Browse Category: Music

Satisfaction

(Originally posted on the website Continuum…)

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One thorough satisfaction for me is the enjoyment of getting new drum equipment or supplies. Today my shipment of drumheads and sticks arrived. I couldn’t wait to get home from work today to give the drumset some TLC. I take pleasure in taking the drums apart, cleaning them up, replacing the well-worn heads. The scents of the drum polish and the wooden drum shells conjure up so many memories of past drumming days. To some, unscrewing 50 plus lugs, removing all the rims, cleaning all the chrome hardware, changing the heads and putting it all back together might sound like tedious work. To me, it is a pleasure on par with a good haircut, clean shave, and all the other aspects of good grooming – refreshing and good for one’s self-esteem.

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The maintenance was also necessary. I have an upcoming opportunity to play at a nearby club as part of the host band for an open mic night. There’s a good possibility that I could have the position on a permanent weekly basis. Cool! So, the drumset and I better both be looking our best to make a good first impression.

N, AS IN PNEUMONIA

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(Originally posted on the website Continuum…)

N, AS IN I DO NOT HAVE IT.

Nope. I had an x-ray today and no pneumonia, not a speck, nada.

I went to a different doctor today. There was a world of difference in the attention I got from this doctor compared to the last! With the last one I didn’t find out I had pneumonia until a month after I had my x-ray done. Today, the doctor left me a message about my x-ray results before I even drove the ten miles from her office back to my office.

That’s not all. She was very thorough in her evaluation of my symptoms. She asked plenty of questions. She thought of some possible reasons for the breathing problems I have been experiencing (maybe asthma, maybe allergies). She even thought to ask if I’ve been having any problems with heartburn. As a matter of fact, I was. She explained that acid reflux can aggravate the breathing troubles and interfere with treatment of them. So she gave me a prescription for heartburn medicine. She also gave me an inhaler to use three times a day for this week. At the end of the week she wants to see me again to do further asthma testing.

Receiving the phone message that I don’t have pneumonia was a mixed blessing. It’s a relief to know that my lungs are not filling up with all kinds of gunk that could potentially kill me. However, the prospect of having asthma isn’t very thrilling. Some say it’s highly unlikely for someone my age (29) to develop asthma. But I read on webmd.com that a person can develop asthma at any time.

So that’s the latest from the health and wellness department.

Since we are flirting with the letter N this time, how about some other news?

Yes, that is a Nine Inch Nails logo in the photo above. No, I am not listening to Nine Inch Nails while writing this. I am listening to… nothing actually.

My daughters are here. They arrived on Saturday. It’s amazing how much a child grows in two months when you don’t see them. Of course, it is always so much fun to have them here. Since we don’t see each other for extended periods of time, I think we appreciate being together more. There is a little more intensity involved. Certain shared experiences seem to be ingrained in our minds deeper and remember more vividly than if we spent each and every day together. We have no definite set plans for this summer. We do want to go back to Crater Lake. The girls suggested that we make that a yearly tradition. We might go to the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival in New York State for a weekend with my mom and sister. You know, folk music, camping out for the weekend, drum circles at night, vegan hippies smoking marijuana. I’m sure we will also go to the beach a few times.

While we were on our way to pick up Tim from work around 8:30, Madeline said something funny. We were driving through back country roads past several farms. There were cows in a field, close to the fence by the road. As we drove past, Madeline exclaimed, “Wow! Look at that thing’s GUTTERS!” I laughed so hard I nearly crashed the car! Maybe she thought the utters were called gutters because they look like the cow’s gut. I don’t know.

I think I will keep this as a nice nifty journal entry, not a novel. Let me end on this bit of trivia. This is entry number Ninety-Nine of this journal.

“Ninety-nine writings of Sam on the web, ninety-nine writings of Sam. Take one down, pass it around, ninety-eight writings of Sam on the web.”

“Ninety-eight writings of…”

Oh! Come on! Sing! Sing!

No? You’re NOT going to sing?

You’re No fun. I’m going home.

alphabyteslogo3 An AlphaBytes Project – The Letter N

ALICE

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(Originally posted on the website Continuum…)

IF YOU BROWSE around through my journal entries, sooner or later you are going to realize that music is a big part of my life. You will probably realize it sooner than later. My second entry mentions music, none other than The Beatles. However, as you browse, you will realize that I am a super Alice Cooper freak.

Now I realize that some of you will just say, “Well, that just makes you a FREAK period!” Hey, Alice isn’t for everybody. But he is for those of us who happen to be cool, those of us who know good tunes (at least Alice’s 70’s music) when we hear them, those of us who happen to be drawn to the freak show that is Alice Cooper.

Alice isn’t all freak though. He’s not only about dead babies, boa constrictors, guillotines, and nooses. The music of the original Alice Cooper band, especially, was basic rock-n-roll for the most part. A lot of the darker themes and theatrics were weird and humorous in their own ways. But much of the music was solid and some of it has stood the test of time.

Alice Cooper was originally the name of a band that included Dennis Dunaway, Glen Buxton, Neal Smith, Michael Bruce and Vincent Furnier. Rumor has it that the name Alice Cooper was the name of a 17th century witch that the band contacted through a ouija board. Later, Vincent Furnier took the name as his own. Once the original band split up in 1975, he was Alice Cooper.

There is no denying that Alice Cooper’s musical quality suffered after the band broke up. He became better known for his shocking theatrics and concept albums, such as “Welcome to My Nightmare,” “Alice Cooper Goes to Hell,” and “From the Inside.” His reputation for theatrics grew, but the style and caliber of his music was disappointing for most of us who loved the music.

However, there is good news for those of us who loved the music of the original Alice Cooper band! Last fall, Alice released an album called “The Eyes of Alice Cooper.” Most of it is in the vein of the old Alice sound. I was thrilled to death when I heard it! (Or should I say I “Loved it to Death?”) Finally! The return of the true Alice! “The Eyes of Alice Cooper” is classic Cooper offerings. It has the good old basic rock, a few songs that could lend themselves to theatrics, and the typical Alice Cooper humor. After hearing this album, I felt that my musical life had almost come full circle.

I say “almost full circle” because one thing is lacking. I have never seen Alice Cooper in concert. “For shame!” you say. You see, the Alice Cooper band had split up by the time I discovered them. I was only 12. Their album “School’s Out” was the very first album I ever bought. Even if the band still was together then, I was too young to go to one of their concerts. And I certainly couldn’t expect my mom to take me. She was too busy listening to her music, evil nasty stuff. I almost saw an Alice Cooper concert later in high school. But that didn’t work out. I lost interest after that for a number of years.

For some time now it has been a dream of mine to buy Alice Cooper concert tickets. My dream has been to knock on my cousin’s door, tickets in hand, and say, “Look what I got! Let’s go!” For it is I who turned my cousin on to the music. I am to blame for my cousin’s love of a man named Alice. When I was 12 and he 14, I pulled out my “School’s Out” album, which looked like an old school desk with the top that opened to reveal the record wrapped in paper panties. I disrobed the vinyl and gently laid it on the turntable. My cousin fell in love at 33 1/3 rpms.

Last week I had the opportunity to fulfill my dream. Alice Cooper is playing at Musikfest in Bethlehem, PA in August, just 20 minutes away from my home. I bought tickets. No, I bought VIP tickets in the ninth row from the center of the stage. When the tickets arrived in the mail, I wrote my cousin’s name on one of them, drove to his house, knocked on his door.

“Hey, cuz… I got something in the mail that has your name on it! Look… right there… And it also has the name ‘Alice Cooper’ over here…”

“Dude!! You bought Alice Cooper tickets?? And you want ME to go?? Rock-n-roll!!”

That’s right, cuz, rock-n-roll. I turned you on to Alice in 1975. I’m obligated to take you to one of his concerts. I’ve waited a long time for this opportunity. Seeing your eyes light up as you held that ticket was a dream come true. I doubt that even Alice himself can top that.

alphabyteslogo3 An AlphaBytes Project – The Letter A

ZERO, ZIP, ZILCH

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(Originally posted on the website Continuum…)

Zero, zip, zilch…

That’s how much I’m writing tonight. I’m tired. I have pneumonia. I don’t feel like writing. I think I’ll watch a movie instead. Maybe I’ll watch “Pulp Fiction” since I’m in a Tarantino mood after watching “Kill Bill 1” with my friend Suzy today.

Actually, what I’m doing is cheating. (Not something a zaddik should do, I know. Not even one wearing a zucchetto. Though one would question the appropriateness of a zaddik wearing a zucchetto.) In my zeal to get started with the AlphaBytes project for June, I am writing an article and posting it today! Ha! It’s still only May! The goal of the project is to write a journal entry for each of the letters of the alphabet. Being as zany as I am, I thought I’d start with the last letter instead of the first. So, you can thank the letter Z, affectionately known as “zed” to some of you outside of America, for this entry.

Not wanting to stay up too later, let me just write a few words since I’m here. I promise not to use the words zucchini, zebra or zygote. I will, however, listen to Frank Zappa while writing this. As a cultural note, I must say that zuppa inglese sounds absolutely delicious, especially the rum part.

Change of plans… Let’s listen to Warren Zevon instead.

Like I said above, I have pneumonia. WHAT? How did that happen?? Exzactly my thoughts! (Slipped that one in there. Heh.) You might remember that I mentioned having bronchitis back in December. The doctor that treated me then, the one who looked like Groucho Marx (not Zeppo), said that I was also experiencing bronchospasms. I had a lot of wheezing.

The breathing difficulties never went away. I was always out of breath, sometimes receiving both the concern and ridicule of those around me as I huffed and puffed up the stairs. So I went to the doctors again in March. Groucho’s partner thought that I might be developing asthma. So he gave me some asthma medicine and told me to get a chest x-ray, even though he didn’t expect anything to show up on the x-ray. Since he didn’t seem too concerned, and I’m a big procrastinator, I didn’t go for the x-ray until mid-April.

When I called for more asthma medicine a week ago, the nurse informed me that my x-ray showed that I had pneumonia in my left lung. Say what??? “Didn’t anyone call you, Mr. Snyder? The doctor wanted you on antibiotics a month ago!” No, no one called me! I heard zero, zip, zilch!

Well, I picked up the antibiotics, Zithromax, as a matter of fact. Today was the tenth day after starting the medication. Guess what. I’m still a wheezing, hacking, huffing, puffing one-lunged tired sucker! I called the doctor on Friday to see what I should do next. He was on vacation and his receptionist told me not to worry about it and just call next week sometime. I don’t think so. This sucker’s going to a different doctor.

You know, a half-year of not being able to breathe properly is enough. The fatigue is driving me crazy. I am not the kind of person who can simply shut down and rest. I don’t want to miss anything. There are too many things to do in the world. I always say that I wish I could just go without sleep completely. Who needs it? I’ll sleep when I’m dead. Well, under the circumstances, if I don’t rest now, I might be dead sooner than I want to be.

But what did I do this weekend? On Saturday, I drove the kids around to work and such, something I do nearly every day now. Then I took a drive to Merril Creek Reservoir, intending to walk around for a few hours and take a few photos. That turned out to be a zoological wonder! The place was swarming with cicadas. It was unbelievable! But that’s a story for the letter C. After a few hours of walking among the billions of bugs, I went home and fell asleep for a few hours. That is completely out of character for me!

On Sunday, I took Suzy to Merril Creek to witness the cicadas. We ended up hiking the five-mile trail around the perimeter of the reservoir. Believe it or not, I made it all the way on just half a functioning lung. Later, I fell asleep again. Exhausted.

Today, Memorial Day, I drove kids to jobs, picked one up an hour later after Burger King lost electrical power. I did manage to take it easy for most of the day though. Our little town had a Memorial Day parade. I haven’t decided to write about that under the letter M for Memorial Day, P for parade, or F for the whole 15 minutes that the parade lasted. Maybe I should use B for boring. Other than that, I did some laundry and watched “Kill Bill.”

Speaking of movies… I gotta go. Warren is almost done singing.

My apologies to ZZ Top for not mentioning them in this article.

(Just out of curiosity… Do you consider yourself to be zoophagous?)

I guess “Zero, Zip, Zilch” wasn’t exactly fitting for this article. I should have called it zomething else.

alphabyteslogo3 An AlphaBytes Project – The Letter Z

MEMORY MOTEL

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(Originally posted on the website Continuum…)

THERE’S NOTHING like getting an album that you used to listen to when you were a kid and haven’t heard in years. Of course, most kids don’t refer to them as “albums” these days. They are just “CDs.” It’s a rediscovery of sorts when in 2004 you buy an album that was originally released in 1976. Unless, you weren’t even born yet in 1976 or were still a snotty-faced four-year-old who didn’t care about music yet.

The album of my most recent rediscovery is “Black and Blue” by the Rolling Stones, which is playing right now. It may not be one of their most popular albums. It does have the song “Fool to Cry” on it, which was a big hit at the time.

So much music defines different time periods of my life. I was 13 when I first got this Stones album. When I think back, there are several other albums that I remember listening to a lot around that time: “2112” by Rush, “Changes One” by David Bowie, “Rock and Roll Over” by Kiss, “Alice Cooper Goes to Hell” by Alice Cooper (obviously). I would often sit in my bedroom with a black light on and listen to these albums. I had a red, white and blue bedspread. I can still picture the glow of the white sections of the bedspread as “Hey Negrita” plays now in 2004, transporting me back.

I was in eighth grade then, with my Speed Racer looking glasses, double knit pants, and slightly visible peach fuzz moustache. It wasn’t until the next school year that I began wearing jeans and the ever-cool silk shirts and growing my hair long. Thirteen was the last year of “cute,” soon to be followed by the arrival of “cool.” It was an awkward time in which impressing the girls was of growing importance. Yet, riding my pull start Kawasaki mini bike for hours after school was still more fun, and safer than girls turned out to be, I might add!

Ahhh! Right now the Stones are taking me back to an old house along the Muskonetcong River. It was so old that you could look between the floor boards upstairs and see down to the first floor. The basement had a dirt floor… and rats. We didn’t go down there! There was a winding staircase from the kitchen to a small room upstairs.

There was plenty of land along with this house. The property we rented ran along the river for a good stretch. There were fields to ride mini bikes, pick wild raspberries, play frisbee, and run naked if you really wanted (not that I would know anything about THAT!). There was a great hill for sleigh riding in the winter. There was an old mysterious barn. There was a spring house close to the river in which I sometimes put trout that I caught out of the river. Then I could fish in the spring house and catch them over and over.

I remember doing a few mischievous things at that age. Stupid things really. I cut the inner pages out of a book in order to hide packs of bubble gum so my mom wouldn’t know I had them. I was a big candy freak as a kid. The only problem with hiding them in a book was that I used a book that once belonged to my mom as a kid. She discovered the cut out pages in the garbage can. Ooops. I also flushed a banana peel down the toilet because I was too lazy to take it downstairs to throw it away. The only problem was the toilet clogged a while later and my stepfather discovered the banana peel when he was plunging it. Ooops again. I also remember how my sister wiped out on my mini bike in the gravel on the driveway. Ooops. And ouch. But I was more concerned with the possibility that my mini bike got all scratched up than I was with the probability that half of the stones on the driveway got jammed under my sister’s left knee cap. What can I say? I’m a brother.

Speaking of my stepfather, there were a few funny incidents in which he was involved back then. Once, in the middle of the night, some guy was pounding on our door. Then he backed into my stepfather’s truck with his car and took off. So, my stepfather chased him. Later, at the police station, a cop came in and read him his rights. When he asked what was going on, the cop said they had found marijuana growing on our property. Ooops! It turned out that the caretaker of a neighbor’s property was the one who had planted it on our land. In another incident, we all got in the car and drove up the road to the Dairy Queen for ice cream one evening. While there, somebody backed into our car in the parking lot. My stepfather had to get out of the car. And the poor guy was wearing my mom’s fuzzy pink slippers! Oooooops! Okay. He wasn’t in the habit of wearing her clothes. He wasn’t a cross dresser or anything. He only had to drive a few miles up the road to the Dairy Queen. What were the chances that he would have had to get out of the car in front of a parking lot full of people? All those staring people! Work boots! Never leave home without ’em!

As I end this brief article, the Stones are singing “Memory Motel.” How appropriate. A good note to end on, while just giving you a glimpse of that particular time of my life.