KEEPING UP UPSTATE

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (03-07-19)

      If you travel about two hours north on the New York State Thruway and then exit the highway, you'll find yourself in an enchanted foreign land. An exotic place where there is less pressure to keep up with the Kardashians. I have to admit, I'm starting to fall behind, their names sound alike and they look alike, so from now on I'm only going to try to keep up with the slower ones. Anyway, the place I'm talking about is called Upstate New York, and it's challenging, beautiful and inscrutable. It's not hard to get here, but if even you're using your GPS you still have to pay attention. There's Route 28, there's Old Route 28, and then there's a Deceased Route 28 out there still drawing Social Security checks. Our GPS said we should turn right at an "Unnamed Road." How hard could it have been to just name the road? Name it "Different But in No Way Inferior Route 28" for all I care. It's like going all the way through the desert on a horse with no name. Just name the damn horse already and let's all have lunch. We went over a bridge that said "Esopus Creek." The second time we passed over Esopus Creek we thought it was an unusual coincidence that there were two Esopus Creeks. Maybe one of them was "Old Esopus Creek?" The third time we figured we might be lost, but the fourth time we realized that Esopus Creek might be lost.

 

      Where I live, a bunch of rusted out pickup trucks on my property is considered an eyesore. I knew a guy that had four Saabs and one wife. The wife and one of the Saabs worked. Then two years later he had no wife but two more Saabs that didn't work, and he considered it an even trade, since the wife wasn't working anymore either. But up here, for some reason, a bunch of junk on a lawn is scenery, and a glimpse into your personal history. As I pass by your house, I can guess the number of people who live there, and whether or not they were ever able to get the hang of jumping on a trampoline or not. I can guess the ages of your kids, since that Big Wheel hasn't moved since 1983.

 

     I've never heard anything about a leash law in these parts, so your dog is on the honor system here. My dog will destroy all your toilet paper rolls if she gets into your house, so you'd better put them under lock and key. And don't let me catch yours on my lawn unless it's pushing a lawnmower. There are owner restraint regulations in my town, so if you live upstate you should put your dog on a 128-mile leash.

 
     I've decided that I need a tractor. If I had one I could do all my tracting in half the time, and spend the rest of my day feeding the livestock. There are a lot of places to buy feed around these parts. Whatever it is you are trying to grow, you can find something to feed it with at the feed store. You can buy 50 pounds of all-grain feed for $14.99, if you're grain isn't growing well enough. if you have a chicken that you are trying to fatten up for tonight's barbecue, feed it the whole bag and you've got yourself a 52-pound chicken. If you have very high standards, consider a 30 lb. tub of Purina Honor Show High Octane Power Fuel for $52.99. I know that's expensive, but it is high octane, so they'll also clean your pet's windshield for free.

 

     There's not as much good pizza up there, but there is a whole lot more good barbecue. I'm sure you could get a kale salad up here, but it seems like precisely the type of thing you're trying to get away from for a little while. If you're looking for a place to stay, there are plenty of motels. The sign in front says "COLOR TV!" Sometimes "HBO!" Or "AIR CONDITIONING!" The air may not always be in mint condition, but speaking for myself (since everyone else thinks I'm nuts) I feel a whole lot more comfortable in a place where the maintenance guy is also the concierge. I even went down to the pool, and it wasn't crowded at all, since it's an outdoor pool.
 
     The subject of politics did not come up. Could these be the same people that handed such a poor specimen the keys to the country? I don't know, but they couldn't have been nicer in person. Proving once again that politics is an unreliable barometer of just about everything. On the way back to the highway we narrowly missed a collision with either a very small coyote or a very large fox. There's no leash law for coyotes either up here, but if that happens to be your scrawny coyote you might want to start him on some Producer's Pride Hog Grower, 50 pounds for $13.99, and he'll be starting at left tackle for the high school football team before you know it.

I FINALLY GOT A “SMART PHONE”

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (02-28-19)

     I got a "smart phone" for Christmas, and I thought I would report on how I'm doing with it so far. To call it a smart phone in the first place is overstating things, because if it had any sense at all it would not be hanging out with me. But now I can do all sorts of things that I never could before. Want to know the correct time without looking at my watch? No problem! I simply turn on the phone, wait a while as it boots up, flashes the logo, tells  me who I'm secured by, tells me who I'm powered by, says hello to me, then goes completely dark. I try to turn it on again but it's already still on, just messing with me and we share a laugh. I punch in my security code wrong twice and right once, and BINGO! It's later than I thought.

     I can sext now! OOPS I tried to type "text," I swear. My fat fingers hit three incorrect letters each time I hit a button, and it's up to an algorithm to figure out what the hell I'm talking about. Or I can just use the words conveniently provided by the "auto-suggest," and the phone will tell me what it is I SHOULD be talking about. When I typed in "Let's go to the..." the auto-suggest suggested "police" and "hospital," so already this device knows me better than my parents did. If my train of thought has not actually left the station yet, I can just start out with "I," and keep picking out different words from the ever-changing selection until I have a sentence that the cell phone and I can both agree on. I have a sentence in my "drafts" folder that I am still working on, and should be completed by the end of this year.

     I just remembered, I haven't set up my phone mail greeting yet. Not too many people call me, so I can conduct most of the conversation right in the greeting. "Hi, you've reached Rick. If this is who I think it is, I know what you're calling about, but I don't want You-Know-Who to find out so call me back. If this is You-Know-Who, the answer is still 'maybe,' but it's not a hard 'maybe' so don't let it get around." The reason I don't get many calls is not because I'm unpopular, it's because everyone knows I won't have my phone on. I don't want to run down the battery. My wife says I should just charge the phone when the battery starts to die, like everyone else. But I never remember, and my battery dies, and then I forget to go to the funeral. What if I'm on Mount Everest, and there's a landslide, and I think I'm definitely going to perish, and I try to call the hotel to cancel my next night's reservation and get my deposit back, and the phone is dead?

     The other reason is that I don't want to be one of the cellphone zombies that walk around the Earth bumping into each other like human pinballs, living their entire life through a 3" by 5" screen. The irony is that you can use your iPhone to look up anything you need to know, but people using an iPhone very rarely look up. WATCH IT- You're about to fall into the Grand Canyon! Oops, too late, but these people are so good with their phones that as they're falling, on the way down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon they have already called to arrange a FREE mattress delivery.

     I'm finding it hard to trust a phone that doesn't have an antenna. There I am buried under that landslide and I have no cell service. If I had an antenna I could at least stick it up and wave it around so someone would see me and rescue me. And it's heavier than I'm used to, so my right pants pocket droops and it looks like I'm lopsided from the waist down. And I have so much to learn. How long is it acceptable to carry around the instruction book? The book weighs a pound and a half because it's translated into every single damned language and some languages are heavier than others. My wife said she would teach me how to swipe my phone, but wouldn't it be less risky to just to buy one?

     Surely I jest. The phone is a tool, and a useful and powerful one. You can look up anything in two seconds. Who was that annoying kid who played for the Angels and ALWAYS got a hit against the Yankees no matter what Cy Young winner we had pitching at the time? And how many times has my wife saved us by booting up her mobile GPS while we were trying to find the hotel? Even though as I've explained many times, there is a difference between getting lost and exploring "alternate, scenic, time-consuming routes." I just think think that the world would be a lot healthier if I used my smart phone a little more, and the rest of the world used it a little less. Oh yeah: David Eckstein.

     I've survived all this time without a smart phone, as hard as that is to believe. I didn't have one when I was a seven year-old kid playing with toy soldiers in the basement, where my Mom let me and my imagination percolate for hours. Now it seems like every child has a smart phone issued at birth, and it will remain to be seen whether it takes a toll on ideas and thoughts when someone else thinks them for you. Will children still play with toy soldiers with their hands, or simply watch themon a little screen? If not, those toy soldiers will have lost their fiercest war.

DON'T STOP

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (02-21-19)

      Last week we went to see a Fleetwood Mac tribute band with our friends Julie and Jeff at Daryl's House in Pawling. I like Daryl's House because it's a nice-sized room, the sound is good, the stage is close, and you can sit down and have a meal while you watch the show. I wish Daryl would move closer so I could go over to his house more often. I would probably like it less if I was Daryl, and I'm upstairs in my pajamas brushing my teeth, and I wander downstairs to see what's in the fridge and there's 250 people sitting around eating everything that used to be in the fridge. Did they eat those last two pieces of pizza that I was saving? Don't even bother to answer. I was going to order a burger before the show started- if I was at McDonald's they probably have something called a Fleetwood Mac, but instead I ordered a Philly Cheese Steak, since Daryl Hall is a Philly guy. 

 

      These days, rock and roll is sort of a dying art, because so many rock and rollers are dead. I saw Earth, Wind & Fire a few years ago, and Wind and Fire are both dead. Same with Blood, Sweat and Tears. You could combine the remaining members and you'd still only have Sweat and Wind. And then of course bands break up, they have legal battles, and one of the songwriters owns half the songs, and the other one owns the other half. So legally, the band can now only play the first half of all the songs. Thus, your favorite band might not survive (even the band Survivor did not survive). If they are still on tour, like the Rolling Stones, you would have to take out a second mortgage on your home to go see them in seats a couple miles from the stadium that have been set on fire to justify their low ticket price. A tribute band might be the only way you can get to enjoy the music that you love and barely remember.

 

      There are all kinds of acts of this type. There was a tribute band for the Police, but they were all arrested for impersonating an officer. The lead singer was taken in during a Sting operation. When I go to the Jersey shore I see the same Springsteen act at every bar I go to, and the singer sounds like he swallowed a fresh cactus before each performance in order to get that raspy voice. But sometimes the tribute bands can be sort of a "farm system" for the major league groups. Remember when Steve Perry left Journey and they hired a singer from a tribute band to replace him? It doesn't always work; for instance, if you are Cher, and you don't feel like going out on tour and you want to replace yourself, you're probably only going to find a drag queen who can pull it off convincingly. They recently kicked Lindsay Buckingham out of Fleetwood Mac, and he wrote about half of their big hits. So now all the Fleetwood Mac tribute bands have their Lindsay Buckingham guy chained to the bass drum just to be on the safe side.

 

      In between songs the lead singer was giving us a running history of Fleetwood Mac. The band is like one of those parties in the 1970s where you put all the car keys into a fish bowl, and at the end of the party you pick a set of keys out and go home with whoever came with the car. I was never invited to any parties like that, probably because I drive a Dodge Dart and everybody else drives a BMW. Anyway, Fleetwood Mac was its own soap opera, and the words to their songs are all secret messages about the intrigue and chicanery that were rampant at the time. Whenever they played "You Make Loving Fun," it was code for "Dude, you slept with the keyboard player, who is literally RIGHT OVER THERE, and she admitted to it by singing this song even though I wrote it!" And when they played "Go Your Own Way," it was code for "I did NOT! And even if I did it wasn't until after I heard what you and the bass player were up to!" Then the singer in the tribute band announced that she had just married the guitarist. Have we learned NOTHING from the lessons of Fleetwood Mac? After that announcement they played "Big Love," which is code for "Honey, can you pick up some milk after the show tonight?"

 

     The band was fun and the music is toe-tapping, and I'm thinking that this is a pretty good gig. These guys are playing four nights at Daryl's House, and they're touring up and down the East Coast playing good rooms. The hardest thing about appearing as Stevie Nicks is not the singing, it's finding a top hat in a ladies size 8. It's impossible, so you have to follow a female magician around and when she turns her back to saw somebody in half, BOOM- make your move. Once you clean all the rabbit droppings out of it, try it on, look in the mirror and be honest with yourself: Does it make you look like Abraham Lincoln? Winston Churchill? Anyone from Alice in Wonderland? If not, you're good to go.

 

      The audience totally ate it up, and how do I know that the audience totally ate it up? Because they burped afterward. At first I thought it was a little weird that the band should soak up so much of Fleetwood Mac's glory, but when you go to hear the philharmonic you give a standing ovation for the band, and they didn't write the songs either. And who do you clap the loudest for? The conductor, and he didn't even play anything, he just told a bunch of people WHEN to play, and pointed at them sometimes when he knew they couldn't point back. Maybe I would have clapped louder if he had taken the time to do his hair and dress up like Beethoven. 

 

     I enjoyed the band, the company, my Philly cheese steak and the music, especially when they did "Don't Stop," which is code for "We're about to stop now."