Hiatus, writ with water & still loving you

If you are tired of hearing me rave about the love of my life, Frances Anne Hopkins, then stay cool, calm and collected. This is the last time you will see her on my page -- at least, for now. I am sort of (as I sort of just about everything) going to go absent without leave for a while. First, Frances: This painting is entitled "At Marquette, Michigan 1864." Marquette is on Lake Superior, the south shore, and writing as someone who has canoed past it a few times, I will guarantee you that Marquette has changed just a little bit since Frances made her visit. Seriously, I actually do recognize the point of rocks. Frances does have a way with colors and details, does she not? In case you think the "spots" in the sky are photographic problems with the painting, I will say this: It is the first time I have seen photographic problems, e.g., spots, fly in a "V" formation. Finally, I am winding down (or, maybe, winding up) for a time, beginning with this post. This post itself will be unusual for me in the sense that it is going to appear in two or three segments; not separate entries, but pieces added on, maybe all them today, maybe some after today. (So, I am busy for a change, and need some sleep, do not give me any grief.) Please, reserve your comment for after June ends or, if the mood strikes you, come back and check upon me again during the next day or two and leave a second comment. When the entry closes with music, you will know it is complete.

Hiatus is an idiotic word

As the length of daylight hours in the northlands begin to shorten (yeh, really), so does my time writing here. My thought is to leave "Sort of San Fran" alone for the most part for -- a sort of a hiatus. When the opportunity or a reason arises, I might not be able to resist temptation and produce a post. But, I am not going to worry about it or to think about it for the most part. I hope I will continue to make comments on the pages of others, but no promises to do it with every post you write.

This might be a stranger phenomenon for me than for most bloggers in that I have utilized writing in many of my work experiences. Other than letters or emails, this is one of the few times I recall not being paid to write. So much for newspapers and paid subscribers. Any and all of us can produce a "news screen" of our own and do everything from preach, to lie (possibly I repeat myself), to beg, to promote, to sell, to report, to editorialize, to show photos or to offer videos, to .... to .... to .... endless possibilities.

One last time before I retreat: My beliefs are that the world is becoming more dangerous, not less so; that while people in some nations, such as Iran, are demonstrating for freedom, people in other nations, such as America, are allowing their freedoms to slip away by blindly accepting promises from false prophets and power mongers; that music is deteriorating (just had to toss that one in); that population control is a significant problem which is being ignored while get-rich-schemers are selling the concept of man-made global warming to wannabe do-gooders; that there probably will be violence in the streets of the U.S. if maleficent government officials and corporate bandits are not all brought before the criminal justice system and .... and .... and .... that is enough.

Just remember, I do love you even if you are a liberal .... in some ways, I am, too, but that might only be a conceptual distinction, and you might actually be a conservative ....

A name writ with water ....

Katy Jackson, who calls her page "Moving Back, Moving On," once wrote a post about her final day in the office at a former job. More specifically, she and a colleague were collecting their own items, boxing up materials to be sent elsewhere, designating redundant paperwork for recycling and performing a general clean up / clear out operation. The last lines of her post were these:

We took one last look around the room and departed from 'our office' for the very last time. You'd never know by looking that we'd ever been there.

And, here is the comment I left for that post:

It is interesting, isn't it, how the history of so many people is written in the absolute trash they leave behind at a work place?

When I leave a job, I have been known to shred 99 percent of the material and take the remaining one percent with me. Then I replace my material with the material that had been left behind by my predecessor and which I had stored away in boxes for just this moment. Within a matter of a few years, no one would ever know I had been there. Similar to you, I guess.

And, this was Katy's remark to my comment:

Maybe it's a desire for workplace invisibility. Not necessarily during the actual occupation of the job, but afterwards - the desire to leave no trace behind like a particularly neat burglar perhaps?

Here worked one whose name was writ with water...

I loved that line, as well as the concept it vividly and brilliantly explained. That had been my intent when I departed this place. Some of you have heard before, perhaps too many times, that I am very guarded about my privacy. Before this page, no photograph of me ever had entered cyberspace, although I have been transmitting via personal computer since 1985. There were many ways and reasons to do it even before the Internet or Windows or browsers came into existence, some of you might be surprised to know. Similar to photographs, my name, rank and serial number were kept under lock and key.

Returning to the point at hand, I had thought to vanish when I decided the "Sort of San Francisco Fan Club" had run its course. Maybe that still will happen a bit further down the road, but not yet, and when it finally does happen, it will fade away with a notice of intent, rather than simply disappear.

There are too many nice people who stop by here on occasion, that the last thing I want do is to be rude and inconsiderate of them on my last day in this office.

Achtung! Achtung! Still missing you, baby!

One more band is being featured right now because I consider the singer, Klaus Meine, to be No. 3 on my list of the absolute best male singers in the era of rock music. While the German band, Scorpions, is among the most significant in heavy rock, as a unit it does not approach the talent level of either Boston or Dokken. Song writing ability, much of it by the band's founder, Rudolf Schenker, and Meine's voice, are the strengths in this outfit.

Included here are two renditions of the same song, my personal favorite by the Scorpions, "Still Loving You." This song generally is considered the Scorpions' trademark piece, and was written by Schenker and Meine.

The first video shows the band performing with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 2000. The audio is sort of out of control, but what a fantastic performance it would have been to attend. I would have stood in line to be present at this one. Meine's pronunciation of Americanized English is near perfect, but that his native language is German is impossible to miss. The tone, the mere natural guttural sound of his voice, is Germanic. A performance is more enjoyable to watch, I think, when it is obvious the singer is loving the moment. Meine clearly is happy with where he is and with what he is doing during these moments.

The second piece, once again, is present to be able to hear the strength and range of Meine's voice without concert hall racket. It is a studio recording, with more-or-less "romantic" slides replacing a video of the band actually performing.

The song is powerful, and I do not think I could understand how anyone would not like it, both for the impact of the message and the strength of the sound. Maybe the fact that in ancestral mathematics I am about 18 percent German shades my view a bit. But, maybe not.