No Vacancy

 No Vacancy.  

August 29th 2020 

"You smell like a brewery", they say...  once you get five or ten "You smell like a Brewery's", over about three months you deserve a cold one.  

Go ahead, you sincerely deserve it.    Once the adding and subtracting of living around and dealing with addiction.  

It bites like a sonofabitch.  Looking right down.  It's fabulously tragic, and clear as glass or new clear plastic.  Like a new Compact Disc or album on tape upon opening.  Not one scratch, not one fingerprint, nor rub mark.  Some times there were tapes whose cases or bodies were colored and clear.  

I remember about 25 years ago or so there was a Ren and Stimpy audio cassette.  For those of you who don't know, Ren and Stimpy was am animated cartoon which was more "alternative", than the normal good versus bad schlock we were being fed on the major and minor networks...  when they still showed cartoons. 

It wasn't Anime, it wasn't classic style.  It made you want to listen to Jazz after watching it, and then some punk, some grunge, or some art rock or new wave or industrial...  Some shoe gaze stuff, or some Zappa, or Captain Beefheart or old old Pink Floyd.  Definitely some Brubeck or Miles Davis.  For sure some Steely Dan.

Ren and Stimpy was the kind of cartoon that I wanted to smoke ciggies and pot and drink coffee after words.  It wasn't a show I wanted to get messed up while watching.  Not that messed up.  Not drunk.  If you weren't on the right chemical channel with that show the thing could get real wierd.  Not good wierd, but real wierd.    

Sometimes I think that I was looking at a hologram when I started watching that show.   Other people saw it, too.  Other people enjoyed "You Can't Do That on Television",  "Turkey TV", "The Adventures of Pete and Pete", and more shows on Nickelodeon.  

Nickelodeon was around since the beginning of Cable TV.  Since the time of MTV...  back when they had music on.

This is 2020.  Nickelodeon has sure as fuck changed.  It isn't 30-40 years ago.  This isn't the 1990's.  This is not the mid to late 80s with USA's "Cartoon Express".    This is not the days of rabbit ears local stations with After School programming, it isn't the same any more at all.  Then again, I'm 44, or so they say.    I haven't been able to figure out what the hell happened after around the mid 90s.    

Not only was it the changing of TeeVee and less cartoons on the normal stations and modes of reception, it was also the removing of Rock on TV.  it was the removal of the "alternative", sounds on the TV and radio except for taking in a few songs that were halfway tolerable in between the commercial piles, everything from Levi's Jeans to Hot Topic store ads, Warehouse Records and Tower ads, K-mart, Thrifty's, Movie ads, PSA's about AIDS and the drug war and how you need to talk to grown ups  when you're getting molested and a tonne more nice and clean things that we used to just ram into our eyes, ears, hearts, and minds.

The plastic divide.

When less rock music was being played...  and pushed...  between 1990 to ... the late Nineteen Nineties, I think there was a real ...  separation for me, from some of the art.  I tried my best to bite into it again, hard.  There was a purity when I would buy a three pack of blank audio cassettes, there was a bliss.  I could copy tracks from the radio, I would also use the tapes for saving data from time to time on Apple, Atari and Commodore computers.   

I could also use the headphone output on the little black and white television, that I blew up one night after midnight, trying to fix the picture tube, to be able to tape TV shows audio, especially cartoons and music videos and rock performances.  I also taped Comedy...  Carlin, Robin Williams, Richard Pryor, Robert Klein, Sam Kinison, Rodney Dangerfield, and more.  I also taped spoken word and performance art like Laurie Anderson and Spalding Gray.  

I didn't know how to repair or replace picture tubes.  I will not try to do it, ever again.  

I know that there are precautions that need to be taken regarding grounding and things before doing certain stuff with picture tubes.    Go look it up.  I filled my old bedroom with sparks from the back end of the thing, shooting about like a field of stars or a firework display.    I could have died.  I could ...  have died.

just get another tv from now on, kids.

+OCM+