Camper Full Of Men?

Sportsmen, Coachmen, Dutchmen

I have often wondered  at the peculiar names of these campers, or as they are now called, RV's, emblazoning the front top of the vehicle for all to scratch their heads at.  Is the Dutchmen model supposed to be full of guys from the Netherlands?  Is Holland the birthplace of such a vehicle?  How many coaches of various sports can fit inside a Coachmen?  Or is this an homage to the days when coach drivers would all live together in the chuck wagon?

My point is, these names are plural for objects that are singular.  To illustrate my point, lets look at automobile model names.  "Jim drives a Ford Mustangs." doesn't sound right, does it?  How about "Hello, I'd like to buy a Cadillacs."  "What kind of mileage will I get in this Priuses?"  (Prii?) Yikes!

The notion that this could go on at a company that manufactures these vehicles for so long without the mistake being pointed out and corrected is baffling.  I imagine the aging president of the company asserting at the board meeting, "Damn it!  I founded this company, and you will NOT change the name of this camper!  How dare you upstarts correct my grammar?"

What is more baffling is what I found out when I researched this phenomenon on the Internets.  I figured that Dutchmen, Sportsmen, and Coachmen were all different models manufactured by the same RV company.  It would stand to reason, but it is not so.  Coachmen Recreational Vehicles was founded in Middlebury, Indiana in 1964, and they produced camping trailers called Coachmen.  It would appear that in 1972 KZ Recreational Vehicles was founded, also in Middlebury, Indiana.  Possibly this was split off from the Coachmen company.  They produced campers named Sportsmen.  Dutchmen Manufacturing Inc. was founded in 1988.  Their site does not mention a city.   They produce sport vehicles called Dutchmen, Aspen Trail, Coleman, Kodiak and others.  So this grammar anomaly exists at two, possibly three different companies!  Weird!

Lots of people in Pediddleville say they're going to "Walmart's", which is wrong, but understandable since it harkens back to the days when there used to be a store or two in every town in this country that was named after the family that ran it.  Elkin's.  Thatcher's.  Harry's.  Mom and Pop's.  But the Camper Full of Men remains a mystery...

Driving Alone At Night With The Music Privilege

The Law of Pediddleville dictates that I may not have full freedom to enjoy my choice of music in the car that I drive.  This has been a long-standing curse that I have endured and accepted with a sense of humor.  No matter what car I drive on a regular basis to work or anytime I go somewhere on my own, I usually drive the older, more beat-up of our two vehicles, and there is always some issue with the sound system in that vehicle.  The cassette or CD player stops working.  You only get one channel.  The knobs don't do what they're supposed to do.  You can only get the strongest of commercial radio stations.  I have soldiered through all of these unpleasantries in several different cars.  Pediddleville Law, being similar to Murphy's Law, makes it not worth fixing or replacing the sound system because the car won't be around long enough to warrant the expense.  So I endure with what I can get.  Since there is no chance of getting pulled over for a broken sound system, I endure longer than I usually do with a burnt out headlight.  Procrastination rules the Nation of Pediddleville, which gets its name from the one-headlighted automobile.

One night I was driving our better vehicle, a mini-van that has a CD player that actually works.  Though I didn't think to bring along any CD's, I found a burned CD-R copy of "With The Beatles" and "A Hard Day's Night" that I had made for my sons to listen to.  This is music so ingrained in my soul that I could listen to it in my head without any kind of sound system.  I do, after all, have a very good auditory memory.  So I was driving, listening to clear sounding music that I had chosen--Wow!  I had the The Music Privilege!  After I got close to home I realized that all this time I could have been listening to my friend DeadBob's radio show.  I was so into the idea that I had The Music Privilege that I missed out on something that I probably would have enjoyed more.

Well, the other day the car I've been driving crapped out.  This car had a dead CD player--radio only.  Now we'll be registering an old pick-up truck that I'll be driving.  You guessed it-no working sound system at all.  Thank God for the iPad I recently bought...the iPad my son dropped the other day and cracked the glass, and I didn't buy the insurance.

There's no place like Pediddleville...

Tank Update #2: Disappearance And Death...Hercules Joins The School...King Is Queen?

As Spring nears Summer, I remember one of the reasons for setting up the tank.  The previous summer had been difficult, for many reasons, but Salmon River was the one thing that redeemed it.  It's a wonderful, beautiful place to go, a minute from home, and free.  I had always wanted to have an aquarium with some type of local fish, and the idea was to have something in the house to remind me of that wonderful place through the winter, when I could not go there for recreation.  I imagined sitting there in the easy chair, watching the fish and remembering back to the warm days of fishing, swimming, and snorkeling with my family.  It wasn't so bad a winter as I expected, not like last year, but it was still nice to have the tank.

Down to ten Dace, the fish in the tank appear to be doing well now.  There have been a few interesting occurrences.  As reported earlier, Giorgio, the very camouflaged bottom feeder has died, though his body has never been found.  Could the Dace have eaten him?  Soon after Giorgio's demise, I noticed that I could only find ten Dace when there had been eleven.

The smallest of the Dace had been named Hercules by my sons.  He generally kept to himself, probably due to his size, while the rest actively schooled around, scarfing up the goldfish flakes when they were dropped in, but though he was solitary, I could always find him.  He would spend a lot of time alone near the bottom, not getting as much food as the others, but he has definitely grown since October.

One of the smaller fish had developed a problem--an apparent ruptured swim bladder.  He had a cavity where the rest of the Dace have a prominent bulge.  He would try to swim up, but couldn't stay off the bottom for long.  This fish would be a goner in the river.  He had a bent look near his head, and I wondered if he had gotten crushed when I was cleaning the tank.  He would try to rise, but quickly lose it and sink again, resting on rocks or on the gravel bottom.  After a while he seemed to be doing better.  He was still disabled, but could move, and was able to get some food.  Now he has made nearly a full recovery.  His spine is crooked, which is very evidently shown by the black stripe down his side.  The line is kinked just past the pectoral fins.  He'd still have no chance in the river, but in my tank, he's able to keep up with the school and doesn't seem to be struggling at all.

This still doesn't address the missing eleventh fish.  I thought maybe he'd leaped out of the tank and was eaten by my cat, but it was just a theory.  Hercules had been spending a lot of time in the far right corner of the tank swimming around a big rock with another flat rock laying on it, creating a hiding spot.  One day recently I spotted a strange looking white object at the bottom near this little cave.  It was curved and was moving.  It was the missing Dace.  He was paralyzed, laying upside down, unable to straighten out.  A mercy flush later and the tank had ten confirmed residents.  Almost immediately Hercules started swimming with the school again.  Had he been caring for this disabled fish, his work now done?

Another thing that I have seen, three times now, was a real surprise the first time I saw it.  One night I went into the room to look at the fish, and at first couldn't tell what was different-looking about King Dace.  The black stripe that runs the length of the body was much thinner, and the yellow stripe that lines the top of the black one was much thicker than normal, giving the fish an unusual look.  The fish actually seemed smaller than normal due to this colorization.  What was going on?  Some as-yet-unseen behavior was about to unfold.  King Dace started swishing around in a small gravel area near the front of the tank.  Soon, one of the larger other Dace started doing the same in the same area.  They were spawning.  Now the sexist misunderstanding came to light.   "King Dace" first, then the smaller male doing his business.  Just because she's the biggest fish doesn't mean she's the King.  I suppose the color variation was a hormonal thing, meant to attract the male.  The two of them did this several times, then when they were done, left the scene, swam around the tank, then returned promptly and began eating the eggs!

I've been feeding them goldfish flakes, and they seem to be doing well on them.  Certainly all of them have grown except for Queen Dace, who according to what I could find on the internet,  is full-grown at about three inches.  When I set up the tank there were two fish almost exactly the same size and were just over half as long as Queen Dace.  Now they are almost as big as Queen Dace, and it is sometimes hard to tell them apart.  These two fish I called "The Henchman" because they seemed to be the flanks to the King in my little aquarium society.  The way to tell them apart from Queen Dace is that they are more meaty, especially in the tail than she is, and I wonder if that is due to the goldfish flake diet that she didn't grow up on.  I wonder if The Henchmen will end up being much larger than her?

They Are Leaving The Things That Belong To Them At That Place

I've always thought that if I was a teacher, on the first day of class I would do a little exercise to separate the wheat from the chaff, as they say.  It would be a dictation of a simple sentence.  It is a sentence that consists of only five words.  Five common, heavily utilized English words.  Three of these words are homophones that a large percentage of people for some weird reason simply cannot use correctly.  Commonly, they use one of these three homophones for all occurrences of any of these three words in writing.  Here is the sentence:   "They're leaving their things there."

How many of them would begin scratching their heads as they looked at the sentence they had scrawled on their papers?  "There leaving there things there."  How many would find that sentence perfectly acceptable?

Chim Chim Cheree

I've been meaning to write about this track from the classic John Coltrane Quartet for a while. Now that it's co-author, Robert B. Sherman has passed away, here's the motivation to put it down.

This track, released in 1965 by the classic quartet of John Coltrane-soprano saxophone, McCoy Tyner-piano, Jimmy Garrison-bass, and Elvin Jones-drums on the album "The John Coltrane Quartet Plays", for me, embodies everything Coltrane was trying to achieve with his music at the time.  Coltrane was  known for taking some very "white culture" tunes and turning them into searching, soulful avant-garde jazz pieces.  Most notable was 1961's "My Favorite Things", a Rogers and Hammerstein tune from Disney's "The Sound Of Music", another was "Greensleeves", a traditional English folk tune.  Already having collaborated with Eric Dolphy and stretching things out with "A Love Supreme", the quartet was still moving ahead by 1965 when they took another Disney number to the outer limits.

As the studio track begins, Tyner, Garrison, and Jones provide a steady, loping vamp over which Coltrane states the main melody of the tune on the soprano. After about a minute he begins improvising over the increasingly wild drumming of Jones, complex, frenetic melodies that seem to fly in and out of the fray.  The "sheets of sound" he was known for appear near to the three minute mark as Elvin Jones chops away at the drum set.

Just after three minutes, McCoy Tyner takes over with an intelligent solo that seems to say "Okay, let's step back and take stock of what just happened. Don't worry, I'll guide you through this."  He seems to be providing a more rational explanation of the music that you are experiencing, preparing you for what's to come.  Some fast runs down the keyboard, then a jerky series of dissonant chords as Jones starts igniting things again.  Tyner breaks into an ascending crescendo ushering Coltrane back in at 4:36.  At this point the whole thing explodes into the cosmos!  Both Coltrane and Jones are ON FIRE!  Complete transcendent musical telepathy.  The sheer intensity of Elvin Jones' drum assault is jaw-dropping, and Coltrane wails and cries through the soprano like he's communicating the chaos and fury of the civil rights movement.  Great music makes visual images in my mind's eye.  I see Martin Luther King, riots, Viet Nam.  Back into the vamp as a coda and the track fades out.

This is one of the greatest moments in Jazz as far as I'm concerned.  It's like a distillation of Coltrane's entire arc as an artist.  It is believed that he had some kind of knowledge that his time was limited and that this knowledge made him progress so quickly, and this track, though he did not write it, may as well have been his because it is so potent a statement.  I got the chance to see Elvin Jones Jazz Machine live at Sprague Hall in New Haven years ago.  It was fantastic to see and hear him play.  At this show bassist Willie Ruff presented him with some kind of lifetime achievement award.  As he accepted the award on stage I was struck by how humble, even embarrassed, he was to be receiving such adoration from the audience.  He sure did deserve it.

The Gonzo Memorial Blog Post

Seven years ago the good Dr. Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide with a gun at his home in Woody Creek Colorado. Jesus God, I wish he had been able to maybe clean himself up a bit, deal with the health issues he had, and stick around for the current Presidential campaign.  As a political writer I have found him to be the best avenue to really understanding the way things are in this sick joke of a course of history we are in, at the primal level.  His predictions about many things, though often scoffed at as the ravings of a drunken malcontent have proven true.  It's understandable that most "regular" or "serious" or "patriotic" people would feel that way, but that's the point.  These people are often repulsed by any number of attitudes, physical appearances, religious foibles, ...differences... and can't really compute a person like he was.  How could a man who hated Richard Nixon and regularly used Mescaline be taken seriously?  How could he be trusted?  "Trust me, I understand these things." he would often say, jokingly, because he knew it would be seen as a joke, in correspondences with writers, politicians, news people, musicians, actors, a full array of interesting people from the full spectrum of the American experience.  He got high with Ken Kesey and the Hell's Angels-he got drunk with Patrick Buchanan.  He was allowed to ride in a limo and talk about football with the Devil himself, as far as he was concerned, his nemesis President Richard M. Nixon. He had a very unique viewpoint of how things work in politics because he saw many aspects of our society that most people never see, and could never therefore process. He really did understand those things.

One big reason I started this blog is Hunter Thompson, and let me say right off the bat that if you detect any similarity in my writing style with his, it is for good reason.  I am a chameleon.  I have no clearly defined style of my own.  When I was younger I read the writings of John Lennon, and that became my style.  Later it was Kurt Vonnegut.  In college writing classes I had to try hard not to write short, blunt sentences full of humorous musings.  Around that time I became aware of Hunter Thompson through my room mate, Barton Highfield III, who told me about this great book I'd like called "Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas".  I never read it until much later, but I did really like a quote from the book that he told me, and it stayed with me all those years--"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."   Well, I was weird, in my own estimation, and the going WAS getting weird.  I had grown up in East Pediddleville, a small town on the banks of Salmon River.  Now I was living and going to school in New Haven, Connecticut, which was far weirder than Pediddleville.  There were parties, music clubs, bars with beers of the world, girls, people who participated in Peace rallies, artists, minorities, all coming at me like a whirlwind.  I wonder now how being initiated into Gonzo Journalism would have framed this new life I was living. It is important to note that this was the Reagan-Bush years, a truly harrowing time for a kid from East Pediddleville who was only just beginning to become a citizen of this land, and realizing that madmen were at the wheel. At the time my main artistic focus was writing, and my thoughts throughout the day usually took the form of a narrative.  It was something that I was very conscious of, though after school ended and I stayed in New Haven to live, the Narrative started to fade.  I was, after all, living in a house with a bunch of friends, cheap rent, playing bass in a band and playing gigs at famous clubs, meeting semi-famous touring musicians, recording scads of music on my 4-track, and only having to work part-time to get by.  The Narrative faded and the Music moved right in.

Time kept on slippin' slippin' slippin' into the future... eventually I realized that I had lived roughly the first half my life in East Pediddileville and the second half in New Haven. I continued playing music and doing music-related things, but did very little writing. At the tail end of the optimistic trade surplus Clinton years I got married, and bought a house in Pediddleville right near the idyllic Salmon River that I remembered fondly from the first half of my life. I worked for a big local company that was eventually swallowed up by a giant global company.  I was now in the Belly of the Beast as they say.  Another Bush slithered into the White House, and then 9-11 happened.

Several years later the hostile atmosphere of my workplace and the discernible decline of the American experience had me pretty well freaked.  It was as if the rottenest dystopian paranoia was actually coming to pass.  The bucolic Pediddeville was no refuge from" The Fear"--something I would have defined for me soon enough.  I was frustrated about music.  I had little free time, and what time I had I often just pissed away procrastinating.  You see,  I have the Creatism disease.  It's an imaginary psychosomatic ailment that is a combination of Creativity and Autism. I must be doing something creative at all times or it is very bad for me.  Yet, I am a champion procrastinator.  And of course the state of things in the World was sketchy, very sketchy.  We were in a war that was a preemptive strike against something that didn't exist.  Fox News, since 9-11 had somehow mesmerized  half the country into thinking it was patriotic to be Republican, that you were not a true American if you were not Republican. Crazy shit, like people boycotting mustard and ketchup.  I was getting disturbing premonitions about the future.  Somewhere in there I started reading quasi-political books that I'd get from the library.  I read Michael Moore, Greg Palast, Al Franken,  also "House of Bush House of Saud" by Craig Unger, which really floored me.  I was beginning to perceive the full scope of just how fucked we are.  It was a realization that something horribly wrong was driving everything, and that there was no way to stop it. At this time I still had not read any Hunter Thompson.  My friend Deadbob was a fan of his, I knew, but I wasn't compelled to check him out.  Even when I heard he had offed himself I didn't read anything by him.

One day I was in the library looking for something to read.  I saw a book called "Liberty And Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto" by Mark Levin.  I had no idea who he was, but leafing through it, it seemed to be a pretty reasonable book, not bat-shit crazy like Ann Coulter or Glenn Beck.  I thought maybe I'd read it, you know, for balance,... what-the-fuckever.  Something about it bothered me though.  It was the smug look on the guy's face on the book jacket.  He had the kind of expression on his face that made me feel like I was being talked down to.  It said "I am right. I am superior to all Liberals.  They are stupid anti-American fools. You should think the way I do."  Hmmm.  I just could not get over that expression on his face.  I wanted to deface it somehow, like black out the eyes with a black Sharpie.  Then a book with a bright orange spine caught my eye.  It was "Ancient Gonzo Wisdom: Interviews With Hunter S. Thompson"  Instantly I knew--I looked at Mark Levin--"Fuck this asshole, I'm going Gonzo!"

It was a good introduction to the Gonzo worldview.  In one interview he talked about how he believed that 9-11 caused " a national nervous breakdown".  I got it.  A nervous breakdown.  It really did seem like that's what it is.  In the years since then, the nervous break down has gone untreated.  Things like the Tea Party, the gridlocked congress at a 10% approval rating, the Birther Movement, Occupy Wall Street, all symptoms of the breakdown. 9-11 caused a rift at an organization I belong to that has festered and widened to this day.  I see it as a microcosmic representation.  A fractal. Just like the course of many people's lives has gone downward since then. The damage has been done and the thing will just keep careening down the road until that part that lost a few bolts starts vibrating, and then it will work itself looser and looser until it shakes violently, causing gyrations that don't belong in other parts of the machine, causing it to swerve out of control and hit the side rails, maybe spin out, then who knows?  At what point does the driver decide it's time to pull over?  Who IS the driver?

Anyway, I was talking about Gonzo Journalism...

I read everything I could get my hands on by Hunter Thompson.  The Fear.  I understood those things. His main thing was The Death of the American Dream.  He was "a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger".  All of his writing was rife with examples of perfect explanations for why I feel the way I do. Here was a person who I had very little in common with, when you come right down to it--
I don't smoke. I don't have any interest in sports.  I very rarely drink hard liquor.  I don't like cocaine.  I don't own guns or explosives. I don't gamble.  My life had been pretty tame in comparison--and yet he seemed to think the same way I do. In addition to the factual journalistic starkness, told in a wicked, at times hilarious style, there are cautiously veiled allusions in his writing to his knowledge of extreme situations most of us can only shudder to think of.  It's all the confirmation I need to be able to form an understanding of how things work--at a primal level. It had such an effect on me for a while, that I unconsciously affected quirky physical mannerisms reminiscent of Raoul Duke.  The people of Pediddleville were alien to me also.  I had been from East Pediddleville, so I didn't know many people anyway, but they seemed like Yuppies to me.  These were people who I would feel uncomfortable explaining why I would do a radio show for no money, or why I would play gigs in clubs on weeknights for no money, or why I would go snorkeling in Salmon River.  They name their kids trendy names like Madison, or Taylor, or Hunter... I fantasize about going up to one of them and saying "Hey cool, your son's named after Hunter Thompson?" to see their reaction. Probably they wouldn't know who I'm talking about.  Once in the Pediddleville Public Library I asked the Librarian if they had any Hunter Thompson and she looked at me like I was on fire. Seven years away from having lived a third of my life in East Pediddleville, a third in New Haven, and the last third in Pediddelville, I began to really miss New Haven, and with everything going on in the world, the workplace almost a parody of "Catch 22", and reading Hunter Thompson, I achieved a certain  Gonzo affinity. Somewhere in there, the Narrative came back...

The current Presidential campaign freakshow just screams for Gonzo coverage.  Sure, there's a lot more cutting edge political journalism now because of the internet, and also the extreme bullshit stream of Fox News, so some might say that somebody like Dr. Duke isn't necessary, but they would be wrong.   We are poorer for not being able to read about the 2012 race in real time, in real Gonzo. The world always needs somebody like him keeping things weird so that they can be seen clearly by the rest of us. 

I want to thank Anita Thompson for putting out that book after his death.  It called out to me and it changed my life.

How Long, O Lord?  How Long?

The fat is in the fire.

Res Ipsa Loquitur.

Mahalo.

Tank Update...Farewell Giorgio...Comstock Covered Bridge...And Mission Statement, of Sorts...

We may have our first tank fatality.  Yesterday Giorgio, the elusive bottom feeder, was seen laying on the bottom, distressed, out of sorts.  I scooped him up with the net and he barely struggled.  When I let him go he just sunk to the bottom, moved a little bit, then landed on a rock and stayed there for quite a while, just gulping every so often.  Today he hasn't been seen.  I wondered if maybe ammonia had built up and was getting to him, or if he's even eaten anything since October, when he and the other fish were put in the tank. I just figure he's been eating algae, goldfish flakes leftover from the dace, and maybe dace poop, but I don't know.  I figured maybe it's time to change the water, so I panned off about half of it, cleaned the filter, cleaned the algae smear off the back glass of the tank, and then started pouring clean water back in.  I figured Giorgio would either be seen skulking around, or that his dead body would float up from whatever rock it had settled under.  But I didn't see him, so I don't know what the story is yet. The "bug", or the caddisfly larva, also has not been seen in a few days.  Possibly it is metamorphosing, or maybe already has done so.  I have not seen a caddisfly in the house yet, so who knows?

When I was replacing the water the dace all had a great time riding the temporary downspout of water and bubbles that would come pouring into one corner of the tank every so often.  Like I've said before, these fish seem to like to have fun playing in the tank, they know me as their provider and playmate and seemed to appreciate the stimulus of the fresh column of water in a different area of their world.  With the new water they seem more energetic, so I hope it wasn't water quality that distressed Giorgio.  If he's gone, I'll miss him.  He was a cool little fish, and is probably irreplaceable. He was most certainly caught by accident when my son netted the dace.  He was so well camouflaged, that trying to find another to replace him is impossible, and only another fluke by-catch could be hoped for.

We finally got some snow in the Pediddleville area.  Today I drove by the newly refurbished Comstock Covered Bridge and saw the new bridge with a coating of new snow. The river is running very high right now.  There is very little white water, even at the cascades above the swimming hole. The bridge spans Salmon River from Pediddleville to East Pediddleville. Growing up in East Pediddleville, my friends and I used to occasionally end up at the bridge with beers or whatever, and hang out in the pitch darkness of the bridge, listening to the river rushing underneath us.  Partying in a covered bridge is not something that most kids have the chance to do.  Originally built in 1873, it is one of three existing covered bridges in Connecticut.  To me, the updated bridge  looks too modern, too square.  Maybe after the wood siding ages to a dark brown it'll be better.  Of course it was never the same after they installed the security cameras and closed it at sunset years ago before the restoration.  So it'll still be never the same.  Or, it'll still never be the same, or something...

I thought I would go over my intentions for this blog.  This blog I have described as "A Deceptively Innocuous Blog About One Of My Favorite Places On Earth, Among Other Things".  So it is about Salmon River, but the "among other things" will be appearing sooner, hopefully, than later, depending on my various motivations and lacks thereof (I am a champion procrastinator).  It may get weird.  It may get political.  It will chronicle several threads of my life in Pediddleville.  I plan to post things I've written from many years ago and of course, new stuff. Maybe some music reviews.  Maybe a somewhat fictionalized chronicle of my struggle in the workplace.  I am treading a line between yearning to play music and yearning to write and yearning to do quite a number of other things that I simply don't have enough time for.  I work full time for a soul-crushing company that drains my physical and emotional energy, and what time is left is hectic, loud, cacophonous, and fraught with reasons to avoid the things that would make me feel better.  The American Dream...