It is now August 1, 2021 10:24 a.m. Can you believe it? Well in this strange post-technology, post-science world it seems that it is hard to know what is truth and what is not. But we will not worry about it here. It is just so so sad that the human race is going crazy, and has found a new way to self-destruct. You see, nuclear holocaust and climate change were not enough. But I am going to do my part right here to preserve a bit of humanity and the various cultural and artistic accomplishments that I hold dear.

Yes, my last post was June 30 of 2019. Work left me no choice but to defer posts so that I could pay the bills. But what happened next was simply unpredictable and hard to process. A global pandemic was just not in my plans for the future. Work travel came to a halt. A new way of doing work was learned so that I could do it all from home. New rituals were performed to keep us safe and healthy. Yet other more sedentary behaviors worked against a healthy lifestyle – and I paid the price. While vaccines were rolled-out and I got in line when my age group was called I never anticipated that the stress of a second vaccine along with working odd hours to communicate with people in time zones three hours away would cause problems for my heart. But it did. After wearing a heart monitor for two weeks in late March and early April this year, I was suddenly scheduled for emergency pacemaker surgery; I mean, like, being notified on Monday and having surgery on Wednesday type suddenly. It has now been three months since the surgery. I am still healing; it generally takes about 6 months to totally heal. I can drive but the seat belt hits right at the incision and is very uncomfortable.

However, I continue to move forward. Even during the pandemic I continued to pursue my relentless acquisitions of great obscure sounds from the past and select new releases. As the restrictions on social gatherings began to ease in May, we were able to get out to see various local artists: Dave Humphries with Mike Alvarez and Wolfgang Grasekamp at Alana in South Park; Sara Petite with Alex Watts and Andrew Crane at Wynola Pizza; Whitney Shay Quartet (Ed Kornhauser, Jodie Hill, and Chris Cancelliere) at Golden Island; Plow (Chris Clarke, Jason Weiss, Doug Walker, Alex Watts, and Dane Terry) at Wynola Pizza. What? No photos? Yep. For now. You see, my iPhone is a 6. I use One Drive to move items, including photos, to my PC but for over a year my phone has not been able to work with One Drive and updates are no longer available for the iPhone 6; planned obsolescence in action. I did post to Facebook, but I am too lazy to use FB to move them to my PC, so you are SOL if you are not a FB friend, LOL. (Don’t you just love how many acronyms have invaded our communications?)

I will try to fix this problem as time goes on. For now, just know I am alive and getting well, Mappinghappenings is alive and well and I will be continuing where I left off a year and a half ago in the very near future. I have more to talk about regarding Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band, Ken Kesey, the Anonymous Artists of America, and I intend to move forward to discuss Ram Dass, Ralph Metzner, and various spoken word albums and related musical obscurities I have accumulated over the past 50+ years. In the meantime, for your edification and enjoyment here is a rare photo of the Popeswami in the early stages of development at “Ye Olde Rashram” about 60 years ago. Enyoy, enyoy.