Loneliness, Yoga and Isolation

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”

Kurt Vonnegut said this in 1982, decades before humanity would become steeped in a world of social media, cellphones, pandemics and artificial intelligence. I think he would be horrified at just how un-lonely the world was in the early 80s compared to today. I’ve read more and more headlines about today’s loneliness epidemic, and have observed firsthand the decline of clubs, sports leagues, religion and spontaneous gatherings, along with the rise of privacy fences, ear buds and cellphones, all of which are built to quash potential conversations. My daughter, while attending orientation at the University of Louisville eight years ago, lamented the fact that in an earlier era when students waited for the festivities to begin, they would have struck up conversations rather than leaning on the comfort of scrolling through their phones.

By contrast, I can still remember the first person I spoke to at my graduate school orientation in 1992. Today, that conversation would likely never occur.

But hell, when it comes to disengaging, I’m exhibit A, or at least B or C. After being a late holdout on the purchase of a flip-phone, and eventually a smartphone, I’ve become adept at passing time via a screen versus speaking with a fellow human being, and after years of heavy involvement at my synagogue and other volunteer activities, I’ve pulled away. And, for the moment, this disengagement feels…good. Comfortable. Cocoon-like. But as Roger Waters concluded in Pink Floyd’s magnum opus The Wall, isolation decays the mind. It places us too much inside our own heads and our own echo chambers, and the inevitable result is loneliness and perhaps even a descension into fear and paranoia.

All of this brought to mind something I read in Benjamin Lorr’s book about groceries that I blogged about a few months ago. In it, he references a previous book of investigative journalism that he authored called Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga.

Lorr writes about his immersion into the world of yoga, where people “would enter a studio and bend for eight hours a day, busy doctors, lawyers, bankers who would sneak off to fit in an hour and a half on their lunch break. In yoga it was self-betterment, self-improvement, or becoming a stronger, more radiant version of yourself.  And in it, I found a whole community based on this ethos: people reveling in the very real ways they had transformed from couch potatoes and addicts, remarking after every class about just how much more capable they felt now. But wat was the end? What did you do once you became a better version of yourself? Where did all this self-improvement lead? The answer was always back to more yoga. Never volunteer at a clinic or a food kitchen, never for a studio owner to open more classes to the poor or injured. Never to take our radiant yoga bodies and put them to use in the service for others. And so those lawyers or doctors would go on to use that extra energy to bend for longer house, and when they had a vacation they went off in search of themselves, spiraling deeper and deeper into the practice, becoming ever more capable humans, who could push their bodies into ever more drastic positions.”

It’s similar to the philosopher who devotes a life to the study of ethics while never lifting a finger to help another person, or the theologian who reads the scripture in one hand and turns away the beggar in the other.

And how lovely it is to judge others and think, “Well, that’s not me.” But most of us practice our version of self-immersion, perhaps in worlds other than yoga. For me, it’s writing and composing, record-shopping, listening to music, watching baseball, organizing photos, etc.

And when was the last time I volunteered? It’s been a year, a full five months past the deadline I’d set for myself to get started again.

Time to make a change, I know. Studies show time after time that one of the best ways to cure loneliness is to volunteer to help others, to engage with our fellow human beings. So why are we working so hard as a society to do anything but?

Build Your Own Record Rack - repost

(NOTE: this is a repost from June 15, 2020, but I wanted to reintroduce this topic as a companion to a discussion from this week’s episode of 1000 Greatest Misses, a podcast I host with Christopher Grey. If you own vinyl, this may be right up your alley).

I’m not a naturally handy guy, but over the years I’ve managed to take on some modest home improvement projects with a degree of success, mostly the result of YouTube videos and frantic emails to my exceptionally handy friend, Rick.  Last March when it became apparent that the pandemic would result in a lot of unwanted time at home, I decided to overcome my typical trepidation and take on a new project, one I’d been grappling with for some time:  building a few shelving units to store my growing collection of vinyl records.  I’d been searching for a replacement of my plastic-bins-scattered-around-the-basement approach for quite some time, but nothing on the market satisfied my three criteria:  forward facing, attractive and inexpensive. 

Enter, the Google search.  Actually enter dozens of Google searches. And lo and behold, several pages deep into one of my explorations, I came upon a marvelous blog post called “I Built a DIY Vinyl Record Shelf, And you Can Too!”  This sounded right up my alley.  The post was over seven years old, but the concept was timeless:  build a great-looking unit that holds around 500 records with one sheet of 8x4 plywood.  Fantastic.

The author of the blog got his idea from what is now a decade-long thread on AudioKarma, a website I’d never heard before but whose entry is a treasure trove of information from dozens of helpful contributors.  It all started with a great concept and has since evolved to include every possible variation you can imagine, with multiple draft designs that accommodate different needs.  If you’re interested in building your own rack, I strongly encourage you to read the entire thread before you begin.  I did not, and wish I had.  It may take you several hours, but it’ll help you determine in advance which features are important to you and which design works best.  Had I read these comments in full I would have avoided a few mistakes along the way.  As it is, I built two identical racks, and then a third of my own design that includes record storage on the bottom and bays for a receiver and turntable on top.  None of my three projects went perfectly, and my lack of craftsmanship certainly reared its ugly head from time to time, but I learned a lot about woodworking and ultimately made decent-looking alternatives to the plastic bins I’d been using for years.

Along with screws, glue, casters, sandpaper, and polyurethane, lights, etc., I figure each unite costs somewhere around $100.   Not too shabby!

Above: records will fill the bottom eventually. Far left: speaker stands that I built to practice using a pocket hole jig. Left: extra support for the bottom shelf.

Here are a few things you may find helpful:

1)     Beware cutting your plywood at the store.  The guys at Home Depot were well-meaning, but their cuts of my red oak plywood (around $53) with a dull an imprecise cutting tool ended up shredding my wood something fierce.  It took a lot of energy and frustration to work around the most dreadful-looking cuts.  If you have a friend with a truck or a van, consider doing this at home.

2)     Buy or build a square jig to hold your plywood together at right angles.  I built one very similar to the one in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPA8FDTcfcE

3)     Get a table saw or borrow one.  I did not and it showed, because even though I used a guide with my circular saw, I was never able to make my cuts absolutely perfect, resulting in slight gaps and mismeasurements that affected the final project.  I’m still happy with my units, but they could have been a bit better. 

4)     Since being able to move your record rack once it’s filled with records is key, definitely include casters in your design.  I purchased reasonably-priced 90-pound casters from Home Depot and they work fine.  Don’t forget to include a few that swivel and lock.

5)     Use a counter sink to hide your screws or use a pocket hole jig.  I did the former from the first two racks I built and pocket holes for the third unit along with a set of speaker stands I built (these actually turned out the best of all of my work).  I loved using my Kreg Pocket Hold Jig 320 and will find new uses for it in upcoming projects I’m sure.

6)     Use wood glue for all of your wood joints.

7)     Buy a bunch of clamps, including a few trigger clamps for ease of use and a few clamps that are long enough to accommodate your record bin.  I think mine are 48 inches, and they were hugely helpful.

8)     Consider adding supports for the shelves.  Records weight a lot, and though it might not have been necessary, I did add a cross-bar support for the lower shelf and perimeter supports for the top shelf.   If nothing else, they give me peace of mind.

9)     Be especially careful with the top shelf as this is the most visible.  On the last rack I made that’s housing a turntable on top, I ended up with gaps along the edges that required the use of wood putty, and it looks pretty bad.  So bad, in fact, that I decided to purchase a bunch of rock band stickers from RedBubble to hide my work!  I love the stickers, but they were not part of the original design.

10)  Which reminds me, consider decorating your racks with stickers!  This was a helluva lot of fun, and it requires no carpentry skills.

11)  If you don’t want to stain, don’t.  I personally hate using stain because I never like the way it turns out – just another one of those handyman skills I haven’t yet mastered.  I kept my red oak plywood bare and used three coats of polyurethane to protect it and give it a bit of a sheen.  Looks great.

12)  Don’t fret so much about how to best apply polyurethane.  I stressed out about this because everyone had an opinion and almost none of them were consistent.  Put a few coats on, sand lightly, put another coat on, and you’re good to go.  It’s just polyurethane.  It’s not life and death.

13)  Consider using real wood iron-on veneer.  I had no idea this product existed, but it’s another one of those great tidbits offered by the AudioKarma gang.  It’s an absolute bitch to work with in my opinion because it’s wider than the edge of the plywood and therefore needs to be trimmed.  Nothing I used – a trimmer designed specifically for this task or just good old sandpaper – worked well.  It either just folded the veneer or disrupted it enough to lift it off the plywood despite the adhesive.  I eventually got the job done and it looks great, but it was an unpleasant process. 

14)  Install LED lights for the bottom racks or your records are going to be hard to see.  This part of the project was easy!  I purchased these stick-on lights from Amazon and they work great. 

15)  Use record dividers for a professional look.  There are a bunch of options out there, mostly overpriced or formatted incorrectly, but I like the option I found at Amazon along with a white ink Sharpie.

I’m probably missing a few additional pieces of advice, but by scanning the AudioKarma thread you will have a lot of great ideas that people of shared over the years.  Happy building!

Music vs Lyrics

In episode 10 of our podcast 1000 Greatest Misses, Christopher Grey and I discuss music and lyrics, and whether one is more important when falling in love with a composition.  I concluded that with some exceptions, music is most important to me, and that as long as a lyric isn’t overtly lame (“Hey baby let’s go out tonight, Hey baby, I’m feeling alright”) a good melody will carry the tune to the finish line for me.  But a lyric that’s embarrassingly bad will often ruin an otherwise good song.

A few weeks ago, John McWhorter of the New York Times reviewed an upcoming book called Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers and Other Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan, and concluded that the book “is a reminder that one can be massively fulfilled by language one doesn’t fully comprehend.”  I love this summation because it perfectly captures my sentiment for a band like Yes, whose lyrics are complete nonsense to me, but that still manage to be profoundly evocative.

Consider a song most everyone knows: “Roundabout.”  The lyric of the chorus is:

In and around the lake
Mountains come out of the sky
And they stand there

Nothing crazy there. Kind of poetic, maybe.  But nothing overtly comprehensible.  Now imagine if singer Jon Anderson had instead leaned on rock and roll’s worst lyrical instincts and composed the following over the same melody:

I’ve got to see you, babe
You know you’re all I crave
In the evening

Not exactly what I’m looking for in a song! And surely “Roundabout” wouldn’t be a classic if its lyrics were such garbage. It’s the same reason why a band like The Babys are hard for me to listen to. An otherwise competent song like “Every Time I Think of You” isn’t helped when John Waite sings:

People say a love like ours will surely pass
But I know a love like ours will last and last

Ugh, who farted, right? And the Babys actually outsourced this tune, written by Jack Conrad and Ray Kennedy. You’d think someone could have come up with a better lyric. Terrible.

But then you’ll get words that are kind of lame but are backed up by such a terrific groove, that it hardly matters what’s being said. I think of a song like “New Sensation” by INXS.  I dig this song despite its lyrics:

Live, baby, live
Now that the day is over
I got a new sensation
Mm, perfect moments
That's so impossible to refuse

Somehow, this works for me. I can’t explain it, and I certainly can’t defend it. But I really like the song.

Of course, the best result is the perfect marriage of music and lyrics, an alchemy that’s rarely achieved, but when it happens it can move me to my core, and it’s why I admire artists like Jackson Brown, Randy Newman, Bruce Springsteen, Rickie Lee Jones, Paul Simon, etc. When Jones sings “And I can hear him
In every footstep's passing sigh/He goes crazy these nights/Watching heartbeats go by” or when Springsteen sings “There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away/They haunt this dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets”…well, damn. I’m all in. Tears, every time.

For my own compositions, just as I try to avoid musical clichés, I try to avoid pedestrian lyrics. Occasionally, I hit the mark, combining melody, harmony, groove and words that convey an emotion together that could never be achieved by their separate parts.

The beauty of song.

Back to Baseball

It’s Tuesday morning, and as I write this a replay of last night’s Brewers game is streaming behind me, a comforting companion to my morning. Like Bob Uecker himself – who’s announced Brewers games on the radio since I was three years old – my life’s accompaniment has always been baseball.

Except last year.

In a bit of bravado, on the heels of baseball’s moronic lockout that delayed the start to last season, I decided a year ago that I was done with baseball. And I was. After announcing in February, “Screw ‘em. I’m done,” I didn’t watch any baseball on TV except for a few game recaps, and I only attended five innings in person (at a White Sox game to hang out with my daughter and her partner).

This was a big change for me, and as I summarized last October, I didn’t really miss it. I found other things to do with my time, and I got lucky that the Brewers didn’t finish the season strong, sparing me the agony of having to watch my team miss the playoffs for the first time since 2017.  But I recognized that my baseball boycott might not continue.

A new season has started, and it only took four games for me to dive back in, purchasing the MLBTV package and following every Brewers game since in some form or another (a game recap, highlights, live or on-demand).

What led to this turnabout? Two things that I can think of:

1)      Major League Baseball, finally – FINALLY – enacted rule changes meant to speed up the game, something that should have been done a decade ago. It was a relief to check out box scores for the first few days of the season and see game times of 2:21, 2:32 and 2:57 (the latter for a high-scoring 9-5 game). This change was sorely needed. After enduring over a decade of watching showboating Ryan Braun step out of the batters box after each and every pitch to mess with his batting gloves, viewers are now treated to a streamlined game that transpires happily, neither rushed nor sluggish.

2)      Reviewing the box scores for those first four games was jolting for me because I recognized three names in the starting line-up. THREE! And I’d only been away for a year! I suddenly felt oddly disconnected from my hometown, no longer a native to Milwaukee, but an outsider. 

It was a combination of these factors, and the fact that the Brewers got off to a hot start, with three young rookies making an impact, that led me to spend $150 for MLBTV, eschewing the monthly bill that I could have opted for and cancelled at any time.  Nope, was all-in.

Two nights ago, I watched a spectacular 1-0 Brewers victory against the Padres, the only run being scored from a combination of a bunt single, a balk, a stolen base and a sacrifice fly in the second inning.  That was it for the night, and I sat on the edge of my seat as Wade Miley and Yu Darvish traded zeros through the seventh inning, and my heart raced as Brewers closer Devin Williams loaded the bases in the ninth and took Trent Grisham to a 3-2 count before obtaining a game-ending strikeout.

Baseball is back!

The Secret Life of Groceries: a book review

On a whim I picked up Benjamin Lorr’s investigative journalism book, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket, and walked away with a newfound respect for the people who allow us the modern miracle (dark as it may be) of having almost unlimited food options in every grocery store in the western world. We forget that the grocery store as we know it is a fairly new invention, coming into being last century and used as propaganda to bolster support for capitalism. That food is as inexpensive and as abundant as it is, is indeed a miracle when considering the course of human history.

But oh, the price we pay for such convenience and abundance. Lorr doesn’t resort to preachiness, pointing an accusatory finger at greedy Americans. In fact, he willfully acknowledges all the benefits of today’s grocery stores, while highlighting many of the downsides of the grocery industry, particularly as it pertains to the challenging lifestyles of many of the people who devote their careers to meeting consumer demands. Lorr spends significant time with the people who make it all possible: the founder of Trader Joe’s (Joe Coulombe), a Whole Foods employee manning the seafood counter, a female long-haul trucker, an entrepreneur trying to get a new condiment onto grocery store shelves, a man who’s spent years on a shrimping boat. Lorr shines a light on the people we take for granted, and does so in a caring, meaningful way. Hearing directly from his subjects as they share stories about their often-difficult lives, I felt not only sympathy for them, but gratitude that they make my comfortable life possible.

Surprisingly, The Secret Life of Groceries isn’t a call to action in the obvious sense. Lorr doesn’t end the book with “five things American consumers should be doing to make the world a better place.” He actually does the opposite, offering little more than a shoulder shrug at our current plight, conceding that there is virtually nothing consumers can do in their purchasing habits to change the system. Rather, “any solution will have to come from outside our food system, so far outside it that thinking about food is only a distraction from the real work to be done. At best, food is an opening, like any maw, that might lead us inside.”

What about buying organically certified foods? Or products produced from cage-free chickens? Or going vegan? Of this, Lorr writes that seals and certifications “promise us that moments of individual action can create a type of change that in reality only institutional forces like labor laws, unions, and trade deals can begin to approach. They allow us to purchase our ideals from others without ever having to enact them on our own.”

Perhaps not the message readers would like to hear, but also kind of refreshing. It’s not going to stop me from buying 100% recycled paper or using canvas bags, but I get it: my actions aren’t solving the problem; they’re making me feel good. Lorr concludes, “…we have got the food system we deserve. The adage is all wrong: it’s not that we are what we eat, it’s that we eat the way we are.”

If for no other reason than to get a better understanding of all that’s involved in the global industrial food complex, I highly recommend this book.