My Sick Mind

"All that dies, dies for a reason. To put its strength into the season." - Survival , Yes I remember when I bought Yes' "Fragile" album.   I was at the Record Museum store in Audubon, early in 1972.  I had heard Roundabout on the radio and wanted to know what else was going on.  I took the album outside and pried open the shrink-wrap.  This was the day of LPs, and some of them had amazing artwork.  Roger Dean's cover and album artwork is iconic.  I sat and gazed at it.  When I got the record home and listened, a love affair was born. Forward to September 13, 1972.   Yes released "Close to the Edge," and being the hip 15-year-old that I was, I had read about the album in Circus magazine.  I invaded the Franklin Music store in the Echelon Mall and asked a clerk if they had the album.  It was in a carton of them below the display rack.  They hadn't put them out yet.  I was the first person in Camden County to have...

I awoke (abruptly) at 3:00am and found myself thinking back to my high school days.  My thoughts drifted to a geometry teacher we had who would start most of his sentences with "Um, supposing..."   And it wasn't the normal 'um' that some of us use when we are trying to connect our thoughts. This um was a major pronouncement - as though he was proclaiming some monumental thought.   Um Like that.   The thing I remembered was that we used to keep track of the "um's" and the "supposings" with those hand-written roman numeral charts like I suppose Nero used to use when he was deciding who he would throw to the lions [do not research my historical reference]   Those of us who were in the gang would laugh amongst ourselves and gaze knowingly whenever he would say "um" or "supposing," and laugh harder and gaze more staringly when he would use "Um, supposing" in the same sentence.  That was a real hol...