"Foreplay/Long Time"

Actually there won't be any foreplay involved in this post; but it has been a long time since I've written.......

…….not that anyone has been jonesing for a new CeeGee all that much, but, some of you do actually pay for this thing and I don’t take that lightly.

I haven’t posted in so long because I’ve had to focus on getting a full-time job. Once I got my full-time job I had to focus on proving that I should be allowed to retain my full-time job.

Which, I’m pretty sure I’ve done so far. I’m editing the freelance work coming in for American Songwriter magazine. What a concept, doing something for a living that I actually went to college and got a degree for. Just took a short 26 years for me to land that first journalism gig out of IU!

That’s not really true, though, I’ve done a lot of freelance and part-time writing and editing stuff…just not full-time music magazine writing and editing stuff.

I feel kind of like the Writers Guild writers coming back from the picket lines, trying to make sense of the past many months and figure out what to write about.

• Today, Kevin McCarthy got voted out of his beloved Speaker of the House gig. First time that’s ever happened.
  

• Of course, there have been a lot of firsts over the last few months when it comes to national news, starting with all those Trump indictments. None of that crap seems as much of an existential crisis to me anymore for some reason. Maybe it’s because I’m working Monday through Friday and concentrating on making a good impression at work. When your mind is occupied with day-to-day business busyness, the political clown show in D.C. seems less relevant to the kind of shit I need to be worrying about.
  
  Which, of course, is the kind of thing the extreme far right folks are hoping for—that left-leaners will become preoccupied elsewhere and let their guard down, and/or assume Trump is going to jail and could thus never be elected (which, remember, doesn’t mean he can’t still be friggin’ president from a damn jail cell!).
  

• There have been a lot of firsts over the last few months when it comes to local news here in Nashville, as well. The lead story (for me, at least) being that super-duper progressives were elected as mayor and as the representative for District 51 in the Tennessee House.
  
  Last year, my buddy Jay (hi Jay) and I walked down from a rehearsal at my house to the house of Aftyn Behn, a very active activist who was a guest on my COVID-era version of East Nashville Happy Hour in early 2020. She was hosting a meet-n-greet house party for who I assumed was a long-shot for mayor—and I think at the time he was. But there was free pizza and wine, so, we went.
  
  And since it’s almost 1 a.m. I have to go to bed soon (still not used to going to bed before 3 ), so I’ll just confirm that, lo and behold, Freddie O’Connell freakin’ won, he is now currently our mayor. And Nashville is a solidly blue dot in the red state of Tennessee, but…like I said, he is super-duper progressive.
  
  And an even bigger surprise: the state House representative for Aftyn’s district passed away unexpectedly, she decided to run to replace him—and she was a real long-shot I thought—and she up ‘n’ won! For a hot second there I was poised to come on board her campaign as a writer and/or event producer, but her campaign manager’s cooler head prevailed (i.e. I’d never worked on a campaign before and they didn’t have the budget for such silliness). However, Aftyn did allow me to propose and compose her policy agenda on arts funding. Which was kind of exciting—especially when she won.

  

But now I have to figure out what CeeGees should be moving forward.

The easy part: I still want to include a music-related element. Two ideas that would definitely be fun for me and may or may not be fun for anyone else:

1. I now have 950 songs in my Spotify playlist that needs a new name but is currently called “Recollection Records: Music That Has Entered My Head Out of Nowhere for No Reason.”
   
   I can’t have heard the song on the radio recently, or seen somebody play it at a concert, or consciously have heard it in any other context. It has to be a song that I become aware of randomly popping into my head for no apparent reason. There are a lot of ‘80s metal songs. But the last song that popped in there was “I Know What Boys Like,” by…I don’t even remember who it’s by. Oh…The Waitresses?? Never heard of ‘em, but…I found myself humming the song for no reason this morning.
   
   Is that weird? That that’s happened to me 950 times over the last five or six years or so and counting? Or does that happen to everybody?
   
   But anyway, I’d like to play a song at random and try to remember where I first heard it, what the circumstances might have been, maybe talk a bit about the song’s and/or the artist’s origins.
   

2. Similarly, I have a collection of cassettes and CDs I still display in my living room as art pieces. They are no longer positioned by title but by the color of the spine of the tape or disc case. And I figure I’ll just start at the top-left of the cassette tower and work my way through all of them, talking about the same stuff as mentioned above.
   

But, of course, the music stuff should serve as an add-on. What I really want to do with the blog is explore ways to find Common Ground, forge Common Good, and fight Corporate Greed.

My running idea before my job hunt hiatus was to seek out folks who hold different positions within various different communities throughout the entire state of Tennessee and find out what makes them tick, what makes their communities tick, what they’re passionate about, what they’re worried about, what they need their local government to do for them, and what they’re willing to do for their communities to make their own lives, their family’s and friends’ lives, and their communities overall better. Stuff like that.

Hell, I need to ask myself all that stuff. I need a reset now that my life has taken a turn—for the better, but it’s a strange turn I haven’t made in a while…and the sexy Australian lady who tells me how to get places in my car hasn’t offered up much in the way of what direction I should be turning next on the Highway of Life. In fact, she ain’t said shit.

And here is where I would have found the link to the part in Spaceballs where the evil Spaceballs are “combing the desert” for Lone Star and his crew, and the two Black stormtrooper types who have only been given a giant hair pick to comb through the sand—when their white counterparts have been given much bigger, proper giant combs—say, “We ain’t found shit!” Which, within the context of the film is quite funny, but as I said, I have to go to bed so I can get up at 7 a.m. and go to work tomorrow. So I can’t be searching for funny videos for this post. Which is killing me because that’s what the post needs to not be me just spouting off with a bunch of words. but I didn’t want to not post yet again. So at least this will have gotten my juices flowing. Thanks for humoring me.

P.S. Under normal circumstances it would also be appropriate to discuss where the aforementioned Spaceballs skit falls on the Woke-a-Meter. My first thought is that Mel Brooks is acknowledging that Black people always get short shrift, in an act of empathy and solidarity. Kind of like it’s a running joke that Black folks are always the first to get knocked off in horror flicks. But are Black folks sick of that kind of crap being used for comedy fodder?

P.P.S. If it weren’t now 1:34 a.m. I might also find the “Life Is a Highway” video and link to it where it says “…what direction I should be turning next on the Highway of Life.” But I’m a company man now, can’t compromise my ability to be an effective editor any more than I already have.

I can’t even edit back through this. I’m just gonna post it. That is really painful. But you don’t mind, do you? Just this once?