Rant #2,696: Music, Music, Music

Now that I got that off my chest in yesterday's Rant what I needed too say …
 
Since I lost my job and the company I worked for went out of business on October 10, 2019, I have kept myself busy by doling lots of stuff in my home, which of course escalated when we were hit with this scourge seemingly out of the blue.
 
Thank God I was able to get a side job to help me cope with everything, but in between that and everything else that I do, I was almost forced to dive back into my record collection, because there were points that, well, there really was nothing else to do.
 
This past Saturday was the second Record Store Day of the year, where special releases—mainly on vinyl—find their way to local record stores to hype their existence and importance to the community versus big-box retailers.
 
As I always do on Record Store Day, I went to my local record store early, was third on line, and waited patiently for the store’s doors to open so I could take in all of these releases and see which ones I wanted to buy.
 
This particular Record Store Day was a significant one for me for a variety of reasons.
 
First off, the day took some of the stress off of me related to the next day, on Sunday, when my family had scheduled the unveiling of my father’s grave.
 
You can imagine how stressful that occasion can be, and it was, but Record Store Day helped me cope with it a little better than it could have been.
 
The second reason this Record Store Day was important to me was that this time around, there were several releases that I really, really wanted, mainly three vinyl releases by the Monkees.

 
These releases were not mandatory for me, as they were simply re-releases of albums that had already been released on CD years before, and one of them had actually been released on both CD and vinyl decades ago.
 
But I felt that I just had to have them to keep my Monkees canon going—and after a long wait outside the store, I got in and yes, I found them, plus one other release that I wanted from a band that I really got into way after the fact, the band called Love that really never made it big but have continued to be a cult item to this day.

 
So I had four nice records to purchase, and I went up to the cash register to pay for them. There was a guy who I had been waiting on line with who was ahead of me, and he had a stack of records that he wanted.
 
He even said, “I wonder how much all of this is going to cost?” and then everything was tallied—
 
He would have to cough up more than $600 for those records, which he gladly did.
 
My four records didn’t add up to nearly as much as his records did, but I felt good that I got what I wanted, and that the store I went to donates a percentage of its profits on this day to an animal rescue organization.

 
So my four-record purchase not only made me feel good, but it helped our four-legged friends too.
 
Add those three Monkees records to one that I received in the mail yesterday that I and countless others have been waiting patiently for for several months, and right now, as they say, I am all Monkee’d out …
 
Until the next release of theirs comes my way, and then it starts up all over again.
 
The next Record Store Day is on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving,later this year in November, and I can tell you that by hook or by crook, I will be there at my record store early in the morning, waiting to see what I can buy from their stock of special releases for the day.
 
It is just such a fun thing to do, and it takes my mind off of some other things that are affecting me personally and affecting us all.
 
The great thing about records is that there are no lies when you put down the tone arm and listen to these records, no double-talk, no nothing like that.
 
You can just sit back and listen, and all the cares of the world seem to go away once the first note comes out of your speakers.
 
And that is all music to my ears.

(P.S.: Just as a footnote to yesterday’s Rant, the government is thinking about mandating a “booster shot” for those who received the Johnson & Johnson shot, because studies show that those taking that shot have so little protection from the variant—and there is a new variant out there, by the way—that they simply aren’t protected enough against not only that variant, but the virus as a whole.

 
I swear, I cannot be that smart about this thing, smarter than those so-called “experts” who claimed that the one-shot dose was enough to protect you as well as the two-shot doses do.
 
I guess I missed my calling. I should have been a doctor … not just any doctor, but a doctor that would tell the truth about this thing we are going through, not one who pussy-foots around everything because it is just the way to go about it, all the while with people not using their brains to make the right choices.
 
And back to the New York Yankees, who have been ravaged by the virus, even though 85 percent of the team has taken the so-called “vaccine”—while one player who had it earlier than others is coming back, we have now been told that several others, including their best player, Aaron Judge, is not coming back any time soon, as I read in the newspaper this morning.
 
And these were players who, we were told, had no symptoms.
 
Yup, and I have a nice bridge to sell you if you bought into what we were told originally.
 
And yes, these players were “vaccinated” with … the Johnson & Johnson shot.
 
Like Gomer Pyle used to say, “Surprise, surprise, surprise!”)