Posted 11:00 AM by Gene

I'll go my way by myself,
Like walking under a cloud.
I'll go my way by myself,
All alone in a crowd....

Today while getting myself barbered for the first time in months (I HATE it! and I'm VERY lazy besides), an Ivy League version of CHEAP CHANNEL extruded an especially annoying song, the same line over and over and over until I could have singed my hair off and saved the money: "HEY LORD! DON'T ASK ME QUES-TYOONNNNS! HEY LORD! DON'T ASK ME QUES-TYOONNNNS! HEY LORD! DON'T ASK ME QUES-TYOONNNNS! HEY LORD! DON'T ASK ME QUES-TYOONNNNS...." I thought, how worthy of today's genius. The DJ who no doubt thinks he'll work for LOWSY soon helpfully identified it as from 1976. Thirty-five years and still junk. Except to rock mu-SIC cri-TICKS that doesn't say much for our age of masterpieces.

Shortly after at JOHN THE DON's Barnes & Noble (let's see B&M collide with B&N!), as I skimmed Consumer Reports to see if I should spend my money on an Asus (AY-suhs?, Ah-SOOS?) laptop (it's going in my bedroom), Satch and Ella were crooning "Love is Here to Stay", and as great as Satch and Ella are I thought, how mannered! How keeyute! Part of it wasn't listening to it at a B&N, as it can be, nor even that it's typical background music for the HITMAKER!!!!! WOODSTER THE PERV, nor that brother Ira had to start a big debate among pop-u-LAR mu-SIC his-TOR-ians by pretentiously leaving "Our" out of the title; but rather it's that George Gershwin's gotten so unceasingly jazzified over the years we forget he was a theater composer, and his own best arranger, and that he wrote "Someone to Watch Over Me" for Gertrude Lawrence, and not for Blue -- and definitely NOT for Sarah Vaughan, nor even Satch and Ella. And with jazz a corpse thus is America's greatest tunesmith confined to the archives, though we're supposed to say we admire him as an article of faith, or like WOODSTER THE PERV -- like a showoffy egghead.

Back at my apartment there's this desk clerk who's lately taken to using his computer to watch the crappiest kind of horror or action movies -- with the volume up WAY LOUD. Why must I endure it? It's like foreground muzak, only it's worse -- the sonic equivalent of a dentist's drill. Why do people think because they have computers it gives them "rights" over others -- like my right not to listen to a dentist's drill?

Back in the two-room apartment I'm trying to straighten up with the help of a bulldozer I wondered, does anyone have my tastes? Am I really the buffoon I often think I am? Why can't I share my loves and my foibles with someone else?

No one knows better than I myself:
I'm by myself,
Alone.