Getting the Balance Right

Today’s my birthday. I generally do not call particular attention to this, but a lot of what follows here would make no sense if I somehow avoided that little tidbit.

This year, as I have done the last couple of years, I have the entire week of my birthday off. I get my birthday off, since it is also Veterans Day, an American holiday that Canadians seem to think that Americans find important. (This would be a logical place for a tangent about how Americans really think, but a massive tangent two paragraphs in seems a little much even for me.) Since I get my birthday off, and a couple years ago it proved to be a useful week to have off, it’s now become routine to just take this week off.

Now, I haven’t published one of these things in a while. Oh, sure, I’ve written a couple. And they petered out, and I never got to a place where I felt like I could hit send. One of them I do plan on finishing soon. I’m pretty sure I’ll have the opportunity, too, since we’re a couple of weeks away from what’s increasingly looking like another full lockdown.

Today being my birthday and all, I figured, I should share a gift with you all. And I have so little excuse, seeing as how I have the whole week off. So here goes.

Currently I have two longer pieces in the works, one for META-SPIEL here, and one which I hope to get externally published, having to do with Election Day and politics and the Midwest and all that fun stuff.

Instead of spending a lot of time this week writing, though, I’ve made a point of being outside. Monday and Tuesday were almost certainly the last two days of the year with temperatures above 70. Before this little burst of delightfulness, we’d spent a couple of weeks murking about in sub-optimal October weather. It was observed, and not just by myself, that signs of SAD were presenting themselves. So I actually went out in the sun, and then even today with the temperature having fallen off a cliff, I still went out.

An aside. It’s 3:18 in the afternoon. My wife just entered the house. She opened the door, walked through, took a step in, and immediately turned to me and made a face, a particular face, one I completely expected, because music is playing, and the music playing sounds nothing like the Mamas and the Papas. Not that she wants me to be listening to the Mamas and the Papas, mind you. She will have no idea why I am mentioning the Mamas and the Papas. And that is fine. She is better off having no idea. More on this music below.

Anyway, I went out, specifically to the Arie Crown Forest. There’s a 3 mile well kept path through the forest, and that seemed about right for today. I bundled up, brought my earbuds, and walked around, seeing perhaps four other people the whole time, while listening to the Phil Ochs album Greatest Hits.

Greatest Hits is a terrific act of self-destruction. This was not a compilation, but rather an album of all new material, much of it personal instead of the “topical” songs he was best known for. The album title was essentially a joke, though as is the case with so many jokes these days, it’s hard to tell how serious of a joke it really was. One way or another, the album was a total flop, and not just for the aforementioned reasons.

Phil was one of those people who kept searching for The Answer. Along the way he came up with the idea of melding Elvis and Che, and so far as I’ve ever been able to tell he was serious enough about this. But by 1969, Che was dead, and Elvis was Las Vegas Elvis, and many of Phil’s arrangements were still weird, tinny affairs that evoked neither. Had he lived longer, might he have regarded The Clash as the culmination he was looking for? Or would he have been even more out of place?

Greatest Hits actually has a lot of endearing qualities. It’s a completely overlooked album - was then, still is - though it contains two of his greatest compositions in “No More Songs” and “Jim Dean of Indiana”. There’s an obscure cover of the latter, done by Sammy Walker for a tribute album in the early aughts. Look for it.

Walking through a forest is sort of a new thing for me. You might say that I’m forcing myself to do it. The notion of “soaking up nature” is not something which comes automatically to me. It is intellectually intimidating. I’m not that good at things like identifying trees, plants, birds, what have you. Maybe I overstate my case here. But I think I am changing my outlook somewhat.

What’s especially fascinating to me are the hallmarks of man in preserved natural spaces. I don’t mean things like litter. I mean posts, trail markers, signage. The natural order is of course an orderly thing. But human order is something different. And so we have to bring a little bit of human order to the natural order so we don’t go mad. Or, we just obliterate the natural order altogether. Which, if you think about it, is the ultimate act of going mad. Hmm.

I got home from my excursion with a couple of goals in mind. Last week the new Hum album, Inlet, arrived in the mail. It’s their first album since 1998. I was in college when Downward Is Heavenward came out. I… am not in college now.

I had been waiting for a time to listen to Inlet which met all of the following criteria:

• Night

• No family around

• Stereo working properly

“No family around” is not because I’m being mean. Hum albums are designed to be listened to with the volume turned up. I can retreat to my office and listen to Phil Ochs whenever, but you don’t crank Phil to 11. And turning something up really loud, even on the other end of the house, will bleed over and lead to, you know, wives making faces.

“Night” and “No family around” are not compatible goals though. So, as long as I could accomplish the third goal, this seemed like an ideal time. Not night, but at least it was in the afternoon. Hum is also not really 9am fare.

The problem with the stereo had been that the left speaker was jarbled, especially the bass. I didn’t know if it was the speaker, the speaker cable, or the receiver. I went in and moved the cables from speaker bank A to speaker bank B and tried it out. Still seemed like the left speaker was quiet compared to the right but maybe that had to do with the room arrangement… I didn’t know.

Two songs into Inlet, not hearing the bad distortion, I went up to each speaker individually, and the left one was much quieter than the right, but didn’t seem to be otherwise problematic. And I thought, uh, wait, is the balance screwed up? And, yes, the balance was screwed up. It was tilted almost all the way to the right. I adjusted the knob and suddenly an already impressive sounding album sounded much better. I’d had the balance knob screwed up for months, apparently, and had never figured it out.

Good golly, what potential we have here for a metaphor! I know what you must be thinking…

Wow, he’s going to bring this around to finding balance in life, finding balance with nature. Great heavens!

Great heavens indeed.

Speaking of great heavens, we can’t let the day end without mentioning our patron saint, Kurt Vonnegut, who would have been 98 today. If Kurt were here, well, he’d probably be miserable, because he’d be 98. But set that aside. He’d have so very much to say about all of the madness of 2020.

Kurt, I suspect, vacillated wildly between the notion of finding balance and the notion that balance is a conspiracy. This after all is the man whse most famous book featured a character who had become “unstuck in time”.

I’ve written about Kurt here and there on our shared birthdays over the last many years. I don’t have a lot profound to say here, except that I think Kurt and Phil had some interesting things in common. I think unpacking those commonalities would be worth pursuing.

It’ll have to be a different day, though. It’s nearing 7:00 here and there is a cake waiting. Hi ho.