Whiling Away

If I had any laurels I'd be resting all over them, but since I don't I'll have to carry on. (I wonder what my Panamanian friend Alberto, living in Canada, who reads my blog, thinks when he reads a sentence like the first one here. I mean, I'm often a tough read for English-as-a-first-language people. Ah well. Hey, how ya doing Alberto?)

The other day I did whatever it is I do in the mornings and then found myself cigar in hand and Panama cerveza at the ready listening to 95.7 on my FM dial. RTGFKAR was off doing something useful as he most often is and Woowoo Charly was either reading a book or searching the Internet for clues to the Mysteries of the Universe. Apart from Gus who was hanging about nearby doing and thinking inexplicable dog things, I was alone on the patio with the music and my thoughts. 95.7 plays Spanish ballads and love songs with few commercial interruptions throughout the day. At night it airs mind numbing Salsa and Rock with a repetitive beat that I suspect prepares listeners for the coming age when they'll all be drones with chips implanted under their skin and can be found jumping up and down in place to that very same beat while awaiting orders from their masters. You can see early evidence of this by looking at footage of our current "rock" concerts. But I digress and as I've mentioned before, you should never do that in public. So there I was in a sort of reverie, if that means a state of peaceful daydreaming and it does - I just looked it up - but I was not quite putting the music to its best use. In between my mind wandering off to explore the wonders of this and that I was trying to understand the Spanish lyrics dancing about my ears. This is a bit of an oddity when you consider that I rarely listen to the lyrics of English language songs, a thing that leaves me later singing my own words to popular melodies and listeners wondering where I had escaped from. Still, there I was trying and halfway succeeding in understanding what the tunes were all about. It wasn't until my third drink when I had switched to scotch that an actual awareness of the music caught my attention and I switched my focus from learning to listening. Who cares what the singers were saying. The overall effect of voice and instruments was a beautiful sound. Well, either that or the scotch was exceptionally good. Whichever, it was a nice afternoon and I highly reccomend 95.7. The Johnnie Walker is optional.