Rant #2,961: One Way Or Another

Another over sleep!
 
I could not get up from bed today.
 
Too much on my mind.
 
This has been the summer that I want to end so badly, the summer of my discontent, if you will, and every day we get nearer to the end of this season, and it cannot come soon enough for me.
 
I have told you about things here and there, but I haven’t told you all of it.
 
This is not a diary, this is only a blog, and some of the stuff I would rather keep to myself at this point in time.
 
My family and I have had a bushel-full of problems both big and small, this summer, and just when you think things can’t get worse, they do.
 
When it rains, it pours, as they say.
 
But like the Little Dutch Boy, I can’t just stick my finger in the dyke and make the water go away.
 
It simply doesn’t work that way, at least for my family and I.
 
We took another hit this week, a major hit, which I am not going to get into now, but we are simply going to have to wait it out, and I am sure that we will be fine.
 
But it is not going to be easy, no way, no how.
 
We will see during the next week or so how everything transpires.
 
And that is all I am going to say about it.
 
I would rather focus on some positives rather than negatives, although during this period, that is very difficult for me to do.
 
One positive is that none of these ills have to do with my family’s health.
 
I went through that with that lesion on my head, and that appears to be history.
 
My wife, my son and my mother are fine, so other than that thing on my head, our ills have not had to do with health, thank goodness.
 
It is just one thing after another that has hit us this summer, both big and small, even when we were on vacation, a week that was our oasis away from all the pain.
 
But like I said, even that week had its low points, as that was the week, in the middle of our sightseeing, that I found out about that thing on my head, right in the middle of a presentation we attended.
 
That kind of short-circuited our trip, but I have to say that I took the high road, and tried to not let it bother me, and we ended up having a great week away from our world.
 
But when we returned, we found that we were right back where we started from, only worse.
 
So again, I would rather focus on some good things, and try to leave that all behind, but it is very difficult to do when things are awry and as messy as they are right now.
 
But here is something nice that I would like to talk about. I have talked about it before, and yes, it is a bit of self promotion, but it is something P-O-S-I-T-I-V-E.
 
I run a Facebook site called “Where the Action is—Yesterday and Today … and Tomorrow.”
 
It all has to do with the late, lamented TV show “Where the Action Is,” which ran weekdays on ABC from 1965 to 1967.
 
It was an offshoot of Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand,” and featured performances form the top rock, pop and soul acts of the day, everyone from James Brown to the Young Rascals to the Association to Herman’s Hermits.
 
It also created its own stars, first and foremost, Paul Revere and the Raiders.
 
The show was extremely popular among Baby Boomers when it was on the air, but for one reason or another, except for bootlegs, it has kind of fallen off the map, and its episodes have not been available legally since it went off the air 55 years ago.
 
Lots of stuff has turned up on YouTube, and that is the touchstone of the Facebook site, where we look back on the show on a daily basis, with lists of performers and what songs they sang on the show, accompanied by a corresponding YouTube clip.
 
No politics are discussed here, and it is just a fun site, period.
 
It has grown by leaps and bounds during its couple of years of existence, and we do have some actual performers who are members of the site, including Lou Christie, Dean Torrence from Jan and Dean, and Keith of “98.6" fame.
 
We are now up to 3,000 members, and new members join each and every day.
 
If this is in your wheel house, please join the group. I guarantee you will not be disappointed. I put a lot of effort into the site, and I think you might like it.
 
The site can be accessed at https://www.facebook.com/groups/598790963991601/?multi_permalinks=1307265283144162&notif_id=1661509892667034&notif_t=feedback_reaction_generic&ref=notif
 
And that is all l have to say today.
 
Have a great weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday.

Rant #2,960: Hair

Gotta get up.
 
Gotta get out of bed.
 
It’s Thursday, August 25, and it is time to rise and shine.
 
Me, I didn’t sleep too well last night.
 
My sleep was intermittent at best, sleeping three hours here, a half hour there, an hour here, 45 minutes there.
 
Not too good.
 
And Thursdays are not my favorite day of the week to begin with, because today is one of the days I shave my face.
 
I truly wish the hair on my head would grow as quickly as the hair on my face, but that is not the reality of the way things are.
 
When I had that thing on my head—that pre-cancerous lesion that I had removed and had all kinds of problems with it until it finally healed late last week—the thing that made it so much worse is that I had no hair on my head to cover it or protect it, so it was out in the open all the time.
 
That might sound like a good thing, but it wasn’t, because several times, in the deep of sleep, I rubbed it or scratched it or at least touched it, and it didn’t help in its healing.
 
If I would have had some hair there to protect it—
 
But that was not meant to be.
 
And as far as my face, I can probably grow a full beard in about a week, but I choose not to.
 
I don’t think I look too good in a beard, and the getting there is the hardest part, as it itches like crazy as it gets bushier.
 
A few of my nephews have beards—or at least some really good stubble—and I have one nephew who is reaching rabbi stages with his beard, topped off with a bald head that he keeps hairless with daily upkeep.
 
I have asked him, and he says that he doesn’t get hot with the long beard, even in the summer we are having now, but it’s just not for me.
 
I know it is stylish now to have long beards with no hair on your head, but again, the hairless head part has been taken out of my hands by forces beyond me, so this isn’t going to happen.
 
Some guys look good with beards.
 
Ringo Starr looks better with a beard than without one, and at this stage of the game, he looks way better than his clean-shaven former band mate Paul McCartney does.
 
Who would of thought that would happen 60 years ago?
 
And there are lots of other guys who look great in beards, but I am not one of them.
 
I look at pictures of myself from different periods of my life, and I wonder where all my head hair went.
 
I had plenty, but it is all gone, never to return.
 
I am too old to take those hair restoration products like Rogaine, so I just have to live with my baldness.
 
I wish they had reverse-Rogaine for my face,, because shaving is not one of my favorite life pursuits, to be honest with you.
 
I do hate to shave, always have, always will.
 
I don’t know how you ladies do it, with your armpits and your legs and your …
 
But you do it, but do you really like doing it, or is it just a necessary chore, part of being a woman?
 
I can’t answer that question for you, but I guess it is probably all of the above.
 
It is funny, though.
 
When you are a young boy, you look at your father shaving and think, “One day I am going to do that myself,” and when you reach that point of your life, you have finally become a man.
 
You anticipate it, you want it to happen so bad, and then, when it happens—for me, in my junior year in high school—you hate the moment, looking forward to thousands of shaves that you are going to have to execute in your life.
 
I have hated it from the get go, and I hated it even more when I shaved three times a week when I had a regular job.
 
The only good thing about my present work situation is that I can get away shaving just twice a week … 

Starting every week on Sunday with a morning shave on that day.
 
With my own mathematical equation, I figure that at age 65, I have shaved more than 7,500 times in my life. Don’t ask me how I came to that number, but it has to do with how many times I have shaved during my weeks of life at age 17 and beyond, and I think it is a pretty fair approximate.
 
Multiply that number by the 10 minutes that it takes me to shave, and I have wasted 75,000 minutes or so in getting the hair off my face.
 
So all told, I have wasted more than 1,200 hours of time while shaving, time I cannot get back.
 
That is more than 50 hours, so that is equal to more than two days of my life where I have been in the bathroom shaving.
 
What a waste of time!
 
But at least I have a clean face.
 
No beards for me, no way, no how.
 
But there has to be a better way …
 
I tell that to my razor every time I shave, but I don’t get any answers …
 
And I haven’t since 1974 or so, so I don’t expect to get any answers in 2022 or beyond.
 
I just wish it was all peach fuzz to me.

Rant #2,959: You Better You Bet

Boy, did I oversleep!
 
My wife and I both woke up late today, and I am writing this Rant out at about the same time that I finished yesterday’s Rant.
 
I think I know why.
 
As you know, we celebrated our son’s 27th birthday yesterday, and after dinner, we further celebrated with cake, candles and gifts.
 
I do think that eating the cake had something to do with our sleepiness because we don’t normally eat cake that late in the day, and certainly not during the week.
 
And on top of it all, the cake was an ice cream cake, and I think that may have weighed us down.
 
I know that that is exactly what happened tot me at least, because I fell asleep pretty early last night, earlier than I normally do.
 
So I am going to blame the ice cream for the extra sleep that I experienced and the lateness of this Rant.
 
Taking that into account, the next question you readers should have is this:
 
“What type of ice cream cake did you have?”
 
It was a Carvel cake with chocolate frosting and vanilla ice cream on its inside, plus those signature chocolate crumbs right next to the vanilla ice cream on the inside.
 
You simply cannot go wrong with a Carvel cake, or Carvel in general.
 
I have eaten all different types of ice cream, and Carvel always rises to the top of the list.
 
In my mind, there is no better ice cream than Carvel.
 
I know that you cannot get Carvel in certain parts of the country—most of the southern part of our country for one—and that Dairy Queen is the ice cream of choice in many of those areas.
 
But for taste, you cannot beat Carvel, and while Dairy Queen is good—we actually have a Dairy Queen about a mile away from us—it simply is not Carvel.
 
I think part of the lure of Carvel is that it is something that Baby Boomers, in particular, grew up with if you lived in the New York Metropolitan Area, and it just brings back so many memories of our lives with every spoonful or lick or bite.
 
Sure, I have plenty of fond memories of Good Humor, too, but that was almost “fast food” ice cream—deoivered by truck every summer—when compared to Carvel, which you had to go out and get.
 
Mister Softie was also good, Bungalow Bar was not, and Hood was somewhere right in the middle.
 
But if you wanted “the real thing,” as far as I am concerned, you went out to get Carvel.
 
And remember those funny commercials starring the creator of Carvel, Tom Carvel, where he touted “Cookie Puss” and “Thinny Thins” and everything else his stores had to offer?
 
They got the point across in their own funny way.
 
I particularly love their Flying Saucers, which pretty much melt in your mouth while they get all over your hands …
 
And who can forget the Brown Bonnets, with the chocolate almost impaled onto the top of the cone?
 
There is just something special about Carvel ice cream, but with all the gimmicks, it has to start and end with the taste, and there is no better soft-serve ice cream than Carvel, in my opinion, in that regard.
 
It just goes down so smoothly, and as it did last night, it weighs you down and can put you to sleep, much like Thanksgiving turkey does.
 
All the other ice creams are good, but they simply cannot compete with Carvel, at least in my book.
 
And the great thing is that we have leftovers from our son’s birthday cake, and we might be enjoying this cake for weeks to come.
 
I envision many sleep-full nights whenever I have a piece of that cake.
 
And I also envision swooning at every mouthful, because it is that good.
 
I guess it is a good way to run out the remainder of the summer.
 
Do you remember the slogan that Miller High Life used in its beer advertising …
 
“The Champagne of Bottled Beers?”
 
Well, to twist it a little bit, Carvel is “The Champagne of Soft-Serve Ice Cream.”
 
Long Live Carvel!

Rant #2,958: All You Need Is Love

I still find it hard to believe to this day, but 27 years ago, I became a father for the second time when my son was born.
 
I already had a daughter, but this was not a co-called “nuclear family” that I had.
 
Remember that concept?
 
A man and a woman marry, they have a boy and a girl, and they have what was referred to as a nuclear family—one child of each sex.
 
And they would have no more, which would lead to what was called “zero population growth.”
 
You don’t hear those terms anymore, but they didn’t really fit my situation anyway, because I had one child with my first spouse and my second child with my second, and forever, spouse.
 
But however it worked out, 27 years today, my wife and I had our son, and life changed for the better since he came into our lives.
 
Sure, things were different with another person in the house, but honestly, we love being parents and we love our son to pieces.
 
Yes, I love my daughter equally, but today is her brother’s day, so let’s focus on him.
 
He was so small when he came into our lives that I could hold him in one hand, but he has grown into a big young man, someone that my wife and I are so proud of for his accomplishments.
 
Those accomplishments are perhaps not as lofty as others have achieved, but the small leaps that he has made over the years are very gratifying to us, and I think to him too.
 
This was someone who was literally damned by a supposed medical professional—recommended by the school system, no less--who should have known better, who should have seen the raw potential in him rather than deem that he fit for only one thing, the scrap pile.
 
I have heard that same story from other parents about their children, so I know that our son’s story is somewhat more commonplace than many of us would like to believe, but I can say that while our son has faced many challenges in his life, and he still has a way to go in some aspects of his life, he has made that supposed medical professional look like the idiot that she was in trying to define his life pursuits and his eventual successes.
 
Our son has great drive and determination, and for someone who was deemed to be a poor fit for this life by this numbskull with a medical degree on the wall of her office, he has far exceeded anything she said by looking at him for maybe five minutes of her so valuable time.
 
He holds a job … he bowls … he plays basketball … and as you know, he played Little League baseball for seven years when he was just a few years separated by that fool’s comments.
 
He has even began to socialize a little bit more, although he is probably never going to be much of a social person, as he still is very shy.
 
But when we were told what we were told by this supposed medical professional, it is almost like our son heard what she said too, and decided in his own young mind that he was going to make this woman into the ignoramus that she was … as much as my wife and I shook our heads upon her prognosis and decided that that wasn’t what our son was or would be when he got older.
 
Sometimes, society doesn’t understand—or want to understand—certain circumstances, and I know that I have stood up for both my son and daughter when I felt that they were not treated the same way as others.
 
With my daughter, even though children of divorce were not a rare species, even 20-some years ago, school districts and other organizations did not know how to handle two parents being on opposite poles, so I had to stand up for my daughter—and myself—in dealings with these groups.
 
It has been the same way with my son, who I have stood up for since day one, with his school district and other organizations who did not understand—or even attempt to understand—his psyche.
 
I have even done this very recently, and I will do it again if need be, and I hope that in 2022 and beyond, I won’t have to do this anymore, but that might be a lofty goal, something I am not happy to report to you.
 
But whatever the case, and against all odds, our son has prospered, perhaps at a slower rate than others of his age group, but he has really done well in the face of those odds that were so stacked against him …
 
And the future is so bright and the ceiling is infinite for further successes.
 
He truly is no different from any 27 year old.
 
He loves sports, he gives the eye to a passing female every now and again, he doesn’t make his bed or handle his laundry, he loves to watch TV, and he loves his iPhone and listening to his music.
 
He is responsible, he can be very serious, but he can laugh too.
 
We are just so proud of him, and wish him continued successes today on his big day.
 
There is no telling what heights he can achieve, and my wife and I can’t wait to see how high he can go in his life pursuits.
 
God could not have given my wife and I a better son, and we look forward to his future as he continues to defy those early odds that were stacked against him.
 
We love you Josh!
 
Happy birthday to you and many, many more!