12 October 2008
Change in the Weather
Lady Day, in the Day.
I blinked open in the darkness, the fir st conscious thought coming that perhaps things had changed, that it was going to be different than it had been.
I flexed a few muscle groups to test the hypothesis. Nope, still sore from wrestling the big bike around. Nearly seven hundred pounds of steel is a lot to move. I had to break the law to get incompliance with it.
It needed to be inspected, since according to the decals it had not passed since 2004.
So, to be legal I had to be illegal. First time out on the street, first time in the traffic with the beast between my legs. It was only a trip to the corner gas station to get the mandatory safety inspection, but now it is fully certified to operate, even if the whole process is backwards.
The score on the game floated through my prefrontal lobes and I winced. It would have been cause for deep feelings even a year ago. The Michigan Wolverines losing to the Toledo Rockets?
It actually happened. I put it aside. My boys are justly unranked this year, the season going down in flames. There were so many other upsets that perhaps this ignominy will pass unnoticed. I don’t even turn on t he television on Saturdays anymore. It is amazing what a fall day without college football can do for you.
Trying to ignore the season meant that the rest of the news stayed at arms length. The North Koreans are off the terrorist list, which iscrazy, they are just nuclear terrorists now. The Chinese, bless them, send an inert projectile to a co-orbital intercept with the International Space Station. It is a signal, big time, that nothing on earth or in space is sacrosanct.
I missed the rhetoric from the campaign trail. Politics is an awful business, but at this stage in the game, desperation is clearly rising. You can feel it in the air, and don’t need electronic media to feel the swell rising. It is now inevitable that Barack Obama will be elected President of the United States of America in less than a month’s time.
The shrillness of the rhetoric is in direct proportion to the realization that it is really going to happen. Maybe it is because we are still reeling with what has happened, unable to come to grips with Now, much less the future.
Britain8 0s empire died on the fields of France, yet the institutions staggered on through another thirty years. I imagine we will shamble along as well, and it is going to take a while for us to get on with business, as it will be. Everything- everything- is being revalued. Everything is going is going to be priced down, put on the block, sold off and sold out. Even if the glorious autumn weather continues, the climate and the weather has changed profoundly, and I have resolved to get with the program.
I was listening to old jazz on the radio last night, hoping to blank out the unruly present. It is comforting to hear the songs that were old before I was born, sung by young sultry women who are now in their graves. Some things don’t change, not the human heart, anyway, or why we couple and uncouple the way we do.
A couple of the old songs tickled my fancy. Libby Holman sung about a man who did not give her what she wanted, but delivered what she needed. He was a good man to have around, she concluded, though along the way she mentioned that she had also purchased a revolver.
But one got me singing from the balcony, looking out over Big Pink’s parking lot. A lot of people have rec orded it, but this version was by brilliant, beautiful, doomed Billie Holiday:
“There'll be a change in the weather;
And a change in the sea,
From now on there'll be a change in me;
My walk will be diff'rent, my talk and my name -
Nothin' about me gonna be the same.
I'm gonna change my way of livin',
And if that ain't enough,
I'm gonna change the way I strut my stuff.
Nobody wants you when you're old and gray -
There'll be some changes made today,
There'll be some changes made.”
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
“There’ll Be Some Changes Made” by Billy Higgins & W. Benton Overstreet, 1922
www.vicsocotra.com