Today’s guest post comes from Jim.

I worked for 2 ½ years at Hormel Foods in Austin, mostly in quality control and toward the end on the production lines. This was one of the last jobs that I worked at before I retired. As a person who supports sustainable farming and use of locally produced foods you would think that I would not be willing to work for Hormel. I am not one of Hormel’s fans, but I do understand that they are an important part of our economy as a major employer and major supplier of food products.

While I could say some negative things about working at Hormel, for now I will concentrate on things that I liked, in particular the people who work there. Almost everyone I met at Hormel was a capable worker because poor workers were weeded out quickly. Some of the workers helped me learn how to do the jobs I was given. My most unusual trainer was a Latino man who spoke almost no English and taught me how to make hams using sign language. He pointed to his eyes to let me know I should watch him and then wagged his finger to indicate my technique was not right. After showing me my mistakes he demonstrated a better way to do the work.

One crew that helped me run an x-ray machine for quality control really impressed me. This crew worked in another part of the plant and was temporarily assigned to help with x-raying. They immediately found the most efficient way to load and unload the machine and while they were there I had none of the problems with the machine jamming that occurred earlier. I found out that they had learned to give packages a push at just the right time to avoid jamming.

Probably my most pleasant experience was meeting and working with some Filipino women. I meet one of these women because she was a coworker and several others because they worked near me. Soon I found out that they ate together in the lunch room and I was invited to eat with them. They were very friendly and sometimes shared some of their interesting Filipino food with me. . On another occasion a Latino man also shared some good home cooked food with me. I tried some of his very well flavored ears of sweet corn and samples of empanadas that had an excellent pumpkin filling.

Veteran workers had lots of stories to tell me and gave me some suggestions for staying out of trouble. One of their tricks was to stay out of sight if they were ahead on their work and wanted to take an “unofficial” break. One morning when I was early getting to work I found several night workers hiding in a dark room toward the end of their shift. On some production lines you had to be an extremely efficient worker due to the fast pace of the work. I was told that a representative of a company that made a machine used at the plant said it was breaking because it was not designed to work at the high speed set by Hormel.

But it wasn’t the machines that made my time at Hormel worthwhile, it was the people.

Describe your favorite (current or past) co-worker.

Today’s guest blog is by Steve Grooms

The first days of August in 1931 were so hot in New York City that people couldn’t sleep. The residents of a large apartment building in Queens had the additional problem that the man in room 1G was out of control, getting up at all hours to pound out bizarre melodies on his piano. On the evening of August 6, the musician went crazy, hallucinating that Mexicans with knives were lying under his bed. He suddenly pitched forward and fell dead. Bix Beiderbecke was only 28 years old.

The cause of death was listed as pneumonia, but that was probably a fiction to comfort Bix’s parents. Most scholars think he died of a seizure suffered during an attack of the “DTs.” Simply put, Bix had finally killed himself with Prohibition bootleg booze. Bix’s health also suffered because of the heavy work schedule of jazz artists. I could make the case that Bix was crushed to death by the conflict of high and low culture. Others have concluded that Bix died of humiliation. In the words of his friend Eddie Condon, “Bix died of everything.”

The body was shipped back to Davenport, Iowa, for a quiet burial. The family was ashamed of their alcoholic son. Even the jazz world failed to note the passing of the cornet player who was one of the giants of jazz’s formative years. Bix lay in obscurity for decades until later commentators rediscovered his work and created a new identity for him as jazz’s first “dead saint” and romantic cult figure.

Now, almost century after Bix’s tragically brief career, historians can’t agree about almost anything about his life. Battles are fought over his name, his sexual orientation, what made his music distinct, his musical legacy, why he died and many other issues. We know almost every movement he made in his short life, and yet Bix will forever be a mysterious figure wreathed in contradictions and conundrums.

What we know for sure is that Bix was a musical genius, born with perfect pitch and an almost mystical ability to think creatively during his solo improvisations. When he was a toddler he would stand below the piano, his arms stretched up to play keys he could not see. He acquired a cornet and taught himself to play it, and one consequence was that Bix learned strange fingering for producing some notes. His idiosyncratic fingering might account for the pure, sweet tone everyone tried in vain to imitate. A friend said the notes coming from Bix’s horn were as pretty as the “sound of a girl saying yes.”

While many early jazz players liked silly effects, such as barnyard noises, Bix was a purist who impressed audiences with the stunning creativity of his solos. In the early years of jazz, the cornet or the trumpet was the instrument that drove the group’s pace and presented the melody. The magic of Bix’s playing is his creative way of spraying pretty little notes in patterns that progress in a supremely logical and pleasing way. He proved that jazz tunes could be both hot and beautiful at the same time.

Bix came to the attention of the jazz world in 1924 when he was the boy wonder star in a band known as the Wolverines. He hit his peak in 1926 while playing in various groups. In 1927 he joined the most famous band of the era, the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. Already by 1927 Bix began seeing himself as a musical ghost, a pathetic creature stuck playing in a style that had become outdated.

What we have of Bix today is a pathetically small body of recordings made between 1924 and 1930 . . . just six years. In addition to his cornet work, Bix wrote and recorded some odd piano compositions. The surviving recordings are a tiny percentage of Bix’s musical output. It is hard for the modern ear to pick out Bix’s playing in the ensemble sound, and it is even more difficult to appreciate how radically superior his playing was when compared to other cornetists.

As someone who has studied Bix for twenty years, I can only urge others to take the effort to become familiar with this tormented, inebriated genius from the earliest years of jazz. The best way to meet Bix now is through a documentary film produced by Playboy entitled “Bix: Ain’t None of Them Play Like Him Yet.” The film, which is sometimes sold by Amazon.com, is in the Netflix system. Electronically remastered versions of his recordings continue to be issued almost every year.

His most famous recording is “Singing the Blues.” Bix’s horn comes in at the one-minute mark:

“I’m Coming Virginia” captures Bix’s reflective, poignant side. Again, Bix’s horn appears one minute into the recording:

Have you ever grieved the death of a celebrity you didn’t personally know?

Today’s guest blog is by Steve Grooms

I spend a lot of time alone, except . . . (sigh) . . . I’m never really alone. More accurately, I am “alone with my thoughts,” and my thoughts are a noisy, jeering, vulgar and confusing partner. A slightly more pretentious way of putting this is to say I’m stuck at all times with “the voice of my interior monologue.”

Most of us, I believe, have a sort of voice in our head, a voice that we often ignore (which just encourages “him” to natter on more). I know the voice of my interior monologue—too well—but I have no sense of what this is like for anyone else. My fascination with that question led to this guest blog. I’m fascinated to find out what others will have to report on this issue.

Much of the time my interior monologue is just a quiet voice muttering in the darkness, with nobody paying attention. I might be totally unaware of the voice and then happen to notice that he is singing the Sesame Street song for the 403rd time in a row. He’s easily amused, my interior voice. I’ve noticed that he has a quirky obsession with unusual names. While the real “me” is concentrating on some frustrating task, my interior monologue might be chanting, like a stuck record, “Hayden Panetierre, Hayden Panetierre, Hayden Panetierre.”

At other times the voice of my internal monologue is an articulate and intriguing personality, a sort of splendid copy of me who has a similar range of interests and abilities. When I try to solve a problem, this voice pitches in and makes shrewd suggestions, like, “Why not whack this little dingus with that heavy wrench? Whadda you got to lose?” I know this sounds a wee bit schizophrenic, but I feel like “two heads are better than one,” and I appreciate it when my interior monologue does something constructive. Anything constructive. Because, just between you and me, on most days that voice is queer and undisciplined, a parrot with a disgusting vocabulary and a contentious disposition.

For example, the voice of my interior monologue often judges me, and he isn’t a generous judge. If I miss I throw a snowball at a tree and miss by a humiliating margin, my interior monologue groans and observes, “Sheesh! You couldn’t hit your butt with a frying pan.” If I am slow to perceive an obvious fact, he sneers, “Stevie Wonder coulda seen THAT!”

Part of the complication of being me is that I live with two codes of acceptable conversation, the polite “official” one and the vulgar voice of my interior monologue. I am not known for having a potty mouth, but that is because I usually can filter out the foul, blasphemous things my interior monologue is saying. But when I am sufficiently startled, the words that pop out of my mouth are his, not mine. If something unexpected and scary happens, I might whoop, “Christ on a crutch!” That isn’t me speaking! Heck, I don’t even know what he means by that!

It is strange having this voice in me, this voice I cannot escape. I once was playing racquetball when I tore the cartilage in my right knee. The knee made a clicking noise, locked and suddenly I was falling. “Oh my,” my interior monologue commented wryly before I hit the court floor, “your dancing days are done!” If I clobber my thumb with a hammer, my internal monologue usually informs me in a detached, ironical tone: “Geez, in ten seconds that’s gonna hurt big time!” Although he is me, he doesn’t seem to have much sympathy for me. Do you see how bizarre this is?

Once when I was hunting pheasants I walked nearly to the end of a line of cornstalks before turning to seek birds somewhere else. Spluttering with indignation, the voice of my internal monologue broke in to say, “What would that smartypants writer Steve Grooms have to say about this? That self-appointed ‘expert’ has written that you should always work out the cover to the very end.” Groaning, I went back to hunt the last 20 yards of corn. When a little rooster flushed from the end of the corn row, I managed to hit him. I didn’t need the smug voice of my interior monologue to tell me, “Told you so! Told you so!”

As I experience life, then, it is complicated. I have this voice in my head that I cannot evict, even though he doesn’t pay rent. He is part of me, part of the confusing, weird and goofy experience of my life. He virtually never shuts up and often says stuff I wish he wouldn’t. I have mostly gotten used to him although he is something like the crazy uncle who lives in my attic.

Do you live with a second voice chattering away in your head? What is that voice like?