A certain kind of New York Jew

 So it started raining at 7 last night, I got a few things rounded up and ready to list after the batch I should have listed last night and will list today. 

I watched stuff on YouTube and finally went to bed at 3AM or maybe a bit later. Awful. I don't want to fall back into that night-owl schedule. 

I woke up around 1 in the afternoon and turned the radio on. They were playing an interview with Paul Simon from 8 years ago. It was pretty neat, showing just how hard he works on a song and it made me look him up on Wikipedia (again). 

"The musician Donald Fagen described Simon's childhood as that of "a certain kind of New York Jew, almost a stereotype really, to whom music and baseball are very important. I think it has to do with the parents. The parents are either immigrants or first-generation Americans who felt like outsiders, and assimilation was the key thought—they gravitated to black music and baseball, looking for an alternative culture."^[8] Simon said Fagen's description was not far from the truth.^[8] Simon played baseball and stickball as a child. He described his father as funny and smart, but said he worked late and did not see his children much.^[8]" 

^{Now, digging into the Wikipedia entry, Simon got to know Garfunkel around age 10 and they set about making songs right away. If there's anyone who's earned what he got, it's Paul Simon. But what's always, always unsaid is that Simon's parents had stable careers, doing things like schoolteacher (mom) and college professor who was a bandleader on the side (dad).} 

^{What's not mentioned is that immigrant parents, 2nd or 3rd generation, will bust their asses for their kids. Provide them enough to eat, a safe, stable place to live, even set money aside for the kids to attend college or at least trade school. It doesn't matter if those parents are Jews or Vietnamese or Chinese or Hispanic or what have you. Until they become thoroughly Americanized, immigrants come to this country and act like human beings.} 

^{Among those who are thoroughly American-cultured, "Raised by wolves" is the rule. By the time you're 18 you're on your own and really American parents don't care if you get a Ph.D. or 20-to-life.} 

^{I've long concluded that this is why there's such a hatred of Jews, and Chinese, and Vietnamese, and Hispanics, and so on. Their working together like normal humans always have. This is hated because it's feared, and feared because people who are essentially Iks who drive cars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ik_people#The_Mountain_People}

^{Even Louis Armstrong, coming from deep poverty, had people he could take refuge with, be fed by, who got him jobs (like his coal-cart job) and encouraged his music (his first musical work was playing simple blues is a bawdy house).} 

^{Charlie Parker came from modest beginnings also, but his parents actually bought him a saxophone before he was a teen, and I can't conceive of really American parents doing something like that. Really American parents won't even feed you enough, they're sure as hell not buying you something as expensive as a saxophone.} 

^{The one Kurt Vonnegut book I've not read, Slapstick, introduces a fictional solution. Vonnegut grew up in a huge and loving family compared to modern Americans, and remarked how everyone ought to have what he had, where if a kid was having a hard time with his parents, he could go stay at a relative's a few houses over for a break for a while. He had relatives all around his home town, and parents who didn't hate him for coming into their lives. He was fed and never had to sleep in an alley. Anyway his solution, inspired by the newfangled issuance of Social Security numbers, was for each person to be issued a name and number to go into their own name, so that you might be John Daffodil-14 Smith. You'd have thousands of other Daffodil-14's scattered all over who'd be your extended family as a mutual aid network.} 

^{In reality what will happen is (this is assuming global warming doesn't kill off everything larger than a mouse, which is a big ask) people of inferior cultures like the American one, will simply die out. While I want to stick around as long as I can to see, out of curiosity, just how bad things will get, I'm pretty proud of the fact that our "line" stops with my generation. American culture is so wonderful that out of the five of us, none of us wanted to have kids. Why bring kids into this horror?} 

^{In other news, I'm even more confirmed in my belief that the cause of "my" headache was ... .chocolate. Chocolate is in so many things that if one is a snacker at all, it's really hard to avoid if one isn't thinking about it. Even the "day-old" bargain bags of croissants and such things from Lee's pretty reliably had at least one that was stuffed with chocolate filling. As far as the headaches go, it doesn't seem to matter much of I'm eating high-carb or low-carb. But low-carb is better for health of course.}