Rant #2,375: Too Much Talk

As we go into another week of dealing with the coronavirus, we all attempt to cope with what is going on as best we can.

Some people are adapting to the "new normal" pretty well; others simply, plainly, don't know what to do with themselves.

Me, I got a head start on all of this due to my work situation, so I adapted a long time ago--nearly six months--to this craziness.

When I have put this fact up on Facebook, some have applauded me, some have ignored me, and some have probably rolled their eyes, but the fact of the matter is that I have completely adapted. It is just who I am, I guess. I always had a lot of hobbies throughout my life, and I have used my hobbies to make me feel good--and keep my occupied--for literally my full nearly 63 years of life.

My mother even brought this up the other day, saying that I "always had a lot of hobbies," and looking back, she was right.

When I was a little kid, my first hobby was collecting comic books, which I began at about age three of so--I taught myself to read--and which continued through my college years. During these 20 years or so, I amassed a sizable collection, and I became an avid reader. During down times in my teenage years, those comic books were my salvation, keeping me focused and occupied.

However, as an adult, I kind of moved on from them, as other interests took hold. I sold a good portion of my collection several years ago, and when I sold them, a piece of my childhood went out the door. But it was time.

My second big hobby was collection baseball cards, and I started to do that at age seven, and that continued into my teen years. Like most kids of the 1960s who collected these things, I bought them because I enjoyed them, and I didn't care that their value would skyrocket over time. I flipped them, I put them in rows by team, I even memorized statistics on the back of the cards. Again, during some very rough times as a teen, my baseball cards were another salvation for me.

But in the middle of my teen years, I guess I got bored with them, and I sold them, right before the baseball card boom happened. I don't regret it, and I still have some non-baseball cards--Monkees cards, among others--still in my possession.

Then we had the hobby that I still have, that I still add on to when I can, a hobby that has branched out into so many other areas.

That is record collecting, but even though it is the one hobby of mine that has continued into the current time, it actually began before the time I started collecting comic books, when I was probably about two years old. My mother, always keen on the hottest trends of the time, was always into music herself. She loved Broadway, and the musicals she saw on stage as a young girl and into her adulthood, and she got myself and my sister into that at an early age, but with things so un-Broadway but still so engaging.

The Chipmunks were among the biggest crazes of the late 1950s, with Ross Bagdasarian cleverly taking recorded voices and speeding them up, matching them with music and having hit after hit with the "band" he dubbed "The Chipmunks," Alvin, Simon and Theodore, whose manager was his own alter ego, David Seville. Couple all of this with a widely popular TV cartoon series, and you got gold.

As for me, my mother bought me--my sister would come around at the end of 1959--some of the Chipmunks singles, and I guess we must have listened to them in the house, although I don't have any recollection of that.

It wasn't until the coming of the Beatles that I have any memory of record collecting, and once again, my mother--very into the trends--bought my sister and I some of the early Beatles records along with her own purchases of Broadway and movie tunes. That got my sister and I on board with buying music, and when we were old enough to do it ourselves--I was seven years old or so--it became part of our family to buy records, mainly 45s but a lot of LPs too.

It was a family thing, and I really didn't talk about it much outside our family. My mother had the radio on in the morning, we listened to WABC and WMCA religiously, and with the family's HiFi in the foyer, we seemingly always had music on.

And then the Monkees happened, and there was no turning back. My sister and I loved the show, my mother bought us the records, and while the Beatles were the top of the line, the Monkees were OUR VERY OWN BAND, made for our age group--ages seven to nine years old, as we were--and that got my sister and I to buy for ourselves not only their music, but others too.

When the Monkees went off the air, my interest waned, although my mother and sister continued to buy records, not just Broadway and movies soundtracks but popular stuff like the Partridge Family. My sister, during her younger years, had an uncanny ability of hearing a song one time and knowing all the lyrics, which she would write down as if water was turned on and pouring freely from a spout. It was incredible, but she was able to do this.

Me, I was more interested in baseball and basketball and Strat-O-Matic baseball, other passions of mine.

So, into my teenage years I didn't purchase too many records; on occasion I would get a comedy album, like Robert Klein's "Mind Over Matter"--which had an underlying sports theme--but otherwise, while I heard the music around me, I really wasn't too much into it.

Then I went to college, and I had an epiphany. Tired of comic books and getting into a crowd there who were heavy music listeners--and some who were musicians themselves--I had a decision to make, and my decision was to spend my free money on records ... and I have never looked back.

I got into the 1960s in the mid to late 1970s, bought up everything I could find on the golden decade when you basically could not give these records away--and I bought new recordings at the local Sam Goody and other new and used record shops as fast as they could put them out.

I got into new wave and punk, hated disco, got into bands like Cheap Trick and Blondie before most people knew who they were, listened to WNEW-FM religiously, and before long, I had a collection that was pretty incredible, much of it coming from flea markets and garage sales.

The collection has continued to grow to this day, but my specialty remains the 1960s, or really, any music from about 1964 to 1971, which is my focus, and anything else that I like ... and yes, I still have plenty of Chipmunks recordings.

This hobby has had tentacles, and it led to me creating hundreds of "mix tapes" that I used to listen to in my car during the cassette era, many of which I made not just for myself, but for friends. This later morphed into my current passion, digitizing my vinyl records, also to listen to in the car, and now I am getting into digitizing my sizable cassette collection, rediscovering tapes that I bought here and there from the mid-1970s into the early 1990s, stuff by Graham Parker and Living Colour and Deborah Harry that had been collecting dust for years.

And finally, I am seriously thinking about fixing up my daughter's old room, and making the mess I have of my records being all over the place into a room that my family and I can be truly proud of.

Anyway, what this all amounts to is that since the age of about three, I have always been able to find something to do when I needed something to do. If I didn't have these hobbies during my difficult teen years I do believe that I might not be here now, as when friends were getting into things they should not have been doing, I was getting into things that I really enjoyed doing, most of the time by my lonesome.

During these trying times, I have many, many other things to bide my time as an adult and as a parent and son, but when there is virtually "nothing to do," I gravitate to my records,

I would hope that all of us would have something to fill our time if we have that time on our hands now that many of us are at home. My advice is that if you are home, get into something you haven't had the time to do for eons. Look, when I first started my unemployment odyssey, I knew that if I didn't fill my extra time with something tangible, that I would go mad, so after my hours and hours spent looking for work, when I have totally exhausted that drive and determination I have, I move onto something else.

All of us should do the same thing--do something where you aren't bored out of your mind.

No, I am not better than anyone, and yes, today's blog entry was, in fact, all about me.

But I have heard too much talk of people not knowing what to do with themselves while at home during the pandemic. I am sick to tears with all the crabbing that some people are doing.

I promise you, we will get through this, in due time. But in the meantime, if you are not working, if you have lost your job, if you are being forced to stay home for an undetermined period, if the work hours that you do have have been greatly reduced, make diamonds out of coal, and use the time to your advantage--which is not sitting in front of the TV all day and getting more spaced out by the constant coronavirus reports.

Too much talk ... you better believe it. Back up that talk with some action, and I promise you, you will feel better about it, better about the whole thing.