March fifth

 

It's a beautiful time here in Southern California. Warm with nice breezes. Flowers are blooming, birds are singing. We know that it is only a moment of time until things are insufferably hot but we can enjoy this lovely period while we can with the knowledge that it will always feel worse in Phoenix.

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I am getting inundated with loan scam calls and texts. I get easy ten a day and they have figured out that they can use local area codes to coerce you into answering.

I am on both do not call registries but nothing works.

A pox on these assholes. Stop already. Do people actually fall for this?

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Kudos to the UCLA woman's basketball players for their latest dance routine.

Speaking of basketball, I have to say that this is one of the more disappointing SDSU Aztecs season's I have ever witnessed and I have been watching a very long time.  The NIL has killed the college game. We lost our point guard from last year,  Nick Boyd to a Wisconsin team that reportedly paid him over a million dollars this year.

The current team is so up and down. I was at the Utah St. game recently, they played great and then lost two in a row with listless play. They need a Nick Boyd, a guard who can playmake and get everybody involved.

We had some amazing years in our run but I can't see us in the NCAA this year.

Having said that, congratulations to the Lady Aztecs for going 25 - 4 and 19 -1 in conference,  first in the Mountain West.

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Saturday is my little brother Johnny's birthday. It broke my heart when they found him dead in his Pittsburgh apartment last year and my trip back there to get his stuff and try to make sense of it all was the definite low point of my year. 

He was smart and kind and I wish a lot of things had been different between us.

It was comforting to know there was no drugs or suicide, he died of natural causes. My last brother. It sucks so bad to lose a sibling, nothing ever prepares you for it.

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Speaking of John, he was with me at my first dead show in California, at the Cow Palace on 3/23/74, along with my mother, Hank and Gabe. 

People that are not into the dead will most probably find this a bore but I wrote last week about seeing the first Terrapin and Estimated prophet 2/26/77 at San Bernardino.

I started thinking about first playings of epic dead songs and the truth is that I witnessed the first Cassidy and Scarlet Begonias at the Cow Palace, as well as the first Fire on the Mountain at Winterland on 3/18/77. 

Every bit as wonderful!

I feel very lucky to have been there to experience those precious inchoate moments.