Charlie's World

I just re-read this whole blog. I see that I bought a guitar and amp four years ago, and then for two years instead of playing it I just researched and amassed better stuff. Well, scumbag 'friend' kaiboshed the jamming plans, and I really did need better stuff. But it took four arduous years to get it, during which time, I didn't have it yet, so I couldn't do much but tough it out.

I figured at the start it'd be understandable to not bother because it would take so long, but then I thought the time will go by whether I get stuff or not, and if I don't get the stuff, most of all I'll have done instead is flush the money down the toilet eating better.

Anyway, at least I've been about music in SOME way in recent years. It is after all authentic me. I have NOTHING ELSE going on.


I also notice myself alternating between facing hard reality, and making hopeful plans. But I'm tired now. I really am. I will be 60 in a year and I haven't got the energy any more to do all I speak of.

I suppose I've got to do SOMETHING with myself though. And I do like the idea of Saturday morning comedy writing sessions with some new smart funny musical friends. And I like the idea of a game night each week too.

It'd be okay to play an open mic weekly.

And I can dabble online with comedy somehow (you can see me doing sketch comedy here with all these fake member accounts (oh, it's true, everyone here is me, and I write all the dialogue....and that IS sketch comedy, done somehow).

I sure would have liked to be part of life with it though.

But I really am tired. And this is what's left of me.
Me and Captain Meow watching TV, laying on the couch, is all I really do (other than shop and do laundry).
I have no money, no car, no friends, no family, and no energy to care.
And that's ALL the life I live now.  Everything else I speak of is just that: stuff I speak of.

But we'll see what develops during the next year.    


The stuff is all gotten finally. Things can ensue now, if they ever will. I want to play piano, and be funny..

My mother grew up in World War II England while the Germans bombed. They moved a lot to escape destruction, but there was nowhere safe. They'd take turns wearing "the blindfold" and jab a map with a hat pin to decide where to go next , then sell the family piano to afford the move. Once they got settled in, they'd buy a new piano. They were forced to keep moving like this, so Mum could have no education beyond grade 5. At 17 she got in Ivy Benson's All Girl Orchestra as trombonist. It was a Swing Band - like Glen Miller or Tommy Dorsey - which was the music of the time.  Ivy Benson's Orchestra was all women because women weren't allowed to be musicians then, so they started their own band which traveled Europe offering post-war soldiers some feminine charm with their tunes, and bingo - marketing. They got to play. Ivy would tell the girls to play hard "like a man". Don't be dainty and apologetic about it! They were a serious Swing Band. They traveled, made a record, appeared in a movie, got fan mail. And towards the end of her life, the BBC came to America to make a documentary of Mum. She had interesting stories to tell of life on the road, and that time.

But I'm ahead of myself. The story here was just the way her family kept selling their piano, and then getting another. I grew up hearing how you have to clean house before the new piano arrives. Indeed, we got a piano at some point, and out came the mops and buckets.

So my piano will arrive June 6. I cleaned the living room and porch yesterday. Today I have to finish the bedroom, closet and kitchen. Then the bathroom tomorrow, and it'll be done. I get tired though at 58. I'd rather watch a funny movie and eat something yummy right now, than scrub things and breath heavy.

Captain Meow says it's okay to eat and watch some TV first, but then the heavy breathing for sure. Slave driver.

Ma always said "Paternoster Row in Northern Ireland".
Well..maps and Google Earth say there is no Paternoster Row in Ireland.
There is one in London, in the dooryard of St Paul's Cathedral.
There is one in CARLISLE. And a couple other towns in England.
In any case, between the title my grandfather rejected,
and this and other property that goes with it (plus his unsold 'tubeless tyre' patent),
we could have been quite rich.
Yet I am poor as dirt, and nearing the bitter tired end
of a life of deprivation and complete unfulfillment,

because of someone's SERIOUSLY FOOLISH sense of hurt feelings.

What the fuck.   We could have been rich.   Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.



Alright.  The family mystery. The story the family has been chewing for 85 years now, is this:

My grandfather was in World War I. While there, in a trench, a soldier demanded, "Why are you calling yourself "Jenkins"?
You're not a Jenkins, you're a Howard!"  (The Howards are the royals.)

When he & my grandmother were first married they moved to Canada, where she started a pie shop and he got some job. While at his work one day, a lawyer came to the door and told my grandmother he'd come from England to tell them that Lawrence Jenkins ('Larry') (and my grandmother was Margaret Morpeth ('Maggie') ..that "Lawrence Jenkins" was actually the one entitled to collect the rents on Paternoster Row. The Duke Of Northumberland had been wrongfully collecting all the rents for the whole street, he said. And this lawyer offered to correct this situation and get them their money. But when Larry got in and was told this by his wife, they left in the night, no forwarding address!  (They went back to England.)


Many things happened when the four kids (George, Georgina, June & Laura) were young that made them ask questions. Even my grandmother didn't understand what went on. They'd ask him, for instance, why they snuck away from Canada in the night, to evade getting a lot of money, and he said "they're a rotten lot and he would NEVER have anything to do with them"!  ("Them" was his real family, which he had not been brought up by.)

Another incident:  When the 9th Countess of Carlisle (Rosalind Howard) was on her death bed, she sent for Lawrence 'Jenkins' (who was working in a coal mine at the time..THAT'S how poor). She spoke with him privately, and whatever it was she had felt the need to say to him before her death, she swore him to secrecy, and he promised to "take it to his grave" as asked. A couple days later they caught him burning a lot of papers but he refused to explain anything, and made sure no bits of the paper would still be readable.

Another incident...When his sister Rose (Rosella Jenkins (married to a Jim ("J.A.R.?") Mathison, and went on to live in Canada) was visiting one day, a heated discussion erupted, during which she exclaimed "I'm not your sister, I'm your aunt!" Larry clamped his hand over her mouth and pushed her into the closet and shut the door to silence her. And he would not explain the remark. Ever.

All he would say was that the people whose money he was entitled to were "a rotten lot" and he'd NEVER have anything to do with them."
He'd starve first (and they kinda did).

Well, if the Duke of Northumberland was collecting the rents which rightfully belonged to Lawrence,
then Lawrence quite possibly had been cheated out of inheriting a title as well.

What makes sense of all this is that he was obviously a bastard child in the blue blood lineage; and in those days a thing like that was
unsurvivable scandal, so they gave the baby away to be brought up as the child of some poor family, which was the "Jenkins".

The 9th Countess of Carlisle (Rosalind Howard) was my grandfather's grandmother.
She had five daughters...and one of two of them was his real mother (Lady Cecilia or Lady Mary Henrietta).


One or the other. And my grandfather (Lawrence Jenkins), who refused his inheritance and disowned the Howards, didn't deny this.
He just reiterated they were a rotten lot and you'd be better off never having a thing to do with them, even if you had to starve.

How or why the Jenkins were the ones to bring Lawrence up as their own is unknown. But in his childhood someone came
and offered to PAY THE MONEY to send him to the finest schools and be well dressed and become a gentleman.

But he wouldn't hear of it. *frown*  
He did tell his family of this though, when he was saying "they were a rotten lot" (about not taking the Paternoster Row money).


My mother gave me what details and names the family has. But in the times before computers, and with it all being BURIED by people who could, the truth seems lost forever now. All those alive at the time, who may have known something are dead now. And even all of Lawrence and Margaret's kids are dead now. So...this no longer matters, I SUPPOSE.  But....if he had taken the lawyer's help, we might be an affluent, well-to-do family, and cousin Andrew (George's eldest son) would be the current Duke of Northumberland. {with any male offspring of his, and if none at time of his death, then Mark, David (deceased), and me -in line of succession}.

AS TO "PATERNOSTER ROW"... I think Ma got it mixed up. I can't find such a street in Northern Ireland at all. The Duke of Northumberland might have been what they were actually being told was in Northern Ireland.


Paternoster Row:

in London: is some of the ritziest real estate imaginable.

in Carlisle (and a few other locations in England): is still a whole street worth of real estate and rents.

And I've been so so very poor and miserable all these rotten years. Fucking fuck.



                                     


Grandad invented the tubeless tire, but when he offered the idea to a tire company (yea, just one.) (stupid bastard!), they said they had just re-tooled and so even though they liked the idea, they passed on it. So he stuck it in a drawer and tried no more.

I don't respect THAT.

Someone else, five or ten years later, got credited with thinking of it, and the money.

*sigh*


Benny Hill was best man at June and Bill's wedding (see picture).

Benny dated a friend of the family and never made a move on her. She said he seemed more interested in knowing about her clothes. (THAT wasn't publicly known, but my family knew it! Benny was gay. He said of it, "when you work in the sweet shop all day, you can end up tired of sweets!")


Georgina (my aunt -my mother's sister, in England) was determined to be someone..so she worked two jobs and rented an address in a posh neighborhood, and bought just enough right clothes to be able to hob nob with the elite. She wasn't one of them, she was one of us, but they never knew her fancy address apartment had no furniture! Anyway..it worked. Peter Lawford proposed marriage to her. Funny thing though..she said no  "because she just didn't feel that way", she said.

Peter Lawford became John Kennedy's brother-in-law.  ..and was a member of The Rat Pack
(Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Dean Martin, Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford).




                                          *More on Lawford being John Kennedy's brother in law:


FROM WIKIPEDIA:
Patricia Helen "Pat" Kennedy Lawford (May 6, 1924 – September 17, 2006) was an American socialite and the sixth of nine children of Rose and Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. She was a sister of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Senator Ted Kennedy. Pat wanted to be a film producer, a profession not readily open to young women in her time. She married English actor Peter Lawford in 1954, but they experienced a serious culture-clash and divorced in 1966.

She met English actor Peter Lawford through her sister Eunice in the 1940s. They met again in 1949, and again in 1953. They courted briefly and officially announced their engagement in February 1954. They married on April 24, 1954, at the Roman Catholic Church of St. Thomas More in New York City, twelve days before her thirtieth birthday. They settled in Santa Monica, California, and often socialized with actress Judy Garland and her family. Garland gave birth to her son Joseph at the same hospital and on the same day Kennedy gave birth to her son Christopher.

MORE AT WIKIPEDIA:

Pat Kennedy Lawford  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Kennedy_Lawford

Peter Lawford        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Lawford




As for how Georgina got such a high ambition in her, well..I don't mention this to people because no one would share this experience in common, to be able to understand it, but - even before I knew of all this, I always ALWAYS felt I was supposed to be somebody. And the books that made the most sense to me in school were Johnny Tremain, and Great Expectations, both of which were tales of a rich kid being brought up poor, and worrying the course manners he was being conditioned with would give him away when he finally made it to where he was supposed to be.

I also understood "Alex P. Keaton" (Michael J. Fox's Family Ties character) - a kid born to humble dumb dumbs, who felt so out of place he seriously questioned if he'd been adopted because he JUST KNEW he was destined for a very much higher rung of existence than being a dumb commoner, able to take pride in that.

And this made sense to me.   It still does.

-though I am almost 60 now, defeated, tired, worn out and done. The future is no longer a concern of mine. It is behind me, not in front of me any more. So I no longer yearn for nor expect ANYTHING except a pitiful end to a pathetic unfulfilling life of deprivation and the unbroken series of various torments I was to be confined to unendingly.

So thanks for being a "man of principle", Lawrence "Jenkins" Howard.

And thanks for being as clueless and irresponsible an adult as one could be "poor little Laura".

No one will ever read this or care.   I have no family, no legacy.  It and myself mean nothing.

And as for you Mr Moore, go to hell.

ALL OF YOU: go to hell.

Okay, the hoarded last remaining Spaceman Effects Sputnik II
that was selling on reverb.com for $1,400
was actually bought,
even at that price (I told you it was wantable).

All in the first page of this now 4-1/2 year journal, Charlie, you:

~got suckered into buying a rig and making this forum,
and then your lying fake friend abandoned you,
so two years went by and nothing happened.

~you grieved that the world turned very shitty

~and then bought a Casino, but another (third) year went by and nothing happened

~in the fourth year, a pedalboard you'd been acquiring piece-by-piece was finished,
and you bought a Guild that became the guitar you should have had in the first place.

So things became interesting (potentially, finally).
But it's been four deprived years of WAITING to get what you need to be able to do anything.
And even now, you're not free to turn on an amp or sing out loud, so no playing happens still.  

______________________________________________________________

In the 2nd & 3rd pages (over 7 months, Jan to Aug, 2018), you:

reconciled that:
~your family had destroyed you, but they and your nazi  brother are all dead now.
~your fake friend screwed you SO badly, but that's in the past now too.
~but you have no friends,  you're poor & isolated -in a terrible city area.

but you:
~got happy with the guitar rig you'd finally completed getting
~bought tools for guitar repair
~celebrated the culmination of 11 years of scrimping to put a suitable home, office and studio together
~and started feeling empowered and at the start of a new journey

however you continue to lament that:
~you can't play out loud
~you're never able to eat okay, with health-wrecking results
~you have no friends and - because of how people always turn out - no longer wish to get any.
~and this is the time when Republicunts finally managed to divide & destroy America entirely,
and you're finding there is only (younger) assholes online, because your fellow boomers are dying
~so it all seems bleaker than ever
~and you're tired.
~you even tried to make a will, but are too poor and without family to do so.

BUT you bought a piano!
and intend to live a little, and eat better,
now that the struggle of getting stuff is over.

You bought some movies to enjoy finally,
and are enjoying having the home you've built.

And you got interested in studying electronics, so you can solder yourself
an exciting unavailable germanium fuzz pedal...and repair your own stuff.
And this makes no noise to bother other apartments, so you can get right on with it.

And you did start playing daily (through headphones)
and intend to start going out a few times a month
to eat, get coffee, see people, network..get those needed new friends.
______________________________________________________________

The cautionary conclusion is:

In spite of progress and opportunity ahead, your mind is ever-plagued by
how awful your life has only ever been,
that you'll never have a car again, or good enough food,
and that you're alone and may never have friends again.

You fear that all you've done in 4-1/2 years of building
is "gonna" a future you may never allow yourself to live, or be free to.

It's been the way things are for you for a very long time.


Plus 'being tired' requires management, or it'll stop you.
(And this is denial that it already in fact has.)


Charlie, you need a new beginning. You need to give it a good hard shove into action!

I was just editing the posts about my English heritage, here.

I am 100% English, though I've lived as American most of my life and consider myself American.

I hate the English though. Deeply. Did you see that coming?

Here's a comment I made elsewhere, which explains why:

You ever meet someone who thinks they're better than everyone else, so you have no choice but to hate them? That's England.
They call themselves "Great Britain" in a baseless attempt to somehow still be the murdering WORLD EMPIRE they were back when they killed an entire race of people (Tasmania, there are NONE LEFT ALIVE),  and forced Ghandi to iron their shirts because they thought they were the master race (why do you think Hitler admired the English). But they're NOT an empire anymore -just a little island with a failed economy, in charge of nothing.

Yet they still want to act all smug and superior -just like they did when they gave up the clothes dye industry to Germany, who used the profit to arm for World War I, while England went on to have half its population "redundant" (retired at 50, if not jobless all their lives) because they figure they're too "posh" to have lowly things like factories.

Smart move eh?  England is no more than a small over-crowded island, rife with joblessness, and currently letting the hating Muslims take it over.  And they don't even have free speech, so if anyone doesn't LIKE Muslim Patrols they have to shut up and let it happen or their own government will arrest them.

Also, in their endless wont to view themselves as world leader long after they lost that position, they try to paint themselves as co-captains of the world somehow, along with America, whose coat tail they try to stand on.  But we never invited that. And we had to bail them out of two wars. Yet they still talk as if they somehow have us as a "colony" over here. WELL HERE"S A CLUE: SHUT THE HELL UP, SO WE DON'T START THINKING ABOUT KICKING YOUR ASS A THIRD TIME! (Hey, they burned down our White House folks! decades after we kicked their butts and sent them running, they came back and invaded AND BURNED OUR WHITE HOUSE! Hello??? Do we really need to 'like' these people?

Plus they allow, and fawn at the fecal emissions of, a family which inherits trillions in wealth STOLEN FROM THE ENGLISH.

Their country is poor yet they rationalize like stupes to let THESE USELESS SNOTTY NOTHINGS keep their money.

Just as they make nonsensical excuses about still shooting at the Irish -> "Oh, they WANT us to!" 


So..I don't know who to hate more: Americans, who vote for republicans to rob them...
or the snotty English, who still call themselves the name of an empire that no longer exists,
when they should actually be ashamed of their history and never mention it.

Have a little humility for godssake.
You occupied countries all over the globe the way Hitler did!
YOU EVEN SURPASSED HITLER, BY KILLING EVERY LAST MEMBER OF AN ENTIRE COUNTRY! (Tasmania)
Even the problems with the Middle East go back to your bloody self-righteous interference.

You should apologize and hang your head in silence!
not act snotty and superior.  You are anything but superior.

"LAWRENCE JENKINS"

Lawrence Howard ("Jenkins") was born on Mar 29, 1889.
- if the people who provided him with his birth date stated it correctly.

He had a sister Rose (Rosella)
who married a Jim Matheson
and moved to Canada.
Ma said she vividly remembered seeing the initials J.A.R. (Matheson)...



One day Rose exclaimed (during a heated exchange with Grandad): "I'm not your sister, I'm your aunt!"
He put her in the closet to shut her up and would never explain that remark.


Rose & Jim had a daughter, Bridget Mary Matheson,  who may have lived in the US.


Lawrence, we're told, also had a brother Jack Jenkins, who went on to live in America.


And a sister Ethyl Jenkins (maiden name).





INVESTIGATING THE DUKE OF NORTHUMBERLAND:

I said it was either the 7th, 8th, 9th or 10th Duke of Northumberland in question (in two VERY RELEVANT POSTS TO SEE, half way back up this page) BUT IT COULD ONLY HAVE BEEN THE 7th DUKE, Henry Percy (1846-1918), who could have fathered Lawrence by impregnating either Cecelia or Mary Howard. And if that happened, he'd have been 43 when he did so.

He died in 1918 (just after WWI ended), and the title went to Alan Percy (the 8th Duke, 1888-1930)
who was most likely the one collecting the rents on Paternoster Row that really belonged to Lawrence!

*But it could also have been the 7th Duke (his father) who was wrongfully in possession of Paternoster Row.
...Lawrence & Maggy would had to have been in Canada BEFORE the war for that to be so.
...And you should also consider the brothers/sisters of anyone in consideration, in all of this.

BUT: it seems logical that the 8th Duke inherited something(s) that Lawrence should have inherited, see?  And that would mean Lawrence should have had the title too, not just Paternoster Row. But this needs more thought and investigation...