This is a song about Johnny Shines, a bluesman who traveled with the legendary Robert Johnson at times. Robert would go to some town with Johnny, stay and play a few gigs and then leave and go somewhere else without saying anything. Johnny would eventually catch up with Robert somewhere else. Then, Robert would leave again without saying anything. It reminds me of a man who does that to his wife or girlfriend, although sometimes he leaves in an emotional sense instead of a physical sense; he’s there but he’s not there, if you know what I mean. This song kind of melds the Robert Johnson/Johnny Shines relationship as well as the other type.

Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on

That man’s going to leave you in New Jersey or New York

But shine on, Johnnie. Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on

That man’s going to leave you in Memphis or Arkansas

That man’s got to ramble. Lord, he’s got to be alone

Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on

Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on

That man, you know he come and go as he please

Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on

I know that man, he bring you to your knees

He keeps his running shoes with him when he sleeps.

But shine on, Johnnie. Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on

But shine on, Johnnie. Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on

That man took the last nickel from your nation sack

But shine on, Johnnie. Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on

He swore one day that he would put it back

Even though he wants to, you know that man just can’t

Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on

Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on

That man, you know he’s as good as they say

Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on

But that man says he sold his soul along the way

Only the good Lord knows it on Judgment Day

So shine on, Johnnie. Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on

Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on

Old Honeyboy tell you that your man is dead and gone

Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on

A jealous husband, that man he did some wrong

Don’t believe him till you see that cemetery stone

Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on

Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on, Johnnie. Shine on

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Dreams relating to football. April 12, 2009

Woman plays football: We go to a “high school” football game. Bright daylight. I’m on the sideline. Our team is in medium blue uniforms with red numbers and white trim. A petite woman from church is the only girl on the field. There is a kickoff and the other team returns the ball. They don’t get very far. And after the tackle is made, a player on the other team just kind of stares at the woman like he’s mad or something. The woman, wearing her glasses, just sort of backs up. The referee has to make the guy move back. We are trying to figure out where the ball is spotted. Is the other team at the 10-yard line or the 30? The yards lines seem to be scrunched at this end of the field.

Football game on a hill: Then we go to a “Shelbyville High School” football game. Day time, although not as bright as the previous game. The field is very strangely laid out because one half of the field has been flooded. We can’t use that end of the field, so the opposite end zone goes beyond the fence and down a small hill, which a ticket booth has been built into. There’s a small part of the field that is marked off with orange flags that is too flooded. You have to run around that part. My youngest brother goes up a path along one side of the hill and building to try and see what’s going on in the game. I try to get up there, too. But it is crowded.

A lovely little song that came to me in the shower recently. Enjoy!

I’ve got a pimple on my face

In a real obvious place

And I am in a race

To get it gone (get it gone)

Be gone acne zit! Be gone!

I’ve got a pimple on my nose

You ought to see it grow

I can not smell a rose … anymore

(With your nose?) With my nose!

There’s a pimple on my butt

Just one, and not a glut

It’s a hard and nasty nut

To crack! (on your back?)

No! Not my back.

By my crack! (By your crack!)

But speaking of my back…

There’s a pimple on my back

This bump I wish I’d lack

I really need to whack

With an axe (with an axe)

There’s a pimple on me knee

When all the people see

They say “Hey, golly gee

“You know … there’s a pimple on your knee.”

No really (Yes really!)

There’s a pimple on my shoulder

And I’m kinda getting older

So I’ve got to get much bolder

And get it gone (get it gone)

Be gone acne zit! Be gone!

Be gone acne zit! Be gone!

This zit has got me under my skin [ a la “I've Got You Under Your Skin”]

Wash with soap and water, or acne makes you hide [ a la “Smoke on the Water”]

Zit, you give pus a bad name (bad name) [ a la “You Give Love a Bad Name”]

Come on, baby fight my blemish [ a la “Light My Fire”]

Pop goes the whitehead! [ a la “Pop goes the Weasel”]

And she’s buying some benzoil peroxide [ a la “Stairway to Heaven”]

Dream – 10/30/2008

I am at a baseball game … a Cincinnati Reds game and am in the upper deck looking down at the field. The umpires are being driven around the warning track behind home plate on golf carts.

People think it is funny to throw cups down onto the umpires. A big guy to my left tosses a cup that has very little beer left in it down on the umpires. I’m not sure it even hits anyone. I think he is a doo-doo head.

A pre-teen boy to my right sees this and tosses two cups … one of them containing a great amount of liquid. He laughs as he throws them.

I grab hold of his arm and tell him that was wrong. He gets upset and asks how come I picked on him. I take him to the usher to have him perhaps booted out of the ballpark.

I start to think. Why did I do something with him and not the other guy? Cause the kid was smaller? I wonder.

No, it was because what he did was way worse than the other guy. The other guy tossed down a paper cup that wasn’t going to get anyone wet and wasn’t going to hurt anyone. The kid threw down a practically full cup of soda or whatever it was.

He should not compare himself to the other guy anyway. He needs to compare his behavior to that behavior he ought to display. Anyway, that was my thinking.

We moved from the big city of Milwaukee into the fine suburb of Wauwatosa when I was in kindergarten. Dad signed for the house on April Fools Day in 1969, and as I recall him telling us, the house was purchased for $25,000, a pittance compared to what real estate prices did at the end of the 21st century.

We must have moved in a short time later as I know I only spent a few weeks of my kindergarten year in my new school.

There were a few differences between my old school and my new school.

At Neeskara, on the west side of the city, our class shared restrooms with a class of deaf kids next door. I remember knocking on the boys’ room door once, and hearing nothing, walked in. One of the deaf kids from next door looked up from the toilet a little surprised and a little embarrassed. I have a feeling I was almost as embarrassed as he was. I quickly shut the door, and returned later.

At Lincoln School in Wauwatosa, I shared a locker with Jim Hollenstein, who ended up going to school with me all the way through high school. They didn’t usually share lockers, but there were no others available, it was almost the end of the school year, and we really didn’t take much to school in kindergarten.

At Neeskara, I was considered something of a class clown. I was the idiot who got in trouble by peeking out the door to see if the teacher was coming back when we were supposed to be resting on our mats. My friend, Danny, who lived across 45th Street from us, always wanted to fight. Not because he didn’t like me or anything. That’s just apparently what his favorite pastime was … fighting. We didn’t see anything wrong with it. We were just playing.

My fighting days ended when I got in trouble for smacking a younger kid at Danny’s birthday party once. I forgot what this kid did, but it must have been pretty awful. Maybe he tried to grab a piece of cake I had or a balloon or something like that.

At Lincoln, I got labeled a brain as I proved that I could indeed count all the way to 200 while we were standing in line waiting for school to start one day.

I got rides to and from Neeskara. We lived a good 12 blocks or so from the school and we were fresh off some riots less than two years before determined to be racial in nature down the street a ways that were part the bloodiest night in Milwaukee history. I remember once my dad coming to pick me up from school, and he was late enough that I was still standing outside the school on Hawley Road when my teacher left the building. She wondered if someone had forgotten about me. But Dad pulled up in his new forest green VW hatchback as she was standing there … or briefly after she went on her way. I can’t quite remember.

But at Lincoln, I walked. It was about five measly blocks or so through a middle class neighborhood. No busy streets, just lots of sidewalks, trees and fine, upstanding families for the most part who cut their grass, threw out their trash and made sure their houses didn’t fall into disrepair.

I had two younger brothers at home by then and Mom needed to stay home with them while Dad took the radical hatchback to work. We only had one car and Mom was a housewife during the week, and nurse on weekends.

The first day of school, though, Mom dropped me off. She explained very carefully how I was to get home. I was to walk one street north from school, turn left and go until I saw the house … about four blocks. OK, I can handle this, I figure. One street, turn left and go home. Easy enough.

So, when school ended that day, I went north to the first street, turned left and walked. After a few blocks, I started to notice that this didn’t seem to look like what I remembered Mom driving past on the way to school in the morning. I looked around and looked for the next street. But I couldn’t see one. This block was the longest block I’d ever been on. There were no cross streets to look at street signs and determine if I was on Hillcrest Drive as I should have been.

This 5-year-old started to get a little nervous, when I turned around and I saw this little girl walking behind me. I recognized her from my class. In my mind to this day, I can still see her in a white, flowered dress and short blonde hair. Although I have no clue what her name was, and I think she moved from that house soon because I don’t ever remember seeing her again. I waited for her to get up to me and asked her politely if she knew where Hillcrest Drive was. (See! Guys do ask for directions.)

She said she didn’t know, but that her mother ought to know. So we walked to her house, which just happened to be the next house. It was a red, brick home set back from the street a little bit. The girl’s mother asked me if I knew my phone number.

And I did, of course, being the brain that I was. So, she called my mom to find out where I lived. Once she got off the phone, she explained that I had turned one street too soon and landed on Warren Avenue, which didn’t have many cross streets coming through that area.

Fortunately, I was only about one more block from the next cross street, 81st Street. So, I made my way down to that street, took a right and only had one more block to go before I could see my house on Hillcrest Drive.

I had to explain to my poor, sweet mother the difference between one “street” north of school and one “block” north of school. There’s a big difference, Mom.

I think of that little blonde-haired girl once in a while and wonder who she was. I’d like to thank her. If it weren’t for her, I might still be wandering Warren Avenue in search of my home.

I started working for the Marine Bank in Milwaukee when I started attending the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. It was early in 1983. I had just transferred schools, just moved back in with my parents, thanked my dad for co-signing a loan to pay for tuition, and needed a job. My aunt and my cousin worked at the bank, and I got a job in the mail room.

I processed mail, delivered interoffice mail to bank branches and picked up stuff. I’m never sure exactly what I was picking up. Mostly receipts and canceled checks I guess. They were in metal boxes with locks on them.

I enjoyed driving to the different branches in suburban Milwaukee. It was nice to be on the road, stopping at fast food restaurants and such as they generally gave you plenty of time to get from one destination to the next.

Most of the time I spent at a building about half a mile from the main office building, which was housed in a rather tall building for Milwaukee. Then, I got switched to corporate headquarters and had to use the freight elevator to get huge dollies full of boxes and stuff from the service entrance to the mailroom, where it could all be sorted, then delivered to the various departments.

Well, the place demanded dress shoes as I was near corporate people. But mine were somewhat worn and trying to get a head start on a linoleum floor to push that heavy load up the ramp to the mailroom proved a bit of a pain sometimes. I had to have one of the maintenance guys help me once. He was some body building pro wrestler type who looked kind of mean. I didn’t like thinking I was going to be squashed by a load of boxes rolling back on top of me. But then I didn’t like having to ask him for help either. I finally did because it had to be done. I wore tennis shoes from then on and had no problems whatsoever.

Then, for a time, I drove the big blue van back and forth between the two downtown buildings. We transported people as well as used hand trucks to pick up shiny metal boxes from place to place on a schedule that was rather tight. Not too much time for tomfoolery.

We had a mailroom Christmas party once where some of the guys who worked there had an air band. I won a bottle of wine andtwo wine glasses in a raffle just after telling my friend that I never win anything.

Mostly, though, I remember some of the people I worked with.

There was a deaf guy in the mailroom who ended up committing suicide. There was “Shaky Jake,” an older messenger with a shaky hand. There was the short dude who was my boss who spent his evening hours introducing a band called “Rocket 88,” which played rock and roll oldies. There was a guy who got fired a few months after he started cause he was stopped speeding at some unreal speed. There was the guy who said that wearing “protection” was like taking a shower in a rain coat. Then there was the guy I hung out with a couple times who lived in a somewhat suspicious area of town with his wife and his guitar. The guy who was a drummer in some local bands andgrew up with my cousin. I had actually met the guy several years before at my aunt and uncle’s summer home in Hancock, Wis., and was scared of him cause he had really long hair. By this time he was balding. And others, of course.

After a while, I picked up work at the Milwaukee Sentinel as a scoretaker in the sports department, and eventually to a part-time reporter. By the time I left the bank and all its wonderment behind, it had been bought by Bank One.

A continuing look down memory lane by checking out old desk calendars I found not all that long ago:

My second semester of my sophomore year in college included a change in majors … from the 14,892 I thought about at Madison to Mass Communications (Radio/TV) at Milwaukee. Even though I was a sophomore, I had to take the freshmen Mass Comm classes since I hadn’t taken any yet.

I wish I could say I recall a lot from those early Mass Comm classes. But I don’t think my professors are around anymore, so I wouldn’t be hurting their feelings to say I don’t recall much.

Some of what I do recall are the hands-on types of things we did. Playing DJ and recording our own radio commercials in the Mass Comm radio studio was pretty cool. I did mine as a play off some commercials we used to hear back in the day. There was a guy called Crazy TV Lenny out of Madison, who used to do these real loud, fast commercials spouting the bargains you could get as his stores. So my parody was Crazy TV Lenin. I did this whole Soviet thing (it was still the Soviet Union back then). I slowed the reel-to-reel tape down when I talked into the microphone. So, when you played it at normal speed later, it sounded almost like you were one of David Seville’s chipmunks. I also know I played the Split Enz’s “I See Red” at the end, a Communist reference.

I also wrote a series of radio and/or TV spots for Miller Genuine Draft using Doors songs behind the voice over. And I wrote a script for a radio play on the history of the Doors, even so much as timing every portion of every song to the second. It was a lot easier to do the work when it was something I was interested in.

Then, there was TV Production. Everyone in class had to produce a TV news broadcast, using people in class to do the various parts of the show, from the anchor to the weatherman to each camera position, and the guy who typed the graphics onto the TV screen. Wow, what a lot there is to direct. We had one guy who was hilarious as a weatherman, and everyone wanted him to do it. He’d put on a scarf and pretend he was being blown about, and other tomfoolery. A black guy, he used to tell us he went to tanning salons now and then just to freak the white people out.

In one class, I had to write a letter to the editor. I wrote to one of the local sportswriters and told him I thought he did a great job. I later found out that this guy was the professor’s son’s best friend. I had no idea! No, really!

Other than that, it was a lot of theory, a lot of the FCC and stuff like that.

One of my favorite classes that semester, though, was a basic philosophy class. It was quite interesting, although I thought I failed the final exam right up until the time I got my report card in the mail. I think I may have had a B or B+ average heading into the final. In the final, we were asked to discuss certain philosophies, who purported to philosophize in such a fashion, and when they lived and crud like that. I had no idea. I could discuss the ideas, though. So, I talked about each viewpoint, said what arguments could be made for and against each viewpoint, and left it at that. No names, no dates, no nothing. I do recall that one of the questions was that old tree in the forest one … you know, if nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? My answer was “it doesn’t matter.” Of course, I did expound upon that statement, explaining why. And I also explained the two viewpoints on the matter. But I thought because I hadn’t mentioned the names of the dudes who were the main dudes known for such things, I was cooked. But neigh, I was not. I got an A for the final grade. I almost went back to the professor to ask him what I did on the final that was so right. But then I thought that he might have seen he had made a mistake and given me a grade that I wasn’t supposed to get. So, I didn’t go back.

Holy cow! I just realized I forgot to put one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen … in fact I do have to rank this No. 1 on my all-time concert list … on the 1983 Part 2 post where I listed all sorts of concerts I went to. On St. Patrick’s Day 1983 at the Milwaukee Eagles Club, I saw Those XCleavers open for the Bus Boys. That was the best show ever. The Bus Boys were awesome. They did some tunes in “48 Hours,” the Eddie Murphy/Nick Nolte movie. And it was the firts time I’d seen the local band, Those XCleavers. Very excellent also.

Dream – 2/3/2008

I’m on a riding mower in my front yard. It’s getting dark and it is hard to see. I can’t believe it is dark for that time of day; too early to be this dark, I think. I need to turn on the yard lights. I put the mower in park, get off the mower.

I go to turn the lights on that will illuminate the yard. I am at the house on Hillcrest Street. As soon as I turn the lights on, the mower starts to slowly roll away form me down the street. I run down the driveway and into the street to try to stop it.

It was in park. It should not have moved.

It starts going in circles and across the street into the neighbor’s driveway. It almost crashes into their garage. I finally catch it and ride it back home. I start cutting the grass in the backyard. There is plenty of light to see.

Dream – 1/31/2008

I’m a newspaper reporter and get a call from a guy who says I need to meet him at a restaurant or else something bad will happen. He says he has information for a story maybe.

I take my daughters and my girlfriend to the restaurant. We sit at a round table with the guy. He looks like the bad guy from “The Incredibles,” Syndrome. He has evil in his eyes.

The restaurant has closed. We lie down on top of the table with a blanket over us. I need to protect the girls from him. He is up to no good.

I feel a sharp blade scraping against my calf. It is him. I wake up.

“Stop! In the name of Jesus!” I yell to him and I say to this dream as I do not want to dream this anymore.

I don’t dream of this anymore and go back to sleep, this time peacefully.

 Sitting in the outfield bleachers at a major league baseball game. Frank Robinson of the Cleveland Indians, wearing those garish all-red uniforms of the mid-1970s, hits the ball (left-handed) very far, over the fence for a home run. But the bat also flies out of his hands as he swings and the bat flies over the outfield fence and  bounces on the blacktop beyond the fence but in front of the concession stands and scoreboard. The bat bounds through an open door at the side of the concession stands and just about hits a guy who is putting icing on cinnamon rolls.

The top of the barrel of the bat gets stuck vertically into a whole tray of icing. I run in to get the bat. I make sure nobody is hurt and I want to return it to the game. I pick it up and hold it up. The whole tray of icing sticks to the bat, so I hold the bat over my head and the tray begins to slip off and fall to the ground.

One of the icing cups remains, as a plastic ring attached to it, where you pull to open the cup, is wrapped around the bat barrel. So the final icing cup hangs there on the bat.

I go to an usher by the fence and ask him who I need to talk to in order to return the bat. He seems agitated that I asked him. But he motions me to an old  security guy in a golf cart. He is sitting  just inside a gate in the fence with a few others. I ask him if they need the bat back and he says no, keep it. Cool.