Concept

I’ve been turning down writing jobs right and left these days… At first they sound good, write your favorite material from home and make money! So you apply and then find out you are going to get $5 per article and you are expected to write five articles a day. I’m like, no you don’t understand, I write when I want to and what I want to. If nothing comes to me I don’t write at all. Sorry, that’s not how we work, good luck.  At any rate, I haven’t had any thoughts lately worth putting on paper, until tonight 🙂

Needed some eats so I walked across the highway to my favorite road house. Green chili was the deal, so that’s what I had. The girl on the bar stool next to me was talking about putting money in the jukebox, something they don’t have at the Crystola and something I haven’t seen in a while come to think of it. So she asks me if I ever get stage fright at the jukebox when I’m  trying to think of a selection. I had to dig pretty deep into the memory box, but I couldn’t think of any incidence of said phenomenon. She gave me this annoyed look, not that I’m any stranger to annoyed looks from women, in fact I have a long history of annoyed looks from women… blog post running off the tracks again 🙁

She turned away but I continued to ponder the concept. You go to the machine, look at the menu of selections and push the buttons, just like a vending machine. Nobody gets stage fright ordering a Snickers Bar. Then it started to come to me, no menu, infinite choices… And I’m thinking, the last time I put money in a jukebox was at the Purple Shanty in Bellevue, Nebraska, when I was in the Air Force. “Me and Bobby McGee” by Janice Joplin. Played it so many times I received death threats from Joanie the bartender. Lucky for me she was a gentle soul and the only repercussion from my inevitable subsequent indiscretion was that the 45 was removed from the machine and unceremoniously terminated on the sidewalk outside the bar 🙁

So I turned to my bar neighbor and said, “But you have to understand, the last time I put money in a jukebox there were only 100 lighted and numbered choices to select from. Then a lever magically appeared from the depths of the machine that moved to the exact location of the 45 record to retrieve the vinyl copy of the song and precisely place it on the turntable while the tone arm moved over and dropped the stylus to convert whatever it is that is in those plastic grooves to music.”. Now the annoyed look was gone and at first she looked at me like I was some kind of alien, vastly preferable to the previous look of annoyance, which then turned into a much more desirable demeanor of amused intrigue 🙂  And enough interest anyway for sufficient conversation to lay another day to rest in the cold Colorado Rocky Mountain winter and give me something entertaining enough, to me anyway, to write another blog post 🙂