Monday, Monday....

I remember the first time I was away from home for an entire summer I was working at Six Flags over Georgia. I way over-packed and had a foot locker of things I sent back home before the summer was over. I remember that I wanted to have some sort of music at the apartment I would share with David Wylie. It is not that I didn't trust Wylie to have some tunes, but figured it would be opera which was not what I was into at the time. I also knew that we would not have a television to watch.
It wasn't like today when you just take your Ipod and have hours and hours of music. Nor could you just go to Pandora and have all the music you like on a computer. The best that you could do back then was travel with cassette tapes. They were less cumbersome than vinyl records, but took up a lot of space nonetheless. You also needed a player which took up more space.
Just before I left for the job I found something called a "sound machine". It was about the size of a toaster and had speakers and a playback system for mini eight track tapes. Not the eight track tapes that were all over at the time, but a special smaller version of insertable cartridges. It was more expensive than a portable radio cost, but you could listen to the music *you* wanted to hear, not the lame choice of some Atlanta disc jockey.
By the time I spent my money on the player, I didn't have a lot of spare cash left over to buy the special cartridges. Of course it was just a paper weight without the music tracks. I was able to buy two "albums" and thought that I would get more as the summer went on. One of the cartridges was an album by the "Mamas and the Papas" which contained the song "Monday Monday". I played that album hundreds of times a day. Of course you couldn't advance to a particular song, you had to wait till it came back around again, but it was the only music I had. I understand now why Mackinse Philips turned to drugs if she had to listen to that music for her entire childhood. Instead of relaxing me during my time off it was starting to irritate me. It was time to buy some more music to play on my state of art player.
Unfortunately by the time I was ready too start my "sound machine" collection, the machine and all the cartridges had been discontinued. The biggest objection to the buying public was the lack of music available on that format. I was perhaps the only one to actually purchase the device, and there were no special tapes to be had any where. The toaster sized player became my nemesis, a repetitive machine that played the same tunes over and over and over. I started listening to Wylie's opera just to keep my brain from going into atrophy. I should have bought a radio. It was a great lesson in impulse buying. It has stayed with me all these years.
So today is Monday...Monday... can't trust that day....Monday, Monday sometimes it just turns out that way.....( it still haunts me.) and we have a day off. The forecast says it will rain all day. In Rochester the rain this time of year is just a dress rehearsal for the snow that is soon to come. There are no guarantees but I think we will be gone before then. We are starting our last week here.
It will be great to get some rest. For some reason the shows have been sapping my energy more than normal. The venue is a little tough and it takes more effort to move the story up the mountain. However, the crowds have been very responsive even when we have a light house. But I am beat.
So today on a rainy Monday, I will open my Ipad to Pandora, or download some videos to watch, click on IHeartRadio, listen to the the hours and hours of my own mp3's, play some computer games, draw on an art app, surf the Internet, write and publish my next blog, email everyone in my contacts file, post some pictures on Facebook or stream the Conrad Murray trial for entertainment, all on a device that is the size of a thin spiral notebook. For sure I will not have to listen to the same tune over and over again. If I get bored it is my own fault and not the fault of technology. This digital age is either coming to the rescue of us bored road monkeys or it is creating a generation of attention deficit syndrome personalities. About the only thing that my iPad can't provide is rest, but who has time to rest with everything there is to do on a black screen.
As you were,
Jay