Welcome to another week of The Runback. Have you been enjoying The Duckpin? Do you have comments or suggestions? Do you want to write for us? Let me know at theduckpin@gmail.com. And please be sure to follow on Facebook, Twitter, Threads, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Thanks in advance.
News and Politics
The Kids Aren't Alright......and unless there is a radical sea change in politics, the country won't be either
America is in Trouble: An aging population means trouble ahead. What are we going to do about it?
September 2023 Republican Presidential Power Rankings: Well, that debate solved nothing did it?
Music
Phish returns to SPAC for a raucous weekend: Last weekend, Phish returned to SPAC for a pair of shows to help flood victims
The Monday Thought
When I was in high school, I worked at Kurtz’s Beach on the coast of the Chesapeake Bay in Pasadena. Our job there was to be general help, to a point. Cut the grass, wash the floors, direct traffic, etc. During large events we emptied out the trash cans and then cleaned up the place after everybody went home.
It was not a fun job but it was definitely encouragement to do well in school.
Most of these outdoor events involved older people, DJ’s, and booze. Invariably, somebody would end up playing a Jimmy Buffett song. Usually, it was of course Margaritaville.
And boy, did I hate having to hear that song over and over and over again for months over multiple summers.
In my teens and in my twenties, I never understood the appeal of Jimmy Buffett’s music.
Of course, I had tremendous respect for Jimmy Buffett the businessman. He went from being a street busker in New Orleans playing for drunks to a billionaire who created one of the world’s largest lifestyle brands and concepts. How he was able to do that is an amazing story that I am most certainly not qualified to tell.
As I got older, I started to understand it a little more. When you get older, you realize the emotions in the song. The feeling that nobody gets out of life alive. The losses. The regrets. It’s an anthem for middle age, realizing that the end of the road is starting to get just a little closer than the beginning.
Let me draw this from the Wikipedia about Margaritaville:
The three choruses reveal that the narrator is pondering his recent failed romance, and his friends are telling him that his former girlfriend is at fault. The last line of each shows his shifting attitude toward the situation: first "it's nobody's fault," then "hell, it could be my fault," and finally "it's my own damn fault." So the overall story that the song tells is not hedonist enjoyment of life in the sun, but rather almost the opposite; it's a man's gradual recognition, while sorrowfully drowning his sorrows in alcohol, that it was his foolish actions that destroyed the chance of happiness with the woman he loved. The appeal of the song is partly the clever way this evolving story is related in just a few words at the end of each chorus.
If you don’t understand that in some way, based on a failed relationship, failed decision, or some other regret, then you have been living a privileged life.
That is not to say that Margaritaville is the only Buffett song that struck a cord in the national psyche. The titular Cheeseburger in Paradise is the only time I use Heinz 571. A Pirate Looks at Forty is about hitting middle age. Everybody knows the chorus to It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere.
Perhaps this explains the Parrothead phenomenon. I was never one, not did I ever see Buffett in concert. But people related to the music, the need to have fun, blow off steam, and an understanding of the experience of life.
Fair Winds and Following Seas to a real one…
"I like mine with lettuce and tomato, Heinz 57 and French fried potatoes, Big kosher pickle and a cold draft beer. Well good god almighty which way do I steer”