I just love that illustration, gang. A mermaid, puzzled by a shoe! (And it’s also interesting to note that the illustration is from Spring 1925 — almost 100 years ago.)

I don’t know about you guys, but today is a weird day over here.

First on the list, as always: I can’t breathe. But today it seems to be more because it’s incredibly humid here this morning. Not hot at all, actually kind of pleasant, but just humid enough to make it hard for me to breathe. The mega doses of Vitamin D do seem to be helping a lot. But now the air itself seems to be the culprit.

Second, it is the anniversary of two suicides in the music world today, and it is all over Instagram: the 40th anniversary of the death of Ian Curtis (Joy Division), and the 3rd anniversary of the death of Chris Cornell (Soundgarden). So that’s cheery, right?

Luckily, it is also Olivia Harrison’s birthday today — she was George Harrison’s second wife. So that’s nice — a birthday! Except of course that George is dead and has been for a really long time, so we’re back to that.

I’m not sure what to do about today. I like to think I’ll get something creative done, however the lack of easy oxygen makes it difficult for the brain to work. I’m going to at least try, but it wouldn’t surprise me if I had to chalk up another day to streaming old Mr. Moto movies again on YouTube (luckily, Peter Lorre made a ton of those films back in the 1930s! So – see?! There’s some good news!!) (And, yes, it is now considered extremely politically incorrect that a German Caucasian portrayed a Japanese detective, however, Peter Lorre is still just wonderful to watch on the screen.) (But it’s also interesting to note that most of the nationalities in the Mr. Moto movies are all screwy. For instance, when Mr. Moto (a German man portraying a Japanese man) is in Peiping (nowadays called Beijing), one of the key Chinese characters is actually a Japanese man.  Stuff like that happens in all of the Mr. Moto movies, because Mr. Moto is always in some intriguing and very dangerous far off foreign land where no one knew for sure what anybody really looked like yet!!)

[I have been corrected by a reader that Peter Lorre, while he did make movies in Germany before emigrating to America, was in fact Hungarian. — Ed.]

 

 

 

 

 

“Mr. Moto” was also a song by The Ventures, that absolutely great surf-guitar band from the 1960s!!

However, if I am able to think straight today and do something besides watch Mr. Moto movies, I’ll do some more editing on The Guitar Hero Goes Home. These are not major edits I’m struggling to do here, just minor tweaks here and there. Still, when my brain is not at full capacity, even minor tweaks seem to confound me. I can look at the same sentence twenty times and be unable to decide if I want to tweak it or not. Stuff like that. It makes me utterly insane, and usually, I’ll end up just closing the laptop and walking away.

I am so fed up with this COVID 19 breathing-nonsense. And to add insult to injury — I’m sure you’ve seen the reports that habitual cigarette smokers seem less likely to get severe cases of the virus (because their lungs are perhaps protected by that build up of tar & nicotine)? Of course almost everyone in the world (especially strident mothers of tobacco free teens!!) asks you not to believe this report — along with the World Health Organization, the very same organization that also assured us that COVID 19 was not contagious, so, hmmm…

Decisions, decisions… to smoke or not to smoke??

I am of course just kidding. Still. Wouldn’t that be something if all this time it would have just been better for me to fucking smoke??

Okay, on the personal front. My birth mom has moved off my sister’s farm and is now in a one-bedroom apartment in a senior living place (back in the town where I was actually conceived, if you can imagine that!!).

What I find really, really interesting about my mom’s move is that she now lives in the very same apartment complex that her husband lives in! They are still legally married but have not been together as husband & wife since 1978.  But they now live 4 seconds away from each other, and now they hang out together, drink beer and smoke cigarettes.  And she’s 73 now and he’s 83 now, and when they got married she was 15 and he was 25.

I just find that kind of stuff awesome. I mean, come on — there is just no way of knowing where life & time will take us, right?  Except perhaps right back to where we started!

I was 20 when I first got married and my first husband was 25. We met in Brooklyn, NY; I was from Ohio and he was from Singapore. We have become very close again, even though he lives all the way in Seattle and is in a long-time, committed relationship.  Still, wouldn’t it be so weird if, when I’m 73 and he’s 78, we suddenly found that we lived right next door to each other and started to hang out together again, drinking and smoking??

If I live that long, I am not going to dismiss any possibility whatsoever. I guess we’ll just find out.

Well, all righty. I have nothing left to say.

I’m gonna close this and go take some more Vitamin D and another cup of coffee and see if I can get some decent editing done here this morning! I hope Monday is good to you, wherever you are in the world, gang. Thanks for visiting!!

I was only a mild Joy Division/New Order fan, but my favorite song of theirs was one that the late Ian Curtis was a co-writer of, “Atrocity Exhibition” from the infamous 1980 Joy Division album, Closer. I’ll leave you with that today. Okay, I love you guys. See ya!

“Atrocity Exhibition”

Asylums with doors open wide,
Where people had paid to see inside,
For entertainment they watch his body twist,
Behind his eyes he says, ‘I still exist.’

This is the way, step inside.
This is the way, step inside…

In arenas he kills for a prize,
Wins a minute to add to his life.
But the sickness is drowned by cries for more,
Pray to God, make it quick, watch him fall.

This is the way, step inside.
This is the way, step inside…

This is the way, step inside.
This is the way, step inside…

You’ll see the horrors of a faraway place,
Meet the architects of law face to face.
See mass murder on a scale you’ve never seen,
And all the ones who try hard to succeed.

This is the way, step inside.
This is the way, step inside…

And I picked on the whims of a thousand or more,
Still pursuing the path that’s been buried for years,
All the dead wood from jungles and cities on fire,
Can’t replace or relate, can’t release or repair,
Take my hand and I’ll show you what was and will be.

© – 1980 Curtis Ian Kevin, Hook Peter, Morris Stephen Paul David, Sumner Bernard