Barking at the radio that is.
Today I have to admit to several bad habits. I kind-of discovered the first really obvious one this week when I continued with the job of getting this whole place clear of rubbish, junk and ‘useful’ stuff that i’m never going to use. Yesterday, in blog time, Jackie got the job of managing the admin side of giving away the huge collection of pots, planters and garden trays that I have collected unknowingly over the last few years. I can explain the large planters slightly in that they’re the kind of thing that constituted our entire experiment of a garden – all done on the small back patio of a terraced cottage where we lived before we came here. I have recently gone back to that practice as i now use half a dozen really large planters as my veggie patch and if i’m thinking about it in the autumn I plant up several of the smaller ones with spring bulbs ; anyway, it was long past time to have a huge clearout.
Today, Monday, i’m wandering around the place a bit listless for jobs to do while I wait on the builders merchant lorry to drop off a load of hardcore and sharp sand for the workshop floor sub base. At the weekend builder Steve (the can-do Kangoo man) turned up with his big breaking hammer and power chipped out the really hard concrete that I just couldn’t touch with my pathetic lump hammer and cold chisel. I’d thought about hiring one and doing the job myself and i’m glad that I didn’t because I could barely cope with the weight and sheer power when I tried it (it’s also insanely loud)- anyway, that job is done and it took me most of the next day to clear out the debris.
This week though iv’e been practicing my other bad habit – which is shouting at the radio in the car and then again in any store that we frequent that plays ‘popular’ music on it’s PA. My partner calls me a GC – short for a grumpy something but then she’s just as bad when it comes to shouting at our idiot MP’s when they feature on her Youtube feed. The real cause of toy-tossing rage for me is every time I hear the millennial whoop, so called, over and over and unfortunately now it all seems to be bloody millennial whoop and i’m sick to my back teeth with hearing it. Some commantators say that it’s a recent thing – millennial music at it’s worst although I think I first heard it from that Irish super prat (Bonio) many years ago.
If you don’t know or don’t recognize the thing i’m ranting about then listen to around 10 seconds of this – any more and you might be tempted to teach your computer how to fly ! According to that font of all true knowledge – Wikipedia of course – the actual whoop is a specific pattern of the use of notes in a melody, usually the 3rd and 5th – there do seem to be variants though and they are all bloody annoying. “The millennial whoop is a vocal melodic pattern alternating between the fifth note — the dominant —and the third note — the mediant — in a major scale, typically starting on the fifth, in the rhythm of straight 8th-notes, and often using the “wa” and “oh” syllables.”……now you know, or should I say now you wah oh wa oh ?
This brings me on to what I regard as, currently, my worst habits : the first being that I get into a basic understanding of something like the millennial whoop, next i’m disappearing down a Youtube driven deep dive – straight down the rabbit hole and last of all I become a bit like our man Bonio……suddenly a self styled expert on the subject(any subject in his case)….in mine though of music getting worse ; in this case a lot worse.
My very bad habit here, once iv’e landed at what I think is the bottom of the rabbit hole, is that I always tend towards confirmation bias and in this case there are plenty of videos all with the same sounding kind of bias : that modern music really is awful and mostly because it’s all the same – which is how I see most of it so that’s my confirmation right there. My greater problem is that, like most people, I rarely take the time to do my my own reading & research but instead, again like most people, tend to farm out the problem to others : then though it’s rarely the case that a view is original or even at least researched so what we mostly get is a second and third hand regurgitated view – essentially a copy of a copy of a copy all the way down the same rabbit hole.
My partner (Jackie) recently asked me what I thought were the worst affects of my series of minor strokes – my answer being that the hardest feature to deal with is the psychological one. At first I seemed to have become very volatile and stressy and in my own thinking there are days where my mind seems to be a stuck record. To explain this i’d like to round up this post with a sea story which is a reasonable analogy for what it feels like.
In the spring of 2019 I retired from my NHS job and within 24 hours I was aboard my little Cat Ketch heading downriver into a first night at anchor, It was clear but strikingly cold. Three days later, on another cold spring morning I left the moorings at Fowey to head out across the English channel towards Brittany. Iv’e written about this before – what I predicted was a slow motor-sail downwind which I estimated to take me around 24 hours if I aimed for Roscoff and a few hours more if I went straight for L Aber-Wrach.
What I actually got was a brisk and extremely cold south easterly which, coupled with the large spring tide resulted in a violent ride as the little centerboarder crashed, banged and lurched from wavetop to wavetop. I was very cold, very sick and I became extremely tired. One of the worst things to happen was what my head was doing ; I seemed to have a single music track on endless repeat in my head and it wasn’t even a band or track that I enjoyed – today in the same situation it would of course be the infamous millennial whoop – just imagine how awful that would be.
Today, I think that it was simply a feature of being extremely tired – I was so cold, sick and tired that I was beyond being able to sleep even if I was able to find a position in which the boat wasn’t trying to bounce me around the cabin like a rubber ball. The mental phenomenon eventually settled but only after about 18 hours spent asleep in the still anchorage in the river near Paluden quay. Today though I seem to get tired very quickly and my mind seems to act, once again, like a stuck record except that it’s not music that i’m stuck on but can be anything. It is particularly the case if iv’e been watching too much or too many short Youtube clips – over stimulation perhaps and the same over stimulation which also affects my attention span for other things.
In boomer musical terms – ok so that’s just my generation musical reference again it’s like a line from a Pink Floyd track……..there’s someone in my head but it’s not me.….I find it entirely suitable that the track is called Brain Damage
Instead of my usual end greeting (outro ?) all I can say is……Wa oh Wa oh
Dirty Wet Dog, the great adventure. 