BEANSPACE 3              9:40am    march 27, 2014

       Retirement is french press coffee... It's having the extra 10 minutes to measure, wait and clean up in exchange  for a quality cup....even high grade java is less costly than those cute little Kuerig cups..... I have been retired now for about a half year. It kind of crept up on me. Open heart surgery in September 2012 and hip surgery this last September . I am the Bionic Beinstein.

One by one my old High School buddies are retiring some voluntary, some not. We could meet for lunch on a Tuesday but we don't . We still act as though our week is regimented by the 40 or so hours in the middle that paid the bills for over 40 years.  I keep saying that i will take on some sort of consulting project or get a part time job and get gainfully employed . I have threatened to write nearly every day and somehow the day passes with no more than lengthy facebook posts. Those can give a degree of connection but they are often reactive to someone else. Example : someone mentions a musicians birthday and I find 2 photos from 32 years ago and tell a story.  This does not force me to stay on a topic of my choosing and report in greater depth.

Me and the 21rst century:
      I started a blog titled Beanspace 4 years ago...Lost interest in it 2 years ago and now I find that I can not post entries in my own blog. I would like to keep the name Beanspace and I am happy with my initial postings in the topics of music and film; but somehow the address and password I stored is not getting me in.  There is no phone number that I can call to speak to a person. I would like to speak to a real person ; even if that person has an accent so thick that I can not understand half of what they are saying ; I want to speak to a person. The irony of writing this instead of just saying it is not lost on me. My kids text they don't talk.  If I ask them if they have spoken to someone they tell me yes and then i realize that their convo has been text . I guess living in a rapid thumb world of abbreviations should help their literacy , but it only seems to reinforce language shortcuts, and it certainly eliminates tone of voice and the dynamic of verbal response. My first generation I pad turns off in the middle of a post because it does not have enough memory to handle the apps. It is four years old and that is considered ancient.  My mother had a toaster that lasted 20 years but a four year old I pad that cost more than my first car ( a 64 Dart for $450 in 1969) is deemed not old...but ancient.
      In short technology is moving so fast that none of us can catch up.  Catching up becomes a career path  . Two weeks ago Facebook paid 19 BILLION dollars for What's App. I have never used What's App I don't know anyone who has...and neither do the news people who are reporting the story. 19 BILLION for a mystery name and the valuation for Campbell's Soup , an iconic brand with a century of history, is only 16 Billion.

     Hopefully I will be able to repost my original Beanspace work here and regain my name of Beanspace. Until then i will remain you retired mellow friend. I will resist being the curmudgeon who does nothing but complain about how things were better in the old days, because they were not.  Sure there are wonderful fond memories but I want to keep growing. I am a better guitar player now than I was at the age of 21. If my hands could have figured out then what they know now I might have spent more energy trying to build a career as a performer. Not that I am a great guitarist now...  just competent. I was both blessed and cursed with exposure to some of the greatest musicians in the world. As I have told many of them..." somebodies got yo listen." ... So I put my history teacher chops into play. I have written reviews and historical articles over the years and I have been told by friends that I have a voice that should be heard on many musical topics....
    I will now launch this puppy and see if anyone is out there.......see ya soon....