ROW80 DAY 12 - SO WHAT IF IT'S THE WEEKEND?

Now that I'm "retired," weekends don't have the same meaning for me that they might for the 40 hour a week wage slave. When I did work, I worked more than 40 hours and I know that most people do, either out of necessity or because they genuinely love their jobs, so the 40-hour-work-week thing is kind of mythical. Of course, if we all lived across the "pond," in Orlando, er, ah, Paris, France, we'd work 20 hours a week, or something and take 37 weeks off a year. At least that is what I keep reading on HuffPost, or is it the Daily Beast? I don't know. I'm still reeling from the fact that TomKat didn't work out; I thought it was a forever thing. Holy Toledo! What next, Katy Perry and Neville Brand*? Oh, she was married to Russell? Who the hell is he? Never mind.

*Neville Brand (August 13, 1920 – April 16, 1992) was an American television and movie actor. The one Katy wasn't married to; color me shocked. Of course, I didn't know he died in 1992. That kind of slows down the romance.

*Russell Edward Brand (born 4 June 1975) is an English comedian, actor, radio and television presenter, singer, columnist, and author. The one she was married to. Is he funny?

So, you can see that I am really on top of it culturally, as well as politically, socially and economically, too. Or I will be, just as soon as I dig around in the couch I bought and dragged home from the Goodwill. Apparently, the people who deep clean the furniture and make it look less contagious beat me to whatever treasures lay in the depths. Nary a coin to be had. I did however, find 2 rusted bobby pins, a Buzz Lightyear head and a Pokey character and some hairballs.

Well, I was never one of those people who hated Mondays, was kind of okay on Tuesdays, sort of happy-ish on Wednesdays, lighthearted on Thursdays, tapping my toes on Fridays, drunk on Friday nights, drunker on Saturdays, blurred on Sundays and do the whole fucked up Merry-Go-Round all over again come Monday. I kind of let my dad do that. Except he just drank all the time. At least he was happy about it.

No. Although I did my share of tippling, playing music for a living and then going back to school because I was stupid enough to marry ANOTHER viola player who thought I was going to magically turn into a fucking zither player after I married this fucking dimbulb and I was too fucking nuts to tell him to A) go fuck himself or B) go fuck himself, so I did the simplest and easiest thing possible: I went back to school full time and majored in computer science. What a wise choice, because A) I did so well in Algebra and Geometry in High School, garnering an aggregate grade of "C" and those were sympathy grades and B) I fucking HATED math and C) I originally majored in a discipline that has been the same for the last 140 years and computers are ground-breaking technology. I turned one on... once. Maybe. Fucking brilliant. Made sense to me. Off I went.

Well, guess what I found out? Music is math. After all those years of fighting it, it turns out that all those cute little patterns and relationships, hand framings and thirds, fourths, seconds, tri-tones and such I learned on my viola? They're all in there. They're all in math. And they're just the cutest little things. Oh, I worked my ass off. I did 4 years of math in 2 years. I approached my college Algebra, Calc and Trig the way I did my viola in College. 8 hours a day every day. I really loved it. I had a professor, Dr. Gingrich who thought I was a "caution." I got all in a panic over something, I can't remember what and in an aside asked him about the "pretend numbers." He looked at me quizzically for a minute. "oh, imaginary numbers."

I finished school and divorced the dimbulb. And silly you just knew that was a match made in heaven. By this time, I was playing and traveling most of time. Weekends had no meaning at all. Musicians usually play on the weekends and Mondays are what we call "dark." During certain holidays, I used to play every day for about 3 months straight with no days off. I have friends who play out at Disney in their Candlelight Spectacular. That cranks up between Halloween and Thanksgiving and doesn't stop until after January 1st. The musicians will play 7 or 8 shows a day, of 45 minutes a piece. I played for Disney once up in the Midwest and swore never again; it was like boot camp, and frankly I don't like Disney. A friend of mine calls it "Mouseschwitz." I loved playing for Warner Bros. Give me Bugs anytime.

Speaking of old Bugs, I have Opera stories. I played in Opera Tampa for about 12 years. We've had about every catastrophe. Well, not every catastrophe. We didn't have the "Aida" one, where the elephant got loose, but we did have the Circus horse thing. We also set Mimi on fire in "La Boheme," but we were only kidding. Musicians are barbarians.

Anyway, I need to read me up some how-to on how-to end these blog posts. Just taking off and not wishing you good evening, or some other happy-crappy just doesn't seem right, but there it is.