How Idea “Compounded Interest” Works

 Inch by inch, row by row
Gonna make this garden grow
All it takes is a rake and a hoe
And a piece of fertile ground

In the late 90s, I created three Google Blogger blogs: The Rat’s Eye View, Wirebender Audio Rants, and Geezer with a Grudge.  The Rat’s Eye view was, originally, going to be a repository for a collection of articles I had written in my position as a freelance manufacturing/management consultant with Productivity, Inc. (A long dead manufacturing consulting company out of Temecula, CA.)  That gig didn’t last long, mostly because I was disgusted by the executives I worked with as a consultant and moved on to other money-making ventures.  But I kept writing in The Rat’s Eye, even though it didn’t seem like anyone was paying attention.  About the same time, I had become a regular contributor to a regional motorcycle magazine, The Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly, and my column was called “Geezer with A Grudge.”  I almost always wrote more articles than the magazine could use and I started storing my “extras” in the Geezer blog.  A few years later, I started working, part time, at a music college, first as a technical support consultant and, later, as an instructor.  I also had three music-related one-man businesses that I called “Wirebender Audio Services.”  So, to promote those businesses, I started Wirebender Audio Rants.

I haven’t written much about motorcycles since I had to quit riding, last year, for reasons of old age.  So, I haven’t paid much attention to that blog’s statistics.  Today, I discovered that sometime ago the Geezer blog past 2 million views (2,028,204, as of today, in fact) and is averaging about 6500 views per month!  So, I checked the other blogs and found that The Rat’s Eye View, my least likely candidate for readers had 393,543 views and for the past year has been averaging 3500 views per month and Wirebender Audio Rants and averaged 9100 views per month and a total of 332,501 views for the blog’s lifetime. 

For a while, Google’s Ad Sense actually paid money for advertising links in the blog and the Geezer blog made me an average of $100/month for the advertising hits.  A few years ago, Google decided to keep all but a few pennies of the advertising revenue to themselves and I deleted Ad Sense from all of my blogs.  That was several (about 10) years ago and, since then I just write for the excuse H.L. Menken gave, “for the same reason cows give milk.” 

The point I lamely tried to make with this essay’s title was that many things that we do, creatively and without much hope of notice, can pay some fun dividends if you last long enough.  Way back in late 2020, I was still writing fairly regular Geezer columns and paying attention to the numbers.  I was pretty impressed with myself when that blog made it to 1,000,000 hits.  I know that’s pretty lame in a world where a Tik Tok or drunks-in-a-bar YouTube “influencer” can, apparently, easily gather 1,000,000 followers.  My most “popular” blog, the Geezer, has a grand total of 90 followers and The Rat’s Eye has 2 and Wirebender has 14.  I’d be embarrassed by those lame numbers, except that . . . I’m not. 

My comparatively new Substack page, “T.W. Day Stories and Rants on Random Subjects,” has 24 “subscribers” (all free) and that page has had about 6,400 hits since it started in December of 2023.  It has ben a slow, somewhat exponential, reader growth and I’ve made-little-to-no effort at promoting my page.  My “biggest” month had a little over 900 hits.  Every source I know of claims that reading isn’t something that many people bother with today.  My wife, more typically, gets practically all of her knowledge from YouTube, which is a sure way to drive me from any room or gathering.  I really don’t want to think about how many people use Tik Tok for that purpose.  I never expected to be read as much as I’ve been on any of my Blogger blogs and I’m delighted with the slow progress of my Substack page.  I’m incredibly grateful to everyone, even the critics, who has take the time, exercised the patience, and kept a rare skill alive by reading my essays. 

Gratefully,

T.W. Day

“I’m An American” (also 😊, me too)

 Bruce Springsteen’s song, “The Streets of Minneapolis” came out of the gate swinging and smacked Donny’s fragile ego right in the balls.  In “response,” Pedo President came out moaning, “White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson shared in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, ‘The Trump administration is focused on encouraging state and local Democrats to work with federal law enforcement officers on removing dangerous criminal illegal aliens from their communities — not random songs with irrelevant opinions and inaccurate information. The media should cover how Democrats have refused to work with the administration, and instead, opted to provide sanctuary for these criminal illegals’ and Pedo himself whined back with a limp-wristed slap, calling Springsteen “dumb as a rock” and a “dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker.” (I guess Trump thinks he’s an expert on “dried out prunes,” since he has to look at one in the mirror while some poor makeup “artist” slathers orange paint on his face.)

But even a biased right-wing source like Forbes Magazine has been forced to admit, “Bruce Springsteen’s ICE Protest Song Soars To No. 1” and not just in Minnesota or the USA but in 19 countries and counting.  Bruce took his rage and channeled it into an anthem that people are singing around the world and in some very unusual places.  Fairly often, I volunteer at our local hospital and last Friday, as I drove to my “shift” at the hospital, I was listening to “The Streets of Minneapolis” in my car.  It put me in a good mood, which has been rare the past year.  As I was pushing my cart through the hospital, the song was a total earworm and I have never enjoyed the stuck song syndrome more.  In one of the clinic’s departments a nurse who I often talk to when I’m doing that job asked, “What’s got you in such a good mood?” 

I said, “I have a song in my heart and it’s moving my feet, too.”  She wanted to know what the song was and I asked, “Are you sure you want to know?”  She did and I played the chorus of “Minnesota” and, in less than a line in, she and two other nurses started singing along with Bruce and the E Street Band, “Oh, Minneapolis, I hear your voice, singing through the bloody mist.  We'll take our stand, for this land, and the stranger in our midst.  Here in our home, they killed and roamed, in the winter of '26.  We'll remember the names of those who died on the streets of Minneapolis.” 

If you are living under a fucking rock and haven’t heard this new anthem for protest, freedom, and getting off of your dead ass (if you’re American) and standing on your hind legs and doing something, here it is:

In early 2020, friends and I started playing music online through a couple of online, real-time music collaboration services (initially Jamkazam, currently Sonobus) and that resulted in e writing my first original tune since the late 1970s, “I Don’t Want to Do This Anymore.”  The constant barrage of Republican lies during the early days of COVID and as the 2020 election approached “inspired” me to write a second song, “I’m An American (Lie to Me).”  The bullshit was so intense I actually made a slight attempt to move this song into public view with a YouTube video.  Last I knew it was on a few of the music streaming services, but I haven’t kept up with that because it’s not worth anything other than some kind of ego boost.  Bruce’s song, in 4 days, has 368,000 hits and my song, in 5 years, has 368.  We’re not in the same league.

However, when I was ranting about how great “Streets of Minneapolis” is to a friend, he told me he thought “I’m An American” was at least as good.  It isn’t, but I’m not ashamed of it, which isn’t a small thing for me.  As my YouTube video description explains, “It would have remained an acoustic guitar-only folk song without Harold Goodman's having written and recorded a killer bass part, which forced me to add electric guitar tracks to the song. Stu Anderson and Scott Jarrett added pedal steel guitar and keyboards, online, through Jamkazam.com. Michael McKern recorded the drums in his home studio space.” 

It’s almost impossible to explain how much I dislike video editing and the fact that I’ve only managed to put two of my songs into videos is some kind of evidence to that fact.  My friends and I (we call our group thing Downstream Consequences) have managed, so far, to record 41 cover songs and 19 originals since 2000.  And you can listen to it all in my Dropbox Original Music MP3 folder.  Even download some or all of it, if you feel so inspired.  In the absence of an album cover with snazzy artwork, credits, and the usual album stuff, I’ve created a document, “Liner Notes.pdf,” that does all of that paraphernalia in a small, electronic format. 

For what it’s worth, I’m adding “I’m An American” to the long list of songs inspired by Trump and the fascist in a long line of protest songs that goes back far before Woody Guthrie and even the labor protest songs of the 1890s.  When we can’t do anything else, song, poetry, and story is how we mark where we stand against inequity, violence, lies, misery, and outright evil. 

Thanks for your attention to this matter and, Donald Trump and all Republicans, fuck you. 

“I Can’t Work Under These Conditions”

 Still on my bucket list after 60-some years.

My first “job” (other than a two-year run at a paper route between ages 10 and 12) was working for Dodge City’s Boot Hill Museum, running the small concession stand outside of the museum’s cemetery building, cleaning the museum toilets, sweeping floors, selling hotdogs and sodas, maintaining the robot gunfighter, and getting shot off of a hillside by a drunk playing town marshal during the bi-daily gunfight.  All for $0.60/hour.  I was 13-about-to-turn-14.  Toilet duty at the museum is still close to the grossest job I’ve ever had.  Tourists are particularly gross and the women’s bathroom was a horror show of randomly discarded sanitary napkins and worse; much worse.

Getting shot wasn’t a picnic, either.  The “marshal” was often a one-legged hobo who looked like he belonged in Old Dodge City, but who had a terrible time remembering the script.  He was supposed to come out of the Longbranch Tavern, which used to be on the west end of the replica street, with a double-barrel shotgun and his pistols holstered.  After a brief argument in the street with the “bad guys,” he was supposed to take several steps east, toward the bad guys, before being warned that another bad guy, me, was about to back shoot him.  He would, then, turn and shoot me with one of the barrels of the shotgun.  Sometimes, maybe not having recovered from the previous night’s celebrations, he’d come out of the saloon and fire off one or two barrels of the shotgun at me from a LOT closer than scripted and I’d get a blast of cardboard blank wad in the chest.  Sometimes, the cardboard would be on fire as I rolled down the dry weed-covered hillside.  I still have some weird looking scars on my chest from some of those fires. 

Since then, I’ve had a lot of crappy jobs and a few really decent ones.  Maybe starting out like that made an impression on me that there is no job so crappy that I shouldn’t expect to be the one doing it. 

For a few brief moments in my early 20s, I imagined that I’d learn a trade and move to the Pacific Northwest to get good at it.  Early in the “learn a trade” phase, Ms. Day decided that she wanted to be a mother and, as a byproduct, I would be a father.  That sudden change in plans force me to dump the formal part of learning a trade and find a job that paid more than minimum wage.  Since minimum wage in 1970 was $1.30/hour, you’d think that would have been easy, but you’d be wrong.  The closest, surest thing I could find was an electronic scales technician position in Hereford, Texas at $3.20/hour. 

Well over 90% of the equipment I installed and serviced was mounted on trucks and trailers.  The drawing (at right) is a sterile illustration of the kind of equipment I worked on and the components (load cells) that most often needed servicing.  But to really get a feel for what that job was like you’ll have to imagine that truck coated from stem-to-stern and top-to-bottom with cow and/or pig shit.  The “clean” equipment I worked on were grain mill platform scales, which were still often coated in animal feces which held the grain and silage spillage in place (and in my face).  In accordance with Murphy’s Law, the hardest to get-to parts always failed in the worst weather and at the most critical (according to customers) time.  I “specialized” in that equipment for about 6 years, driving 100,000 miles/year every year I was in that business and working overtime so often it felt like regular time.  After six years of that, I got my first manufacturing engineering position with an ag equipment manufacturer.  The company had just invented a design to “fill the corners” on center pivot irrigation systems, but to do that required electronic systems that didn’t yet exist.  The “clean part” of that job was design and fabrication work, which I loved and was pretty good at.  However, once that was done someone needed to setup an electronics manufacturing facility and I got tagged for that job.  In the 1970s, electronics manufacturing was a pretty awful job.  I used to have a book of the EPA’s hazardous chemicals and all of the first dozen chemicals listed as “carcinogens” were chemicals I’ve used in electronics or mechanical manufacturing.  There is a Simpson’s episode where Mr. Burns gets a physical exam and learns that “all of your diseases are in perfect balance” and, as long as he doesn’t get any of them cured, he’ll be fine.  That might be me and my chemical exposure. 

 

In the early 2000s, a friend was starting up a live sound reinforcement business and he asked me to help with one of his first big shows.  The headliner was a South African reggae artist named Lucky Dube.  There were also two opening acts.  The touring crew was a bunch of South African white guys who mostly stood around and tried to look important while we busted our asses to setup the stage and do a soundcheck.  I wasn’t familiar with the FOH (Front of House) console, but it was pretty straight-forward and we managed to get everything sorted out for the two opening acts.  When Lucky’s band came on for a soundcheck, the touring FOH goober took a look at the board, pissed and moaned a bit, and headed for the auditorium door saying, “I can’t work under these conditions.”  Up to that moment in my life, I’d never heard anyone say anything like that out loud, although I know I’d seen essentially the same thing displayed, unspoken.

He stormed out and I finished the soundcheck for the headliner band.  Soon afterwards, the auditorium doors opened for the audience and the show started.  The opening act did a few songs and left, followed by the next band and their set.  Lucky’s band came out and did an intro number that ended with Lucky, himself, coming out Motown-style, and they got into their set.  About half-way through the 2^nd number, the touring FOH goober showed up and elbowed me out of his way.  I’d labeled the console and arranged it the way I usually setup a mix, but he was apparently thrown off by the organization and the labels were below his paygrade; or something.  So, he spent the rest of the set fiddling with the sliders on several graphic EQs, which were all bypassed because I never use them and he hadn’t noticed that fact.  Since that experience, I’ve wondered what it would be like to be so valuable that you could say, “I can’t work under these conditions” and walk out, expecting someone to fix it so the conditions were right for me to work under. 

So far, it’s never happened.

Skip ahead to my post-retirement hobby, working backstage at Red Wing’s Sheldon Theater between 2015 and 2020.  I sort of stumbled into that gig, mostly, because I know how to rap audio cables and use audio equipment.  The dead last thing I wanted to be doing was working live shows, but I love doing the stage setup: selecting and positioning microphones, laying out a trip-free stage, getting the soundcheck sorted out, and I don’t mind the tear-down, either.  I just don’t enjoy the usual excessive volume and typically awful sounding live show.  The Production Manager liked me enough that he’d let me help with everything up to the soundcheck and, if I thought the show was going downhill from there, I could sneak out and either come back to help with the loadout or call it a night. 

Sometime around 2016, Kathy Mattea and her band were our headliners at the Sheldon.  The soundcheck was easy and fun and the band was totally professional.  Kathy, as stars usually do, showed up for the last bit of the soundcheck to get her instrument, vocals, and monitors sorted out.  There was some administrative crap that went on at the beginning of the show and it was still going on when the band arrived backstage to get started, on time weirdly enough.  Someone, I think the City Mayor, was running on about some nonsense and everyone backstage was getting antsy.  Kathy was kind of hopping from one foot to the other, joking with her band and marking time.  After a bit, she said, “I can’t work under these conditions” and faked heading back to the dressing room, which got a solid laugh from the band and the rest of us backstage.  Of course, she waited until the nonsense was done and did a great show (which I stayed for). 

Obviously, I’m not the only one who would like to be important enough to throw a fit and stomp out when the “conditions” aren’t ideal.