I Get Ideas...

I say things all the time. I usually forget what I said but apparently other people are listening and sometimes they think what I said is important and sometimes even visionary. Other times what I said has caused me trouble but I usually don't blog about those instances. This week, that digital footprint of online memories prompted me about something I said by dredging up in a going over the same old ground year after year kind of way a post sent to me by one of my kids that said, "hey dad you always said we were going to have these in the future," with a link to a story about spectacles that played music while you wore them. 

What I proposed back then seems all geeky and clumsy now (plus I don't actually remember it) that we have earbuds and all the anxiety that goes with choosing the coolest, sleekest, best sounding pair and the endless choices of music to listen to on them all isolated and by yourself which only feeds back into that anxiety loop that began when you started picking the damn things out. 

Maybe that's why I did not go anywhere with my original idea because I knew all this but forgot it. 

Way back before speculation about eye glasses that played music and in a less anxious time I often went out to a friend's house which was in a rural setting and listened to music on long playing records. One of our favorite activities was to put on a record by Pink Floyd which contrary to popular belief is not an early American bluesman but an English psychedelic rock group playing plodding, moody music with much self examination and moaning about the isolation of modern life and which proves that I am still on track with where I'm going. 

Now a long playing record really does not play all that long. There have been some intrepid travelers who managed to pack 30 minutes of music to a side but mostly there is going to be about 19 minutes of music there and I would guess that a Pink Floyd record would fall somewhere between those numbers. 

I mention this because the rural house I refer to was located in a sort of a hollow on a little pond, a lagoon so to speak forming a sort of amphitheater. Me and my friends would put on a long playing record by Pink Floyd and climb on the garage out back of the house to enjoy the natural acoustics of the area. Of course when the LP finished in 19 to 30 minutes someone, we took turns, I think, would climb down, flip the record and return to the roof for side two. 

This usually went on for a period of time, generally at night and one modern thing I wish I had had back then that is on the modern thing I have in my pocket now, a phone, would be the step tracker app that could tell me how many steps I took in an evening of roof sitting, record changing activity.

The days of the lagoon are long gone and when I occasionally pass that way I can't even spot the gate of the property. I still live in a rural setting and have a good choice of outbuildings and garages I could get up on but in my second career as a physical therapist assistant I had lots of patients for rehab that were men about my age who had fell off their outbuildings so I have avoided that kind of thing for a few years now. 

I don't own earbuds but like listening to music outside which Cathy is ok with as long as it's not bebop jazz which she says makes her want to slap someone. Though I'm rural, in contrast population density is greater and though some describe isolation in their lives there are neighbors close by and I don't need them saying Galileo is up there listening to Pink Floyd again.

So to tie all this up my latest idea (and it may already be done, who is keeping up?) is that instead of letting your media use you we should use it and have a picture of the year app. I know the last couple of years might be a picture of you in a mask or with a friend who passed away but I think my picture of the year this year is going to be a swimming picture. 

Now you know I really don't swim and do all that splashing and stuff but I just kind of sit in the cool water and relax and I did not really say that I liked Pink Floyd all that much but that I sat on the roof  while they played. 

Find a couple of things. Do them every chance you get. Make it your picture of the year.