Sick Day

Off work with sickness today, not long after noting to a friend that it had been some time since I had so much as a sniffle, cough or wheeze. But I dragged myself out of bed to keep my plaything production afoot and added a note over on the toy weblog so I thought I'd update here as well. One of my son's favorites has always been Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald, I long ago learned a pidgin version to amuse him and so added this cd to the collection thinking I might learn a tune or two from Gordon and never did. Pretty stuff, very engaging, he's so mellow-voiced and the guitar is so clean and tuneful. I'll bring it upstairs and put it on the bedside player, a coupla Benadryl and I'll be Dreamland bound...zzzzz...

Do I overuse the ellipsis?... It seems a useful device oftimes...

News of the day

Ahhh, what to write? No great shakes lately, been a tolerable week thus far at the workplace. Had some fun comraderie with my buddy, Patoo, and another recent toy convert, Doug(who, by the way, is a woodworking hobbyist as well, builds elaborate birdhouses and is working, however slowly, on a Ponderosa ranch house facade for to display my own homemade Bonanza men), over a closeout store find of some retro-style GI Joe figures. One has a neato pilot helmet with a little flip down visor, very cool. We all got snookered out of them once before when a fourth toy buddy snapped up a batch at another store and promptly sold them off at a healthy markup on eBay... without a thought of his fellow toy geeks, that stinky goat! (Yeah, you, Don!) Happily, I was able to hook everybody up with their favorite Joe outta this batch.

Don't you hate an IM box popping up, thinking, 'Hey, who's this? Somebody I know but don't know online perhaps?' and it turns out to be another 'We're getting naked!' come-on?!? Eeee....

What else? Footloose and fancy-free over the weekend so the boy and I picked up our buddy, Fred- he whose wife deserted him along with my own on the road to Kentuck, leaving him high and dry without a car or spending cash! -and ran some errands and went to Pizza Hut. Next day it was just the kids and I after Sunday-go-to-meetin' so we took a little drive up country to Hummelstown to browse the All Toy Company, a collection of vintage toy dealers. The town also boasts one of the best pizza joints for miles around, Jo-Jo's, great Italian bread sandwiches so the kids laid waste a pair of cheeseburger subs. I got a pepperoni stromboli, a standard junk food from my college days at Millersvile's Sugar Bowl. I make them myself a coupla times a year and they're better than bought because I stuff 'em so full of pepperoni they bust out at the seams with cheese and grease.(Drooling on the keyboard...)

Back to Fred, he's not an artsy type at all- he and Cathy have a few years on us and he's worked as a prison guard and in various manufacturing environments before being sidelined by some health problems -but some time ago he started out of the blue making these little wacky sculptures, just something to pass the time, I suppose. Animal heads, some strange cartoony faces, small figures and what-have-you. I've tried to encourage him to make some molds and duplicate them because they are really pretty nice for an untutored artist. I mean, they'd be nice for a schooled artist.. you know what I mean? I'll have to try and get some pictures of them. Anyway, he's tried renting a craft mall booth, that was a bust even though I thought he was offering them waaaay too cheaply, and was supposed to place a few in a new gallery an acquaintance of his son's was opening but that never materialized. He had a coupla new ones to show incorporating plastic doll eyes, strange but cool in a 60s Rat Fink surf monster way.

The wyfe returned from Kentucky gushing dreams of relocating there in the near future. Says it's beautiful and green and the cost of living is way lower, cheap land, cheap housing... no work. I dunno. We toyed with the idea of moving to the beach on and off but I think if I'm gonna uproot it better be for a more agreeable clime and something like sandy beaches to recommend it. I guess Kentucky is more southerly and therefore more temperate, I guess, I don't really know, but what else has it got? I'm not a practical sort of man, by any stretch of the imagination, but I can't see jumping from a frying pan into a fire on a whim or a weekend vacation's impression either. Not like moving down the street or across the county even, which we've done way too many times as it is. We're like steenking nomads, fer cryin' out loud! I remember how hateful it was the few times I moved with my parents, my kids have had to do it twice that many times...

And I bought another guitar, a real throwback to the halcyon days of metal mania, all pointy and begging for a tiger stripe paint job. I'm thinking lately I may never master the music but, by cracky, it won't be for a lack of instruments. The question is "Do I start hanging them from the ceiling next?" I'm tripping over them almost daily in our wee abode already...!

 

Observations

  Boy, I thought I had some odd stuff in my music library. My brother, Brad, stopped by last night to show off the finished Wonka trike and brought along a CD case full of some wild stuff, a lot of nu-metal I guess you'd call it. Not a whole lot to my taste, it all sounds the same and not very catchy at all. But I picked out this band, Guano Apes, to give a listen for a while. They have an interesting vibe, lot going on, very cool production. I'd liken them to Evanescence but not so ethereal or operatic, some great heavy sounds with a little Oingo Boingo thrown in for good measure. And how 'bout that moniker? I'm telling you, I was fifteen years ahead of time with 'Monkey Grip'. Anyway, I swapped him Queens Of The Stone Age' latest and presented him with a Rogue Male album he'd admired last week on eBay. I think they were French, 80s metal, like a junior Motorhead from what I remember of their sound. He's gonna make us CD copies from it, should be interesting.

On my tour of the neighborhood this morning I saw a variety of cats, blacks and grays, one a black and brown calico I guess you'd call it, very skittish. And one rabbit. I'm surprised the rabbits ever show themselves with as many free ranging felines as call this little burg home. There's a house on the main street with a great rambling English sort of garden, they have several giant green pumpkins maturing on the sidewalk. Another place with a morning glory vine overtaking the shrubbery at the rear of their yard, great little violet and white blooms. Speaking of, there's another house with a giant sort of trumpet vine-slash-bush with great big white blossoms. I can put two fingers inside the trumpet, cool.

The man down the street with the pink flowering hedge and the beautiful collie had a big blowout last weekend and it looks as though he's gearing up for another today. In fact, he was just readying the pig for the roaster last night around ten. At eleven he was perched in his lawn chair in the driveway and the roaster was smoking already. This morning at seven he was in the same spot, maybe he slept in the chair, turning the spit in his sleep. Wow, it wafted the alluring smell of smoky bacon and then some and followed me halfway down the street.

But the strangest thing was somebody's outfit left by the ball diamond. Jeans, t-shirt, belt, shoes and a white garment which, having not inspected too closely, I can only hope was not an undergarment yet. Stacked carefully if not precisely at the curb in the grass and I guess they walked away in the altogether. Who knows...?

ROTFLLAM

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, rolling on the floor, indeed. My high school senior year picture now graces the box at left. Boy oh boy, what a glamour shot that was. At least the friendly photographer managed to retouch it so the prominent teenage scourge of debilitating skin eruptions didn't show. Probably took a few hours I would think.

Anyway, it's just one of a handful of photos I found under a stack of junk, waiting to be added to the online family album. Don't take my word for it, go look. The newest additions are at the bottom. Use the handy and aptly labelled 'Family Album' link at left. I'll wait here.

Pay no attention...

...to this entry, just saving my goofy turn of a phrase for my own future amusement as I get ready to change the picture in the box.

This is a picture of one Wes McCue- note the insipid grin; the tousled, carefree appearance and the indisputable photographic evidence of electromagnetic super-energy spiraling from the subject's cerebellum. Consider, if you will, his weblog at right. Is it random cogitation of the sort one might ascribe to an intelligent chimp? Possibly. Or is it the mutterings-under-his-breath of a man heedless of passersby at midday on a busy city street, a man hardly grown into his adult skin? Perhaps. 

Or is it something more? Something only given slight notice... in the Twilight Zone...!

Thor's day...

This collection begins with Kentucky Rain, coincidental becuz' the wyfe is in Kentucky this w/e. Like most 'foreign' places I imagine it all primitive, untamed like the days of Daniel Boone even though I know better. Y'know, Boone was borned right here in PA, I've been by his birthplace on some road trip or other. This song was written by Eddie Rabbitt, his best work I think. It's one of those songs I can put on 'repeat' and listen to over and over again. I slacked off adding to the family album but in the whirlwind reconstruction of the toy haven I found a small cache I had planned to add so I'm scanning them now. I like the virtual process- scanning, saving, naming, uploading and so forth -but the tangible photo is still something special, isn't it? You can't carry a .jpg in your wallet as such. I guess if you have one of those photo-capable cell  phones it's a portable image. Still not the same as that glossy scrap of paper getting dog-eared over time.

Events

  Boy, as a kid I used to love The Monkees too. I remember watching them and my Dad saying he couldn't believe they actually got 'paid to act like idiots on national TV'. He wasn't big on their music either. I'm sure later on he would have preferred The Monkees on my stereo versus Van Halen. Once upon a time, probably 1982, he called the family to the porch for a picture and I was decked out in a concert jersey, my 'holy' jeans and at least four bandanas wrapped here and there, the big tiger striped one around my neck, hair everywhere. Hahaha, he would not take the picture until I at least took the one off my neck. "This is real life, not #*%@ Van Halen!", he said. I think I was stunned that he actually knew the name of the band. I recovered quickly enough- "It's just Van Halen, Dad. Not #*%@ Van Halen.", I said, hahahaha. What a smartass kid I was.

   But I digress. I mentioned the 'Stony Brook Bypass' previously, my usual route home. Monday night as I passed the apartment complex on one side there was a teeny little girl in rain boots standing all by herself not a foot off the side of the road. Now, it's not a main artery, by any means, but it is a pretty heavily trafficked cutoff and this was right after work so it was waaay  too busy for this tyke to have any business whatsoever standing virtually on the roadway. I thought, 'If nobody stops and finds out what's going on you'll see her on the evening news hit by a car...', so I swung around and as I came back to the spot where she was standing there was a van stopped in the road and the wee lass crossing deliberately and none too speedily in front of it! Ay-yi-yi! By the time I got off the road and parked, a woman in another van had stopped to help too. I thought it better anyway that a motherly figure approach the girl but, fearing an untoward domestic situation, the woman asked if I would accompany her as she walked the girl home. Which I did along with another fellow who happened by and overheard the woman quoting the little girl, 'I don't want somebody to call the police on my Mommy and Daddy..' Finally, the girl spotted her father walking about the complex, a mite too casually by my estimation given the life-threatening circumstance his four-year-old daughter had wandered into. He did seem genuinely consternated when apprised of the situation, however, and we left it at that. Not that my kids never made an escape or got out of sight at a tender age, still, it was no small cause for wonder that such a small fry would A) have free run of an apartment complex where she could endanger herself in any number of ways and B) determine she needed to cross a busy street to a business where she was unknown and knew no one... Go figure.

   In other news, the toy haven is coming along. All that remains are one materials shelf and the video shelves to arrange. The videos are a real mess, tapes and more tapes and even more tapes- Batman, Star Trek, Bonanza, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, lots of other sci-fi and TV westerns -and then DVDs stacked on top of those stacks. I hate to unload any because I know I'll need to watch it as soon as I do. Oh, yeah, and a little sorting of the storage bins of various and sundry craft materials, fabrics, dolls and doll parts, photo file and who-knows-what-else I've stashed and forgotten. By the time I'm finished I figure I'll have to start all over dusting the plastic men. Some of them were really, really hairy looking after standing here unattended for many, many months. I finally stopped trying to dust and wipe them individually and dragged them by the handful into the driveway and hosed them off, no kidding, and let them dry in the sunshine. I was careful not to do too many at one time though lest passersby think it was a toy yard sale or something going on.

  I should be getting accustomed to the bachelor life by now. This week my spouse is out the door Wednesday headed to Kentucky for the weekend, some sort of spa retreat with her best gal pal whose husband begged off. And the kids'll stay with their cousins to facilitate my girl child's work schedule, her workplace is only a stone's throw from their abode. It'll give me plenty of time to do my little rubber experiments and spray paint some homemade toy fixins, I guess. Maybe the neighbors will be out a night or two and I can turn the amp up to eleven, squeeee-ZOINKS!!! My erstwhile bandmates have been trying out some new playmates too, might be a chance to see what's happening on the rock scene... We'll see, maybe I can talk them into doing 'Hey, hey, we're the Monkees!'...

TGIF...

...and it was a short week even. Still seemed like an eternity, bleecchhh. Anyway, I usually pass my little family on the route home as they come the opposite way driving my daughter to work. Her start time makes it just a hearn too precarious for me to get all the way home and get her back to town on time. So we flash headlights at each other and wave like idiots as we pass. Tonight I thought 'I'll be a little smarter and park along the way where they can pull over when they see me. Then we can plan a little shopping or dinner out or something.' This is what people who have yet to join the cellular communications revolution do instead of driving with one hand and dialing with the other.

   At any rate, we missed each other and I ended up shopping for myself at WalMart, fuel injector cleaner, oil and filter- my one small foray into automotive maintenance, I can change the oil! Well, I can change a flat too. And wash the car. Yep, that's about it... - thumb tacks and packing tape, new rulers- my old wooden one is so scarred and dog-eared, plus I use it to stir colors into latex, whatta mess! -and some small picture frames for displays in my toy enclave.

   The good news is our paths didn't cross because they were doing a little shopping of their own at the local irregular/closeout clothing store and brought home a super-neato Creature From The Black Lagoon T-shirt for moi, despite its evolutionary leanings Creature is one of my favorite monster movies. Which is double-super-neato because I just brought the Creature doll back into display circulation as I organize the shelves and wall space in the toy museum. When the makers announced the Creature doll, it was supposed to be a rubber mask over a likeness of the actor who did the swimming parts in the film, Ricou Browning. For some reason it didn't make it into production and it's a standard hard head figure. Which is still incredibly cool, the likeness and detail are just beyond compare. I'd like to know what scale these things are sculpted in originally because they are astoundingly accurate, all the scaly textures and finny protuberances are there, right on the money...

   Again I'm more in the toy mode but that's my wont, I suppose. Like a pendulum swings, so go my interests and the intensity of the attention given to them, waxes and wanes, hopscotching from one thing to another. Some would say that's significant, that it smacks of attention-deficit disorder or some such modernistic malady. But at least one learned individual with many certificates and degrees on his wall has pronounced me free of at least the more pronounced symptoms of that disability. Says I'd never have completed an Adam West as TV's Batman action figure of my own making if that were the case. Still, some might beg to differ with that conclusion based on that limited evidence...!

   Boy, can I go on about nothing or what?

The Toy Cave

I suppose this belongs in my Classic Plastick log but, hey, it's mundane enough for inclusion here, sez me. I'll copy it over there and kill two birds with one stone. 'The Toy Cave', alternately the 'toy lab', the 'enclave of madness', 'dungeon of defenestration'... Okay, I don't even know what 'defenestration' means... Anyway, the main pathway through our humble abode passes right by the ramshackle desk/shelving/display/storage area that houses my toy collection and the workings of my so-called toy company. It has slowly grown and overgrown until I could hardly make my way to the desk chair or turn 'round twice without knocking into some stack of craft items, comic books, ring binders, record albums, guitars and parts of guitars and assorted seemingly self-reproducing articles of various stripes. It started simply enough with the shelves and topmost surfaces of the computer desk arranged with all the little plastic men I hold so dear and the lower regions arrayed with the latex, paint, clay, paper and other makings but at some point it all went haywire and it became easier to just stack stuff on top of the last stack, however precarious.

But this week I've taken a good run at organizing the place. The largest task by far is just dusting the toy men! I'm taking that in small doses to avoid being overcome by the flying dust balls. But I have managed to make some sense of the 'library'- a small collection of TV, comic and superhero related books -as well as the dozen or so ring binders of various sizes loaded with Jonny Quest, Space Ghost, Hanna-Barbera TV Superheroes, Joe Kubert's Tarzan, Bonanza and a few examples of other TV western comics. Hung some stuff that had been laying around waiting for a thumb tack or wall space to become available. I've found some things I'd lost or forgotten about; the DVD slideshow and video from the now defunct Ponderosa Ranch at Incline Village, Nevada, a binder of Viewmaster sets seperated from the main body of the collection, an arm from a plastic figure of Talos, the giant bronze man from the sword-and-sandals classic Jason and The Argonauts, a huge negative blown up from a drawing I did shortly after my adult onset Bat-mania took hold; a big, broad-shouldered, running Batman with his cape fluttering around him, I need to get some prints from that. I even took time to straighten out Superman and Space Ghost 'flying' above the desk. They no longer face the wall as they dangle from their fishing string harnesses, cool.

Not only that, it was all accomplished along with making a nine piece stencil of the Willie Wonka logo and a Target license plate for a custom tricycle, if you can believe it. More on that later. A few more nights of this and the place might even be...>gasp<...presentable!

Monday, Monday...

Aahhhh, nothing like a Monday with no work. Stay up late, sleep in, loll about all morning. Why can't every Monday be a holiday, I wanna know? Or Friday? I'm not particular, I'll take either one. I recall a certain high school social studies teacher telling thirty glassy-eyed youngsters that by the time they'd been in the work force for perhaps a few years economic conditions and a rising standard of life would make a four day work week the norm. Well, let's see... I've been out of high school for going on twenty-five years, in the work force for twenty two of those years and I have yet to obtain employment that asked only four days a week. Maybe I'm just doing the wrong kind of work!

Anyway ol' Doc sings and plays such a mellow, folksy kind of tune... I'd give a toe on either foot to make my fingers do just half of what that old blind carpenter can do with a guitar, sweeeet.

Speaking of guitars, fired up the Charvel with my bass buddy Jimmy on Friday night. Not for long though because, though it's still got a great sound and feel, looks great since all the little dings and dents have been glossed over and refinished... it also still does not stay in tune. No magick fix occurred over time while it was gathering dust or on the glue bench. I guess I'll have to consider some opions at the nut, rollers or something. I hate to go the whole tremolo route, A) because it has a certain 'pre-production' name value in spite of it's misadventure, always lessened by additions or modifications, not to mention my own sentimental attachment to the guitar as it stands.

   And B) the cost of adding an aftermarket locking tremolo unit is numbingly expensivo. I found that out when I snagged my Epiphone Strat for forty bucks- can you believe it? -an Epiphone humbucker for ten smackers and the Floyd tremolo for fifty, three swell eBay deals. I thought 'Great! Now I'll get the tremolo slapped in there for a hundred or so bucks and be ready to rock and roll on the cheap!' I was duly warned it would be less expensive to buy a guitar already outfitted with tremolo and, still heedless of the dangerous cost of hours of routing and wiring and fitting and testing and so forth, insisted on proceeding with the instrumental makeover. Suffice to say, the guitar is a joy to play, sounds great, actually stays in tune once its tweaked properly and the strings are stretched in right... andcost almost four times the figure I had in my head. Ouch!

Well, enough for now, the day is far too beautiful to spend here in the darkness! Adventure awaits!

Giant green bass waves...

That's more like it, I had a huuuuge photo, resized now... Anyway, there's that old PhotoShop rippling magick at work. Not professional, by any means, but still gives a rather surreal, even otherworldly edge to the image, don'cha think?

Good ol' Jim, 'Jimmy Rave' he styles himself onstage. When I was seriously interested in becoming a heavy metal type guitar player, nigh almost twenty years ago, Jim and I worked together for a local fly-by-night landscaping outfit and he was just starting out playing bass. Because I could fake a few licks and stumble through a song or two but especially because I had the requisite rock star 'big hair', I became his guitar hero. We get a good laugh outta that these days, lemme tell ya.

Anyway, we lost touch after a while and then one day a little over a year and a half ago he called up outta the blue. We went out to lunch and he brought over a video of his band playing some local watering hole. He'd become a bona fide rock star! And it was like the intervening years were but a week, maybe two. That's just the kind of guy Jim is, gregarious, easygoing, do-anything-for-you. Always there when you gotta move a refrigerator, tow a dump truck by hand or build a log house.

So he twisted my arm into venturing along one night as he jammed with some guys who were putting together a band and eventually we got together with the aforementioned little group until just recently. In fact, we're headed up to the storage facility tomorrow night, just to goof around and make some noise now that I have my old Charvel back. Wheeee!