The Traveling Headcase

There are times in life when we are fortunate to meet people who affect us in a way that makes us want to spend more time with them. If I had known when we moved to France that our neighbor Sally was going to be one of those people, I would have done all I could to get to know Sally right away.

One of the first things I learned about Sally, was that she and I liked the same type of books and many of the same authors. Sally and I were also able to introduce one another to new authors, which I greatly appreciated.

I also learned fairly quickly that Sally had a rapier wit. She was very quiet, but more often than not, when she spoke it was to say something that made those around her laugh out loud. As an example of Sally’s sense of humor, one day, Sally’s husband Clive came by our place to ask if we had a small screwdriver. I told Clive that I did and that I would be down to help him. I grabbed our tool box, which actually contained not one tool other than eight various screwdrivers, and headed down to help Clive. I knocked on the door of Clive and Sally’s flat and went inside toting my toolbox. Sally was standing in the kitchen cooking, and the second she saw me, she feigned palpitations with her hand on her chest and said dramatically, “Ohhh, a man with a toolbox!” as if I were the sexiest man she’d ever seen. I almost dropped the toolbox because I was laughing so hard.

Sally appreciated a good joke as well, even if she was somehow intertwined with the joke. At one of our neighborhood gatherings, I told a joke about a woman who went to a finishing school. Sally laughed as hard as anyone else and had Clive not alerted us, we never would have known that Sally had actually gone to a finishing school!

Besides her sense of humor, I also appreciated Sally’s toughness. She battled cancer for over twenty years. Though she had numerous health problems associated with cancer and its accompanying treatments and often times was in a great deal of pain, I never heard her complain. In my mind I picture her waking each day and telling her various ailments to “bugger off!” and getting on with her day.

The time I got to spend with Sally enriched my life more than she could have imagined, and I will be forever grateful. I only wish she had more time to give. I am proud to have been able to call Sally a friend even though it was only for a short while.

Go out and be consistent.

One of the great philosophers of our time, Forrest Gump, once said, “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what yur goan git.” (Misspelling used for quotation accuracy.) This piece of wisdom applies to many different life scenarios, but for the purposes of this blog, I am going to apply the quote to music heard while in a store or business. Specifically, music in French grocery stores.

In the United States of America (USA), people can generally expect to go into a grocery store and hear one of two types of music. One will hear elevator music, which generally consists of songs one recognizes but horribly rendered on an electric piano keyboard and without vocals. Or one will hear what is generally termed, easy listening, or soft rock. Basically music that would not be considered controversial in any mix of people. A person may not like the music they are hearing, and they may even think it is boring or not something they would normally listen to if given a choice. In fact, after a couple of minutes in the store, most people have stopped hearing the music as anything other than background noise. This is less likely to occur in French grocery stores.

In French grocery stores, our Forrest Gump quote becomes applicable because you never know what you are going to hear while checking the ripeness of your peaches. One would naturally expect to hear the French version of elevator music or soft rock. Native French music is heard in the grocery store, but it is exceedingly rare. Typically if you do hear native French music, it is some French pop song in it’s original form, not stripped down and turned into elevator music. More often than not, you will hear music that even if you do not recognize the tune, you will certainly recognize that the person is singing in English. More probably you will recognize and be able to sing along with the music.

I will use today’s grocery trip as an example. Not long after entering the store it was hard not to add a little groove to my grocery shopping step with George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic playing, “We Want the Funk.” I thought this was an apt song when one is searching for just the right French cheese. Immediately after George Clinton, none other than Marvin Gaye was needing some, “Sexual Healing.” I am not certain Marvin’s song can be applied to shopping as was, “We Want the Funk,” but the quality of the tunes certainly made searching for my gluten-free bread more entertaining.

I have also heard the following in the local grocery store: Eminem, Survivor, Snoop Dogg, The Temptations, the Stones, the Beatles, Sting, Springsteen, Elvis, Gun’s N’ Roses, Van Halen, Louis Armstrong, Salt N’ Peppa, and the list goes on. One of my favorites that is frequently played is Michael Jackson.

As some reading this will no doubt know, some of the artists listed above tend to have lyrics that would never be played over a PA system in a grocery store in the USA because someone would no doubt be offended. Not so in French grocery stores, where the songs are played regardless of the lyrics. I am eagerly awaiting the day when I see an elderly French lady mouthing the words to Snoop’s “Gin and Juice” while perusing the juice aisle. I can also imagine old Francise (around here better known as, “The Grumpy Butcher”) making up his own lyrics to Eminem’s, “Without Me.” Something along the lines of, “ham and prosciutto, get all you can see, but there is no beef, without me!”

I have used the grocery store as an example for this blog, but this unexpected music happens in other French businesses as well. Take for example a recent trip to the doctor’s office where the receptionist was actually singing along with the music coming over the speakers in the waiting area. What artist was she singing along with you ask? None other than the aforementioned, Snoop Dogg. It should not have been too surprising, considering the doc has a Metallica poster on the wall of his office.

Possibly the most unexpected place I have heard music here in France was in a place that I now believe should always have music, considering these particular places are typically gloomy. Parking garages. It is a most pleasant experience to get out of your car in a dark and dreary multi-story parking garage and hear Mozart. The concrete acoustics somehow work well with the strings of a Mozart symphony.

Go out and be consistent.

*If anyone would like to get a better sense of France, I highly recommend reading any of Peter Mayle’s non-fiction books, such as “A Year in Provence.”

Since the beginning of the Covid19 pandemic I have heard various rumors regarding the virus.  Most all of these rumors have come from people who read that bastion of knowledge, that haven of academia, that font of truth, Facebook.

I do not know why people have not yet realized that any information reported by their “friends”, on Facebook is not necessarily accurate and likely false.  I think it has something to do with the fact that people can no longer tolerate uncertainty.  When they see something that conforms to the way they think, even if it is ridiculous, they jump on the bandwagon and repeat whatever backs up their perspective.  With so much information readily available, people do not bother to ask themselves whether or not something makes any sense or is logical.  After first being frustrated at people’s lack of logic regarding these rumors, I realized how comical the rumors were and decided to do a little analysis.

1. THERE IS A CURE!
2. THERE ARE ONLY MORE CASES BECAUSE THERE IS MORE TESTING!
3. HOSPITALS GET PAID!
4. THE VIRUS CAN’T SURVIVE IN THE HEAT!
5. MASK WEARING TECHNIQUE!
6. MASK WEARING IS SIMPLY A WAY FOR THE GOVERNMENT TO CONTROL EVERYONE.

Number 1 above refers to the rumor that there is actually a “cure” for COVID-19, but the pharmaceutical companies are not willing to let the public have this cure because the price the pharmaceutical companies get for the cure is too cheap.  Therefore the pharmaceutical companies are secretly hoarding this cure until the price they can get for it goes up and they can make more money.

There are so many things wrong with this idea, it is hard to know where to begin.  Let me start with the most obvious problem which is that this rumor does not have a single specific piece of evidence.  It simply lumps all pharmaceutical companies together as if they are all one company rather than competing businesses.

Speaking of business, this leads to another thing wrong with this rumor.  Let us say that a company could get $1 for every dose of their miracle cure.  Assuming that at least 1/7 of the people in the world would want this cure and there are 7 Billion plus people in the world, that equals a minimum 1 Billion dollars.  There simply are not any companies that I know of that would say, “No, we don’t want a billion dollars and the possibility of being the company known for creating this cure and thereby creating multiple other business opportunities for ourselves”.  I could go on about this one, but let us keep moving forward.

Rumor number 2 above absolutely begs for the still popular elementary and teenage phrase of the century, “DUH!”  Stating that there are more positive cases because there is more testing is like saying, “If you have one basket of apples and you add another basket of apples, you have…TWO BASKETS OF APPLES.”  I am not sure what people were trying to prove with this statement.  For some reason, I think people thought this was a bad thing, instead of realizing that finding out more people were sick is one of the only ways to actually help those sick people.

Rumor number 3, “Hospitals get paid when they say people died of Covid” is one of my favorites.  This rumor is accusing hospitals and furthermore, doctors, of falsifying information regarding causes of death, as well as accusing hospitals and doctors of letting people die so that the hospital can get more government money.

First of all, I am not sure from which government program this money is coming, as the rumor of course does not specify.  Personally, I think it comes from the cabal of Jews who secretly control the world financial industry.

Secondly, this rumor accuses doctors and hospitals of going against the Hippocratic oath. “First, do no harm.”  I think letting people die for the sake of monetary gain goes against this oath.  Not to mention the fact that falsifying causes of death is most likely a crime.

Rumor number 4 that the virus can’t survive in the heat was proven false when most of Africa and India got sick.  For those that do not know, those places are hot basically all the time.  As if that were not enough, when colleges and universities began letting their athletes return to practice, one of the first places to have to shut down their return to play program because of an increase in positive tests was the University of Houston where it is hot most of the time as well.

Number 5 above isn’t a rumor so much as it is a critique of mask wearing technique.  We have all seen, and possibly been guilty of this ourselves as well,  people walking around with the mask under their nose or down around their chin or one of my personal favorites, over the nose but having the bottom somehow flopping around instead of form fitting around the mouth.  A recent guest on the Rich Roll podcast had the best comment (if a little off-color) which I will paraphrase here.  Wearing your mask with your nose uncovered is like walking around with your dick hanging out.  Why even wear pants?  The masks are at best a stop-gap measure so wearing them incorrectly utterly defeats the purpose.  It is a simple thing to have a care for your fellow human beings and wear your mask over your nose and mouth.

Number 6 above is an argument that I have only recently come across.  For some reason, some people have decided that wearing a mask is a way for the government to exert more control over their citizenry.  Well, okay, or it could just be a very simple thing to do that might save someone’s life.

When the Chinese invented Covid-19 in a secret lab in order to kill off a large majority of the world’s population, I do not think they anticipated the further benefit of creating an increasing number of dumb people.

Go out and be consistent!