Nurse the Hate: New Year's Resolutions 2016

I’m hobbling around in a walking boot, my cranky Achilles flared up.  I’m thinking this ailment might become charming if I can start predicting weather with it.  “Ole Greg’s achilles is flarin’… Storm’s a’comin!”.  There is no doubt that the machine is breaking down.  I am careening from health inconvenience to health inconvenience.  It appears that anything good that was going to happen for me has already happened.  Now it is all about waiting for the sweet release of death.  Or gambling, writing songs, and drinking wine while ignoring these pesky issues.  Or both.  I feel like I might need to start listening to Lightnin’ Hopkins records exclusively, a wailing blues guitar starts to play anytime I limp around.  I think people would like to see a guy in a walking boot/cowboy boot combination with a dirty Delta Blues riff blasting out of nowhere.  “That there?  That’s Gimpy Boy… best country punk bluesman I ever heard!  Well, the only country punk bluesman I ever heard…  But ain’t he something?”

I will not be defeated.  I am moving ahead.  I have made mistakes, had major losses, but will win the war.  It is all about setting goals publicly and putting oneself on the hook for their completion.  Last year I shot my mouth off and said I would do the following:  further my wine expertise, dive a shipwreck, record a record with the Daredevils, and swim with sharks.  I passed the WSET Level 3 exam.  I dove two shipwrecks, one in Curacao and one off the Keys.  We released two records, “Nashville Surprise” and “The Genny Session”.  I did not get the shark dive done.  Let me get into that…

I was under the impression I would pop out to San Francisco, see my beloved Giants and work in a Great White shark dive off some godforsaken islands called The Devil’s Teeth.  I had learned that charter groups would go to where the sharks gathered each fall and toss chum into the water to get enormous 1500 pound sharks to swim over and nose around shark cages.  While to most people this seems like a terrible idea, I have always wanted to see an honest to God sea monster in the wild.  How often does a person get to come face-to-face with a monster that could actually eat them?  I am all in.  

The problem was environmentalist groups rushed in to say that this chumming was upsetting the shark’s natural behavior and needed to be stopped.  The charter groups were forced to stop chumming, and the success rate of seeing the Great Whites dropped to almost none.  Meanwhile the California charter companies don’t make public that they can’t chum any longer, so they charge exorbitant amounts of money to toss you into a shark cage in low visibility freezing water where the only chance to see the shark would be if one swam by via cosmic accident.  I almost fell prey to this scam while in San Francisco.  By the time I realized that it was a scam, I couldn’t arrange going to an area in Mexico to do the old school chum method. 

Now I need to travel to Ensenada, which I have learned is called “Ensenada” because “En senada nice place”.  It is a great place to get your head cut off in dealing with drug cartels, which seems like a fun and unique travel experience.  There are also shady Mexican dive operations that will drop you into the water with Great Whites near some spooky island off the pacific coast with I’m sure top notch attention to detail.  What could possibly go wrong?  This seems like an experience I might need to have with my associate The Land Sailor, who is currently delivering Coca leaves and dynamite to independent Bolivian silver miners in amateur tunneling operations somewhere outside La Paz.  (I’m not making any of this up by the way)  I will keep you informed as this fiasco unfolds.  

I am continuing the wine certification.  I passed the WSET Level 3 exam in Bordeaux, with merit even!  I kept going.  I have already begun Level 4, the final level.  It’s really ridiculous.  I have spent the last three months attempting to learn fermentation chemistry, soil contents, trellis systems, winemaking methods, and plant diseases.  It should be noted that I am someone that cheated their way through Chemistry 1 and 2 in high school.  While I regret not learning any of the actual information now, discovering that Mr. Hanson would grade the earlier class’s tests and leave them atop the work counter in his classroom enabled me to find a short cut and a “B+” grade.  If anyone wondered why I was gone from the lunchroom so long on certain days in my junior year, now you know.  I did not have an irritable bowel.  I did develop stealth skills to slip into Mr. Hanson’s dark classroom while he was at lunch and write down the answers which I would attach to my trusty “periodic table of elements”.  While now I have some limited regret in not understanding “free” and “bound” chemicals, I do thank Mr. Hanson for teaching me that by taking advantages of short cuts I would learn skills that I have adopted well into the amoral world of sales.  Thanks again.  I will take my first of four exams this January in San Francisco.  I will pass.  Somehow.  I wonder if I can bring a periodic table of elements?

I recently purchased a Porsche 911 Carrera S.  I spend a great deal of time in cars.  I figure that if I am going to spend a great deal of time in a car, I should enjoy myself while doing it.  I have driven BMWs for a long time.  The BMW 335i is an extremely fast automobile.  People have no idea.  There was an incident I would rather not get into great detail on where I needed to make up what seemed to be an impossible amount of time to get to an Airport.  During this incident I may have driven 143mph, which is very attention getting.  Now I am not saying that this happened in the United States, as if it were I would not be taken to jail but rather shot at the side of the road without a trial.  There would be no protest march.  Even the most anti-police liberal would have said “Fuck that guy.  He got what he deserved.”.  The Germans are much more tolerant of the idea of fast roads and automobiles, hence their production of the 911 line of cars.

According to the manual, the Porsche 911 Carerra S will go 184 mph off the assembly line.  It is a fucking beast.  I don’t think I can drive 184 mph here in NE Ohio as our police shoot kids with toy guns and people whose car had the misfortune of backfiring near police HQ.  I don’t think The Police would be in favor of me whisking across I-480 at 184 mph, and I don’t want to die in a hail of gunfire unless I at least have some hostages involved.  Therefore I would like to take my car and find a track with a long enough stretch where I can hit at least 175 mph to see what that’s like.  I feel confident that the car is engineered well enough to allow me to go 175, though I don’t feel confident I would fare well if I wreck the car at that type of speed.  Maybe I will wear a helmet.  That outta do it.  I met some fella that races cars for a living, and I’ll see if I can get him involved in this Doomsday Mission.  It seems irresponsible not to at least try.         

  

The Whiskey Daredevils have written a new batch of songs and we are recording this January.  I think we got off track slightly with “Nashville Surprise”, which was a bit too bombastic.  It’s not what we do best.  It’s time to twang a bit more.  I will continue to write songs as long as these stupid songs pop into my head.  The Whiskey Daredevils/Cowslingers have never really played music for any other reason than for our own satisfaction anyway.  I hope that some new people drift into what we do, like our little songs, and tell some more people.  If not, that’s OK.  We just do what we do.  I love writing and performing music with the band.  To be able to travel around the world because of these little ideas that we have in the basement is still astounding to me.  At some point I will be discovered as a fraud.

I need to travel to England.  I have never been to the UK.  I would like to see what’s doing in London, pay too much for everything, and walk around in the rain.  I have been dealing with quite a few English people in this wine education thing.  They all seem to regard me as some type of barbarian.  I find this odd as that anytime I am somewhere in Europe where some pasty drunks are causing problems they inevitably turn out to be English.  Ok.. Sometimes they are Irish.  I need to figure these people out and see what they story is over there.  I don’t really care for Indian food, fish&chips, drizzle, warm beer, or the NME.  I hope that’s not a problem.

Well, that’s it…  Those are my humble goals entering 2016.  It’s not much, but without getting some sort of action set up I will discover myself to be old with all types of grand plans I haven’t actually executed.  You'll miss your life if you don't take an active part in it.  I've found that one simple thing that is embarked upon leads to other interesting consequences.  A series of small things can lead to big things.  What the hell.  I'm going to try these.  Let's see what happens.