almost okay

My Dear Lyzako,

I really should be sleeping.

It's a little after four in the afternoon here and I've spent the past two nights toiling from dusk 'til dawn on a thankless job for marginal pay that will help me cover my bills so I can afford another month of thankless jobs for marginal pay.

When people ask me if I work out, I say: 'Yes, I'm constantly jogging on the treadmill of capitalist consumerism!' No, that's a lie. I don't really say that, but wouldn't it be funny if next time I remembered to? Oh, who am I kidding? I rarely get asked if I work out, either, which doesn't come as a surprise to you, I'm sure. You've seen me.

Anyway, I used to have hobbies that helped me to forget the awful cycle of work and pay. I gardened for a while before raising the white flag against the never-ending March Of The Weeds (led by the mighty Captain Crabgrass, of course). I read, collected things like jazz records and comic books. I even went through a brief period where I assembled and meticulously painted plastic models, the same ones I botched altogether as a child - custom cars, Rat Fink characters, Dracula, Wolfman and the Mummy. Nowadays my hobbies amount to drinking coffee and rubbing the cramps out of my calves.

Today I finished work early enough to fool myself into thinking it was evening instead of morning. It was still pitch dark, a bright disc of waning full moon hanging in the sky to the west. The birds were still asleep. After stumbling into the house around 6:45 AM, I took off my work shoes (which felt as though they'd grown to the soles of my feet), donned slippers, a paint-stained hoodie and my 'Good & Plenty' pajamas, then put on side two of Coltrane's 'Ballads' LP.

As the quartet settled into 'I Wish I Knew', I made a trip to the fridge to retrieve one of the two remaining cans of Blue on the shelf. By the time they'd made it to 'Nancy (With the Laughing Face)', the rising sun was already starting to wash gray light through the place and I was nicely buzzed on half a can, thanks in large part to fatigue and lack of sleep.

When the needle lifted I could hear the first utterances of the birds as they began their day. I pulled off Coltrane, put on side one of 'Kind of Blue' and grabbed the last can of beer from the fridge. After years of collecting and listening to thousands of records (jazz and otherwise), the Miles Davis classic is still one of my favorites. Coltrane was on that session, too, and his natural spirituality bubbles up between the whispers and boasts of Miles' trumpet. 'So What', may be the best tune ever written.

I still had half a beer when side one was over, so I put on side two, sipped at the beer as I sank into the sofa feeling the weight of seventeen hours work and only six hours sleep in two days' time. I never made it until the end, nodding with chin on chest and waking in pain around 8:00 AM before dragging myself into bed amid blue skies and bright sunshine.

I managed almost five hours of restless sleep, interrupted twice by bouts of painful Charley horses in both calves, most of the time spent with a pillow over my eyes to help shade me from the glare of daytime.

Tonight, I have to do it all over again.

Before I fell out, though, I was looking at the liner notes to the record, which was recorded in 1959, just a year after I was born. My copy is an original mono version on the six-eye Columbia label, which in a perfect world might mean it would be worth fifteen or twenty bucks in the shape it's in, but in reality, it probably would have trouble fetching more than five (plus shipping) on Ebay these days, thanks to the advent of the CD and the MP3.

As I held the near-fifty-year-old album cover in my hands and looked at the notes on personnel, my eyes beginning to blur from the strain of two days' work and the foamy goodness of the beer, I couldn't help but notice a funny tag at the bottom which had nothing to do with the recording itself.

And I quote... “This Columbia High Fidelity recording is scientifically designed to play with the highest quality of reproduction on the phonograph of your choice, new or old. If you are the owner of a stereophonic system, this record will play with even more brilliant true-to-life fidelity. In short, you can purchase this record with no fear of it becoming obsolete in the future.”

I had to laugh and wish that the same guarantee against obsolescence came with yours truly when I was born!

I just have one question: What's a phonograph?

Very Truly Yours,
Marty Sherman