Crackpot Harrangue
Jim O'Pines
Crackpot Harrangue (CPH) #3: Jim White on Transnormal Skiperoo
A Town Called Amen is a song about growing old and settling into a sort of tender acceptance of life. There's a film by Ingmar Bergman called The Wild Strawberries that reminds me of what I was trying to get at in that song.
Blindly We Go is an unusual song for me musically, although the lyrics deal with a familiar preoccupation of mine----the (for lack of a better term) unknowability of God. It's something I find myself thinking about a lot. There's that old Zen saying, "If you meet God on the road, kill him." In the South everyone is always telling me about how God told them this and God told them that, and their recitations of divine contact always feel like constructs of hubris. I have little trust for people who tell me they talk to God and God replies in strangely anthropomorphic, culturally precise ways that exactly mirror the person's mindset.
Jailbird is an old song from the days when I had to run from my problems.
Crash Into The Sun is my message song. Since it was so preachy I wanted it to be musically adventurous, so I talked my good friend Tucker Martine into producing it. I flew to Seattle, all excited at the prospect of finally getting to work with Tucker with his stable of incredible musicians - Karl Blau, Steve Moore, Laura Veirs, Eyvind Kang.
Fruit Of The Vine is a song that was prompted by thinking about that movie I did with BBC 4 [Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus]. The images and characters in the film returned to me a lot, particularly the meth dealer who was doing life in prison. I thought about all my friends in similar situations and how their lives carried them to points of desperation and wanted to put some of those sad stories and cultural elements into a song.
Take Me Away is a story song, a hillbilly stomper, loosely based on the life and times of a friend of mine whose daddy was a preacher and who married a woman whose daddy was a preacher. He was surrounded by Jesus on every side and there was lots of pressure put on him to be a preacher as well. But he just didn't have it in him. In his heart of hearts he was a deeply creative, intuitive, artistic person, but in the church he had no outlet for his profound talents (he was my musical inspiration when I was in my teens) so he slowly but surely lost his mind. I took him as a character and created a context with the train and the men from the assylum that I thought symbolically represented his plight.
Turquoise House is a corn ball homage to misfits. Every album I put out has some goofy song on there that seems to contradict my perceived personality--this sensitive, suffering lost soul.
Diamonds To Coal was a real challenge, both to write and produce. I've always relied on dramatic situations---crimes and murder and betrayal and terrible loss---to convey my feelings about life. This is sort of a juvenile mindset. Sooner or later you have to move on from those dramatic archetypes and talk about the meaning that can be found in the quotidian realm. This is my first attempt to do that. Musically I was shooting for Tony Joe White and never quite hit the target. It makes me appreciate all the more what he does.
Counting Numbers In The Air is a question song. It asks "how did we get in the mess of being grown up and disconnected from what is essential in life? Musically I've very proud of this song--I feel like I went to an exotic sonic club med on this song.
Plywood Superman started out as an observational song, (a song about imagined others), and slowly came around to being a song about an aspect of my personality that I used to struggle with, but that of late I've learned to disregard. For years that side of me held a lot of sway with my sensibilities and choices. I was always a fingertip away from something that I could never quite reach. I quit reaching a while back and what I craved found me, instead of the other way around.
Pieces Of Heaven is a song I wrote to my two daughters. It's my way of wishing them well on their way and hoping that they will remember me with the love that I daily feel for them.
Long Long Day - I collaborated on this with a bluegrass outfit called Jeff & Vida. They're a husband and wife duo that have great musical skills and really understand how to compliment each other. Vida really nailed the wistful bucolic feeling that I was hoping for in the vocals. She a great singer and Jeff can play the hell out of anything with strings on it (bathing suits excluded, so far as I know, anyway).
CPH #2
God, isn't it beautiful? The year is 1967. Welcome to my town---a virtual sonic prison, with but one solitary radio station that plays anything resembling modern music.
Transistor radios are the aesthetic weapon of choice here in this jerkwater deep-south hellhole. Downtown you got the JC Penney's, which features a sad sack selection of country and western horse farts, and other than that, there's no such thing as a bona fide record store hereabouts. As such, social deviates the likes of yours truly pass our days crushing tiny metal boxes against our skulls, madly torquing this way and that---courting copasetic kinships with fiendishly fickle, unseen "airwaves"---bending for hours on end…just… waiting... for… one….good…song.
In waiting, young restless minds get to idling, now don't they? And oh my, how idle minds are prone to devilish drifting---is that not what the preacher tells us? Press the box to your skull, do you feel your thoughts spinning pretty circles of damnation down this or that sonic stream of othermusic----past upwellings of hack psychedellia, through undertows of cookie cutter Motown, through cesspools of last gasp Do wop, the shallows of gimmick pop, schlock puppy love pabulum, swamp rock, hell, even calypso. Cesspools? Yes friend, cesspools are a part of the natural order, particularly when there is but one portal through which all shit must pass.
Listen up; in 1967 you and I, we both know what we want to hear, but in order to get at what we desire, we must learn to abide the presence of shit, of in-betweens, of contraries to our so-called "taste in music". For my part, in abiding, my idle mind unwittingly succumbs, imbibing the worrisome beverage of unwanted influences. They slowly and insidiously creep into the shadowy tissues of my psyche, lodging there like some inorganic carcinogen. There, free of conscious supervision, they silently fester and mutate. Frightened? Don't be. It's 1967, before most of you poor bastards of freedom are born.
So lets shoot ahead to the mid 1970's. You born yet?
Rumors are circulating around town, but I disbelieve in such a thing…at least until I behold it with my own two and a half ears; a stone cold revelation called formatted FM radio. I tune in. Song one; a good song. Song two; my song. I keep listening---hell, this station is playing one and only one style of music; the teen-age hippy stuff. And you know what friend? There's others like me out there listening because damn if the station doesn't catch on.
Day or night now whenever I twist the knob, buddy, there it is---MY music! I'm free to partake of MY songs whenever I so choose. Before too long a hippy record store opens up on the outskirts of town. No more idle dreaming about MY song. I can get it whenever I want. Has heaven descended? No. What happens to MY soul as I find myself dreaming about MY song less and less? What would you say if I told you freedom is the true enemy of dreams?
Flash ahead ten or so years. My brain's been twisted into a middle class pretzel by the insidious machine known as Popular Culture. I've taken a job on one of those hellish 3 day 4 night vacation cruise ships that roundtrip endlessly between Miami and Jamaica. It's after hours and I'm giving my best shot at seducing a coy little Norwegian snack bar cashier. She perks up sexy nice when I arrive at her door with guitar in hand. I sit down and sing her a semi-schizophrenic number I wrote called "Don't Fall Prey To Odds And Ends". She listens in polite bewilderment, then tells me "You sing like a broken short wave radio." Her favorite band turns out to be Mister Mister (read; boring LA studio band). I feel compelled to report to her that Mister Mister cobble their fine songs out of dried up cat shit and am unceremoniously expelled from her quarters. But her words stay with me.
Years pass. Turns out nobody likes my broken short wave radio songs so I quit writing them. Why bother? I quit listening to the radio. I disappear into the wondrous silence of middle age. A decade later I start writing songs again. Just to pass the time. I don't give a dried up cat shit if anybody likes them or not.
Now we are in the present. Believe it or not, I'm a card carrying professional musician. I sometimes hear songs I wrote played on the radio. If a song I wrote is played on the radio, I actually make money, so from time to time I listen, hoping to hear myself making money.
But what a mind fuck the radio has become. The airwaves are packed tighter than a third world streetcar. Now there's a formatted radio station for each and every demographic in the kaleidoscope of human experience. Rich kids listen to rich kid radio. Depressed white males listen to depressed white male radio. Kittens with one ear listen to kitten with one ear radio.
Secondary discovery: there's a new mutant breed of vacant-eyed supermodel-looking girls and boys who can simultaneously sing like Aretha Franklin while they dance like a crack head whore. That's hard to do all at once. Upon closer examination I discover they are soulless automatons programmed by corporate demagogues.
Third discovery; I notice smart kids of late have caught on to the phenomenon of rampant soullessness and have adopted a pose called fashionable cynicism. Fans and record company A&R types regularly mistake said cynicism for a brand new kind of soul. They place aspects of their mistaken impression in songs and make millions of dollars in the process. Their music is basically a catchy little cynical smirk. Am I wrong? Is there a section in Tower records called Cynical Smirk? If not, there damn sure should be.
What I notice most on the radio of today is there ain't a whole lot of rooms for dreams. No "Sam Stone". No " The Israelites" No "Welcome To My World".
The record label calls this morning. I'm writing songs for a new album. They tell me, "Don't worry about trying to write a single. There's no such thing as an indie single any more." I ask why, and they explain, "Clear Channel bought up every radio station in America. The play list is forty songs." Turns out if you can't sing like Aretha Franklin while you dance like a crack head whore you won't get any airplay. I clap my hands and shout, "Thank God! At last!". My label boss is stumped, so I elucidate, "Don't you see? It's just like the old days! One narrow conduit through which all shit must pass. Pretty soon them poor bastards of freedom will be able to dream again!"
In short little brothers and sisters, look around you at those who are so free that they need nothing. What the hell do you think they dream about? Nada. I wish you a prison, so that your dreams may live.
Signed, your friend,
Jim White
PS: verse 1 of "Don't Fall Prey To Odds And Ends"
The day the world went flat,
it went flat with a fizz and a crackle and a boom and a crash.
All of a sudden no mountain or hill could be found nowhere.
I whistled and said,
"Gosh life just ain't mysterious no more.
What's to dream about when everything's so goddamn clear?"
CPH #1
It's one week ago. I'm slinging a bush axe furiously at the demented paraboloid of a prehistoric wisteria vine. The damn thing won't die. It oozes and spits and hisses at me. It's six hours into the work day. My task? Clearing a four-foot wide swath straight through the heart of two miles of deep south hellgrowth up in the panhandle of Florida, or LA (lower Alabama), as it's more rightfully known. To make matters worse, this cracker I'm stuck working beside today, he's contrarying every other word I say. I say up, he say down. His comebacks aren't so much corrections as they are rebukes for violating the manly silence with the painted whore called "talk".
The last straw of cordiality comes when I lose cracker's favorite wire snips somewhere in the underbrush. He's pissed. "Christ! You lost my tool!"--- like I misplaced his reproductive device. He stomps off, red-faced with heat and frustration, with having to cut fence lines with a moron. "Why I gotta put up with this shit?" I hear him grumble to himself. Cracker's got some Cherokee in him, and a machete in his hand, so I err on the side of caution and wade off through the underbrush to the far end of the plum line, where I commence to defoliate in solitude.
Anyway, that's how the day goes, slinging and chopping, all the while miserably failing this paradigm of southern manhood--until a rusty nail attached to a rotten plank introduces itself to the internal works of my goddamn foot straight through the sole of my discount work boots. Bones and blood. Rust and rot. I say f--k it and limp through the rest of the afternoon. That night in the ER the doc gives me a little chastising head-shake, then whispers conspiratorially, "Dirty wounds do best when probed and cleaned." I limp out two hours later about crippled---the cure worse than the affliction.
So now it's now---flip ahead in the book of life exactly one week and five thousand miles. The night air feels like heaven, weighing in at 45 (F) righteously chilled degrees. A broken-winged angel by the name of Monica Queen has just finished hitting the highlights of her hypnotic album 10 Sorrowful Mysteries. I walk on stage, grudgingly aware of the several hundred adoring eyes focused exclusively on me.
It's an inverse universe. In place of a bush axe I presently wield a costly telecaster. At my feet the tangle of vines is replaced by a maze of Japanese electronica. I'm situated center stage on the Renfrew Ferry---a night club/river boat that floats placidly on a worrisome river (the Clyde?), made all the more worrisome by the news that a young woman's torso has that day been dredged from the nearby shallows. Strangely, the song I'd been rehearsing for a month now to kick off the show, called Objects In Motion, is a story song about a girl floating dead in a river.
The mingling of fact and fiction creates a slipknot in my mind. I get to thinking about the book of life and the mechanics of this coincidence. Look at it this way; imagine the "present" is this line being read on this page in a book called your life, and the "future" is a line on another page somewhere further ahead in the same book. Axiomatically, who's to say that now and again some spooky wind doesn't momentarily flip the pages forward, allowing you a glimpse of some seemingly random "future" passage?
Here's where it gets tricky; where does the wind enter your mind from? Spirit windows. Portals in your mind that face into the teeth of spooky winds. You open them up and what you get is the occasional buffeting of pages in the book of your life. Said pages move in such a manner that, should you be interested, you can apprehend snippets of non-nows, but totally out context---ghosts, if you will---and not all of them friendly little Caspers. Like this poor murdered child. Why did I see here there???
And yes, I know, I know---this essay is fast becoming less a diary and more a schizophrenic memoir. But then I'm Jim White---an obsessive-compulsive sidetrack artist, hell-bent on spotting ripples in the pond of consciousness, hunting up first movers and causal origins, then utterly disregarding the evidence I so fervently sought out.
So it's no big shock when right in the middle of my bossa nova version of King Of The Road, up on the arched ceiling of the ferry I see the cracker's face materialize and hover. He's pissed as usual---shaking his head at me in disapproval. And like a counterpoint to the chorus I'm singing, I hear his voice in the monitor muttering, "Why I gotta put up with this shit?" I come up short and can't remember the words to the song. Something to do with trains and trailers.
This time though I concur with crackers negative take. See, he's not griping about fences but about pErFormaNCES, which is fine by me Why? Basically I got some issues with being a public person. Don't get me wrong, I'm no misanthrope--it's just that in public contexts, you have to move at the speed of community. Not my cup of tea, thanks.
Yet there I stand, frozen in place before the kindly watching eyes, the muscle car within buried up to it's axles in the quicksand of presentation. And yes, I know I could eschew the company of the watching eyes, but the problem is, they are such kind and accepting eyes. And there I am assuaging my injury (psychic) by regaling said eyes with musical stories regarding that selfsame wound and are they fleeing in horror the dirty wound is probed and cleaned? No, quite the contrary, the "audience" is generous and accepting and, while I'm vaguely aware of the many positive permutations to be inferred from fervency of their attentive eyes, unfortunately, the phrase I've fixated on is this; "We find your injury fascinating."
So herein lies the paradox of my life. Since I was a cogent entity, I have very sensibly loathed my injury. My injury has left me a loner, and not a contented man of solitude (as some may think), but an unwilling, outraged exile of the human condition. Yet my injury is now my connection to the world. So I am beholden to it, as it is my lifeline to connectivity. So, should I encourage my injury?? As, say David Lynch did post Blue Velvet? I think not. Yet, dirty wounds do best when probed and cleaned. Strange.
Thankfully I'm not a mentally ill teenager anymore. My psychic internecine warfare has diminished to the point where I find it vaguely entertaining, like watching man-eating grizzly bears devouring hunks of unknown bloody flesh in some exotic cage in the Zoo of my mind. Just ignore the nagging issue of the origin of the flesh. Mine?
So I finish up my show, take bows, say thanks to the watching eyes who made me so uncomfortable with their kindness and encouragement, then I get the hell out of the Zoo before the grizzlies catch a whiff of me.
Down the greased chute of British transport headed to Brighton. Along the way I stop off in London. I've been working on a documentary about "murder madness and music in the south" for BBC Arena. We've already spent three weeks filming performances by 16 Horsepower, The Handsome Family, Johnny Dowd, Trailer Bride, and more. The filmmakers thankfully aren't so much interested in glamorizing this collection of Alt Country darlings as they are in examining the wacko culture that spawns generation after generation of redneck deviants like us. So we hit the back roads of Louisiana, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky and the like, collecting testimony from truck drivers and preachers, teenage brides, waitresses and convicts, barbers and butchers…hot on the heels of the ghosts of Flannery O'Conner, Faulkner and Cormack McCarthy.
Arriving in Brighton I have a non-acid flashback. I'm ten years old, watching that afternoon TV movie matinee, the one called Dialing For Dollars (see Janis Joplin's "Me And Bobby McGee"). Today's feature is a dreamy B&W (Pinewood Studios??) film made in the 40's or 50's, set on some coast in England where there's this fantastic carnival situated at the end of a pier.
Maybe you yawn. Typical British seaside--but to me, this redneck kid stranded in the buckle of the bible belt there's nothing typical about it. It emanates otherworldliness---the bright spinning lights attached to rickety, clanking, whirling machines surrounded by the fluid dream sky and sea—storm clouds forever looming in the distance.
"That's heaven." I thought, "Heaven is a carnival on a pier in England". Now here I am…40 years later---in heaven. I scan the immediate vicinity, hoping to catch a glimpse of Jesus operating one of the rides, or Mary Magdalene hawking cotton candy in a plywood booth, maybe Pontius Pilate shooting by in a speedboat, but instead I'm interrupted by the reverb-soaked voice of my childhood pastor, Pastor Cox, shouting about the glooooory! of heaven. Streets of gold and jasper! The heavenly host continually rejoicing! Praising! Adulating Jesus in righteous exultation---which is nothing like Brighton. Brighton is settled and serene, literally heavenly. It gets me wondering, can there be two heavens? And if so, can there be more?
The crowd arrives early---during sound check---which for the seeker-type I recommend. It's educational, whereas the show is merely (at best) entertaining. The early-birds watch as John Paul (the sound man, not the Pope) scrambles around like hell trying to scare up a viable 110 power source for my armada of Japanese electronica (Boss Loop Station, Digitech GNX2 guitar synthesizer, Akai Headrush, Boss digital delay, and more).
The show, while being not unsuccessful, feels like a slow, gentle strangulation. The Concorde 2 a big dreamy place, with a far-away audience that leaves me feeling like everybodys too relaxed. Do I climb down off the stage and mingle? That'd get messy fast, I'd get that creepy feeling, like Bono in Vegas, working the crowd. Two seconds of that and I'd be hitting the door like a cat on fire. I stay put and let the strangulation run its course.
Back to cutting the fence line. It's the next day. I'm half crippled and had my fill of the cracker, so I mosey over to JC Caldwell's house to see if he's up for some day labor. JC's hard-lived sixty years in the rural south have rendered him a dead ringer for John Lee Hooker. While we're working I mention I'm leaving in two days to go to England. "England???" This is a mind f—k for him, as he's never been further from home than Montgomery, Alabama. "To do what?" I tell him I'm a singer and I'm going over to do some shows. He just studies me, bewildered, like I just told him I was going to hack off my arms with yonder chainsaw. The cracker drops by a while later and glowers around, kicking mounds in the underbrush, lamenting the loss of his magical wire snips. JC about has a conniption, laughing at that fool white man in love with his tool.
So there's work and there's work. Sometimes you're slinging bush axes, other times you're standing on stage being gawked at, the muscle car of your soul roadblocked by a wall of kindly watching eyes. Either way it's manual labor for minimum wage.
In case you think that last remark there is just so much self-serving bitching, here's some nuts and bolts data for the uninitiated; aside from the tactical nightmare of putting together 90 minutes of material that has a dramatic arc---that's cohesive, yet not overly repetitive---there's the dreary physical logistics of transporting equipment and body to a new venue each and every day (a break-even necessity).
In my case, being that I'm doing a life sentence in the prison of poverty, I can't afford the luxury of paying an extra body to help out. My 45 years of driving on the wrong side of the road render automotive options null and void, so I'm doing this whole tour by way of trains, lugging two huge coffin-shaped road cases, each weighing 80 pounds (34 kilos?) from town to town. It's far from ideal, especially on days when there are multiple train changes, because between the travel, set-up and sound check, the show, say my hellos, break down, back to the hotel, each day's basically a sixteen-hour bust ass proposition. So I spend the twelfth of May on trains, making my way north to Sheffield for my show at the Barfly, which turns out to be a first class joint.
There's a couple of venues in Europe and England that bend over backwards to ease the burden of a musician's life on the road. This place seems like one of them. Lyndon runs sound there and he's top-notch, which makes my job a lot easier. Soon as sound check's over I'm escorted to a bona fide dressing room and served a very palatable plate of vegetarian grub (I'm off meat for ten years now). The promoter shows up and chauffeurs me to the hotel after sound check, waits for me to get my shit together --then takes me back to the club. It sounds like a lot of pampering, but after ten hours of slogging the coffins on trains and cabs, dragging them down London streets (King's Cross to St. Pancreas with twenty minutes to connect. Six flights of stairs—200 pounds of equipment---f—ing hell!), the indulgence feels like an act of divine grace.
The opening band, Chicken Legs Weaver puts in a serious ass-whooping nu-blues set---something akin to Royal Fingerbowl (a great band out of New Orleans). I talk to the lead singer, about the labyrinth politics of the music business, suggesting some ways he might get his stuff heard. My set goes well, with just the right amount of listening and talking from the audience. If it gets too reverently quiet between songs, I get to feel less like the night is mutual meeting of the minds and more like the "Look At My Injury" show. Tonight, thanks to a good natured, lively crowd, "the performance" works real well.
Me and the coffins hop a train in the morning for Wolverhampton. What the hell is a Woverhampton? A cheeky wench in the front row explains it's a disobedient rodent residing in a black hole at the center of the universe. That surreal clarification sits well with me, and I know me and this crowd are going to get along just fine. Talk to me friends, it gets lonely up on that stage.
A small digression; I have two Pakistani cab drivers in Wolverhampton who both inform me it was Jews who organized the World Trade Center disaster. I hate politics, with everybody posturing like it's only them that knows the real score (when nobody does), so I counter with my own crackpot theory, suggesting that the World Trade centers are actually still there, just cloaked by a mirrorized cloth sewn by extraterrestrial seamstresses employed by Mossad, the CIA and the Trilateral Commission. Those thousands of dead people? They're alive and well and being put up at the Ramada Inn in Laramie, Wyoming. I mean, let's get real here Muslim friends. You're backstroking down the big river in Egypt called De Nile (n.-denial)
So it's time for the Leeds show. I gotta say, me and Leeds, we always see eye to eye. The shows I've done there (now 3) always have a relaxed feel, like I'm among friends. I'm playing one of my favorite venues in the world, this pub called the New Roscoe, which is the antithesis of the top shelf venue I just left in Sheffield. People treat me like a regular Joe there.
After sound check I spy Mr. Dai Thomas, the multi- instrumentalist Manchester blues man. Dai lays a copy of his self-produced CD "Song's From The Ragged Backside Of The American Dream" on me. It's a stilted, weird, happy homage to Dai's abjectly loving take on degenerate Delta Blues sung through a beautifully manic smile. Good stuff.
Back at the New Roscoe, a good-sized crowd's gathered, pints in hand, friendly discussions prevail. Smiling faces abound. And what occurs to me is that in Pensacola, this scene would simply not be possible. Bars in the bible belt are generally localities of sin, where the backslid and reprobate go to reject their loving savior. In Pensacola the sinners go to bars, drink heavily, then of course fornicate (occasionally with members of their own species). The righteous? They attend church, bible studies and otherwise worship in that great American consumer tabernacle, Wal Mart.
The final show takes me to Bristol, which at first glance think it looks kind of upscale and swanky, which sets my teeth on edge. Turns out I'm wrong. My cabbie's a leather-necked bouncer type who informs me that can gets rough and tumble on the wrong side of the tracks, with crack being the drug of choice. Either way, the timetable's such that I got no time for inverse sightseeing, so I stick close to the hotel, dining with "the beautiful people" on some kind of giant Dutch pancake in this trendy in-group restaurant. It's a miracle I keep my food down.
It's showtime, and what can I say? Other than the crew that runs the club are about the sweetest people you'd ever meet, it's another night of goodwill and loving kindness, with 400 of them damn kindly watching eyes simultaneously urging me on, and freezing my motor. It's got to the point where I'm about to snap, take a machine gun to main street. You can feel it, can't you? I'm dying from an excess of love, like a cactus drowning from being overwatered.
A side note: all throughout this trip friendly English people have asked me when I'm coming back, like England's just around the corner. But it's not. I'm writing this segment from the Dallas airport where I'm stranded. My day began 20 hours ago and I've just missed my connecting flight home by two minutes. Now I'm looking at at least another six hours of travel time.
Flash ahead eight hours. Am I home? Nope. Still stranded in Dallas. The flights to Pensacola are overbooked, cancelled, etc., so I'm rerouted 60 miles to the west of Pensacola, to Mobile, Alabama.
Two hours later. 30 hours into the trip home. I'm stranded at the Mobile airport. Why couldn't I fly into Pensacola? The flights were full due to the world-class music festival Pensacola puts on each spring. Today's the first day. Being a hometown favorite, you'd think I'd be on the bill, but I'm not. But then again, how can I compete with the likes of Bachman Turner Overdrive? This year The Village People are the headliners.
I get to thinking about the adoring throng cheering the Village People on. Y-M-C-A!! and all of a sudden I bust out in a great big grin. Not because I like the Village People, but because it suddenly dawns on me that I'm loose of that goddamn lovefest back in England. The blast of indifference, rejection and mediocrity is a breath of fresh air.
Three hours later, here comes JC rolling up in my van. We load up the coffins in a driving rain. I feel the muscle car within fire up and start to crawl forward. An hour later I drop JC at the Waffle House (his office) and head home. I've hardly put my suitcases down when there's a knock on the door. I open it up. There stands the cracker, just as glum as ever. He shoots a look over his shoulder at the van and grumbles, "You left your lights on. You'll kill the battery like that you know." I start laughing, though he can't figure out why. He's the perfect antidote to England. I can't stop laughing. He's bewildered. As he's walking away he says, "Go ahead, laugh now. But tomorrow you won't be laughing. We still got a fence to put up." It's 90 degrees, I'm sweating just standing there. Yonder lies my role model. I'm home.
A postscript;
Ten minutes later the phone rings. It's my ex. She's a spooky southern born woman in possession of bona fide psychic abilities. Her granddaddy was a legendary swamp man, a half-breed alligator hunter. Turns out she heard about the lost wire snips and went out to the woods and just like that, she found them. The cracker is ecstatic. I sit down and smile. All the spirit windows are closed. The wound has been properly probed and cleaned. The book of life is once more a paradigm of order.
Horner's Corner
September 14, 2007
If the Chihuahua Whisperer were invited to my house, I believe I would first listen to the knock at the door and decide if it was a hard knock or a soft knock. If the knock was gentle and kind sounding with no indication of malice, I would open the door, just a crack, and see if the Whisperer had the gentle hands that could make a blue Chihuahua feel like dancing, the way happy Chihuahua's dance. If I see such hands, I would open the door a bit more and let the blue baby's sniff the air, to sniff the soul of the that Whisperer. If my blue baby's begin to dream of heaven, I would invite the Whisperer inside. And if that Whisperer was True, I would invite them to watch the movie "Flushed Away" with us, which is the Blue Chihuahua's favourite movie.
September 18, 2007
Fall is approaching and I believe this year's Squirrel Forms are even better than last years.
http://www.ellzeys.com/newforms.html
September 18, 2007
Finally, the A.C.A. (American Callers Association (squaredancing)) is addressing the problem of electric revolving doors at square dance hall entrances.
http://americancallers.com/7.11.07.pdf
September 20, 2007
Dolls by Barbara specializes in making a bride doll for you that resembles the real bride. Rumours abound that sometimes these bride dolls come to life while the real couple sleeps at night. This has never been confirmed.
http://www.dollsbybarbara.com/index.html
September 24, 2007
Imagine the floodwaters coming to Phillipi and flooding the house where the two [insane] mummies lay beneath a bed. The waters carrying them out of the house and into the dark night, the lightning illuminating their eyesockets and strangely serene faces as they float through the turbulent waters engulfing the town. And then, as the water subsides, they are found and simply laid out to dry in the sun in front of the town post office, where a green fungus covers them. Eventually, they are cleaned, moved inside for visitors to gaze at and adorned with air fresheners.
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/WVPHImum.html
September 27, 2007
Skunk Memorials and Skunks with Human Baby Faces
http://www.justskunks.com/site/532249/page/364599
September 27, 2007
Don't waste your time with other RV camps that pull you in with their slick "Gun Shop / Yurt" advertisements. The Rocking "A" has everything you need.
http://www.rockingarvpark.com/
September 27, 2007
The vegetarians at the festival at phuket this year once again demonstrated that a meatless diet leads to better cheek piercing.
http://www.2camels.com/photos/phuket-vegetarian-festival.php
September 28, 2007
During biker week 2005, they threw the dice and fell in love forever just a few miles away from Oatman's Ghost Town at the Moon River RV resort in Mohave Valley, Arizona. He first saw her at the Coffee Corner carrying an antique musket she had just bought for $200.00 at High's Claim House. He approached her and asked if she wanted to have breakfast by the side of the Colorado River. She said she would. They got married and since then they come back on biker's week to the Moon River Resort, fill a thermos up at the Coffee Corner and sip it by the side of the Colorado River.
http://www.moonriverresort.com/biker.htm
October 1, 2007
Now the eldest of the Bryce boys, Todd, had surrendered to his compulsions by the time he was 26 years old and it all but seemed hopeless. And on top of his appetite for his vices, he had received the nastiest set of blue bottle stings imaginable that a person could receive during a short 20 minute skinney dipping session.
Fortunately, Grandma Beatrice was still alive and remembered the curative powers of Reckitts Crown Blue. She prepared a diluted solution of the blue powder and Todd bathed in it for nearly two hours. When he emerged from that bath he was changed. Not only had his blue bottle stings disappeared but he also lost all interest in gambling. You may dispute that Reckitts caused this, but what cannot be argued is that prior to that bath Todd was completely tone deaf and could not sing a note. After the bath, he sang like a canary and even became a famous entertainer, delighting many with his beautiful voice.
http://www.divinafe.com/shop/item.asp?itemid=874
http://www.abc.net.au/canberra/stories/s1749791.htm
October 1, 2007
Much has been said about Elvis' "Tiny Trailer of Tragedy" which is found at the City Museum of St. Louis. I think of Elvis and Priscilla when I view Paige Bridges' painting "Flower Child"
http://www.fabuloustravel.com/ww/elvisrv/elvisrv.html
http://www.tinytears.cc/PaigeArt.html