Right now I'm listening to Blue. Joni Mitchell's Blue. Not Simply Red's Blue or anyone else's Blue. Joni Mitchell conveys the type of insanity I prefer. Schizophrenia (disambiguation) most splendid. The mental illness I'm most accustomed to. The mental illness I sidestepped. Did I avoid it by being authentic to myself, as I would like to believe? Or is it so I delude myself to believe? I ask myself these things but perhaps it's just my way of inspiring megalomania in my own case. So, I want to be a doctor. No big deal these days, is it? Do I want to have this pre-amble for my own pride or because I need to do it for my own sanity or is it my own insanity? I'm still listening to Joni Mitchell, so I can't be quite sure of anything right now.

I remember when I was much younger, twenty-one or so. 1984. I was working on a cruise ship in Hawaii. I have a million sea stories, but this on stands out to me to be the difference between being twenty-one and forty [gasp]-four. There were so many gay waiters on that ship! I was oblivious and naive. One asked me for his customer, to have "silver-dollar" pancakes. I was working in the baking department of the ship. A foolhardy career choice I would grow to regret.... But anyway... the waiter asked for some "silver-dollar" pancakes. I had never heard of "silver-dollar" pancakes before. So I didn't know what to do. What I probably should have done was ask, "What's that?" and after the explanation, followed up with, "If you want me, I'll be at the bar...." [Still listening to Joni Mitchell....] But I didn't say anything. I racked my brain for the answer. I had gone to cooking school. Silver-Dollar pancakes had never come up. Now I have to ask myself, why hadn't they? But back then, I searched the dark corners of my brain for the answers and there were none to be found because neither the definition nor the experience had ever been implanted there. I didn't have a very good relationship with the chief baker. I thought he was useless. I didn't get a positive vibe from him, and I didn't want to ask him anything because I was afraid of getting an answer that would make it seem like I was useless. I didn't want someone to tell me I was useless because I felt very much so on my own. Time was going by, and now answers were not being inspired divinely or otherwise. So I had to come up with something. My solution was to just make regular pancakes and give them to the waiter, and let the chips fall where they may.

Lately, I notice how many gray hairs I have. I look in the mirror in the bathroom and marvel at them, like they are a biological wonder. They don't make me feel old or anything because I haven't fully accepted them yet. I wonder and I have heard stories about changes to the diet, which will make them go away. I wonder sometimes if I should color my hair. But then I think, I have earned this many and many more gray hairs from my life and times. Taking risks for my own amusement and adventures beyond my imagination, these gray hairs should be doubled if they were earned that way. I know that they are simply epithelial cells, dead cells the body is rejecting, expelling. We choose to believe they are still a living reflection of our lifestyles. We color them and use heat and chemicals to get them to bend or flatten. So, I woke up and, "it was a Chelsea morning," [Joni Mitchell, remember....], I thought about making a few calls. One to my parents to tell them that my brother-in-law, came over last night and discovered that the reason my hot-water baseboard heat boiler was not working was because the circuit board containing the gas control circuit was corroded and needed to be repaired, which he did with an old soldering Iron which should be brought to "Antiques Roadshow," as he put it, and some plumber's solder. "I should have brought my tool kit," he said. My brother-in-law is a genius. He is literally a rocket scientist. I went over to my sister's house for Thanksgiving. So, Thanksgiving morning we sat 'round the kitchen table and proposed solutions to alternate fuel sources and my brother-in-law suggested that we should have a $2 dollar per gallon gas tax which would fund alternative fuel source technology and implementation. This would have the effect of increasing revenue for projects while causing people to be much more thoughtful about their petrol consumption. He said that SUV's would be off the road and people would be seeking more fuel-efficient transportation, forcing the auto industry to provide efficient options to this market. I thought that was a brilliant idea, but I wish it wouldn't have such a devastating effect on po folks [like me], who still would have to drive around the old clunkers because of the cost of buying new vehicles is so high. He said that would only be the case for about five to six years. After that there would be a renewal of the auto industry.

I have never paid more than $1,300.00 for an automobile. And I paid that to my dad for a 1981 Honda Civic, that had 60,000 miles on it. I put another 140,000 miles on the Civic and then sold it to my brother, who drove it around for a few more years, then sold it to someone else. I have never had a new car... ever. I never thought it was worthwhile to buy one. When they came out with "New Car Smell" auto air fresheners that were the "clincher." I could have that same smell while driving around in my 1976 AMC Pacer X, or, my Datsun 710. I also find it personally challenging to maintain and use older vehicles. I marvel at people who don't know how to, or even attempt changing their oil or brakes. People pay others to rotate their tires. To me that's like paying someone to eat my "Tin Roof Sundae" ice cream. My list of vehicles includes one that I never drove on the road. My first vehicle: 1968 Chevrolet Bel Air Wagon. White with a black interior, including a black shag rug in the back. It was very cozy. But at the time I got my driving license, 1980, the oil industry was being manipulated by the same folks that have been doing it until now, and the price of petrol was about $2.75 per gallon as it is today. Of course being an election year, the Republicans blamed it on those crazy Iranians and other Arabs and used things like that and more to sway the opinion of the American public, as they continue to do today. So with regard to politics, not all that much has changed. I always found it amusing that people would listen to Republicans. Their opinions are always so fundamentally flawed. So I sold my yet un-driven Chevy wagon to an older brother of my younger brother's friend. He had a scheme. He was working for someone in Freehold. An older man. A bit of a chicken hawk as I saw it. The older gentleman paid me by check, which he promptly stopped payment on. When I followed up on that, a tragedy happened. My brother's friend was killed in a hit-and-run accident. He was left to die in the woods here. After that had happened, I didn't have the heart to go after his brother for a few hundred dollars. "Laughter and crying, you know it's the same release...." Did I mention I'm still listening to Joni Mitchell....?

So now-a-days I ask questions. And if I don't understand what's going on, I stop everything and say, "What is this?" I guess that is the most fundamental change in my life over the past 23 years: Understanding that I need to know what's going on in my life and not be "Waiting for a car on the hill...."