Letters from Loonville

The tie that binds

2006-08-02T19:30:00.000-04:00

It's going to be a great day. At this time of year, I don't put my
shirt and tie on until I'm right across the street from the hospital
on my bicycle, and I remove them as soon as I leave hospital property
on my way home. This morning, my tie slipped out of my bike basket,
and I didn't notice that it was missing for two blocks, after which I
had to go back and retrace my steps (pedals) to pick it up from the
gutter.

It had been run over a couple of times, but it's a dark brown tie and
diagonal stripes (you may remember it from the second season
of "Barney Miller"), and the tire marks merge with the pattern so
well they can' be seen at all unless one scrutinizes closely and
intentionally.

That, for me, augurs well for the the day

Music reviews

2006-07-24T19:45:00.000-04:00

Here are the latest music reviews from our very own Love Whip:

William Lee Ellis

God's Tattoos

Yellow Dog Records YDR1343

www.yellowdogrecords.com/wle

His guitar speaks back to him ... like a burning bush. God turns up pervasively, but as an inspiration rather than a subject. Is that difference clear? They're not songs about faith, but songs written to express the beauty of visions Mr. Ellis has had, and he happens to express himself with acoustic guitar in a powerful acoustic blues style style rooted both in East Texas and the Piedmont, with strong seasoning hints of Scotch Irish hill music. It's a very thoughtful record, a theme record, with the soft, introverted voice of a sensitive man sharing important secrets about Life and Beauty with his lucky listeners.

The titles say a lot: "Snakes In My Garden," "God's Tattoos," "When Leadbelly Walked the River Like Christ," "Search My Heart," "Four Horses," "Perfect Ones Who Break," "The Call," "Cold and Weary," "Here I Am, Lord Send Me," Jesus Stole My Heart," "The Missing Moon and Stars" and "Dust Will Write My Name."

Eddie Turner

The Turner Diaries

Northern Blues Music NBM0036

www.northernblues.com

Hendrix-like in vocal approach, but more into blues and swing. Still fully psychedelic. Power trio. Certainly rooted in blues. Blues fans and rockers alike will turn it up, replay individual cuts and otherwise make every effort to immerse themselves into this record. Jazz fans will find it palatable or better.

Drink Small

Blues Doctor: Live & Outrageous!

Erwin Music

www.drinksmallblues.com

If you know Drink Small, ten you know him as the best live blues guitarist vocalist out there and, man, I mean he is out there. "Live & Outrageous" indeed; the man solemnly told me once that he'd invented rap, then proved it off the cuff for the next twenty minutes. He pushes blues, he sells it as a frame that will hold any canvas from any other genre of music and do it convincingly, as in the Roy Acuff number on this CD re-issue of a mid-'80s cassette release which he prefaces by assuring the audience, "If you turn out the light, you'd swear I was white. If you hear me in the dark, you'd think I was Roy Clark." Okay, you're never really going to mistake Drink Small for Roy Clark, but if you haven't heard him, then you're mistaking someone else for the best solo or small combo blues performer on the road today.

He knocks them out wherever he goes. Where he goes is usually a Southeastern coastal circuit, centered around Columbia, South Carolina, but he makes it to Memphis and New Orleans once in awhile. He is pure T hell at festivals, because everyone's afraid to follow him. It's impossible for anyone to show the audience a better, bluesier, more authentic time.

Delaney & Bonnie

Home

Stax Records STXCD-8626-2

www.concordmusicgroup.com

"Bramlett was at a hotel bar with Stephen Stills, with whom she a was singing backing vocals. The pair got into an argument with a very drunk Costello who called Stills an "old tin nose" and, later, Ray Charles a "blind, ignorant nigger" (for which the clearly not-racist Elvis later profusely apologized). Unable to take further abuse, Bramlett punched the Englishman and knocked him out cold ..." That incident may qualify as Bonnie Bramlett's greatest remaining claim to fame in 2006. Jeez, backing vocals for Stephen Stills back in '79? That was a long way down from being one of the most emulated female vocalists in rock, a woman behind whom Eric Clapton and Dave Mason were happy to play.

Home was the first album (1969) by more-or-less hippies Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett and a fluid backing band. Recorded on Stax, "The Voice of Black America," it is, in retrospect, evocative less of Memphis or Muscle Shoals than of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Capitol of Southern Soul and Shag Dancing Nostalgia. While achieving this ambience seems like small reward for a record that included the talents of Booker T & the MGs, Leon Russell, Isaac Hayes and William Bell, it is actually a rare treasure of a package.

Quite simply, one does not find releases like this often, and it captures the best of 1969 very, very well. One tires of the Creedence, Beatles and Stones singles from that period that still crop up on specialty FM stations, as they are too familiar. This is a random, yet extremely lucky find from the patchouli, sweat and pot-scented record bins of that day. Thanks to Concord Music Group's CD re-release and re-mastering of this record, with added cuts, one doesn't need random luck. You can and should go right to it.

Janiva Magness

Do I Move You?

Northern Blues Music NBM0033

www.northernblues.com

Everyone's going nuts over this one. Play any song from this album for guests, and they'll perk up and want to examine the CD case in detail. Who is this woman? She is a young blues singer with remarkable control. She gives the impression that there's always more waiting, that the next phrase may be even better than the last. She is a true interpreter, and her takes on these perfectly chosen and various eleven songs are all unique. Attitude-wise, she describes herself as a "Hussy," which we can interpret as "one who flaunts her sexuality regardless of how disturbing that may be to all those she comes into contact with."

Her full band instrumentation stays behind her. It is her record and she is the star and focus of each cut. This factor actually requires some getting used to, and some significant pondering. So many blues songstresses, early on, sound dominated by the male musicians around them. She does not. She absolutely does not. And that's as it should be. A honey of a hussy of a release.

The Miles Davis Quintet

The Legendary Prestige Quintet Sessions

Prestige Records PRCD4-4444-2

www.concordmusicgroup.com

Those were the days, back when there were so many peaks to scale, and many scales to peak in small combo jazz. Those were the days when a quintet could astound listeners by finding strong, brash harmony between two instruments instead of sixteen, when the front and back lines of the band blurred, and could blur in more, better equipped studios, when it took a couple of days to make a record that would last forever, and Miles Davis was, to those in the know, king of this strange new world. There were thoughts that could be thought best or more easily with his music playing in the background. It was cool. It still is.

This is a great collection of first or second take masterpieces, and it's mandatory for a jazz CD collection not only for the recordings, but for the liner notes. When you obtain a set like this, you experience a level of music criticism higher than that found in most full length artist biographies. The booklet accompanying this four-CD set is a gorgeous, highly insightful and instructive work. Again, a must for the serious jazz collector. And cool.

Walter Trout and Friends

Full Circle

Ruf Records RUF1117

www.rufrecords.de

After thirty five years in the music business, five years since his last studio record, blues-rock guitar legend Walter Trout here reflects on the sounds that influenced him and the sounds through which he influenced others. Lending hands here are John Mayall, Coco Montoya, Jeff Healey, Guitar Shorty, James Harman, Richie Hayward, Junior Watson and several other luminaries from American and British blues royalty. The tunes are, well, typical of British blues, as is true of any Mayall alumnus going back to those true blue roots.

The guitar work is stellar and precise, though the vocals are, after all these years, still failing to evoke the natural, easy passion of real blues. Oh well, that's a hallmark of British blues, and, though it sounds artificial, it's dead center of a real tradition, Other, better vocalists, including John Mayall himself, add more distinctive, real flavor to the record.

All in all, this is as good a British blues CD as you're likely to find this year. It is a fine, current anthology.

Tunes and Toons

2006-07-18T10:30:00.000-04:00

Enjoy this classic high-school humor from Whip's very own Latin II book, and then check out his latest record reviews at http://daddyvoice.150m.com/july05on.html

More kick-ass Whippery can be found at Whip's Database. Link below and to the left. Be sure to come back to Loonville to post comments!

Sick of This, Part Three

2006-07-13T17:09:00.000-04:00

OK, right after July 4th, I e-mailed a note to someone I'd dated in '05. Verbatim, the note read:

"The fourth was tough. A year ago, we were together. It's not that I'm trying to conjure up memories. They just surface sometimes. We walked down your mother's street and worked on getting that shared, couple pace down ... Last night, out of the blue, I had this overwhelming and thorough memory of that, and of holding your hand and putting my arm around your waist and feeling you beside me a year earlier.

"I'm not asking for or expecting anything from you. The last thing I want is for you to feel obliged to write back. Please just know that someone, once in awhile, thinks about you and that the thoughts are positive, and then hit that delete key and get on with your life, which I hope is happy and healthy.

She wrote back three times in a day to remind me that 7/4/05 was not all as wonderful as I remembered, what with her dad being sick and what-not and discouraging me from contacting her, and finally, in the third note, telling me that, although I bring out a toxic, hateful worst in her, she has occasional positive memories of me, too.

I wrote back and apologized, noting that twice (meaning when I sent the e-mail above and a couple of months ago, when I purchased two used bulldog books and a 2007 bulldog calendar and had them shipped to her), "I have failed at not being in love with you."

That e-mail from me accidentally carried a signature that sent her to this blog site, where she recognized herself as the bit player,"Rhonda (last year, with the bulldog)," and wrote back to tell me I was crazy for disparaging church people and dog people and people taking meds for mental illness, suggesting that my father, who called me and told me he was going to commit suicide over the disrespect I'd shown him by marrying without his permission and then died of natural causes (cirrhosis and alcohol-induced diabetes) a few hours later, and whose birthday, coincidentally, was July 4th, might still be alive had he just been on antidepressants, and then the blog site comments began.

"Anonymous said ... Gee I am seeing a pattern here with the food and restaurant experiences among many other things, so when do you think that maybe it is YOU and NOT the 'crazy' women you date? And well, lumping all of the 'crazy' women you date in Loonville together and then thinking 'Gee, why do they take this personally?' Hmm, I wonder? All I can think is you are addicted to these types of women for some very sad reasons. C'est la vie in Loonville!"

"Author said ... When you follow the blues, sometimes it catches you. Hell, yes, I've had those same concerns and worried about myself and done repeated soul searching, but then I get up and go to work and pay my bills and contribute to the community and get good comments here and elsewhere, as well as "sad" ones like this.

"The pattern is in this town and the sadness is in the therapy available to people I'd rather see well here. 'Coincidence' is something you missed the first half of. Pre-existing conditions of paranoia about government agencies, severe, ongoing back problems requiring heavy pain meds that string them out and confuse them on top of the mood meds, and the specific bizarreness regarding toothbrushes, conditions shared by all the women in these certainly sad narratives, point to a 'first half' for which I was not present.
The rational mind, then, looks for what was present, and where, when these conditions coagulated. That would be the therapy in this town.

"How awful and how sad am I for being present for its repercussions? Can they, literally, take these anecdotes by reading them as personally as they take their prescribed antidotes by ingesting them?"

"Anonymous said ... My question then is this: Why on earth would the 'rational mind' keep going backwards in life to revisit the very same 'crazy women of Loonville' that he USED to date? I am guessing that it is comfortable to this 'rational' minded person, and that it is as always self serving to keep going back to the familiar so he can continue to criticize them as opposed to say moving forward to the
unknown where he might actually find a woman who is not dysfunctional in his eyes, which by the way are few and far between, but then how would he answer to his own demons? That is a tough one. So it seems
the comfort zone provides better material to write about. And I am also guessing he tells these women he is still in love with them because he doesn't know what true love is and sadly never will unless he changes."

"Author said ... Reasons for trying again? Enough romanticism to see past the illness and into the souls of women I fall in love with. Enough egotism to believe I can ride it out until they get well. Enough faith in humankind to be absolutely certain that today's chemical therapy will be looked back on in a few years with the same abhorrence that we now feel for that fellow who received a Nobel Prize in the '40s for performing lobotomies with a device resembling nothing so much as an ice pick, inserted in mental patients' noses get.

"Gluttony for love that makes me take chances on known problems in order to pursue not just a present and possible future, which is what one gets dating strangers, but a past, present and future.

"Do I know what true love is? Hmmmm, it's hard for that one to not be subjective, isn't it?

"Do I know how long a doctor treating physical ailments could go on 'treating' them without any progress and with all of his patients 'coincidentally' developing the same new infections before losing his or her license and being sued for malpractice? I have a pretty good idea that after no more than six months, that physician would be lucky to find a job as a shoe salesperson. Do I know how long how many women of my acquaintance and, sadly, attempted affection, have received 'treatment' from the same mental health care provider in this small town and, in addition to retaining each and every aspect and degree of the illnesses for which they're supposed to be receiving professional care, have also all ended up convinced of constant, malevolent government agency surveillance, terrific back pain that must be treated with more and more numbing meds and some weird attitudes about toothbrushes? I have a pretty good idea that it's been far too ridiculously long."

And then there was another wee bit of e-mail correspondence from her:

"As it is very unhealthy to be partaking in this drama I am calling a truce, on my part, cannot speak for you. So no more comments from me or 'Rhonda' as I will not indulge your fetish for criticizing anyone and everyone from churchgoers, dog owners and people with legitimate pain issues ... which maybe one day you will have a chronic pain problem and will be more sympathetic although I doubt that as you have already proven that you yourself have some serious mental health issues and yet you show NO sympathy whatsoever for anybody else with said issues ... then again, denial is a strong emotion.

"So write away ... after all the only people I assume are reading this crap are your circle of other dysfunctional 'friends' (and I use that term quite loosely). Criticize me all you want ... and hey, even use my REAL name since your pseudonyms are not that creative ... write your opinions about everyone else in the world being so far beneath you that you have to suffer by being affected by their craziness. Poor you! Hey you lay down with dogs you are gonna get fleas!

"So keep telling yourself the half truths you like to believe and live in your own created Loonville, but I am guessing you will die all alone in this world because you would rather be right than loved. I give up ... I am letting go of the anger ( because I have considered the source and it is not worth getting upset over), I am not getting pulled into your little web of lies (like the editor that doesn't exist), not going to entertain you by reading your Blog to see what nasty things you have written about me or the world, I don't care what you obviously think of me (especially this schizo-attitude of 'I have failed at not being in love with you' but I can write disparaging commentary on my blog about all my past crazy girlfriends, 'Rhonda with the bulldog' being one of them because I am a writer!)

"My goal here is to live an honest life with peace and happiness not one filled with such negativity and hatred that you seem to be so filled with. It really saddens me to see a relatively intelligent man as yourself going down such a negative path. A pity really. Maybe one day you will wake up from your Absinthe/Salvia/Yopo seed smoking fog and see that the world actually can be a beautiful place if you let it be.

"I do have one regret that I feel the need to apologize for as it has truly been bothering me and that is the comment I made about your father. I do apologize for saying what I said. That was very low ... and sadly that is the kind of space you put me in ... and I do not like how I feel there. That is why I will not continue to read your Blog or be in contact with you. I never would have said that kind of statement before ... I feel it is equivalent to me telling MY mother 'Hey you aren't my real mother!' I would NEVER do that because it is so shamefully hurtful I could not bring myself to inflict that on her. I should not have commented on your father either. So for that, I do apologize. It was cruel and came from a very angry and mean spirited
place in me ... one which you obviously bring out and I try my best to not be that cruel of a person.

"So take care and keep on keepin' on in that crazy world you like to dwell in. Oh and by the way smoking Salvia or any other 'legal' hallucinogenic is so much better than taking Prozac! Guess you didn't see the news story about Salvia causing that young man to kill himself. But hey, it is legal! So I bid you adieu ... and I do wish you more happiness in your life ... you seem to need some."

... and then I responded to her and said that she'd made it clear that I brought out a bad side of her and would leave her be, but gave her proof of the editor's existence and told her she'd caught me at a particularly bad time with the jibe about my father, as his birthday had just passed and my July 3rd date had sent me a "my blood will be on your hands" note after I'd gotten tired of waiting for dinner and having government surveillance vehicles pointed out to me from her porch and window and had my beret used to clean the TV screen and been nipped by the goddamn dog enough times and gone home.

By the way, she's OK; I saw her ex-husband leaving the County Mental Health place earlier this week, which meant that she's alive, at least, and that he had, as is his habit, driven her to her weekly appointment with the therapist who'd advised her to clean people's toilets with that same husband's toothbrush a few years earlier.

That's the way life is here in Loonville. I later found out that she had attempted suicide, using, with an irony not diminished by the fact that she'd used the same method over a dozen times over the years, pills prescribed by the goddamn doctor who was supposed to be curing her mental illness to do so, and that sure as ever-living fuck never happens with herbal passionflower or yerba mate capsules. Anyway, that response apparently incited the anonymous "Rhonda with the bulldog" to end her "truce," because the following blog site comment then appeared:

"Anonymous said ... The 'ones' that get well unlist their phone numbers, block his email, issue restraining orders and ultimately flee this idyllic paradise to 'Get Well.' The remainders commit suicide. His path is strewn with death and decay. Author epitomizes 'Creep,' a desperate evangelizing atheist, hates love, believing in nothing but his own cum. This format is his cheap variation of his own therapy for his suffocating perversions."

"Author said ... There are neither restraining orders nor suicides, other than the 15th suicide attempt in a series by someone I never knew had tried it even once when I started seeing her or when I left her house, aggravated, prior to that 15th attempt. I think that note is a bit excessive in tone, bringing up new, cheap shot issues in a maddened frenzy that is not justified by any comment that precedes it. This must be someone who's desperately clinging to the chemical therapy I'm so against, attacking me for attacking the prescribed cotton candy fog of those damn pills."

Now is it plain to the sane that I should be sick of this shit, that all this makes it clear, not that I am the fucking Lex Luthor of Loonville Lovin'‚?, but that the therapy isn't working? Where do I provoke these comments from "Rhonda with the bulldog?" Where is all this death and decay, where are the suicides, where's my belief in nothing but my own cum and where are my suffocating perversions? For that matter, where, in her heavy correspondence and commentary here is her "flight" from Loonville, to which, as it is described in these voluntarily read pages, she repeatedly returned, and where, in her hateful, hurtful messages is the "wellness?." To me, this is one more sad example of the state of this town.

Yes, goddamn it, I do have fond memories of "Rhonda with the bulldog," and I would love to be in touch with her again, and in touch with any of the other excessive number of government-program-quack-drugged-victims here that I happen to have run across and dated because the Loonville Law of Probability inevitably leads me to them because they are everywhere, because of the very conditions I'm pointing out here.

So, yes, I am sick of this shit, and of being reviled and rejected by the women I meet in the community I live with when I go up against the system that is providing them poisons and not doing their minds a bit
of good.

The Road to Hell is Paved

2006-07-11T20:02:00.000-04:00

A workplace colleague, horrified by my ongoing series of dating disasters, offered to do some matchmaking for me, stating that she knew a charming half English, half Greek woman with a lovely English accent. I asked her if she had anything in a half Dutch, half Chinese woman with really tiny wooden shoes.

Sick of This, Part Two

2006-07-03T17:37:00.000-04:00

This morning, I made a nice entree pasta salad with beer-broiled flounder and called Annie to invite her over for a 1 p.m. lunch of that and ice cream. She called at 12:55, at which time, having given up on hearing from her at 12:40, I was just finishing lunch, and she suggested that maybe I'd like to pack the pasta salad and take it to a church potluck picnic with her. I dislike all churches, but reserve an especially high level of vitriolic, vehement hatred for hers; The Church, or, as I like to call it, The Church of the Walking Wounded.

Many years ago, when I was dating Annie, before she was diagnosed, I attended church with her. You see, it was her birthday, and I'd tried to buy her a thoughtful gift and be nice and do everything one is supposed to do, and then I asked her what else I could do to make her natal event, which happened to fall on a Sunday that year, special.

She told me I could go to church with her. I reminded her that I considered church congregations to be slack-jawed, superstitious mobs of like minded, no-minded morons and that I did not, on my own, wish for one instant in their company. She reminded me that I'd asked her what else I could do for her birthday, and off we went to the cheaply constructed, hexagonal frame building with the skylight over the sanctuary gummed with years of sap from the tall, skinny pine trees near the building and crap from the birds that made their homes on the upper branches ... the very phlegm of God, reserved for just such ridiculous clusters of contemptible idiots as was promised by the shark smiles and fake squeals of how-did-I-get-through-the-week-without-you delight echoing noxiously through the parking lot as shallow, needy people greeted one another with what they sincerely hoped was a good imitation of the fellowship they'd heard so much about.

We entered through the library, devoted mainly to liberal and arts periodicals, and I was surprised to be grabbed in near assault-level enthusiasm by an effeminate man in ambush near the door. He was part of a receiving line awash in fellowship and aslosh, judging by the malevolent tang in the air, in residue from successful men’s room encounters in some bar probably called “The End Zone,” but without sports paraphernalia or big screen TV sets tuned to ESPN, the night before.

As soon as that bastard turned me loose, I was mauled by a character so similar, he could have been having his rectum stretched in the very next stall during the starry, mimosa filled previous evening, then another. The whole goddamn receiving line was made up of extroverted gay men reeking of the little inconveniences resultant from destroying one’s ability to close one’s anus with any certainty or confidence, then fermenting acid-Ph semen there overnight, then standing in a church lobby and pressing against a hundred or so entrants.

Served by a husband-and-wife ministerial team with rhyming names and nary a college degree, the church also featured a Lucite podium in lieu of a real pulpit and an overhead projector / transparency rig instead of a hymnal. Said hymnal included, to my certain memory, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Try to Remember,” “Inch by Inch” and “The Impossible Dream.”

I strongly suspect it included “YMCA,” too, but we didn’t have to join hands and sing that one the day I attended services. No, our blessings were limited to a sermon backed up by a television remote used as a prop so that Renee and Penee could explain how walking God’s path was like watching TV, and how it was necessary to sit through the commercials along the way and not channel surf, or else some of Life’s lessons would otherwise be missed and one would come back as an armadillo or some damn lower species that’s probably not overly given to homosexuality, and that would be a shame, so sit through those commercials, boys and girls, and then there were prayer concerns from the congregation, announcements, silent prayer and a swaying, handholding version of the church anthem, “Let There Be Peace on Earth,” and then a stampede for coffee and the glory holes that I was pretty sure were in all the men’s room stalls.

I am no homophobe; I simply do not want to know as much about anyone’s intimate life as I ascertained quickly, whether I wanted to or not, about these people. The whole congregation wasn’t gay. Some were just recovering junkies, recovering Catholics, unemployed actors in search of attention, recovering alkies, slumming Unitarians, mental outpatients and zealot tourists who were confused and had
gotten the wrong address out of the local phone book. It’s just that the receiving line made that impression and smelled that way … bad planning on the part of the Church Newcomers’ Committee, especially if they ever expected me to contribute my good flounder pasta salad to one of their flyblown goddamn potlucks. That shit was not in the cards.

Church potlucks. That’s where they film all those commercials about children being filthy little beasts who need to be hosed down with anti-bacterial sprays before they’re let near civilized adults or anything civilized adults will come into contact with. I’ll be a ring-tailed son of a bitch if I’ll let children pet stinking dogs that asshole Christians just will bring to potlucks in the park and then wipe their snotty noses and then paw my food as it congeals under a hot sun and swarm of flies and is offered to these church members like pearls to swine. Fuck them. They need to go to Hell right now, hands joined and an earnest version of “The Impossible Dream” on their lips.

I wanted, for some goddamn reason, to spend time with Annie. I did not want to tag along to a potluck and see those assholes from her church. By the way, the church's ministers slyly assign their members to “church families,” which are supposed to function as effective little support groups for their members, which is cool as long as they’re supporting problems like trauma over which dress to wear or lost sleep over whether or not Jesus was Jewish, but those fuckers dropped Annie and pretty much blocked her calls as soon as she was committed all those years ago.

Instead of food whoring out, going, “Wow, wow, wow” over crappy, bland, flyspecked, child infested bullshit at a hot park in Whackjob County in summer with a bunch of phony, self-indulgent, shallow creeps who’ve proven they will only put up with her until she actually needs to call on them, she should have fought down the self destructive urges her own sister and mother keep trying to put her back in an institution for and spent some time with me … better company, better food, more deserving, more comfortable, less crowded, less risk of infection.

I am sick of this shit.

Sick of This, Part One

2006-07-03T17:36:00.000-04:00

It should have been a peaceful, perhaps even restful weekend. On Friday night, I spoke, somewhat productively, with my roommate, had a few beers, read a couple of Damon Runyon short stories and went to bed early.
Before seven Saturday morning, I tightened bicycle brake cables in anticipation of a ride to the 'burbs later to meet with Mojo Collins about a proposed slide guitar festival and then to have dinner with a friend and his ex-wife, who I introduced more than 20 years ago and who seem to be enjoying a reunion since I put them back in touch with one another a few months back.
After visiting with them, I was to go to a big Fourth of July party hosted by friends from work, and I'd even been offered a car ride to that event, a real plus since one can't see bike tire-puncturing nails and glass in gutters in the dark and because I do hate to drink responsibly.
The plan began to unravel when I got out of the shower at about 2:45, preparatory to leaving home at 3:15 to stop by a bank to make a deposit and by the grocery store for wine or flowers or something to take to Larry's house, where I was due at 5:30, as a dinner guest gift and then get to Mojo's house, near Larry's by four. As soon as
I turned the water off, I heard knocking on the front door. Hoping it was UPS bringing me those yopo seeds I'd ordered mid-month and looking forward to the hallucinogenic snuff one makes from them, I tugged on some shorts and went to the door.

It was Annie, offering to show me the new highway bypass around Loonville that had just opened that morning in return for half a tank of gas. She promised to get me to Mojo's house by four and we left my house at 3:10. Well, I've seen highways bordered by swamps before and got no aesthetic joy out of the road, but it was nice to see Annie positive and excited about something harmless and, since she'd worked for the highway department before yanking a cigarette out of a co-worker's mouth while driving a departmental vehicle (which was supposed to be nonsmoking space, being government property, but an official board of inquiry later decided would have been a shitload safer with a little cigarette smoke going out the open window than
with Annie careening all over an interstate highway while assaulting one of her colleagues), I could understand how the beauties of new pavement might not be so subtle to her.

Looking at my watch, I told her that we didn't have time to stop at the county line produce stand that marked the end of our tour, so she pulled into the produce stand parking lot and began asking me, "Don't you want a watermelon to take to Larry's?," and then, when I declined, asking me if I wanted tomatoes, then peaches, then every
other goddamn sonofabitching fruit and vegetable under the palm-thatched awning before us.
I kept saying,"No," and reiterating that we didn't have time to shop there, but since I'd been dumb enough to have handed her $25 cash back at my house for the requested gasoline, she got out of the car, went into the stand and immediately found a gay, male couple from her church to hug and annoy before starting her leisurely, melon thumping bullshit. I stood in the sun and smoked a cigarette.

You see, these fuckers on mental disability have no concept of time. They don't have to work, they've got all the time in the world to fuck around, sleep late, have to have their coffee shop coffee before they can do absolutely nothing in the morning and so on and so forth.
A few weeks ago, I watched "Dirty Filthy Love" with Annie, and her take on the film, which would be a "Sleepless in Seattle" quality chick flick if the protagonist wasn't an obsessive compulsive paranoid with Tourette's Syndrome, was that the people around this irritating, mentally ill, screwed-up mess should have just listened to him.

Yes, Dirty Filthy Love" is probably a good test of sanity, guys. Watch it with a woman you're getting to know -- If she thinks people with lives and loves and responsibilities should listen over and over again to some crazy fucker tell the story of how his wife
left him because he wanted to leave Istanbul and return home early from their vacation because he'd accidentally broken an aftershave bottle on the bathroom floor and might have gotten a microsliver of glass in his foot, then she's fucking crazy, herself, and you should either start running, keep running and don't stop to shit or be the constant victim of crazy women that I am. It's your choice. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Of course, her estimated half-pound of peaches weighed in at just less than four pounds (yeah, anybody could make that mistake), and so there was an ugly confrontation with the bewildered new arrival from Honduras at the checkout station, and we got back in her car fifteen miles from Mojo's house at 3:50.
Originally, we were to stop at my bank so that I could make a deposit, but that had to be abandoned, and I hate being late, especially to a meeting at which other participants have to think I have my shit together enough to, oh, let's say, be able to goddamn tell fucking time, and I explained all this to Annie, which made her do 70 in a 45 zone until I agreed that I'd rather be late than die in a loud car crash/ball of fire/disaster film epic, and she let me out at Mojo's at 4:10.

He was great company, positive, full of ideas (starting with moving our meeting to the cafe tables outside the Trendies-A-Plenty bookstore coffee shop, where I could smoke) and in all ways the right man to start planning this festival with. At 5:20, he gave me a ride the three blocks to Larry's house. Everything was clicking along, back on track. I yucked it up with a contented, domesticated Larry and delightful, bright Cindy and put down more beers than were really necessary to stave off dehydration. Larry generally followed directions given by Cindy, visiting him from her base in Confederate City, with the results one might expect from "generally following
directions" in a kitchen. There are some of foods I don't care for fresh, but am quite fond of frozen or canned or otherwise processed by others.
Asparagus, spinach and mangoes are on that list. I can't get the fibrous threads out of asparagus and don't give a damn about the satisfying crunch. Fresh spinach tastes like dirt no matter what,
and mangoes ... well, if they'd grow on trees pre-peeled, in chilled, glass jars of heavy syrup, then I'd have some serious mango mania, but they don't. They grow on trees or bushes or wherever the hell they grow before reaching grocery store bins in the form of sorry-ass substitutes for unripe apples with acrid, bark-thick peels.

"Oh well," must have thought Larry, at least if I make them into tricky shish kabobs, alternating slices of mango with the barklike peel still in place with unpeeled shrimp, everyone will be concentrating so much on wrestling the chitinous, clinging shells off
of hot, greasy shrimp without destroying the meat while fighting back tears of pain from having to handle piping hot shrimp fresh from the grill with one's bare fingers in the first fucking place that they won't even notice these cocksuckin', underdone mangoes. If you let them spend a little, but oh no, not enough time on the grill, mangoes develop the flavor of a boot heel that's trod on unripe apples, yet still retain their feisty, fibrous, annoying raw character.

And, of course, they caramelize just enough to make the neighboring, searing hot shrimp exoskeletons flanking them on the kabob skewers stick to your hands when you try to take them off the goddamn shrimp in order to make your meal become actual food. Oh well, my life has taught me that not all dinners lead to actually having a meal, so what the fuck. They were smoking cigarettes during the meal, anyway,
and that's an appetite suppressant for me. I smoke cigarettes; I do not eat them. Cigarette smoke in a kitchen will ruin chopped lettuce or onions for me. The company was good, and they gave me a ride to the party at about 8:30, which was great, and the party was a grand time. I stayed late and drank epically.

Night in the ruts

2006-06-26T17:37:00.000-04:00

How was my weekend?

Well, I walked Amanda downtown for the Art Gallery walk, and she was actually ready when I got to her house, though she insisted on stopping for a beer two blocks before the first gallery, so we were late, anyway. I liked the first exhibit and she wanted to move on.

I detested the second exhibit, where she lingered, and then she pointed out that I hadn’t ever taken her out to dinner and headed into a restaurant. It wasn’t devoted to a cuisine I didn’t care for, and it wasn’t too pricey, so I good humoredly acquiesced. She insisted on an appetizer, opting for fried, breaded mozzarella sticks, which she decided after one bite were too salty, requiring a pitcher of beer. She insisted that I order dinner, and I selected a smoked turkey/artichoke heart/ricotta mozzarella calzone. Before the waitress got that order to the kitchen, Amanda said she was bored and wanted to go sommeplace else. I reminded her that we’d just ordered dinner.

It was the methadone kicking in, I’m fairly certain, that made her forget that dinner was on the way three more times before I suggested that I have it wrapped and bring it to her house and that she precede me and walk the dog so that chore would be done before I got there.

Normally, I wouldn’t send a woman to walk home alone, but it was before dark and in good neighborhoods, and I was getting a little pissed about the whole whatever-the-hell-it-was that made her demand dinner, then reject the appetizer, then forget the dinner. With drinks and tip, I was looking at $48 here, for no good reason, and the gallery knoshing should have been the appetizer, anyway, so I let Amanda walk home by herself and I had another drink while waiting for the food.

It got there sooner than I’d expected, so I stopped at another bar on the way to her house, knowing how she’d dawdle walking the sonofabitch Rottweiler, Buddy Joe, and got there around 10. She was on the edge of unconsciousness by that time, so the rest of the night passed quietly.

I awoke at five Saturday, because I do, and stepped into her hallway to find a ghoulish abattoir. Amanda has a daughter who just graduated high school, there’s a thing you may have heard of called the “McClintock Effect,” named after one of John Wayne’s more violent Westerns, and the goddamn dog had eaten a bathroom trash can full of used sanitary pads and then yacked them up all over the hallway floor and to a wall height of just under three feet. I left it there.

Before leaving at noon, after she’d gotten up and I’d tried to fix some computer problems for her and we’d gone over the fact that she didn’t like turkey club sandwiches anyway and I’d given up on trying to tell her it was a calzone and not a club, and while I was devouring the whole damn thing myself, I was treated to a humorous anecdote.

You see, it’s a small world, and Loonville’s a small town in a small world, and I’ll be a ringtailed son of a bitch if Crazy Martha, Annie, Rhonda (last year … with bulldog) and Amanda don’t all go to the same therapist at Whackjob County Center for Mental Repair (multicounty government agency). Amanda’s anecdote comes from a few years ago, when she was trying to make her husband sicken and die by scrubbing his toilet with his toothbrush. She complained to Dr. Dingwad that this clever parlor trick wasn’t even making her husband sick. He (Dingwad) replied that her husband’s own waste residue would probably not kill him, and advised her to scrub someone else’s toilet with her husband’s toothbrush if she really wanted to kill him.

Let’s see, that takes us through noon, Saturday ...

What if?

2006-06-21T17:53:00.000-04:00

I've been perusing "The Book of If" with icebreaker conversation for potential babe pickup banter in mind. You may be familiar with this collection of "If" questions such as:

If you were sentenced and scheduled for execution, what would you choose as your last meal?
(I wouldn't care, as long as I could cook it)

If you could go back into the past and kill one historical figure, who would it be?
(I would choose Yoko Ono)

If you could go into the future and kill one person, who would it be?
(Probably not really among the questions in the book)

If you could exchange your rectangular front door for a door of any other shape, what shape would it be?
(Mobius strip)

If you could take one unwieldy item and make it portable, what item would that be?
(I would choose a javelina. Also known as the peccary or musk hog, this 80 - 200 pound wild pig is native to the American Southwest and parts of Mexico. Cursed by Nature with tusks much longer than its attention span, this creature, in briefcase or pocket edition could, in my opinion, liven up the dullest social affairs. Why, you might as well throw those coffee table books away once L'il Musky gets down to business amidst the guests at your next suburban soiree)

What is the blues?

2006-06-15T18:48:00.000-04:00

What is the blues, anyway?

Blues is about innuendo, not the direct phrasing of things. I sing about sex, even about the specific act of cunnilingus, but I never say it in the song.

Damn it to hell, I love cunnilingus. It's all I can do to restrain myself from singing during cunnilingus. I was really happy with the woman I used to date who liked me to hum "Camptown Races" during what we referred to as "clisses," but that's another story.

The test of a blues is whether people who don't get it accidentally get it. If they do, then it isn't a blues. Seven year-olds are particularly fond of "Let Me Play With Your Poodle," a song about cavorting with a topiaried canine to them, and that's their right, to have those minds.

Legitimate blues shows its roots among the oppressed. The oppressed don't take away the rights of others, because they
know all to well what that's like.

I'm sure that sounds rigid and preachy, but I know what I'm talking about, and that IS the blues.

How long could anyone ride an image like the one such a song as that would give? Well, how long can a wig from which such
songs come remain truly big in the eyes of a real blues person?

Therein, I hope, is your answer.

Psycho magnet

2006-06-13T17:16:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, I was drinking ice tea in my yard with one of my painter friends, Jay Brown, when a white Toyota pulled up, backfiring and belching smoke, and a toad belly white fat drunk woman in a skimpy bikini, rolls of gelatinous flab overhanging the strings that revealed her flabby flanks got out of the passenger side, asked if this was the famous recording studio specializing in harmonica and said she was there to audition.

By the time all this had been determined, her significant other had gotten out of the driver’s side and was leaning on the car, weaving slightly, shirtless, the part of his evil face not covered in dirty beard and mustache pitted like a plaster satyr attacked by malicious children with BB guns.

I had no idea and less curiosity what the hell she thought she was auditioning for. We’re a studio; we take money to record what people who want to give us money want to record. We don’t instigate. Therefore, I pretended the tea in my glass was whiskey and told the lardy trull that I’d been drinking and was in no shape to audition anyone.

She insisted, so I got up and headed for the backyard to get a couple more chairs. She headed toward the house. I headed her off, saying the engineer was in the middle of a maintenance routine and shouldn’t be disturbed. She said she needed to use the head. I ushered her and her poster child for racism, ignorance and minor felony asshole boyfriend into the house, and he promoted her to me and my roommate Lee, who was sitting in the living room doing nothing, as usual.

As she came out of the bathroom, ol’ Lemuel was telling us she’d played with Randy Travis. She modestly demurred, saying she’d met him at a bar and played for him, but not actually played with him. Hezekiah was one of those extreme rednecks who ain’t gonna be corrected by no woman. His eyes flared with rage and he ordered her to get in the car with him. “Git in. I’m gonna talk ter yeouw.”

She, with some fear, plucked a rusty, blown out old Marine Band out of her greasy shoulder bag, which she’d dropped in the grass, and began a terribly amateurish version of “When Things Go Wrong With You, It Hurts Me, Too,” the classic recording of which was done by Elmore James around 1954. As if to test the theory implicit in the lyrics, Zeke jumped out of the car, which he’d been revving, putting us all in a toxic fog of oil smoke, ran to her, grabbed her by the hair and threw her roughly into the passenger side of the car. She started yelling, “Call the police,” as he scooped up her bag, leaving an empty, crumpled anti-fungal ointment tube, two used Kleenex tissues and a Kotex in my yard.

I walked to the back of the car and got their license plate number as they took off, then went inside and dialed 911 to tell the police about domestic violence and abduction in progress. I would have intervened more directly, but I had the distinct impression that she would have jumped between us to defend her man had I tried. It was one of those thoroughly dysfunctional couples that give white trash such a bad name.

Jay looked at me and asked how I had done that; how I had made some completely bizarre and gratuitous scenario unfold before our eyes and why that sort of thing always happens to me and only me. At that point, I took the tea glasses back in the house and came back out with the brandy decanter and two Jefferson cups.

Let the good times roll

2006-06-09T16:50:00.001-04:00

Got call around 5 p.m. from last night's winning date, telling me I could redeem myself by going to her house and being "an amiable fellow."
I refrained from cussing her goddamned Rottweiler and offered to pay for her cab if she wanted to come to my pad for the night instead. I asked her to think about it while I napped after work, then called her at 7 p.m. to see what decision she'd reached. She said she'd probably be here around 8:30, so I showered, shaved, dressed, vacuumed and chose a
movie.

Around 9:25, she called to say she'd just gotten back from walking the dog and that they'd been chased. Concerned, I asked for details and learned that some gay dude downtown had turned his porch light on while she was stealing flowers from his garden and the goddamned dog was crapping in the grass and started yelling at her, "Ma'am, ma'am, I saw you stealing my flowers last night and I've caught you now. You have to stop pinching my bulbs."

He advanced on Amanda and Buddy Joe (the dog), and the dog lunged at him. Amanda, being from Mississippi, always begins her dog walks by breaking a supple limb from a tree to use as a switch, which is the only thing that makes dog walking with her bearable to me ... at least she beats the son of a bitch incessantly. Anyway, she told Mr. Mincing that she couldn't restrain the dog, so the dude pulled out his cell phone, called the police and said he was going to follow them and get
their address, because the dog was, as she herself had confessed, a menace.

So they zigzagged through the hysterical district bordering downtown with a screaming, melodramatic fag shrieking along behind them until he became hoarse and went back home, and that's why she was late calling me.

I told her we'd try again when she could start an evening with me at a reasonable time to start an evening. As it was, had she called a cab at around 9:35 on a Friday night, it would have arrived at 10:10, and then she would have gotten the poor bastard lost on the way to my house and racked up an unnecessarily large fare for me to pay for her to get here around 11. I can't start a movie at 11. Why the fuck should I? I have absinthe. The only movie I want to start watching at 11 is going to run on the backs of my eyelids.

What a shitful chain of events. I think I'll start some cheap-ass, frozen chimichangas, which I'll top with plain yogurt, extra sharp cheddar and a drained can of Ro-Tel.

Blind date

2006-06-06T17:04:00.000-04:00

I recently asked Amanda to accompany me to a record release event, not because I'm particularly fond of her, but because I thought she'd like to commemorate her first night off intensive probation by going out and having some drinks.
I told I'd be at her house at 7:20 so that we could WALK downtown to SEE some music videos, so, after her shorts got
out of the dryer at 7:35 and she'd put on uncomfortable shoes and neglected to take eyeglasses, we went down there.

She doesn't work, but she hadn't managed to feed herself all day, so she hovered around the buffet table extensively while sucking down three beers in less time than it took me to finish one, then began to get woozy and fearful of the beer in combination with the five morphine tablets she'd popped right before we'd left her house, and to object to the videos,
loudly proclaiming them from her disoriented perspective to be unintelligible and pointless.

Well, hell yes, music videos are unintelligible and pointless if you can't really feel them and are too high to remember that they feature music from a new CD release being spotlighted for the first time publicly before your dilated goddamn eyes.

So I carried her halfway home. She dictated shortcuts that took us five blocks out of our way, but came wholly too a couple of blocks from her house and asked me to get a six-pack at the corner Snack 'N' Crack to share with her at her place.

I refrained from pointed out to her again that I really didn't care for her feral, 112-pound Rottweiler and just told her I had an appointment with my pillow and that I hoped the next time we planned to walk someplace to see something, that comfortable shoes and eyeglasses would be a part of the event.

The latest from Loonville

2006-06-04T10:09:00.000-04:00

Here’s Loonville’s latest.
The woman I used to date who usually doesn’t communicate with me except to periodically
e-mail, “I hate you. You turn my urine black,” bought a bicycle from some clown in the downtown library recently. He had some song and dance about having to raise money for a bus ticket back to Alabama, because Loonville had treated him so badly. In reality, the bastard had probably just stolen the goddamn bike. In any event, Patty called me and asked if she could chain the bike up in my backyard. I agreed, waited for her for awhile, then went to sleep.

Immediately after that, she showed up and got my idiot roommate Lee to go out in the rain in his socks to wrestle the bike out of her trunk and put it in the backyard, where he left it unlocked and came back in with the lock and chain.

Well, he’s a stupid, trifling bastard, too. I woke up a couple of hours later and asked him about it. He said he was just about to go back out and lock it up, but why in the name of Ezekial’s shit-baked cupcakes make two trips out into the stinking mud, leaving an unattended bike that doesn’t belong to you in the backyard in the meantime? He was just sitting there, as always.

I went out and locked the son of a bitch to a tree and didn’t pay much attention to it. Patty called the next day and asked if I’d fixed it yet. I told her I’d barely glanced at it, which pissed her off, so I agreed to look it over. It was an 18-speed mountain bike, originally from a store along the quality lines of Target, with dry- rotted brake and gear cables and some rust on the chain. The front gear cable and assembly was entirely missing, the back tire was flat and the back wheel, though the bolts were tight, was wobbly, which implied to me the possibility of missing, leaking bearings.

I called Patty back and told her she could choose one of the three front sprockets and just permanently position the chain there, oil the chain, spray lube down the gear and brake cables and pump up the back tire to see if it was leaking or just deflated, but that the back wheel wobble might be due to a serious problem that would make the bike, as soon as enough bearings leaked out or eroded away, completely lock up, sending the rider over the handlebars to painful injury or death. Checking online first, I also told her replacement wheels w/bearings were available only in sets of two, for at least $45.00 and that the bike, having been about a $90.00 item to start with, wasn’t worth fixing, what with new wheels, new front gear assembly, brake cables and pads and labor. I suggested that she donate it to her gayness and sprouts little whiny ass Democrat church to sell as a fixer-upper or for spare parts at their next garage sale fundraiser. She said she didn’t want to donate an unsafe bicycle to her church, and that I should ride it to her house instead.

I declined, what with not wanting to die of head injuries in an algae- blooming ditch halfway between my house and hers and shit like that, and she told me that’s why she couldn’t trust me or deal with me in any way.

Well Lee heard part of my side of this and asked what she’d take for the bike, lock and chain, since between that and a couple of other junked bikes in the back yard, he could cobble something working together. I estimated $35.00 -- $25 to recoup for her donation to the Alabama returnee or bike thief or whatever the hell that dude was plus $10 for the lock and chain. He said he’d go for that and I called Patty to tell her about the offer. She told me she’d take it, since I was holding her bike for ransom and she had no other choice. The point was moot, since Lee didn’t have any goddamn $35.00, anyway, and wouldn’t put the bikes together into one working Bike’N’Stein unless made to do so at gunpoint, what with being a lazy no good drunken, Sabbath-taking swine.

Well, a couple of weekends ago, I was out in the suburbs running errands, and I stopped by Patty’s apartment. She had bad news – Her mental disability benefits had been cut, and she was running out of food. I had a few bucks, so I took her to the store and bought her $50.00 worth of groceries, in large part because she had some good news, too -- she was off psychological drugs and intending too stay that way. She then asked me to iron some of her clothes, because that would make her productive and able to make some headway in cleaning her pad, which was littered and limited to pathways by stacks and piles of old political pamphlets, travel brochures and year-old newspapers from which she wanted to clip all the expired coupons.

Since I remembered that the last time I’d ironed for her, she’d gotten mad about the creases and gone several months without speaking to me, I did not relish this chore, so popped one of the 24-oz, 10% alcohol cans of Evil Eye Ale I’d bought at the grocery store on my way to her house. And then I ironed some stuff and then split.

Yesterday, Lee came up with $35.00, so I called and left Patty a message to let her know the deal was on and to ask whether she wanted the check mailed or whether she’d be near my house or workplace at any time and might want to pick it up. I told her I’d be up ‘til 10, so she called at 10 sharp. Pain in my ass.

She went on to say that she’d flooded her apartment by starting to run a bath and then leaving for three hours, and that later, she’d thought it was a kick ass time to call the cable guy to come stand in water and fool around with electrical stuff to fix her cable. She didn’t think it would matter that she’d never paid for cable in that apartment and that neither had anyone else in the building, but it did, and the guy a) slipped in the water and cracked her wall-mount TV holder kit thing and b) put a block on the cable to her place and the other three apartments, so her neighbors now hate her. She told the cable guy he sucked, because her grandfather helped develop cable to free people from evil advertising and Republicans and stuff, and he told her that was interesting.

She asked her landlord to file an insurance claim, but he declined, so she’s looking at $800-$1100 carpet replacement cost from the flooding, which she thinks is unfair, because it only cost her $400 to replace the carpet in her bedroom last year when she bought a slightly charred Sears mattress warmer at a yard sale, used it as an electric blanket in August and awoke in burning bedding, to which she responded (chronologically) by 1) throwing the burning stuff on the floor, 2) calling the Sears customer complaint line and waiting on hold for twenty minutes before being told that warranties are no good after secondary, yard sale purchases, 3) calling 911, 4) pouring water on the fire and, finally, 5) unplugging that sucker from the wall.

Anyway, she’s going back on anti-depressants and anti-spasmodics now, and she told me to just keep the $35.00 in return for the $50.00 in groceries that I hadn’t mentioned at all and consider her dead.