The Lynnster Zone

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Dumb and Dumber – AKA Major Record Companies & the RIAA

Posted by Lynnster on January 2, 2008

First things first – Happy New Year, blogosphere!

So I was over catching up at Music City Bloggers this afternoon, when this post about now even more RIAA/record company-related lunacy and related issues got my blood pressure up. I was in the process of commenting over there when I realized that (in my usual long rambling fashion when ranting and raving with a bug up my you know what) I had gone on several paragraphs too long for a mere and appropriate comment. Thus, today I blog.

I am sooo glad this post appeared at MCB today because, a few weeks ago, there was a similar post on this same basic topic that I meant to comment on then and forgot to get back to. Then it got way down in the queue of posts, so I just let that thought go for the moment. Now I’m back and raring to chew on it ’til it’s a bloody, ugly, and messy unidentifiable pulp.

And yes, I meant that description to be as nasty and ugly and violent as it sounds.

I was just saying to someone last night, in fact, that I just do NOT understand why the record companies and the RIAA don’t understand that – over now all these many years these battles have been going on – they have not only COMPLETELY alienated but TOTALLY pissed off their largest and most profitable customer base to the point where most of us will NEVER buy another CD or similar media ever under any circumstances.

In 99% of most cases, I will simply do without rather than put another cent into record company pockets. There is, for the most part, just not anything I need enough that bad any longer… and whatever I will spend in the future is mere pennies compared to what I have spent on recorded music in the past.

I am not your “average music buyer”. I am your hardcore music JUNKIE who – up until all this RIAA battle crap started now years ago – spent probably on average of 95% of my disposable income on, commercially produced and sold, first vinyl records, then 8-tracks and cassette tapes, then CDs.

Yes, you read that right. Probably 95% on average. But just in case that figure is an overestimation, I know I can say, without a doubt, most certainly over 85%.

I have been buying records since I was three years old, walking around to the corner store from my family’s downtown store with a relative and picking out and purchasing those three 45 RPM records myself. My collection of storebought music – especially if you include the vinyl I eventually decided to part with – is HUGE. That’s nearly 39 years of buying commercial produced music in literal DROVES – again, averaging probably 95%, at least 85% of my disposable income, up until very recent years when it has drastically decreased because of this RIAA/record company BS and the ridiculous cost.

In addition, my father was also a pretty hardcore music junkie with a vast and huge collection – maybe not so much as me, but yes, exceptionally large – so put us together and that’s two consumers who spent, absolutely and most certainly, thousands and thousands of dollars on recorded music starting in probably about 1953-54-55-ish. So for the sake of argument let’s just say there’s 50 YEARS of extraordinary amounts of disposable income spent on recorded music there.

Then cometh the RIAA and its gestapo tactics and other pain in the neck policies and procedures and just general irritation and annoyance, as well as ever skyrocketing prices (I won’t get into DVD and VHS in this discussion, but I have a pretty large collection there too and talk about cost… ugh).

The result?

I have not purchased a commercially produced CD for myself in over two years. In fact, the number I have purchased in the last FIVE YEARS probably less than TEN.

The ONLY CDs I have purchased in that past five years or so were requested Christmas or birthday gifts for family, and that number is also probably less than ten, definitely less than 15… and more often than not, purchased on the secondhand/used market.

In the past, I used to buy more CDs (or tapes or LPs) in a YEAR than the average person probably does in a LIFETIME.

I now go out of my way to not have to purchase another commercially produced CD ever.

That’s sad, folks. That’s really sad. I’m sure record company profits look pretty pitiful as well and have for a while now.

They’ve done it to themselves.

I have a lot of love for some independent and not-major labels who have bent over backwards to try to do right by consumers and make up for what the majors and the RIAA have done. I’m not talking about those wonderful folks, many of whom I have at least a direct and remote acquaintance with some of their staff.

But at this point, and after all the increasingly horrifying tactics executed over the last several years, every major record label in the world that has fought alongside the RIAA deserves nothing less to go bankrupt and disappear. The RIAA deserves to be eradicated and in the future be nothing more than a past memory much like the Hays Code is to film.

Couple all this with the fact that in the last couple of years I have discovered that some of my storebought and paid for, commercially produced CDs are disintegrating (when they told us back in the ’80s that oh, CDs will last forever and it’s just nearly impossible to destroy them)… I’m done with buying music in the “old traditional way” unless (A) the record companies and RIAA stop being such idiots and a*holes and (B) the price becomes something REASONABLE again.

Right now my alternative means of acquiring music are perfectly legal. If the record companies and RIAA push it some more to make that impossible or just a more major freakin’ hassle too – I, again, will likely just choose to do without.

Sadder still that – not as a career but as a hobby of sorts and labor of love – in the past 15 years, I have probably been one of the fairly major independent supporters and mouthpieces for the alt/indie community in both the U.S. and (more especially) Australia, especially in certain circles; and as the Internet has grown, my influence has grown as well. Yeah, I should have made a real career out of it at some point probably, but didn’t.

Nonetheless, I have helped sell PLENTY of those CDs, records, and tapes over the years for many of those greedy companies simply as a major supporter and a fan of various and sundry artists, and a supporter of modern music in general.

Heck, I LITERALLY sold those CDs, records, and tapes for a time. I’m (surprise, surprise) a former record store employee myself, after all. You saw Empire Records or High Fidelity? I lived it (unfortunately without the hotness that is John Cusack, but that’s another blog post…).

Again, take heed, RIAA & record labels: I am not just Jane Average Music Buyer, but it’s bad enough you’ve angered and alienated the Jane and Joe Averages of the music consumer world. If a completely addicted, hardcore music junkie like myself hasn’t bought a CD for their personal use in two years, and few for three years before that – you people have got a problem that, at this point, you probably CANNOT really make that much better by attempting to do anything MORE about it.

But you certainly might be able to staunch the flow by simply STOPPING the current and ongoing utter madness.

From my viewpoint, the wound’s fatal; the illness is terminal. The RIAA and record companies have simply gone too far, and there’s a rare music consumer who’s going to forget about it in the rest of their lifetime of potential music buying. Even the most remote and not very active consumer who doesn’t think much about the music they buy and how and where they buy it – I guarantee you they are still thinking, when considering a purchase, about the insane cost of music these days and could they possibly get what they want by some other means than what the RIAA and record companies think – and are more and more often insisting – they should.

There are now, literally, TWO bands in the entire WORLD that might have future major label releases that I will support with my dollars in major corporate pocket if I must. There’s two more that could, but probably won’t. That’s four bands in the WHOLE WORLD.

Additionally, I will continue to support my favorite indie and small label artists however I have to. Hopefully by means that are music consumer-friendly (and most of them are) and not major label gestapo-like.

Even so, I suspect that – unless things in the corporate music biz change drastically – five years from now, I’ll be telling you I still haven’t bothered to purchase and spend any more of my disposable income on any major label, commercially produced recorded music. If at all, the number will probably equal exactly one. Yep, one CD.

There’s plenty of stuff I never got around to replacing on CD (or buying for the first time) over 39 years of music buying. Some box sets. Some special remastered CD reissues with all the bells and whistles and extra goodies. Extending my collection of some of the “biggies”, like the Stones, Zeppelin, etc.

But nowadays, I don’t care. Thanks to the RIAA and its cohorts within the major label industry, I no longer care one bit about that stuff I never got around to buying. Be nice to have, but I don’t need it that bad for what the industry has put this entire country – the entire world - through in the last decade.

And unless things change drastically – and I mean drastically - I don’t think I’m likely to ever start caring again. And I feel certain there’s lots more like me out there, as well as many, many more millions of Joe and Jane Average Music Consumers out there who are leaning in that direction these days as well, if not already there.

Ain’t that a shame?

ADDENDUM:  Don Coyote & I are kinda on the same wavelength this week, it would appear.

Posted in * top serious babble, aussie music, blah, blogfolks, blogstuff, favorite things, music, music city bloggers, music junkie stuff, pissed off, thumbs down | 2 Comments »

Love is a Mix Tape

Posted by Lynnster on October 18, 2007

This is another one of those long-delayed posts, much like the one about my trip to Los Angeles in March. Coincidentally, it was on the plane trip back from L.A. that I finished this book. I wasn’t long into reading when I realized this should not have been an airplane read and I should have read it at home in a weekend or something… mainly because it was a tremendous struggle to keep from weeping buckets uncontrollably on the plane.

I’m not sure I can truly do this work any justice with my words, so I’m not going to even attempt to make this out to be a big review of sorts. I just need to write about how awesome it is.

The novel I am talking about is Rolling Stone editor/writer Rob Sheffield’s Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time, now soon releasing in paperback in December. The book was brought to my attention last winter by Mike over at Chez Bez, who wrote about it here and here and brilliantly so, and I was just immediately, like, oh yeah!!!… I HAVE to read this! So I ordered it, then it took a while to get around to starting it as I’ve just gotten so lazy about reading anything that’s not on a computer monitor screen these days, and then I opened it, finally… and was immediately hooked.

It’s the story of Rob and his wife Renee, who had little in common except a grand love of music. He was a shy, geeky Irish Catholic boy from Boston when he met her, a loud and extroverted Southern girl (borrowing those astute adjectives from an excellent Amazon review, well put!), and they bonded over their rather extreme connection with the music thing – a dynamic I have not been unfamiliar with in both past and more recent years myself. They married during the Nirvana/Pearl Jam/and/all/that grunge age of the Nineties, and were happily so until Renee’s sudden and untimely death from a pulmonary embolism in 1997, dying in Rob’s arms in their kitchen and at a distressingly young age.

It is quite simply the most wonderful, and most gut-wrenchingly sad and heartbreaking, story I have ever read, I think… but it’s probably so to me because it hits awfully close to home – same age, same time, similar circumstances, and almost the same places. I cried not only when she died, but pretty much through the whole thing; I think I wept reading the first or second page, in fact.

I believe the only other book I have even come close to weeping so much over was Doug Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma, and that experience just doesn’t even compare – while heart-wrenching, the story itself is a fantasy. Sheffield’s tale is achingly real and almost unbearably so, but wonderful and beautiful all the same.

This book is probably not for everyone, but if you’re a total music geek like me – and especially if you are in your late thirties or early forties and were around and in the indie music scene wherever you were at the time – and even more especially, if you ever spent hours making countless mix tapes on those ancient antiques called cassette tapes, back in the days before the computer age – yeah, you really need to read it. And have a box of tissue handy – seriously.

Posted in * top serious babble, blogfolks, books, endorsements, favorite things, music, music junkie stuff, thumbs up | 4 Comments »

Two Two Two for My Family and…

Posted by Lynnster on February 25, 2006

I fairly recently found out – well, this really started almost a couple of years ago but let’s just say the brunt of it has come about in the past few months – that some of my relatives that I just really had no idea about are pretty cool. This is kind of disconcerting to be finding this out this late in the game. Who knew?!

OK, let me start over here and provide a little back story. I have practically zero family on my mother’s side; I’m the only child of an only child (my sister’s not really literally my sister) and pretty much everyone on that side of the family that’s not dead is really, really old, save for my mom and me; and even when there were still more living, there just weren’t all that many of them and they were all old. There are some extremely distant cousins, most of whom I’ve never laid eyes on and most don’t live in this area, but there’s not even really that many of them. So when I talk about family, and when I’m not talking about my mom and me and my sister who’s not literally my sister and my godmother and my brother-in-law, I’m referring to my dad’s side of the family. ‘Cos that’s the only extended family of any number I’ve ever had, really.

Anyway. I grew up as probably one of the most spoiled rotten children on the planet, mainly because I was the only one for a long time. For the first six years of my life, I was the only child, the only grandchild, and the only great-grandchild. That makes for a whole lotta spoilage, yep. I was not a bad kid by any means – actually I was a pretty good one and in many ways a miniature adult, which doesn’t really explain why I’m so obnoxiously immature and regressed in my thirties, but I digress… but yeah, definitely spoiled. I got everything I ever wanted and, most importantly, all attention was on me at all times.

Then my cousins started getting born – first as well as some seconds, all around the same time with the first wave. Now, I won’t say all was lost as far as my reign as Family Princess (heh) went. There are still certain and many advantages to being the elder and more established, yup. But all these babies started coming along and I had to share the limelight a little bit with all these drooling infants and wobbly toddlers. Which was okay – I wasn’t ever jealous or upset about it, that I recall – plus I still got most of the attention anyway. Plus now there was a host of other toys I could play with and toyboxes I could pillage besides my own.

In any case, my point is that I am five/six years older than the cousins closest to me in age. One set moved off to another state when they were still pretty young; the other set, I moved with my family to another town when I was 13 and they were still pretty young. Now, in the grand scheme of things, they’re not all that much younger than me – but in childhood like that, even a few years is a vast difference in age, of course. So really, I only knew all of these cousins as little kids. Had seen some off and on – and VERY rarely – as the years passed, but really, my experience with all of them, they were all very, very little. I’ve never really known any of them as anything BUT little kids.

I actually only had one cousin really close in age, and he was actually my dad’s first cousin, the youngest of my grandfather’s sister’s kids, and two years older than me. We were buddies but also only saw each other once a year if even that, because his family also lived pretty far away in another state. So for all purposes of this discussion, he really doesn’t count.

And when I was an older child, and a teenager – really didn’t have any interest in any of them or want to have much to do with them. You get to that point where you don’t really want to play with little kids anymore, you know. Although I’d still play with their toys anyway…

Then you have my second wave of cousins – one born when I was close to graduating from high school, the other when I was nearly 23 years old. Now, these two I saw quite often; one in particular, when he was little, I rather tended to try to spoil to death just like one of my aunts did me when I was little. Bought the child cool stuff, whatever his heart was desiring at the time – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles swag for a while, then there were the Mortal Kombat years. My then-boyfriend and I took him to the zoo once when he came to Memphis. But both of them, these two, I had a moderate amount of contact with.

But again – little kids. And with these two, even though technically they’re my cousins, because of the truly vast age difference there, it’s really been more like they’re my nephews and I’m their old maid, eccentric but slightly cool (I guess), aunt.

My contact with them was not so much as they went thru their preteen and teenage years, just due to different stuff going on within the family. My mom and I started spending our Christmases with my godmother and pseudosister and their family back around 1994, and though I did see the rest of my family at other times, not so much and so regularly as before. But enough so that I witnessed my little blonde towheaded cousin that used to sit in my lap and get read to grow into this big hulking teenage football player, and other such stuff that made me feel ancient.

Still, this one and the younger one – my contact with them as they got older was much more minimal. And every time I’d see them it was just so disconcerting. The other one grew to be very tall and big, much taller than his parents and certainly taller than me, who’s 5′2″. But both of them, again – to me, in my mind – should be little kids. That’s mostly what I knew them as, just as with the older ones.

Starting with a family funeral almost a couple of years ago, and then much more recently brought to light to me during more recent family funerals – though the times have been brief – suddenly I’m starting to get to know all these “little kids” as the adults they now are. Which is neat, but weird.

And I mean, heck – for one thing, I’ve got to stop thinking of them as KIDS – after all, the first cousin closest to me in age is going to be 34 years old this year, for crying out loud. The youngest of the first wave of cousins will turn 30 next year. The other two, one (the former great big hulking football player) is in his early twenties and is a great big hulking Marine now, about to get out this summer and planning to go to college now and later, hopefully, law school; the other will graduate from high school in May and is starting college in the fall.

One thing that makes me proud about this whole bunch is that the music genes of my dad, my uncle, and my dad’s cousin are strong, strong, STRONG. My Marine cousin seems to have missed that gene somehow (dunno how that happened) although he does seem to have some appreciation of music in general, and a couple of the others I think have only had some minor interest.

But on the flip side, you’ve got me and my completely out of control music junkie habit, and the guitar, and various other instruments in the past. One cousin that recently got his doctorate in music and is now a professor at a small Midwestern college. His sister has the music gene as well and was involved in music throughout high school and college, as has my young cousin about to get out of high school and who picked up the guitar this year much to my utter joy. And another who has been an accomplished drummer most of his life and has played in some pretty cool bands around West and Middle Tennessee, nowadays in Murfreesboro band AntiSense Therapy. I just listened to a few of their tracks on MySpace and I approve, much – they’re pretty cool. Kind of remind me of the Gin Blossoms or Jimmy Eat World or something.

As I keep getting to know them – what little I get to – after all this time, as adults, I find that all of these previously-little-kids are neat and interesting people. The ones who have been grownups a while, they’ve all kept good, mostly steady jobs and/or aced higher education, stayed out of trouble, just all done really well at whatever they’ve been doing. One’s the mom of the most adorable, curly-headed red-headed little girl you’ve ever seen. My other female cousin who is just brilliant and has this really cool, interesting, and refreshing view of things and personality. My big hulking Marine cousin who fully admits he loved playing football because he loved to just go bashing into things – underneath that knockabout exterior is a thoughtful guy with a really good heart who is also (kind of like somebody else I know) intelligent enough to have done virtually anything with his life, and hopefully he will. Really all of them have grown up to be pretty cool, levelheaded adults, and the one that’s just technically starting adulthood has always been pretty mature for his age and extremely intelligent.

He’s also the one that I usually buy music for at Christmas and birthday (which are only a couple of days apart). Since he was a young teenager, he’s always had an Amazon wish list, so that’s where I head when it’s that time of year. I always buy him whatever’s on his list that I can stand to, because although his tastes have evolved rather nicely in recent years, there’s still stuff on there I just refuse to. And I will admit – one year I did break down and buy him a Britney Spears CD. But it’s gotten easier and easier with him. This year it was Weezer and Green Day, and I can certainly deal with that.

Honestly, when it comes down to it – they’ve all shown me up. Me being first and only for the longest time, and also a rather precociously smart little kid – there were a lot of expectations regarding me and my future when I was young. We could be here all night if I really started talking about all that, but suffice it to say in some parallel universe somewhere there’s probably another me that kept getting straight A’s throughout all school, got multiple degrees from several prestigious universities and am unbelievably powerful and wealthy and successful in that parallel universe, as well as making all kinds of excellent and appropriate life decisions. Instead, I got tired of being the smart girl, realized I really just didn’t like school anyway (though I kept trying to give it a halfhearted try for a long time, really I did) – and made every possible bad decision and worse that ever came down the path, and now – well, here I am. Heh.

Anyway, in that regard, it’s all kind of ironic how things have turned out. But I certainly don’t begrudge any of them for showing me up, not in the least. Very, very proud of all of them – especially the two that I got to have a hand in raising, the two that now literally tower over me and outweigh me by about 100 pounds each.

But to bring this back on track, here’s the coolest thing of all to find out for me, in all this getting to know these previously-little-kids as the adults they now are. My male cousins are funny. Well, most of them anyway. They’re hilarious. And you know me – I appreciate a good crack-up more than most, and god knows I amuse myself enough, even if no one else is amused. (And I do have official credentials, says Miss Wittiest of 1984…)

I dunno, this shouldn’t all be a surprise, really. My uncle and my dad’s cousin both have terrific senses of humor and are just plain fun and interesting people, and my dad could be pretty fun most of the time. None of us cousins look much alike – not even the brothers and sisters, really. But obviously the music and the humor genes have passed on down the line.

I didn’t get to spend much time with any of them, all these brief funereal moments that have brought us all together recently and a couple of years ago. But since then, I have found myself wishing there’d be more opportunities and occasions to get us all together – preferably not another funeral, I’ve had about enough of those for the time being.

But yeah, I’d like to get to know all these strangers, who aren’t really strangers, a little better. Get to know who they really are and more about them, these adults that in the back of my mind should all be babies still. Hang out with them for more than just a few minutes. Be – undoubtedly – entertained by them, laugh a lot. They’re all really neat kids… oops… I mean, really neat people.

Of course, everyone gets so busy – including me – free time is always so limited nowadays. And the irony – I guess since when I was an older kid, I had no real interest much in any of those little kids – well, except for the one – probably most of them are too busy and into their own things to have much interest in hanging out with their approaching-middle-age cousin/”aunt”, and it’d probably serve me right.

All this weird reflection and introspection lately, it’s probably just part of a mid-life crisis or something. But yeah. Family. It’s a curious thing…

By the way, the Marine and the other young one have to put up with me whether they like it or not. Unless the boyfriend and I lose all sense of reason and intelligence and decide we’re gonna have kids in our forties… well, I’m pretty sure those two are smart enough to have figured out which side of the bread that butter is on…

Posted in * top serious babble, a family thing, ancient history, in memory of... | Leave a Comment »

Nothing Has Changed

Posted by Lynnster on February 1, 2006

Well, today has been a kind of bittersweet day for me – three years ago today, and the same day as the last space shuttle explosion, my whole world changed when three of my best and oldest friends were killed in a freak car accident together. In a life where I have now lost so many friends I have lost count as to how many exactly unless I think hard about it, in everything from accidents to suicide to AIDS to drugs to other illness to being at the wrong place at the wrong time during a robbery – in a way you get a little immune, but some have been harder to deal with than others, and they don’t really get better, it just changes. And losing all three at the same time three years ago, three of my best and closest – the rug really got yanked out from me there, and, in fact, was a good excuse not to blog/journal much for years as they were such an interactive part of my doing so, for years.

I think I said at the time I felt like I had a hole in my heart as big as the Grand Canyon. Well, I still do. It’s not much better, just different is all. There were twelve of us – thirteen if you count JJ – who were together forever, since college days – in mine and KC’s case, we’d been together since I was 7 and he was 8 years old – but yeah, twelve or thirteen. There’s six of us left now. SIX. Less than half, really. And the oldest one of the bunch is just now soon turning 42.

And in moving all the old blog entries I have thus far, one thing that really jumped out at me was the fact there are just paragraphs upon paragraphs and reference upon reference to KC, Greg, Duncan. A little of Scot, a little of Evan, probably a whole lot more of Jay S. because he was still around for a lot of it. Not much of Joey I’m sure, but he’s been gone so long that was like another lifetime ago.

But KC, Greg, Duncan – yeah. Anyone who’s been a relatively regular Zone visitor over the years, all knew of KC pretty well, he even had his own section on my site for a long time. There’s so much sprinkled throughout old blog entries of all three of them. Some even written when one or more of them were here at the house – a particular one that made me laugh when I came across it moving it last weekend, Greg throwing ice & other things at me from the other side of the room as I tried to type and barely could from laughing so hard.

Not too very long ago, Greg’s ex-wife Beck, who I was actually pretty close to at one time and lost touch with after they divorced, called to catch up. We laughed about KC and his acid tongue and rapier-sharp wit, and how he was always right all the time and it was so infuriating because you never wanted to admit that he was right and you were wrong because you’d never hear the end of it. Because KC and I carried on this “hate/hate relationship” most of our childhood, teenage, and adult lives, one of my favorite jabs was to outline in detail how he was going to die an old, lonely, grumpy man. Of course the truth to that was, had he lived that long, he would have died old and grumpy, curmudgeon that he was. But one with a heart of gold. That was always supposed to be a big secret but it was one everyone knew – especially me.

And Beck and I chuckled about poor brain-dead, blissfully ignorant and stupid Duncan – think Michael Kelso from That ’70s Show but prettier, blonde, and much more dense and ditzy. Exacerbated by some old habits in college days, yeah (heh); but his older brother Evan spent his entire and also too short life feeling guilty that he, Evan, was responsible for making his baby brother slightly retarded because he dropped Duncan on his head when he was a baby (he really did). Duncan used to drive me insane, tho in later years it was just more of a mild annoyance. One of my favorite memories of him is documented here on the Zone in a 1998 entry:

“…dipping into the viewer mailbox and Duncan, bless his psychedelically burnt out little brain, writes: ‘Are you still stewing? Because I have a favor I want to ask you but I don’t want to ask if you’re still stewing.’” Giggle.

And then Greg. My “little brother”. Possibly the man I should have married? Nah, probably not. Probably the most telling aspect of all about the relationship between Greg and myself, as well as probably the most telling of all dynamics of everyone in that whole group of twelve or thirteen, is in a short story I wrote about – matter of fact – the trip the whole gang made for Greg and Beck’s wedding, now all those years ago. So I’ll hold on to that for now, but for the record, of all the unfinished works, the one that is stories of the whole gang is probably the one closest to ever seeing the light of day of getting published.

It was good to have someone who knew them all to share all those memories with – there are fewer and fewer of us these days. I was glad Becky called.

Anyway… well, if you haven’t really been here before and get to thumbing thru old entries… meet my friends. They are all over the place in those old entries. And, today anyway, very much in my heart and not so far away. Ciao for now…

Posted in * top serious babble, friends are good, giggles, in memory of..., sad stuff, west end boys & girls | Leave a Comment »

A Good Day is Any Day That You’re Alive

Posted by Lynnster on March 28, 2005

I guess there was something big I forgot to mention that occurred during my two-year absence from the Web, something I remembered Sunday afternoon that I hadn’t written about here, remembered yesterday while I was sitting in the front room of an O’Charley’s on the south side of Montgomery, Alabama, watching hail beat down on the cars and pavement outside and listening to someone talk about a tornado that had allegedly touched down 7 miles east of there, well…

Almost two years ago in May 2003, I was driving home from my mother’s and back to Memphis. We were in the process of moving her into a new home she had just bought and this was what wound up being the third of four almost consecutive weekends I had gone up there to help move more stuff. As I usually do when I’m up there, I left much later than I probably should have, mainly because we had been sitting on her new front porch watching a storm pour down rain and go by.

Driving back to Memphis on I-40, as I got closer to Jackson I seemed to be having more difficulty keeping the car on the road for all the wind, and I noticed the lightning ahead seemed to be getting worse and worse. I called my mother on my cell phone and asked what they were saying on TV about the weather. At the time, Madison County, which I was coming into right about then, was just under a “severe thunderstorm warning”. I debated about pulling over then, but then decided to move onward, figuring if it got really bad I could just stop in Jackson and get a hotel room for the night and be done with it. Coming into Jackson, as I got to the new Campbell Street exit, I thought about pulling over again but decided not to. As I got into Jackson the wind was so bad and pushing at my car, I decided that was it, I was getting off on the next exit, which was the Hwy. 45 Bypass exit.

As I pulled off onto the exit, here came the hail. Giant, bigger than golf-ball size hail, in torrents. How I drove on up several more yards through it, I have no idea. Within seconds, there was like this huge river of humongous hail on the road.

I edged on up, scared to death ‘cos I couldn’t see if anyone was in front of me or behind me, but managed to get where I thought was on the shoulder – for those of you who know the area, I was right off the exit onto the shoulder of the bypass and past a concrete guardrail (should have probably stopped there) and could see the Vann Road exit sign (to Super Wal-Mart et al) directly ahead, tho barely. And hoping like heck no one would come up from behind and ram right into the back of my car, not being able to see me with all that stuff coming down.

The hail just kept coming and that was when I noticed the tiny cracks in my windshield. Soon they were bigger and bigger, and at that point I was so mesmerized in horror at the cracks I was barely paying attention to how loud the pounding was on the roof and hood of my car. I just kept watching in horror as more and more cracks appeared. The wind was hammering at my car, not moving it but it was somewhat shaking from side to side in place. There are several large shopping centers, the Super Wal-Mart and a car dealership directly ahead and to the right of where I was, as well as many other businesses, and lights were flashing all around as transformers blew, electric signs exploded, all kinds of stuff going on all around me. I never did really see anything flying through the air other than the hail – it was all just one great big gray blanket or sheet dotted with that huge hail, all coming straight at my car.

As I kept watching the windshield crack over and over again, now so cracked that the whole thing was pretty much one giant spidery crack with lots and lots of legs, it finally occurred to me that I’d better cover my head or something, and remembered I had the lids of two of those giant Rubbermaid tubs in the back seat, so I grabbed them and kind of hid under them, praying the whole time the windshield wouldn’t completely shatter, or worse. About that same time it occurred to me that I had put the car in park just past the concrete rail, and that there was probably a dropoff of some kind on the other, passenger side of the car, as I was up fairly high, possibly one of the highest elevations in northern Madison County.

Two important things about this experience. I have grown up where tornadoes and straight-line winds are commonplace in the spring and, in recent years, in November and December. Let me tell you, first, that all those things you hear your whole life about what to do if a tornado strikes, if you’re somewhere with no real warning – say, in your car driving down the road – all those things they told you about getting into a ditch or some other low place and such doesn’t do you a bit of good because when it hits like that, you don’t have time to do anything. At the point when I realized that something was truly and definitely wrong, within a second or two that river of humongous hail was coming down. For one thing, I don’t think I could have gotten the car door open to get out against the wind. And second, if I could have gotten out of the car, I think that gigantic hail would have beaten me mightily if not to death.

The other thing is, when it finally occurs to you that you just might not make it out of this – well, there’s nothing you can do. That’s pretty much it. I mean, yeah, I prayed I guess, I thought about some people and some things, all that kind of stuff. But as far as actually being able to do something, you’re pretty much completely helpless like that against Mother Nature. I mean, really, when the horrible realization dawned on me, it was just like, “Well, this might be it”. And that was that. Not another thing I could do.

I know it was probably only minutes, but time really did stop and the thing seemed to go on forever. When the car finally stopped shaking so much and the sound of the hail beating up my car got less and less frequent, I peeked out from under the Rubbermaid lids to find the windshield pretty much completely cracked, but intact still, not shattered. I sat there for a while trying to gather my composure again, called my mother on the cell phone and, very oddly calmly, told her what had just happened… collected myself again and decided to try to drive up to a convenience store I knew was just up the road a little ways.

As I pulled in the parking lot, I saw the person standing outside the store take in the appearance of my car and mouthed “oh my god”… several people had gathered there by now, including a Madison County sheriff’s deputy who had lost communication with the sheriff’s and city police department (the law enforcement transmitter downtown had gotten blown out in the storm as well)… everybody there pretty much looked completely shellshocked. More people kept congregating looking shellshocked. I sat down at a table, called my mother back and Kelli (who lived just up the road and wanted me to come stay with her, but as I told her the storm had passed and I was going to try to make it back to Memphis if I could). As bad freaked out as I was, I kept learning how lucky I was, especially when the married couple who were working at the store that night got a call from home near Lexington, 15-20 miles up the road, telling them that they had lost everything – their home, a shop, a barn on their property.

I finally got myself together enough to start heading back, slowly, towards Memphis. Even though the windshield was cracked all over there was a small spot in front of my eye line, so I could see well enough to drive tho it was a little tricky.

I pulled onto the interstate only to find that, just south of the exit, trees had fallen and were completely covering the entire shoulder of the road and much of the right-hand lane of the interstate for a couple of miles. This is probably where I would have pulled over had I not pulled off the exit. Scary.

And really no less scary in the coming weeks although after I spent the day off work and trying to compose myself back to normal and get over the jitters and freaked-outness, once I’d finally gotten home about 5 in the morning (when I should have been home around midnight), I was mostly back to normal. But the next weekend Andra & I went back up to Mom’s for the final bout of moving, and as we passed through where I had been driving on the other, westbound side of the interstate the weekend before, I saw all the decimated trees and signs twisted and pulled over and all kinds of damage up and down that side of the interstate… so if I’d pulled over and stopped before I did, too, who’s to say whether it would have been better or worse. Even worse, a few weeks after that I was headed that way again and decided to pull off the interstate real quick and check out the spot where I had parked, to see just what was on the other side of the car at the time… and the dropoff was much greater than I had thought. Maybe not enough to kill me, but surely had the winds pushed my little car over the side I’d not have gotten out of that unscathed.

But as it was, I did get out of the whole thing unscathed, physically anyway. My car, on the other hand, was another story – it wound up totaled, unfortunately, tho I kept it and did some minor repair (like replacing the windshield) and am driving it still today, hail dents all over and all. I was planning to get it repainted and see about getting at least some of the dents out, but to date have not done so.

Sure, I have been frightened at various times in my life… but not like this. That was most assuredly the single most frightening few minutes of my life. I really did think for what must have been several minutes but seemed like an hour at the time, as the tornado went on and on and on and didn’t seem like it was going to stop anytime soon, that I wasn’t going to get out of that alive, probably. Since then to this day I still carry with me a feeling like I am not really supposed to be here. It’s an odd thing to live with, very odd.

And tho when I’m home and the tornado sirens go off (there’s one just blocks away from my house at the fairgrounds so it gets very loud here) and especially if hail starts falling, I get pretty nervous… yesterday I wasn’t nervous at all, sitting in that restaurant on the south side of Montgomery watching the hail fall out the window (which I was sitting near but ready to move at any second) and listening to the sirens wail. I guess I figure I’ve already beaten the monster. Hope it’s the one and only time, anyway, ‘cos it is truly a game of chance, that… and I don’t really wish to bet on what the chances are of getting out of that unscathed a second time. Good night & be safe & most importantly – be happy.

Posted in * top serious babble, about the weather, in my head, natural disasters, near-misses, scary creepy stuff, travelin', west tennessee | 1 Comment »

That’s What Friends Are For

Posted by Lynnster on December 1, 1998

How can one get soooo behind in not even a week?! Augh. Anyway, because I’m so loopy and behind at the moment, I did not notice something, and many of you wonderful and kindhearted friends and whatevers o’ mine who participated in the Dockers Khakis-sponsored 24-hour donation for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation’s Link @ Life a couple of months ago probably got the same e-mail I did today regarding today, which is World AIDS Day. Allow me a little Lynnster graffiti leeway here…

All I ask is that you all please take just a moment out of your evening or day to remember the thousands upon thousands who have lost their lives to this horrid disease that’s become the plague of the century, and hope for a moment with me that someday the death toll of this disease will disappear forever. Even if you’ve been fortunate enough not to have lost a friend or loved one to this disease – in which case you should also reflect on how fortunate you are – if you know me, and especially if you know me well, then you’ve been affected because I have been affected. It’s my hope that someday they’ll finally find a cure and I will never, ever again have to watch someone I care about lose their life to this nasty disease long before it ever should have been time for them to go. Anyone who’s never seen it cannot possibly imagine the horror, and I hope that none of you will ever have to know.

While I’m at it, now seems like the perfect time for something I’ve been meaning to do, which is to give a great big rousing Lynnster Zone salute to one of the Zone’s best friends and supporters, as well as being one of my own dearest and favorite friends, Stefanie O. way up in Boston, who missed the chance to participate in the Dockers thing a couple of months ago and instead made a mighty and wonderfully generous donation to Memphis AIDS resource center Friends For Life in memory of the three friends I have lost to this disease. I simply cannot say enough about this way cool chick’s kindness and generosity, not only regarding FFL, but also in being a fabulous friend whose (generous and wonderful again) support of the Zone has very much helped to keep the Zone online this year as well as helping your Webmistress keep her sanity intact over the past year or so, helped keep said Webmistress from doing a lot of really stupid things, and basically has just been one of the very best friends a blonde chick could ever ask for, and she already knows this but I thank her anyway. If you look up “True Friend” in a dictionary, Stef’s picture would be there (lookin’ like Julianna Margulies and all, heh… and speaking of, we think y’all should know that it would appear that 9 out of 10 people look like someone on ER. Really, think about it, you’ll see!). (giggle) Anyway, this is my public salute to the mighty Stef here on World AIDS Day for such a generous and kind donation to Friends For Life, and ‘cos Stef’s just the coolest anyway.

There are three people you unfortunately will never have the pleasure to know because of this awful disease. Christy, she of the famous (to the Zone, anyway) brother Jay W. who continues to be a thorn in my side to this day… Christy who told better jokes than me, had a messier dorm room than I did back in college, and wanted everyone to know she got this disease from the only guy she ever slept with, back in the time when most of us didn’t even really know anything about AIDS except that it was what the actor Rock Hudson had died from. She may not have become famous like the late Alison Gertz, but she was just as brave and always hopeful that someday the world would stop seeing AIDS as just a “gay disease” and understand that it could happen to heterosexuals, and females, like her, too. She was darned angry, and rightfully so, to be dying before the age of 25. When my own 25th birthday came along, as much as I hated it and griped about it (a day which still lives in infamy among my current and former co-workers), I was just glad to be having one. It is now somewhat unbelievable to me that this beautiful young woman who was so full of life has now been gone from this earth for almost a decade now.

Then there was Scot D., kind and gentle and generous and in my life all too briefly and had a cooler and bigger record collection than I. I didn’t know that this disease had taken him until it was too late to do anything or say goodbye, and for that reason I am truly grateful for Memphis’ Friends For Life, which was there for him when he needed it.

And finally, another in a long line of Scotts and Scots and Skots I have known thru the years, my beloved, sweet, dangerously funny John Scotti Coletta, who I always threatened to marry if he hadn’t been so doggone obnoxious, prettier than Brad Pitt and sharper-tongued than me on even some of my best Dorothy Parker days, but a kinder-hearted soul you’d rarely meet under all that jest and bluster. KC complains that he never finds anything really gross on the Web anymore without Scot’s e-mails; I miss the early morning phone calls at my office, rattling away in my ear about something ridiculous when I’m not quite awake yet; and another Scott/Scot/Skot, Scott the Producer Guy, mused a couple of weeks ago that hanging out downtown just didn’t seem quite right without Herr Coletta’s trademark, way way too loud laugh punctuating every turn of the dinner conversation. It broke my heart like nothing else to see this tongue stilled so long before he took his last breath and left us all. I know Tim Vine stands with me in thanking so many for rallying ’round, in person, e-mail, or otherwise. Scot would be pleased, I’m sure, for me to tell everyone he was a real obnoxious pain in the neck, but he was a nice pain in the neck. (giggle)

Anyway… these were real people and friends to me just like yours are to you, or maybe just like I am to you if we’ve had the good fortune to meet, and there are thousands of others just like them from all walks of life, homosexual and heterosexual, black and white and others, male and female, who have left us because of this needless waste of a disease. All I ask is that you take a moment to remember all those thousands. But, if you’re so inclined and would like to do something else, Stef and I would be honored to direct you to either of these two things… you can click here to visit the Until There’s A Cure website and check that out, or you can contact Friends For Life at this snailmail address: 1450 Poplar Avenue, Memphis TN 38104. Whether you choose to purchase a bracelet from UTAC, make a donation to Friends For Life, or just take a moment right now to think and remember, we’re just as grateful.

I guess the moral to this story is don’t waste your life on stupid stuff and do it up right while you can. Actually, that might even be a better memorial to them and all the others than anything else. Thanks for listening, and good night for now… still gotta unpack, blah…

Posted in * top serious babble, friends are good, in memory of..., memphis, sad stuff, thanks to..., west end boys & girls | Leave a Comment »