Turntable in the Shower

I worked most evenings in high school. Not so much out of economic necessity, dates and gas were cheap in rural Ohio in the 70’s, but more so out of boredom.

For a few semesters, I delivered pizzas at night for the local Dominos outlet. They gave me a VW beetle without a passenger seat, but cleverly equipped with a sterno powered “finishing” oven in the back that stacked five pizzas. At the time, Dominos promised 30 minutes from the landline call to the door, or the pie was free.

My part in this contract was to drive, shift, reach behind me, spin the pies enroute, pull into Mrs. Curry’s driveway (she had two awesome daughters) box up the pie, and deliver. One summer, I was coronated as Dominos speediest driver in Ohio- I had delivered more pies than any of the other guys with an oven in a VW statewide. It was a small rural county, I knew where everyone lived (see a following paragraph), and I loved driving, shifting and listening to Led Zeppelin on WLS 890 out of Chicago on the AM radio.

One of my classmates, Tommy Miller, equally bored witlessly, worked the night shift in the local aluminum can factory. I miss that teenage metabolism, although it’s been replaced by an insatiable nervous sensuality and borderline insomnia. My hands are constantly afire.

My favorite boredom-tonic job was delivering furniture for the local home furnishing store- mostly cheap dinettes. The farmsteads, most particularly Amish farmsteads of my rural Ohio county were treading water above the poverty line, and the intimate glimpses of their lives during that drop and go delivery swelled my appreciation of the life my factory manager father had provided for me.

But the best was the storeowner, Grandpa Gatchell. As background, my mom and dad were the youngest of eight and seven children Pittsburgh children respectively, so their parents, my would- be grandparents, were gone before I bloomed on the family tree. So, Mr. Gatchell became my surrogate grandpa.

He had one tooth.

Grandpa Gatchell was 90 or so and still running the shop when I memorized the county map for him in the 1970’s, meaning he was born in the 1880’s. I loved him more than life - still do. Sitting on the back loading dock, sneaking a cigarette, Grandpa could recount his first airplane, first automobile, first telephone, first radio, first television - all the transformative technologies of the” modern age”, but mostly he looked forward to lunchtime when the local downtown factory secretaries would parade past the store windows on their way to lunch at the “Alcove”. Life for Grandpa Gatchell was linear, one thing at a time- “multitasking” had yet to make Webster’s dictionary. He loved riding in my MG (given to me by my high school girlfriend’s father as a down payment on a prospective future son-in-lawhood) top down, cruising for secretaries one-fourth his age. But, he didn’t like having the AM radio on. One pleasure at a time was enough.

The arc of my life, by comparison, has been untransformative - with one grand exception - the World Wide Web - the internet.

Here’s what I know. An English scientist, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web while employed at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland as a hoped for means to more easily share scientific research amongst his peers. In that role as global replacement to the Dewey decimal system, Sir Berners-Lee created three protocol tools essential to the now world-wide sharing of information: a system of globally unique identifiers for resources on the Web and elsewhere, the universal document identifier (UDI), later known as uniform resource locator (URL) and uniform resource identifier (URI);the publishing language Hypertext Markup Language (HTML);the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

I only know this stuff because I just copy-pasted it at 11:47 pm from Wikipedia on the internet. Instant smarts.

The web is fantastic. I no longer have to wait for the library to open, or buy updated copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica from the door-to-door sales representative. I can look up anything, anytime from my beloved sofa. A few months ago I was watching an astronomy show on Curiosity Stream, on my IPad, with sofa, probably again around 11:47 when the evening’s martinis are settling into their role as uninhibitors. At 11:49, I’m on Amazon ordering a refractor telescope that would turn Galileo green with envy.

My beloved Sofa thinks that the internet is an adult playground that has unleashed non-circadian on demand impulses and has given rise to a new branch of pharmaceuticals devoted to inducing artificial sleep.

I overlapped with Tony Bourdain in New York. I remember popping up out of the subway on the upper west side and musing over the guy selling his 12-inch vinyl disks on the sidewalk to fund his addictions. Tony.

I’ve shamelessly stolen one his best observations over the years. He said the staff at his restaurant was like the crew of a pirate ship. For me, the ambitious, nervous, creative, wobbly, eccentric designers in my orbit are the unreliable, marginal, deliriously interesting outcasts on the pirate ship Kevin.

One of the crew, up on the foredeck, manning the mainsail, recently confessed that one of her guilty pleasures was an extended hot shower, with frequent call outs to the ever attendant , always eavesdropping “Alexa” outpost on the bathroom vanity.

“Alexa- Play my favorite Lil’ Wayne song- you know the one”

Instant gratification...

Everything about that lay outside my experience set, except for the hot shower. For her, it only takes an eleven-word command to bring on a gratifying experience.

For me, at her age, listening to music on demand would have been a six or seven step process akin to bringing the turntable into the shower:

Stumble on a great song either in the MG’s AM radio or on an album rock FM station out of Cleveland Plan ahead. Add the album to the shopping list for the monthly shopping drive to the city. My little town in Amish country didn’t have a record store.Procure, in cash, from the proceeds described in paragraphs one and three.Drag the speakers, red and yellow tether wires attached, to the bathroom door across the hallway from my bedroom. Warm up the shower, set needle in the groove, and sing out loud in a voice that only recently dropped an octave.If it’s an album side, like Dark Side of the Moon or Roundabout, settle in for the extended hot shower.If not, then make multiple carpet soaking runs to the milk crate album library in the bedroom, singing an half octave higher version of Black Dog, or a close pitch equal to Marty Balin’s hormonal Starship anthem “Miracles”.

Not so instant gratification. That was 159 words.

I’ll confess that I wasn’t always alone in the shower. Grace Slick was an early companion. Followed by Suzi Quatro . Later, Stevie Nicks stepped in with her raspy Texasness, cheating on both Mick and Lindsey. After Stevie, Debbie Harry grabbed the soap. I loved showering with Annie Lennox, particularly when we’d duet on “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This”. Susanna Hoffs would later carry her harmonies of my imaginary personal performance of “In Your Room”.

Lately, I’ve been reduced to a solo career of covers of “Comfortably Numb”.

Tony had his pushers, and the web is now mine. The web studies my browsing habits, and “pushes” content to me that I might find of interest. The Pinterest is one of the best pushers, it knows I have a weakness for airplanes and ears, mostly Basset Hound ears. But The Pinterest erroneously insists I’m in love with Marisa Hartigay. I’ve never watched “law and order”. There is a web site called Stumble Upon, which pushes the entire global web content at me based on some pre-sets - astronomy, MG’s, Pink Floyd, goats, ears, Suzi Quatro.....

The web pusher strives to emulate the experience of entering a library and encountering the rack, up front, of recent acquisitions. That was one of my favorite evenings, a reliable pull on my intellectual curiosity.

Another favorite was Christmas Eve shopping in Manhattan’s SOHO district, which for me meant brisk walks against the wind whipping off the Hudson between hip, non-franchise, stores punctuated by refueling stops at all the neighborhood bars, particularly the Cub Room. It was buy, drink, buy, drink, buy, drink, buy, drink.....

The best Christmas season was 1977 in Hampstead, London. That year, during the “Winter of Discontent” the power plant workers, firemen and gravediggers were on strike. Yet shopping soldiered on, chin-up British style, each evening by candlelight. With intermittent stops in candlelit pubs.

Try replicating that-Amazon. It would keep the drone fleet busy.