I dedicate my song today to my old Rock and Roll buddy, Lewis Howcroft from Guiseley in Leeds whose birthday it is. Have a nice day of celebrations, Lewis, and thank you for making me and Sheila very welcome when we started coming to the Rock and Roll evenings in Batley in 2010. Your kindness is not forgotten.
Today’s song is ‘Some Guys Have All the Luck’. This song was written by Jeff Fortgang. The song has twice been a Top 40 hit on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’, first by ‘The Persuaders’ in 1973 reaching Number 39,] then by Rod Stewart in 1984 where it hit Number 10 in the U.S. and Number 32 on the ‘Adult Contemporary Chart’. The Shakers recorded it for their debut album ‘Yankee Reggae’ (Elektra, 1976) and released the song as a 45-rpm single.
In 1982, English singer Robert Palmer released a version of the song as a single from his live/studio album ‘Maybe It’s Live’, and it reached Number 16 in the ‘UK Singles Chart’.
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I imagine that the sentiments expressed in the words of this song have been, and still are being felt by many a man on his own, or woman for that matter. There are so many good people out there who just cannot seem to be able to get a partner whom they can love and be with, and looks often appear to have very little to do with them being on their own. The lovely people I know of who would make any man or woman happy, and who remain alone and unattached, are simply too many to enumerate, but they do have a number of characteristics in common.
I frequently wonder, what is about them that makes them less appealing in the eyes of a potential mate? Some are clearly not the marrying type while others are prepared to commit and marry too readily. Some find themselves never having been able to express love and trust in another, while others express love too freely and always seems to finish up trusting and loving the wrong type. The major difference I have noticed between the men and women who fall into this category of not being able to attract someone that is marriageable is that the men are often unable to attract anyone while all the women tend to be a magnet for all the ‘bad ones’. There have been so many women I have heard say, “I don’t know, why but I always seem to attract the wrong type!” All I can say to that is that they are obviously the type who unconsciously feel the need to inflict self-punishment.
Whenever I hear the above statement from a woman, it invariably comes from a person who cannot distinguish and separate ‘sexual feelings’ from ‘loving feelings’ or ‘sexual and loving feelings combined’. It helps if they were able to view sex as ‘an act’ and love as ‘the play’.
This usually occurs in people who experienced too rigid and morally strict an upbringing (or the opposite). It’s as though the grown adult was never able to fulfil parental expectations when they were a growing child. The overstrictness of the parents often leads to teenage rebellion, sexual precociousness and abandonment of acceptable morals and baseline standards. It can also produce a situation where one person in the couple is perfectly decent and lovable in every respect but possesses an ‘unconscious rebellion’ against an over-strict upbringing that seems to be putting up two fingers to their parents.
How this reveals itself is while they have outwardly accepted their parent’s values and standards, they are more prepared to accept laxity and even the display of opposing values and standards in their partners. I wonder how many young women, whose parents bitterly opposed the man their daughter chose to be with and described him as being ‘no good’, finished up running away with their lover and marrying in haste; only later to realise that her parent’s judgement of his character was more accurate than hers?
When I was a teenager, where love and courtship was concerned, I tended to be too free with the former and too restrictive in the latter. I had no intention of saddling myself with any marriage partner until I was at least thirty years old. I wanted to do so much with my life and travel to many places before I considered myself ready for settling down and starting a family. The fact that I didn’t start a family before my I reached twenty was no less than a miracle in the life of this ‘Russian Roulette’ romantic teenager. When I look back now, I see a young man in his late teens who wasn't prepared to settle down to any serious courtship which might lead to marriage (like all my peers at the time resigned themselves to); to be followed at the age of 23 years, after a few years in Canada, of me being prepared to become engaged (on the rebound) and marry during the most emotionally unsettled period of my life. These two opposite behaviour patterns equally puzzled me!
As a teenager, I was a happy and good-looking lad. I was also an emotionally expressive young man with lots of mates. I was an able and confident individual who believed himself to be as good as any other teenager around and who considered himself to be as good as any other Bopper on the dance floor between Huddersfield and Halifax. I was never without a girl on my arm whenever attending any dance or social event I ever went to, but I would never court a girl long enough for either me or her to become emotionally attached. I must admit, where romance and women were concerned, both my heart and loins remained in constant readiness and use until I was well into my early twenties.
I will always recall one of the Windybank Estate gang who never seemed to get a girlfriend, yet it wasn’t from the want of trying. He wasn’t unhandsome by any means, but he did essentially lack confidence, especially whenever asking young women to either dance or date. Each time he decided to ask a young woman to dance, it was as though the number of previous refusals he’d received from other young women was always at the front of his mind as he approached the young woman to make his request. His negative expectations of being turned down ‘again’ would invariably precipitate another refusal. He would approach the young woman he wanted to dance with and begin to have second doubts when he was a few feet away from her. Then, he would put such doubts into precipitate action and start to turn around to walk away in the disappointment of receiving yet another refusal, ‘seconds before it was delivered to him’!
I’ll never forget him asking a group of us one night at the dance, ‘What’s wrong with me, Billy? What is it that you and the others do to get the girls easily that I don’t? How can I be more like you and the others?”
I told him the only thing I knew to be true at the time, the only thing that made sense to me. I said, ‘You can be the best-looking lad on the estate, wear the finest of clothes, have your pockets jangling with loads of money, drive the most expensive car, be the best Bopper on the dance floor, have the biggest this or the best that; and none of it will matter a jot if you don’t have personality!”
In retrospect, I was probably wrong in my initial teenage conclusion, because over the years I have witnessed both the ‘absence’ and the ‘presence’ of a personality hold one back. In the main, I always believed in the mask I wore and the destiny of the dance throughout my life. But I have since learned that we each wear different masks to hide different traits of character at various times in our lives and that my mask does not readily fit the face of anyone else who may be in the same place at the same time, trying to achieve the same thing.
My personally has served me well throughout my life, but my personality has been molded and fashioned from different clay on the potter’s wheel than yours. We are entirely different people with different backgrounds, different dreams, different opportunities, different expectations and different destinies. We each have different paths to walk and different destinations to reach, and what matters most is ‘what we do during our journey through life and how we do it’, especially when we encounter the unexpected.
I have since come to accept that the largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we opt to defend ourselves against anxiety, sadness and traumatic events. I have grown to understand that ‘personality’ is no more than the outcome of our conditionings. Therefore having ‘no personality’ doesn’t really exist. It would be more accurate to say that some people have an ‘unlikeable personality'; that they display unattractive character traits or possess a personality that doesn’t gel with the expectations of others as a potential mate.
Hence, were I offering the same person my advice today on how to fare better with the fairer sex, I’d probably say that a good way of resolving this personal dilemma would be to become ‘a more likable person’ instead of trying to establish ‘a more likable personality’. In this way, one’s mask and face come to look identical. In fact, one no longer needs a mask that needs to be removed in order to know what lies beneath.
Love and peace Bill xxx
Today’s song is ‘Some Guys Have All the Luck’. This song was written by Jeff Fortgang. The song has twice been a Top 40 hit on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’, first by ‘The Persuaders’ in 1973 reaching Number 39,] then by Rod Stewart in 1984 where it hit Number 10 in the U.S. and Number 32 on the ‘Adult Contemporary Chart’. The Shakers recorded it for their debut album ‘Yankee Reggae’ (Elektra, 1976) and released the song as a 45-rpm single.
In 1982, English singer Robert Palmer released a version of the song as a single from his live/studio album ‘Maybe It’s Live’, and it reached Number 16 in the ‘UK Singles Chart’.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I imagine that the sentiments expressed in the words of this song have been, and still are being felt by many a man on his own, or woman for that matter. There are so many good people out there who just cannot seem to be able to get a partner whom they can love and be with, and looks often appear to have very little to do with them being on their own. The lovely people I know of who would make any man or woman happy, and who remain alone and unattached, are simply too many to enumerate, but they do have a number of characteristics in common.
I frequently wonder, what is about them that makes them less appealing in the eyes of a potential mate? Some are clearly not the marrying type while others are prepared to commit and marry too readily. Some find themselves never having been able to express love and trust in another, while others express love too freely and always seems to finish up trusting and loving the wrong type. The major difference I have noticed between the men and women who fall into this category of not being able to attract someone that is marriageable is that the men are often unable to attract anyone while all the women tend to be a magnet for all the ‘bad ones’. There have been so many women I have heard say, “I don’t know, why but I always seem to attract the wrong type!” All I can say to that is that they are obviously the type who unconsciously feel the need to inflict self-punishment.
Whenever I hear the above statement from a woman, it invariably comes from a person who cannot distinguish and separate ‘sexual feelings’ from ‘loving feelings’ or ‘sexual and loving feelings combined’. It helps if they were able to view sex as ‘an act’ and love as ‘the play’.
This usually occurs in people who experienced too rigid and morally strict an upbringing (or the opposite). It’s as though the grown adult was never able to fulfil parental expectations when they were a growing child. The overstrictness of the parents often leads to teenage rebellion, sexual precociousness and abandonment of acceptable morals and baseline standards. It can also produce a situation where one person in the couple is perfectly decent and lovable in every respect but possesses an ‘unconscious rebellion’ against an over-strict upbringing that seems to be putting up two fingers to their parents.
How this reveals itself is while they have outwardly accepted their parent’s values and standards, they are more prepared to accept laxity and even the display of opposing values and standards in their partners. I wonder how many young women, whose parents bitterly opposed the man their daughter chose to be with and described him as being ‘no good’, finished up running away with their lover and marrying in haste; only later to realise that her parent’s judgement of his character was more accurate than hers?
When I was a teenager, where love and courtship was concerned, I tended to be too free with the former and too restrictive in the latter. I had no intention of saddling myself with any marriage partner until I was at least thirty years old. I wanted to do so much with my life and travel to many places before I considered myself ready for settling down and starting a family. The fact that I didn’t start a family before my I reached twenty was no less than a miracle in the life of this ‘Russian Roulette’ romantic teenager. When I look back now, I see a young man in his late teens who wasn't prepared to settle down to any serious courtship which might lead to marriage (like all my peers at the time resigned themselves to); to be followed at the age of 23 years, after a few years in Canada, of me being prepared to become engaged (on the rebound) and marry during the most emotionally unsettled period of my life. These two opposite behaviour patterns equally puzzled me!
As a teenager, I was a happy and good-looking lad. I was also an emotionally expressive young man with lots of mates. I was an able and confident individual who believed himself to be as good as any other teenager around and who considered himself to be as good as any other Bopper on the dance floor between Huddersfield and Halifax. I was never without a girl on my arm whenever attending any dance or social event I ever went to, but I would never court a girl long enough for either me or her to become emotionally attached. I must admit, where romance and women were concerned, both my heart and loins remained in constant readiness and use until I was well into my early twenties.
I will always recall one of the Windybank Estate gang who never seemed to get a girlfriend, yet it wasn’t from the want of trying. He wasn’t unhandsome by any means, but he did essentially lack confidence, especially whenever asking young women to either dance or date. Each time he decided to ask a young woman to dance, it was as though the number of previous refusals he’d received from other young women was always at the front of his mind as he approached the young woman to make his request. His negative expectations of being turned down ‘again’ would invariably precipitate another refusal. He would approach the young woman he wanted to dance with and begin to have second doubts when he was a few feet away from her. Then, he would put such doubts into precipitate action and start to turn around to walk away in the disappointment of receiving yet another refusal, ‘seconds before it was delivered to him’!
I’ll never forget him asking a group of us one night at the dance, ‘What’s wrong with me, Billy? What is it that you and the others do to get the girls easily that I don’t? How can I be more like you and the others?”
I told him the only thing I knew to be true at the time, the only thing that made sense to me. I said, ‘You can be the best-looking lad on the estate, wear the finest of clothes, have your pockets jangling with loads of money, drive the most expensive car, be the best Bopper on the dance floor, have the biggest this or the best that; and none of it will matter a jot if you don’t have personality!”
In retrospect, I was probably wrong in my initial teenage conclusion, because over the years I have witnessed both the ‘absence’ and the ‘presence’ of a personality hold one back. In the main, I always believed in the mask I wore and the destiny of the dance throughout my life. But I have since learned that we each wear different masks to hide different traits of character at various times in our lives and that my mask does not readily fit the face of anyone else who may be in the same place at the same time, trying to achieve the same thing.
My personally has served me well throughout my life, but my personality has been molded and fashioned from different clay on the potter’s wheel than yours. We are entirely different people with different backgrounds, different dreams, different opportunities, different expectations and different destinies. We each have different paths to walk and different destinations to reach, and what matters most is ‘what we do during our journey through life and how we do it’, especially when we encounter the unexpected.
I have since come to accept that the largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we opt to defend ourselves against anxiety, sadness and traumatic events. I have grown to understand that ‘personality’ is no more than the outcome of our conditionings. Therefore having ‘no personality’ doesn’t really exist. It would be more accurate to say that some people have an ‘unlikeable personality'; that they display unattractive character traits or possess a personality that doesn’t gel with the expectations of others as a potential mate.
Hence, were I offering the same person my advice today on how to fare better with the fairer sex, I’d probably say that a good way of resolving this personal dilemma would be to become ‘a more likable person’ instead of trying to establish ‘a more likable personality’. In this way, one’s mask and face come to look identical. In fact, one no longer needs a mask that needs to be removed in order to know what lies beneath.
Love and peace Bill xxx
