Summertime Blues

In lot of ways the summer after I graduated from John Tyler High in 1970 was like all the prior summers. But there was one significant difference. The question "What now?" no longer had a clear answer...
In the past it had always been "Have some fun then go back to school in the fall"... But now I needed to get on with my life and I had no idea what that meant... I had no intentions of ever going to college... The school system had left me in a state where holding down a job seemed impossible... My primary career goal was to become a rock star - but then I saw Bugs Henderson play...

Now- most of you are probably going "Who the heck is Bugs Henderson?" And that's exactly the point. That little "podunk" town in the middle of nowhere was home to the greatest rock guitarist I had ever seen... His blistering solos literally made the hair stand up on the back of my neck... I instantly knew that no matter how hard I practiced I would never be that good.
And there he was - struggling to survive despite the fact that he'd had a song on the Billboard charts four years earlier... It was something of a shock to realize that fame and fortune had so little to do with merit. I mean - I'd always suspected as much but listening to Bugs really drove it home.

BTW: As it turns out I was a pretty good judge of talent. Bugs Henderson is widely regarded among guitar cognoscenti as the greatest "unknown" of our time. Guitar Player Magazine said he should be declared a national treasure... But all of that came much later :-)

And a brief digression:
Starting with The Monkees and The Archies - on through Vanilla Ice, Milli Vanilli, the Spice Girls and the Backstreet Boys - all the way through Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga, the music industry has been on a downhill slide ever since they discovered that they can get away with "manufacturing" pop idols... I suspect they have to do that because they wouldn't know real talent if it bit them in the balls... Yes - those ass-clowns at the major labels have managed to take one of mankind's greatest endeavors and turn it into a giant crap-fest... And the worst part is that the music buying public has rewarded them for it... Sigh... End of digression.

Yes - I graduated from high school fat, dumb and unhappy... Luckily, Karina (the master of all eating disorders) did manage to remedy the fat part by putting me on a diet that consisted of a small TV dinner for lunch and a dry hamburger patty for dinner... It was probably a bit on the unhealthy side but I lost 60 lbs in 2 months... I did eventually gain it all back (and then some) but at least I got to live life as a skinny person for a couple of more years :-)

So yeah - that summer was bittersweet. The days were hot and the nights were - well - hot. Wayne and I would head out in his 65 Mustang with the windows down and no particular place to go - our hair blowing in the warm, humid night air. Every once on a while we'd catch the scent of magnolia, honeysuckle or lilac... It was one of those experiences that left an indelible mark. For those few moments life was "real".

Yes - the smell of honeysuckle triggers a lot of fond memories. In Lakeshire (outside of St. Louis) my bedroom window was surrounded by honeysuckle... That aroma put me to sleep on those warm summer nights.
And as fate would have it my room on Chilton Street in Tyler had honeysuckle almost covering one of the windows. If not for that I probably wouldn't have gotten much sleep that summer :-)