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The new neighbors have a dog. It’s against our lease to have a dog, so they must have been granted an exception. Which is OK by me. I had our cat, Lola, when I moved in here a few years ago. The exception I got was I told Rob he didn’t have to put new carpets in the place if I could keep the cat (the carpets are horrible). The dog’s a little Shi-tzu like my brother Mort and his ex, Michelle, had. Ming-ti was my buddy. He could lick, like, forever.

Anyway, I come home from work the other night and find this note in a card stuck in my door, along with a “bouquet” of lollipops:

The neighbors are a young couple; I’d say in their 20’s. Very nice. They came over and introduced themselves with a plate of homemade Valentine cookies on Valentine’s Day. And I’ll only say a couple things about this letter:

1) Their schooling failed on at least one level.
2) I haven’t said anything about their dog.

Cara (my brother Kevin’s oldest) recently asked me to find this song. It was recorded 20+ years ago in my bedroom at my parents house during my College years. I was doing some recording, noodling around, when Cara, then age 4-5 came to visit with her favorite Uncle Bryan. I think Grandma was picking her up from preschool and she was staying at our house ’til Mom picked her up after work. Cara would come down and want to play on my synthesizer (a Casio CZ1000) or whatever.

This day, I had my harmonica out and she wanted to play it; so she was playing it and asked her if she wanted to make a song. Then I asked her what she wanted to call the song and she said, “Better Stop Shaking.” So I picked up the guitar and hit the record button and this is what you hear. No editing.

You can hear me coaxing the first couple phrases, but after that, she took over and I just played. She’s playing the harmonica AND singing while I’m playing guitar. I added the Farfisa organ later (a REAL Farfisa organ I bought for $50 from David and Sean Johnson’s brother).

I’ve always thought this was an awesome song in how Cara expresses truly genuine feelings. In the first part of the song about spanking and whatnot she was being a bit Procacious. She was smiling and playing with it, (although as she kept jamming on the harmonica, tears would come to her eyes). Then in the latter part when she started talking about monsters and stuff, she was really getting into it and expressing real feelings.

I remember around this time we had been having some aggressive thunderstorms and hail which were frightening to her and she was crying and trying to work through her fear about them. I can’t remember if I suggested or it was something her mother or dad would say to her, but what calmed her about the thunder and rain was that it was Jesus playing drums.

And, finally, one great part about the song is how Cara ties it all together at the end with the song title. It’s really quite beautiful.

I just realized I’ve been working a long time. Almost 40 years. That’s enough, don’t you think? Of course, what I do now is so much fun that it’s odd to call it “work.”

The worst job I’ve had is “maintenance guy” at KMart. It was just really, really boring looking for things to keep you busy. I once spent 3-days cleaning the railings around the deli area.

The cheese factory was not much better. I worked at both Kmart and the cheese factory simultaneously. The factory was boring as well because it was so assembly-line type reptitious work all day long. And getting up at 3am didn’t help. I was in college at the time, but everyone else on my crew and the others that ate lunch at the same time seemed to be lifers there — and they all HATED it. All during lunch they would complain about how much their jobs sucked. Except one guy talked a lot about fishing; and for those of you who don’t know much about fishing there’s a surprisingly large amount of stuff to talk about it. This guy was sort like Forrest Gump’s shrimpboatcaptain army buddy.

There was one guy there named Kevin who I became pretty close with since we were both into music and recording. He had gotten a bacterial infection while working there that got into his blood and layed him in bed for over 6 months. I could never figure out why he would come back to work at the same place after something like that.

I worked in restaurants before college. Probably the most memorable thing that happened in the cook line was one night a customer kept sending his steak back because it was well done enough to his liking. For cases where a person wanted a bone-dry piece of meat we would put it on the grill and weigh it down with steel plates, pushing out all the juices. So here it is a weekend night and very busy like all weekend nights were and this guy’s steak comes back for a third time after the head cook had taken personal offence the first two. This cook worked in what we called “waffle stompers” then, which were sorta like army boots. When the steak came back this time, he grabbed it off his plate with his tongs and threw it to the ground and stomped down hard on with one boot, grabbed it back up, flipped it on the grill a few times, threw it on the plate and sent it out — it didn’t come back, nor did we hear any complaint.

For the most part, I’ve had great camaraderie at work throughout the years. Besides family, it’s where my longest-lasting relationships have come from. I’m probably not alone in that regard.

Following up on my post of yesterday, on further reading (I often read backwards) Solomon was not your typical one-sided purveyer of wisdom — no dogmatist was he. Earlier in the book of Proverbs he is counselling his son against the dangers of strange women. And I think this is one of the most beautiful passages I’ve read in the Bible. It is simply so earthy and human:

Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth. Let her be as the loving hind and the pleasant roe; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times; and be thou ravished always with her love. — Proverbs 5:18-19

I love reading history. I especially like reading about how people lived in early civilization. The Bible doesn’t really give us too much directly about people’s lifestyles, but the words people wrote, the quotations are fascinating I think. For instance, King Solomon’s observations on life in Proverbs:

It is better to dwell in the corner of the house top, than with a brawling woman and in a wide house. –Proverbs 25:24

A continual dropping in a very rainy day and a contentious woman are alike. –Proverbs 27:15

Thousands of years later and you still hear this kind of stuff.

I don’t know when
My little boy changed into him
Now he’s just a freak
So stiff and cold, he doesn’t speak

Don’t you look into his eyes
‘Cos before you realize
Oh, no! Oh, no!
It’s my Zombie Son!!
Oh, no! Oh, no!
It’s my Zombie Son!!

He wanders ’round
From room to room making moaning sounds
Stumbles in his dumb feet
Bet he’d eat my brain for a midnight treat

Don’t you look into his eyes
‘Cos before you realize
Oh, no! Oh, no!
It’s my Zombie Son!!
Oh, no! Oh, no!
It’s my Zombie Son!!

His zombie friends
Are just like him, will it never end?
Think I’ll just go and hide
And return in 2025

Don’t you look into his eyes
‘Cos before you realize
Oh, no! Oh, no!
It’s my Zombie Son!!
Oh, no! Oh, no!
It’s my Zombie Son!!

Zombie, Zombie
It’s my Zombie Son….

music and lyric by Bryan Baker
published by Blind Mime Music, ASCAP

Bryan Baker: guitars, bass, piano, farfisa, drums, vocals

Garbage Day is easy on my street because there’s a kid who goes around all the houses and rolls all the garbage containers out to the street for us. But it’s sorta creepy.

Our garbage pick-up is Friday at 7 AM, but this kid is taking is own family’s containers out to the street as early as Wednesday or even Tuesday, positioning and re-positioning them. He’s sometimes out there for hours after I’ve come home from work, hanging around the garbage bins, rolling them from one place to another.

He must wait in eager anticipation for Thursday afternoon ‘cos then he gets to roll everyone else’s garbage out to the street. Sometime’s he will move garbage from one bin to another in order to manage the overflowing garbage of one container. He’s often out there moving bins around past dark!

And we don’t pay him to do this. One time I happened to be sitting in my car while he came to wheel my gargage out, so I thanked him and he looked at me like it was strange that I should thank him — like he should be thanking me, I guess.

The loudest I’ve heard any kid laugh on our street is when his friends were racing him around in one of the empty bins one Friday afternoon. It was the absolute sound of carefree childhood.

Creepy.

Last Friday I was driving off to work and the garbage truck was making its rounds down the street. As I came by, Garbage Boy was standing close by, watching it lift a container up into the air, mechanically dumping its contents. The look on his face was utter fascination.

We recently renovated our shop so I had to clean out all the drawers and shelves and transfer all that stuff to the new graphic design room. Most of the loose papers consisted of old proofs and notes on projects completed long ago, but I came across this list that a Alex, a former designer, had made of things he wanted to do — like a bucket list, only he’s like 23 so I think it’s a list of things he wanted to accomplish before settling into the long tail of life or something.

I don’t really know why, but I kept the list. I’ve always had a little fascination for random found things like that. Like grocery lists and random notes. Back in GAJOOB’s heyday I toyed with creating a collage album from found tape and knew of a few that had been done. Later on I created a piece featuring an interview sent to me from the late Robert Winson. Dino DiMuro had a song on his The Simple Chance of Life CD which featured singing by one Mr. Carvel that he had found on a tape he had purchased at a Burbank garage sale.

Alex came to help out in the department last week and I showed him the list and I think the funniest part was that I had kept the list. When he left our shop around 8 months ago he was facing the long tail: girlfriend pregnant, new job, housing, etc. I’m not exactly sure if seeing the old list was already like a look back at another time for him.