Fragments From A Pre-SuperBowl Deranged Mind

I just left our beloved blogger, Mary Moon of Bless Our Hearts, with something to look forward to.......a treatise to  follow up my somewhat well received pronouncements on Loss and Grieving.  The new item being one of Mary's (and everyone's) favorite, or least favorite subjects.....GUILT.  I have some fear that probably assures me that everyone but Mary will stay away from this site in droves from now on.  Oh well.  The truth is that, while I was poring over and pouring out my thoughts on the subject, I had a great insight of my own so it was definitely worth the doing even if no one comes to my The- Great- Expose- on- Guilt Party.

I already have 7 pages of notes  and I keep thinking of more to say......ain't done writing yet.  The main trouble is that I seem to be blessed with the perfect words and ideas, all exquisitely phrased,  when I am lying in bed, far from my laptop, waiting for Mr. Sandman to visit me and I struggle each night to try to memorize keywords so that I will be able to record them next day.  Sadly , by the next morning when I dig them out and dust them off they are not nearly as  brilliant as they seemed the night before, but I am relentlessly slogging forward with what I feel may be my greatest effort at trying to explain this baffling life and mishugina world.  Stay tuned, if you dare.

Of course, on other fronts I am embroiled in desperate but sporadic efforts to get ready for the SuperBowl this Sunday.  Actually, I kind of hate the SuperBowl .......first, because, as I have written here before, I hate the ends  of things and no matter who wins it still means the end of my football entertainment for at least another 6 months.  And secondly, I hate the lurid, idiotic hype.  It turns a valid event into a ludicrous circus and almost drains all of the real value and dignity out of the win.   And thirdly, it has seduced me into reading a gazillion tempting recipes for snacks and goodies I am supposed to prepare for the event........items I will probably never prepare and which sound devastatingly delicious but are probably disappointing and too  damned much work any way but which make me drool disgustingly so I dutifully printed them off and filed them away.  All of it forced me, however, into adding "Tostitos Chips" along with milk and eggs  to the shopping list so that I will not have to feel too deprived when the big day arrives and I find myself without a single required SuperBowl snack to stuff in my face.  (I am going on the assumption that items in my pantry such as Twizzlers, Pretzel Nuggets, Ginger Snaps and Roasted Almonds hardly count.......)

Oh, yes, I have another fascinating revelation to make re my current endlessly thrilling life.  I do not remember if I mentioned in my recent blog where I sheepishly confessed to sending away for a course of internet singing lessons,  that back in the Dark Ages when I was young, my college buddy Lu, my Mother and I used to sit around the dining room table with our songbooks open, playing our Ukuleles and singing the great Old Songs.   (You do not really expect me to go back and read my blogs to find out if I did indeed tell you this, do you?.)    Anyway, I am pretty sure I mentioned it because I swear I recall saying that I should really try to  find my old Uke from 68 years ago, even though I doubted if the strings would still be any good.  Well, the other day I had a brief moment of extreme mental clarity and I was sure that 10 or 15 years ago I had  seen it in the corner of the living room behind what my grandma used to call the  the Torchiere Floor Lamp.  After creeping over all of the boxes stashed in there, left  over from the Famous Failed Garage Sale of 2012 (the left overs from which are slated to go to the Goodwill any day now), what do you think I found?  Yep, the good old Arthur Godfrey Ukulele big as life and hardly even dusty.  I must remember to thank my wonderful cleaning lady, Ana, for keeping it thus for lo these many years.  Thrilled beyond words, I dug it out andto brought it tenderly into the light and decided I would try to tune it and if the strings popped I would just replace them,  Believe it or not, the strings did NOT pop........they tuned right up.  Only trouble was, the pegs which you turn to tighten the strings had gotten too loose and did not hold the strings in tune.   I am not going to give you the long version of this story where I got on the computer and looked up guitar and ukulele repair shops and found several in my neighborhood.  Nor will I drivel on about how the first one told me how long I would have to wait for a repair nor how bloody much it would cost (the Uke cost $1.00 in Thrifty Drug Store in 1945), nor the next guy who brushed me off saying he couldn't be bothered to try to fix it, but happened to ask me a question about whether the pegs had little screws in the ends of them.  After I finished cursing all guitar repair folk I got out the huge flashlight and the heavy duty magnifying glass and discovered that it indeed did have little screws and that by tightening them I could tighten the pegs and tune the uke without having the whole thing slip back and go out of tune.  Wow.  And the fact that, even though I had forgotten every chord position, I still remembered the little "My dog has fleas" song that enables you to tune the damned thing.  Double Wow.  But the real cherry, the icing, the triple Wow  is yet to come.  I remembered that 15 or 20 years ago I had seen in my biggest bookcase several of the song  books with the uke chords for each song displayed in them and had the vague recollection that I decided I had  better put them in a "safe place".  Of course, everyone knows that once you do that the thing is forever lost  because I, at least, can never remember where those safe places are.  However, I dug around a bit and found a big plastic covered bundle of music that used to live in the old piano bench and, sure enough,buried within were two of the books we used to play from.  Now all I have to do is cut my fingernails on my left hand, build up some callouses playing chords and I can strum away and accompany myself while I sing "Blue Tail Fly" and "Those Little White Lies".

Please, do NOT expect that audio goodie on my blog quite yet.  My so-called voice has not yet recovered from the strain of the singing lessons and I have a lot of work to do before the callouses build up.  One should never give up hope though......what if I had done that during this amazing odyssey?  You would only have gotten half a  blog......and while that is better, I guess, than no blog at all, it is nothing like a whole blog, now, is it?  But, wait.......I guess that would depend on the quality of the blog.  With a lousy blog, half a blog would probably be preferable to a whole blog.  Hmmmm.....I shall make a note to consider writing a blog about that.

Or NOT.