I like it here.

(MQMurphy photo)

Heaven and Hell

There’s a town in the news that gets
Bombed every day.
Heaven is when you don’t get hit.

There’s a town up the road
Where people sometimes shop.
Hell is a long checkout line at WalMart.

I like it when I don’t get blown up,
And I hate a long checkout line
Especially when I just came in to get these batteries and boxer shorts.

Decline

(MQMurphy Image)

10/20/09
Ahhh – I just can’t throw myself at the barricades with
the same vigor anymore.
If I ever did.
These days it seems like a huge accomplishment when I manage to get the trashcans out to the street on Tuesday evening for
the Wednesday pickup.
Makes me feel like a solid citizen.
See what I mean?

My simple plan for getting rich.

Have you noticed that whenever there's a piece on the radio or on television about anything of a financial nature they play the Pink Floyd tune "Money" as an intro?
Of course you have. That damned jangling cash register! Totally annoying!
I've resisted using that tune in any of the radio shows I've done with a 'money' theme.
By the way, the photo above is a line of trucks delivering
royalty checks to Roger Waters.

So - to get to the point about my simple plan®:
I intend to write a very catchy tune with the title "Naked + Murder".
Hell - it'll write itself. You already know why I'm doing this. You're probably kicking yourself in the butt right now because you didn't do it first.
They'll be playing my tune every time there's a TV or radio piece about one of those wonderful bloody naked murders.
Which is . . . all the time.

I don't mean to sound like - oh, a fogey? - but is there a prime-time cop/lawyer/cooking show that doesn't at some point have an image of a bloody naked corpse?
Well, now I've found the silver lining in that cloud. The neighbors will probably complain about the trucks, but I'll just throw a helluva block party a couple of times a year.

"MURDER! It's a gas, let's see a pic-ture
of a naaaaked ass . . . "

Slim

I have applied for the job of Trim Carpenter, a job for which my qualifications are obvious. I understand, of course, that should I gain too much weight I will be demoted to Fat Carpenter until such time that I shall demonstrate once again my fitness for the prior position.
Sincerely,
Michael Q. Murphy

Sweet Jesus in a jukebox!

(Image shamelessly lifted from Google Images)

February 27, 2009
Working on tomorrow’s radio show and I’m thinking that one of the best things that ITunes has got going for it (you’ve got to check this for me!) is people who’ve had a couple of glasses of wine with dinner and are now overcome with nostalgia for a tune they heard somewhere once – or a hundred times. And they tap ITunes for their nostalgia fix. Perfect. $$. (sound effect = "Ka-ching")

I think "Don't Stop Believin'" hits it in that category for me. I'm always reminded of an afternoon when I sat at the bar in Kahn's Ugly Mug and heard that tune on the jukebox. It became manifestly clear to me that it was a completely perfect rock and roll tune. Please - don't take my word for it - listen to that tune for yourself.
Years later, I downloaded it from ITunes and now listen to it whenever the mood strikes me.
Ka-ching.

Banging some dents out of that Fender.

Article in the Times this morning about U2. I feel as though they are the timbers that keep the ceiling of this coal mine we call Rock and Roll from collapsing.
I'm on the far side of 50, closing in on 60 - and my inner-13-year-old-guitar-geeky-self gets indescribable joy from making noises with a Stratocaster that sound like what The Edge gets in the song "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For".
It is a ringing, echo-ey, sometimes brittle sound that washes over the whole song. A distillation of all the best guitar sounds that guitarists have managed to squeeze out of that guitar since the first Strats rolled off the assembly line in Fullerton, CA over 50 years ago.
Thank you, Mr. Edge. Thank you, Mr. Hendrix. Thank you, Ms. Raitt.
Thank you, Mr. Dale. Thank you, Mr. Vaughan.
Thank you, Mr. Clapton.

Reading about you? Reading about me?: Contact with Other Worlds

Wondering now about what is average America. I read the New York Times online every day – I see pictures of New Yorkers in the Times – upscale young couples with jobs that pay well – clean cut and smiling.
They probably take vacations – kids will go to good schools – I tire of looking at them.
I told Ellen that I was looking for another newspaper to read because I was tired of looking at rich white people smiling and holding their babies up for a picture.
Who do they represent? I Googled ‘average American newspaper’ to see if I could take a look at another America – it’s an academic question – I could look at the Philadelphia Daily News or a paper from Idaho, I guess.
So I did that. I Googled "American newspapers" and got a list. I went to Idaho and looked at the papers there – I chose the Idaho Mountain Express, which reports news from Sun Valley, Ketchum, Hailey, Bellview and Carey. I don’t want to make it a novelty kind of thing, but the first item I read was about how the Planning and Zoning Board in Hailey had changed the code to permit five chickens on a property instead of just three.
Certainly I could look at my own local papers, the Cape May County Herald or the Cape May Star and Wave, but the issues they report are too close to my daily reality for me to get anything like a long view of American culture from them. Hence my Idaho sojourn. I'll check there from time to time to get some perspective.

Plan A, Plan B

(MQMurphy photo)

On another topic – have I mentioned here about how I went out on a Friday or Saturday morning in August of 1969 to the Ben Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia? 

I had a piece of cardboard with “Woodstock” written on it. Don’t remember if I had a bag with me, or just what was in my pockets. I went down to the bridge – why? No plan in particular, except to head north to hear some music. 

Plan A had been that a friend and I were going to get a ride with a friend of his. We waited up late the night before, but the ride never appeared (materialized?). 

So – no Plan B. Well, actually I guess that no Plan B would’ve meant that I stayed home.

 

Plan B was “Figure-it-out-as-you-go”.
It took more than a few rides and quite a bit of walking, but it turned out to be worth it.

Some damn thing . . .

(MQMurphy photo)

From the "Lunchbox" journal - something about the book that I've been telling myself that I will write:

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Ideas for chapters and metaphorical devices.

For example: plumbing.

I’m remembering the time that I soldered together the pipes for a new sink in the upstairs bathroom. The floor was out – I was running pipes through the joists. There were elbows and angles and couplings and valves. I remember counting the number of separate joints that were soldered – perhaps more than forty. When I connected the water and turned it on, there were no leaks. It was like I’d taken and passed a major exam.

Returning

(MQMurphy cameraphone image)

Today – this beautiful August the twenty-fourth – has the feeling of a tipping point. 

It’s almost as if there is a current, or a stream of biology deep inside of me that feels or knows this. 

As though the year is a ball tossed into the air and today is the day when the momentum slows, slows to a halt – there is a pause that is 

eternal and only a millisecond – and we fall

back towards the contracting and condensing of the year from which we’ll need to be hurled up again to air and warmth and light.

I Am Vivi Nevo

(Image found at NYTimes.com)

Okay, it’s true . . . I am Vivi Nevo.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the firewall between my high-flying international media-investment-schmoozaroo and my private life here in quiet Cape May County.

After lunch at San Pietro today I pushed my chair back from the table – too tired to fight with Spielberg for the check – and tried to remember if I’d ordered that sheet of birch plywood for the Pinto’s bookshelf.

Mystery Schmystery!
It was that damned Times article that killed the ride for me.
All that stuff about being a ‘Zelig-like’ character. And he’s not even a real guy.
Hey – I’m just me, trying to be me . . . and a normal guy, too. Is that too much to ask?
Can’t a guy have a little privacy when he’s not zooming around the world moving the shakers and schmoozing the movers?

I just like to be able to kick back in the workshop with my router and throw a little sawdust around – makes me feel like I’m accomplishing something.
Not to mention – don’t even mention it – that I get some of my best ideas while pushing the old Bosch 1 3/4 hp around the edges of a door. Pretty sure that’s what I was doing when I came up with the MS/Yahoo/Google thing.

Lenny Kravitz commented the other day “ . . . is that cat hair on your suit? Man, I didn’t know you had a cat!” Nine of them, Lenny. And four dogs, too.
(So now the nine cats and four dogs are out of the bag, bro.)

And no, for all you clever types out there, this is not one of those “I am Spartacus!” things. I considered that briefly, but concluded that instead of being able to escape in the cloud of confusion I was just as likely to be caught up in it. Can you imagine the mess that 50 or 60 bloggers could make out of that plan?

Weinstein and his girlfriend were staying in the loft over the workshop last week and he gave me this look – like “. . . you can’t keep this up, Viv. It’s gonna blow up in your face like a glued-up slab of birdseye maple in a planer!”

Yeah, Harv – maybe you’re right. Let’s let a little of the air out of this thing before it gets really crazy.
See you down at the Wawa.

Aw, please - just go away.

(Image found at NYPost.com)

More than ever, I am checking the NY Times online (and then all the other news outlets) hoping I'll see the announcement that Hillary Clinton has quit.
The only purpose she is serving now is to show us a pure example of naked, unheeding ambition.
If we needed it, her latest is sufficient proof that she is a single-celled organism and she makes Schwarzenegger's "Terminator" look like a pansy.

Lawnmower Years.

(Image found in a box of old stuff)

I bought this house thirty years ago this month. How long is that in lawnmower years?
There’s a Polaroid photo of one of my early lawnmowers somewhere around here. A cast off, a hand-me-down. Big-ass stamped red body with a white motor. I might’ve even repainted it in the process of its revitalization. New plug, new paint, fresh gas. So proud of it that I took a picture of it.
A. Photo. Of. A. Lawnmower.
An icon. A symbol of normality. If I recall correctly, I wanted to send the photo to my aunts in Peabody, Massachusetts. Owning a lawnmower was my ticket to respectability. You wouldn’t have a lawnmower if you were just some slacker guy. It was an emblem of my property-owning, upstanding citizen self.

I actually like mowing the lawn. It satisfies an 'Ozzie and Harriet' yearning in me. We had no lawns at the houses I grew up in. Not that I remember wanting a grassy yard, but when I bought this house it came with grass. At some point I realized that it had to be dealt with.
I think mowing has a calming effect on me, not unlike the feeling I used to get from ironing shirts. You pass the tool over the work and the result is so visible – so tangible. Smoothed cloth, a tamed wilderness. Man’s handiwork – evidence of civilization.

The simplest of machines, the lawnmower is. The inevitability of the sickle harnessed to the vast potential of internal combustion.
How many of these wonders had I dragged home from trash heaps and yard sales? How many Frankensteinian creations did I put together with each others’ hearts, handles and wheels?

Back in the early days, the machines were often no match for the yard if I didn’t establish a routine early in the season. When the grass got knee high the only way to attack it was to rear the mower up on its hind wheels, surge it forward by its own length and let it drop on the thicket from above. Progress was slow, of course – measured in blade shadows. Impatience on my part inevitably led to biting off more than the machine could chew. This resulted in the stalling of the machine.
The process of rear-surge-drop and rear-surge-stall would finally defeat me. Soon enough the grass would grow sufficiently tall to hide the mower and ease my shame somewhat.

Prosperity enabled me at some point to buy a brand new lawnmower. Maybe from Sears – maybe from our local hardware store. Some assembly required, of course, but I was an old hand by then. I’ve never been proud enough of the store-boughts to take a picture of one.

Phrases pop into your head.

(image found at the Official Website of Mark Twain)

Just this morning, for no reason that I can discern, the phrase
" . . . turtle on a fence post" popped into my head. I'd sort of heard it before - I'd read a reference to someone having used it. So I Googled it and came up with a couple of hits - 9,800, actually. Here's a great explanation and example of the phrase, which is formally credited to Mark Twain.

Ed. note: I couldn't seem to make that link work. You might still want to check out variousmiseries.blogspot.com and in the meanwhile here's the text that I was trying to link to:

While suturing a cut on the hand of a 75 year old Texas rancher, the doctor struck up a conversation with the old man. Eventually the topic got around to former Texas Governor George W. Bush and his going to the White House.

The old man said, "Well , ya know, Bush is a "post turtle".

Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him what a "post turtle" was.

The old rancher said, "When you're driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a post turtle."

The old man saw a puzzled look on the doctor's face, so he continued to explain, "You know he didn't get there by himself, he doesn't belong there, he doesn't know what to do while he's up there, and you just want to help the dumb shit get down and move on"

Cleaning the back of the Saint's head.

In March I worked for a few days for a company that restores stained glass windows. They needed a carpenter at a job over in Lewes, Delaware. The real restoration craftsmanship was done back at their studio in north Jersey. In Lewes they were installing a clear plexiglas protection layer against the window jamb. To prepare for the plexiglas we had to remove the old exterior protective layers. Some of these were weathered plastic; some were glass. After they were removed - which involved dealing with old, hardened caulk and glazing compound - the old pieces were used as patterns for the new plexi protection.

The weather was absolutely gorgeous for the three days that I worked there. The building was a slate-roofed brick church in the oldest part of Lewes, which bills itself as the first city in the first state. The church was in a property that covered an entire block and included a churchyard with the graves of the early congregants.

We worked on the building from small aluminum scaffolds that were moved from window to window.
Church volunteers paused to thank us - the work crew - for the transformation of their windows. 

After the old glass and glazing compound were removed, the jamb was caulked and given a coat of paint. The last step to be performed before installing the new plexiglas was to sweep off any dust and spray a glass cleaning solution on the outside of the stained glass.

I didn't ask which Saint's head I was cleaning from the top of the scaffold. When I went inside on the last day to see what I'd been working on, he was just beaming.

When I'm ninety-four.

I'm the little guy in this picture. The big guy behind me is my Dad. I was about nine months old when this was taken, and that would make him just shy of 39 years old. He lived for about 15 more years. He died just a little over 40 years ago, on New Year's Eve 1967.

But - I've only given you a photograph and some basic math. I'm told that I am the little guy in the picture. The big guy is defintely my Dad. He looks happy. I'm guessing that my Mom is taking the picture, so there I am - sandwiched between two people who loved me.

I wasn't even nearly a human being when he died - I was still a blob of some sort. Didn't know who or what I might turn out to be, and didn't really have much to talk to him about.
I can see him clearly in my mind, on that wicker chaise in the background. He'd have a terrycloth jacket and a Phillies cap and a transistor radio and maybe a beer, and he'd sit back on that chaise and listen to the baseball games in the summer.
He gave me that wonderful right hand of his to grip. When I got older he told me about the importance of having clean hands - clean, well manicured fingernails. He told me a secret about how he'd punched a man once. He was ashamed and proud of it and he wanted me to understand. I think I did.
Another thing I understand now is how quickly fifteen years can go by.

I put this post up and took it down more than once. On one hand, I felt that I was charmed by the photo and sort of wrote something just to justify posting it. On the other hand, children and families and the crazy passage of time are still relevant. Maybe more than ever.
To quote Jackson Browne " . . . they say in the end, it's the blink of an eye."

Caught off guard!

I wasn’t paying attention to the news – completely missed the announcement that the Fed was moving Christmas up 13 days this year.
That is the biggest single move since the nine day move of 1958, and the first substantial move in more than a decade. Most of them (like the 14 hour, 51 minute move of 1981) slip by almost unnoticed – and if you did take notice, well – it’s in the rearview mirror even before you have time to think about it.

Well - the joke’s on you, Mr. Federal Holiday Administration! Mr. Big Brother Government! My Christmas cards will -as usual- arrive late, if at all – and the Mall (Maw?) will still see no more or less of me than it usually does. I will not get all caught up in all your irrational Holiday Cheerxuberance®.
Chri$tmas will have to careen down the “Pine-Scented®”, “snow-covered" path without my meager assistance this year.

Sour grapes, you say? Sure – like I said, I got caught off guard.
Sucker-punched, if you will.
I’ll be back on the game next year, though. Just you wait.

Not Dropping Heavy Things.

I don’t feel as though I’ve got to justify my sailing hobby – or more accurately, my ‘learning-to-sail hobby’ – but if I did, this might suffice.
One of the additional benefits of learning how to control a boat is learning how to use rope. I’ve flailed at ropes for years, hoping that if I put enough loops and "knots" in them they would do a job of holding whatever needed to be held. So now, when circumstances might require you to park your horse, or you’ve got a captive, or some big pieces of scaffolding need to go from down here to way up there – it is a relief to know that no matter what else may go wrong, your knot will still hold. This knot is the bowline (pronounced “bo-lin”) and it is sometimes referred to as ‘the king of knots’.
Such was my desire to begin the mastery of rope that I taught myself to tie this knot one handed, with either hand and with my eyes closed.

It better be loud . . .

Distortion? In music? Here’s my take on it:
It’s about an impulse that can’t be restrained – or contained.
An impulse that doesn’t give a shit about the inadequacy of your tiny speakers – it must be heard. The reproduction of distortion in a record is all about that. As loud as possible . . . isn’t loud enough – that’s what we’re saying. I’m listening to “Rosalita” right now – two speakers, one about eighteen inches away from each ear – left and right. Didn’t necessarily plan that – the laptop is on the workbench below the stereo. And the stereo is turned up.
And if you are telling the father of your girlfriend that this is his last chance
to get his daughter in a fine romance
because the record company
just GAVE YOU A BIG ADVANCE,
you know that you’re going to be needing that to be loud.

Why I blog.*

If you are lucky enough to own your home (check) and it is an ooold home (check) with old systems (check) and you are not rich (double check), you’ve probably had an occasion to be treated to a scene like the one above.

This is our water pump. Well, maybe it is our third or fourth water pump - not sure.
I was down in the cellar this morning to try to determine the cause of the loud noise that recently began accompanying the pumping of water.
My guess was that the vibration of the pump had caused it to shift on its platform and come into contact with related items that transmitted the vibrations to other related items until there was a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.
Please excuse the techno-jargon.

As I looked at the shiny new fittings that connected the pump to the copper waterlines of the house, I realized that I’d been here at least twice in the last twelve months.
I’d come down to the cellar for something last winter (Christmas decorations?) and heard that familiar sssssss-ing sound before I saw the water running on the floor. I turned on the light in the back section of the cellar and saw the jet of water coming from the side of the PVC coupling that threads into the body of the pump. (see Fig. 12-J) – just kidding.
The ‘pump repair’ guys (summoned in a previous emergency, no doubt) had managed to force a 1 1/4” fitting into a 1” outlet. Only a pro would attempt to do this. Or a maniac. Granted, it was probably a Sunday evening or a Global Holiday – thereby making the proper fitting totally unavailable. It worked – for a while.
Skip past this next part if you are a poor old house owner – you already know it.
I drained the pressure tank and cut the fittings apart. There’s an hour. I took the coupling out to the hardware store to be sure I was getting the right part. There’s an hour. I cut new PVC pipe to replace what I’d cut out and I dry-fitted the new parts together a couple of times to make sure they’d line up with everything that hadn’t been cut out. There’s an hour. Is it too late for me to make a long story short? Basically, you’re looking at half a day for a non-professional plumber to replace the fittings that connect a pump to the rest of your water system. Oh – I’m a non-professional plumber with about 29 years of experience here at the classroom.

About six months before this I had gone through pretty much the same process because something about our water doesn’t get along with copper. Yeah - go figure. Our water eats little holes in the copper pipes, and then water gets out in places where you really don’t want it to.
To correct this problem, repeat the process outlined above, but this time you'll substitute copper pipe, flux, solder and a torch for the relative pleasures of PVC pipe and vision-inducing solvent glue.

Next week on "This Poor Old House": Let's re-wire!

* So that I've got someplace to share stuff like this - that's why. Thank you for letting me tell you that.