Attack Of The Drama Llama

“The truth is you don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow. Life is a crazy ride, and nothing is guaranteed.”~ Eminem

Just about that time when you are about to put everything on cruise control for a few days… that stupid llama finds you in the bedroom window, staring at you while you sleep. And its wanting inside the house.

And then by no fault of anyone, it finds its way inside. Suddenly your everything slowly turns into a nightmare from which you just wished that you would awake.

That’s when you realize that any and all attempts to play the hero and be Superman are going to just fall apart in the process. So you let nature run its course and hold on tight, hoping that it ends soon and the rays of sunshine appear once more sooner than later.

HELP!!!

That’s the way things have been recently, but they seemed to have turned around.

Saturday, the 13th…. NANCY SILVA PROJECT is coming to town and will be playing a show at Dirty Dog Bar. They are playing a show that is a homecoming event for a band called ONE-EYED DOLL who has been touring these last few weeks. The 13th will be the last day of the tour for ONE-EYED DOLL and NANCY SILVA PROJECT is on the bill to help support.

I don’t think that I have to tell you how important this show is for me. I think that throughout previous blog posts where I have talked about Nancy Silva, one can get a sense of where I am coming from with what I am thinking and feeling.

In other words: It doesn’t take a nuclear physicist to figure it out.

Six exact months I have waited for this opportunity. 185 days to today, and then add one more day because I will not see anyone until the 13th… so 186. More than 4,440 hours of waiting will pay off.

As of nearly a week ago though, the drama llama came for a visit and hasn’t left yet.

My sister hit me up to borrow money, which was basically ALL of my spending money for the evening of the show. Now there will be no merchandise bought if there is anything that I want.  No drinks. NOTHING.

Then I busted my only pair of eye glasses on Sunday afternoon. Went into a panic because of the fact that I my vision is horrible and only am near sighted. So unless these bands plan to play while sitting on my lap, this is going to be a disaster if I cannot see.

I had a temporary fix which involved tiny amounts of Super Glue and LARGE amounts of Scotch tape, rigging the frames together to make for one-sided foggy experiences.

I went to the vision center inside Wal-Mart as was suggested. They weren’t any help at all. They didn’t want to talk to me, they didn’t want to help me, they didn’t even want to refer me to a place where I could get a pair of broken glasses fixed. These people were terrible. Then I went go look for GODZILLA on DVD, but Wal-Mart didn’t have it. I was one week too early for them to have it in stock. So ridiculous! Nothing was going right.

Finally, all signs pointed to a frame fixer who claimed that to fix the glasses would be anywhere from $5 all the way up to $60. I was charged $40. Another forty bucks out of my pocket.

But at least I got the glasses fixed, and still taking away from any hope or chance of using that money to do a little self-shopping for band merchandise. I sure would love to add to my collection of NSP t-shirts or other pieces of memorabilia if there is anything to be had.

Am I going to have any money for this show at all?? Will I even have money to get a taxi ride home?

Will I have to skip out on seeing ONE-EYED DOLL for the first time in order to catch a bus home???? The possibilities are endless that its excruciating.

The only thing that I can say at this point is that I am stressed out. I’ve been counting this date for over three months. I remember when I told Nancy Silva that the show was ten weeks (70 days) away. Both of us kind of got a little excited.

Now its just a little more than 24 hours away. The only thing that is certain is that I got my eye glasses fixed. And that I will go to the show. The rest remains a damned mystery.

First world problems and the struggle becomes real. Hooray for me.

A History of Panic

“A man’s mind will very gradually refuse to make itself up until it is driven and compelled by emergency.”~Anthony Trollope

 

Today was the nationwide testing of the Emergency Alert System (EAS). For days now, I have been seeing bulletins and commercials that had been warning the general public that the test was going to happen. I began to wonder what the big fuss was all about?

 

I grew up with these kinds of program interruptions every Saturday morning for only about 30 seconds. It really didn’t bother me all that much as a kid.

 

But this was the Emergency Broadcasting System (EBS) back then. Today was the EAS, which had replaced the EBS on the first of January in 1997. Today’s testing happened all across the USA, instead of when the EBS would do their testing in just the local area at each time and place.

 

So with all of the warnings in advance of today’s testing, I waited to see just how badly the EAS had failed to allow people the knowledge that “this is only a test”. Turns out, that each individual channel that I flipped through as the test was ongoing, had actually said that it was a test and not an actual emergency. Apparently, they were worried about people going into panic without the prior knowledge that the test was going to happen.

 

This got me to think of American history and widespread panic.

 

Enter: The War of the Worlds.

 

No, not that dumb failure of a film. The radio program. For those of you who just don’t know what I am talking about, let me arm you with some real knowledge:

 

The War of the Worlds was an episode of the American radio drama anthology series Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was performed as a Halloween episode of the series on the 30th of October, 1938, and aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network. Directed and narrated by actor and future filmmaker Orson Welles, the episode was an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds.

The first two thirds of the 60-minute broadcast were presented as a series of simulated “news bulletins”, which suggested to many listeners that an actual alien invasion by Martians was currently in progress. Compounding the issue was the fact that the Mercury Theatre on the Air was a “sustaining show” (it ran without commercial breaks), adding to the program’s realism. Although there were sensationalist accounts in the press about a supposed panic in response to the broadcast, the precise extent of listener response has been debated.

In the days following the adaptation, however, there was widespread outrage and panic by certain listeners who believed the events described in the program were real. The program’s news-bulletin format was decried as cruelly deceptive by some newspapers and public figures, leading to an outcry against the perpetrators of the broadcast.

This radio program in 1938, did cause the panic because millions of people had tuned in to this show and wasn’t able to separate the fact that the radio program was purely fiction and not real. The world was not under attack. All of this because the company that put on this program wanted to give a little Halloween scare for the children. Instead, it scared men, women, AND children.

I had thought about this time again and again. What really did happen with the widespread panic of the country? I mean, were there riots, crime, or maybe even death??

Throughout the times that I have researched the events that happened around this time in the USA, I have come to the conclusion thus far that the possibility that people suffered either injury or fatality, is just an urban legend.

I recall an elder relative of mine who said that he heard the radio broadcast as a child, and that it was reported that a man had turned on his radio far late into the program, ultimately missing the warnings that were given prior that it was only fiction. He believed it to be true and he was scared so much that he was bound and determined NOT to be taken by any Martian aliens nor let his family suffer under them. So he had killed his wife and children with a shotgun. And just moments before he turned the weapon on himself, he was listening to the radio and then heard at the end that it was all just a Halloween prank.

But this too, appears to be false. And I might personally add, thankfully.

So many different stories about “what happened next” that it is too difficult now to know what really happened in the days after the radio broadcast. It was reported that many people attempted to sue for “mental anguish” and “physical injury”. But these cases were thrown out. Except for one case where a man from Massachusetts had sued for the price of a pair of brand new shoes. The man had actually spent his shoe allowance on a brand new pair of shoes, so that he could run from the invaders. Welles actually paid the man. But I would definitely need some kind of citation on that story to know that it really did happen.

For today’s testing of the EAS, I honestly do not think that there was any reports of panic, much less any widespread panic. I would have my doubts it did alarm anyone at all to react in the wrong direction and inappropriately.

Still though, it has happened in this country once. It could happen again.