road waving a badminton racket as he walked; a shirtless and tattooed man holding two cans of Smirnoff Ice Smash as he bicycled through a parking lot on a kid’s bike with chopper handles; a large man carrying a huge driftlog to his tiny car and thinking he was going to fit it inside; a man wearing pajamas and a trench coat ambling all over town; a svelte woman missing her front teeth who lurks around in the manner of a prostitute.

The fissures are getting deeper. The heat and pressure escape. It’s not a relief.

225k dead. The football stadiums are filling up with maskless fans. It’s like watching a show and wondering which cast members will end up dying before the series is over. People are killing themselves to watch football in person and see the President.

Will it all be over soon? Are we going to have an attempted coup? The first one in our history?

I talked to a kind elderly woman in Oregon Tavern Age country. She was killing time with a Bud Light before attending a local Trump rally as a patriotic show of support. She thought about bringing her autistic adult daughter that she cares for at home, but thought that wasn’t a good idea since no one at the rally would be wearing masks. I didn’t say anything.

I worked the pandemic into a Christmas story! It will appear as a bonus if you buy the book through the Nestucca Spit Press web site (get yours today!). Here’s a riff from the story:

About the only good thing going for Santa was the raging pandemic. No toy run this year. He’d canceled it in the summer and took a lot of pounding on conservative talk radio and social media as a result. They screamed and stomped and dubbed him an essential worker who had to stay on the front lines and do his job.

Santa didn’t respond to the firestorm of criticism, but he was secretly relieved he didn’t have to deliver more useless crap to increasingly hostile and dumbed down people, particularly the Americans. What had happened to them? They once established the world’s first national park system, implemented the Marshall Plan, and rescued the bald eagle from extinction by banning DDT. They couldn’t do anything worthwhile anymore. They could fix nothing with themselves or their diseased body politic. Why? Why? Why? Santa didn’t know and he didn’t really give a shit anymore. All the virus meant to him was sitting at home and rereading the titans of Russian literature to ride out the holiday season.

Resurrection of a Corduroy Coat

NSP Meditations

I handed my beloved and tattered corduroy coat to a great friend. She was going to cannibalize it for patches for a new coat. She looked at it and me. She said she wanted to try and save it. There was no guarantee of success.

Go for it I told her. She went for it. A week later I was wearing this trusted friend again and marveling at how my friend had resurrected it. She even added an Oregon State Parks patch to the flannel interior! I got another decade out of this coat!

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