I Don't Want To Talk About It

The Roadhouse, part 2

The visions of the mind have a debt to reality that is hard to get the mind to pay when it is under the influence of its visions.

The lower his rival fell in his estimation the better he thought of himself. And this was because of his overriding feelings for the girl. He was being carried away by a process of reasoning that was invented by himself and had nothing to do with anything in this world.

He thought if his rival was objectionable to her, then she might be attracted to him as one who truly loved and appreciated her. His thoughts returned again and again to the night when his feelings had declared themselves and he had not been himself, when she might have seen and might have understood.

That was in October when the leaves had brightened to their brightest and had started to fall. Things has reached sort of a culmination of badness between the girl and his rival then but no differences had ever been resolved.

It embarrassed him to confess even to himself that such thoughts and their attendant visions possessed his mind. It was a mercy when finally his vision grew so reckless and so extravagant that even he could maintain it no longer.

His vision seemed to excuse his supposing (by a logic purely glandular) that she would like to be free of the rival.

One evening, alone in the roadhouse, with a beer untouched before him, forgotten, he saw all of a sudden in his mind a vision of he and the girl running away together. They were in his old car and were putting the town behind them.

The incompleteness of the vision was the giveaway, and was what finally ruined it for him. Before they could have wound up running away, he knew, there would have to be an understanding between them. He had not imagined that, and could not have. The girl would have had to have given him a look, a smile perhaps, of consent, and this, though the thought of it filled him with the pain of longing, he could not imagine. He could not imagine that conversation, what he would say to her, what she would say to him. He could not imagine where they were going or what they were going to do. But he knew there was some border somewhere ahead of him that he yearned to cross.

In his vision the two of them were running, just running. His car, having caught their eagerness, was going down the road very much faster than he would ever drive it, shuddering seemingly with its own excitement, a long plume of blue smoke rising behind from the faulty tailpipe.

And he supposed that this escaping, this speed and violence of exertion from his car’s engine, was the fullest expression of his love as he had understood it so far. As he drove the car mercilessly in his mind toward wherever in the world they might have been going, he was saying to himself, or perhaps praying, “Why can the world not permit two lovers (any two) a moment of escape, free of all its claims, to be in love, just the two together, each the other’s all?”

What destroyed this vision, removed him from the chambers of imagination and put him back in the world again, was the assumption (not supportable even by imagination) that the girl would have consented to such a thing. The proposition that she might have consented was much more daunting to him than the certainty she would not have. It made him see.

Supposing she would have consented, he saw that what he would be asking of her would not be just that moment of abandon, the thought of which had so commanded him (imagination had spared him nothing of that), and not even just her love. He would have been asking for her life, for the power to change her world into what could not be forseen. If he destroyed what already existed, what would he replace it with? For something always exists before you get there with your desires and visions, and this simply had not occurred to him before in such a way that he could feel the truth of it. What did he have to offer?

If you love somebody enough, and long enough, finally you must see yourself. What he saw was a laborer, a charmer, a singer, making half a living, a bachelor, a man about town, a friendly guy. And this was perhaps acceptable, perhaps even credible in its way, but to his newly chastened sight he was nobody’s husband.

Treed

Trees. Spartanburg, SC.

Animal Planet

This is Betty, Sully's friends' dog. We've been taking care of her this week. I like this picture, it captures Betty pretty well. It also looks to me like it should be an ad for something but I don't know what.

Why Sully's red water bottle is everywhere I can't tell you. This is her kitten, Daisy. I like the yellow light.

I love this picture of Rowdy.

Redneck Cheeseburger

I'm visiting my sister in Spartanburg, SC. Yesterday after we went grocery shopping and before we started cooking for Christmas dinner, we stopped into a joint called the Nu-Way Lounge for lunch.

The Nu-Way is the quintessential dive bar, dimly lit, cracked, dessicated vinyl bar stools with bits of yellowed stuffing poking through duct tape mending, and at noon still redolent of last night's fun. As the sign indicates, they serve

and on a Saturday afternoon have NASCAR playing on the TV behind the bar. With the sound up. An artificial Christmas tree rakishly tilts into the beer mirrors.

In short, my kind of place.

Other than the waitress, my sister, and myself there were no other females in the place. One of the old geezers seated at the bar actually uttered the sentence, " How is so-and-so, I haven't seen him in a coon's age." I say "coon's age" a lot myself. It's an expression that always tickled me when I'd hear it in eastern Kentucky, where two out of three men is a coon hunter and a "coon's age" can't be very long.

I've been to many fine restaurants in my life, establishments where the standard array of sterling silver utensils include a shrimp fork, a dessert fork, a salad fork, a soup spoon, a demitasse spoon, and each diner has their own tuxedo-clad waiter who, regardless of your age, calls you "sir" or "madam."

It's okay, I don't mind that kind of restaurant, but I vastly prefer a dive. A place where your utensils come to the table in a paper sleeve, the waitperson calls you "honey," and the ice tea is so good you want to marry it on the spot.

The Nu-Way, along with all the aforementioned virtues, serves a delectable delight known as the "Redneck Cheeseburger." Clearly it's what to order, right? Obviously. Great name.

The Redneck Cheeseburger is a great burger topped with that misunderstood, maligned, but oh so gracious of southern staples, pimento cheese.

Not many people love pimento cheese but I contend it's because so few people have had real, homemade, southern pimento cheese. It's good stuff people. Don't let the nasty glop in the supermarket fool you.

The Redneck Cheeseburger was so good I thought I might die. The burger itself was fantastic, real meat, hand-pattied, seasoned with nothing but salt and pepper. The bun was soft and pillowy but not mushy or insubstantial, providing the perfect nest for the tasty meat concoction. Topping the burger was not an oozing overabundance of pimento cheese but rather the perfect dollop of peppers and cheddar melting ever so slightly, melding burger to bun in a pleasing cheesy bond.

I need to take a sack of these burgers home with me to Nashville. Heaven. I'd move to Spartanburg just to eat Redneck Cheeseburgers.

Roadhouse

He was a wishful thinker. A dreamer. His mere dream had led him into a vocation of endless work and struggle, endless borrowing and paying of interest, endless  indifference, endless wear and tear of obscurity, and yet he was a dreamer still. He was an escapee. He would plunge from the confines of one dream into the confines of another. In the midst of his life, in the midst of a winter's night, he would turn up at a roadhouse with the lips of a woman on his mind and a grin on his face.

Some days all I can come up with is a single, short paragraph. Perhaps eventually I'll string all the paragraphs together and find a story there. I decided not to think of a single paragraph as a bad day because there are plenty of days I can't even eke out a decent sentence. Technically a roadhouse is outside city limits but that's how I'm seeing it and maybe this bar is outside of city limits. I don't know yet.

Love and Time

Love, sooner or later,forces us out of time. Love does not accept the limit of time. Of everything we feel and do, of all our virtues, of all our sins, in the end it is love alone that crowds us over the edge of the world.

Love is always more than a little strange here. It is not explainable or even justifiable. It is itself the justifier.We do not make it. If it did not happen to us, we could not imagine it. Love is in the world but not altogether of it. It is of eternity. It takes us there when it most holds us here.

Every living creature carries within it the presence of eternity. That is why looking into the face of an elder you come to see the child they once were, and why looking into the face of a child you come see the man or woman they will become. That is why in marriage we say, "till death." We must take love to the limit of time, because time cannot limit love. A life cannot limit love.

Maybe to have love in your heart all your life in this world, even if that love fails here, is to succeed. Maybe that is enough.

Vaseline, love the skin you're in

I get my brain scanned tomorrow to see if the thing on my brain stem has grown. We're hoping for "not bigger." Also, we're hoping for "not more of them."

Lair and I found a shirt today for his show Friday. It's a great shirt, black with red roses on the yoke and the back. Yoke. I speak fluent Western Shirt now. File under: skills I never thought I'd acquire or need. For instance, there is a "fitted cut" western shirt. That's what we found today and what we needed because Lair is tall but slender and he likes his shirts tight so we need them long but cut in, not boxy. Trust me, it's a lot harder to find than you'd imagine, even in NashVegas. However, we now know a company that makes just what we want. So hurray!

I wonder if maybe I should write an article about all this. But what is it exactly, all this? It's the nuts and bolts of getting a band on the radar I suppose. It's actually very, very interesting to me. Hard but fascinating. Would other people who love music find it interesting I wonder? I think if I wrote it actually about Lair and his band people would because then the struggle has a face. I don't know. To me it's a great story. I want to write it.

You know sort of the only bad thing? I'm working this hard to essentially loose him. I mean, that's the goal. That he'll have professional people helping him instead of me and he'll be out on the road. Sometimes I think of it like raising a kid. Not that he's like a kid, I don't mean that, but parents pour all their love and time and resources into another human being for the purpose of being left behind. Left behind in a certain sense. So that's how I think of this. I think of it as love and sacrifice and as the natural order of things. It doesn't make me sad but it's bittersweet. It's actually sort of an amazing thing. Unusual and very cool. I don't think that many people get the opportunity to work so hard for someone not in the context of job or family or church. I like it a lot.

I don't know that I'd ever want to do this kind of work for anyone but Lair though, I think once through this meat grinder is enough, but I'll tell you this, I'm going to know a whole heck of a lot by the time he walks out that door into stardom. Funny how you come to a place to learn one thing and end up learning something else entirely.

Erin informed me today that incense rids a home of doggy smell. I thought she meant some kind of real dog odor eliminator incense and almost asked if I could get it at PetSmart. Just in the nick of time though she recommended the apparently irresistible "Night Moods" scent and I figured out it was regular incense. I find it hysterically funny, the notion of burning "Night Moods" incense to get rid of doggy odor. I'm going to try it though. It's that or I move out and abandon the house to the stinky brothers.

Remember the incense called "Sex" that convenience stores used to sell? It smells nothing like sex. Plus, I'm thinking if you buy "Sex" incense at the stop-and-rob, probably while also buying condoms and/or beer, chances are you aren't actually going to close the deal.

I bought the "Sex" incense the night my freshman year roommate, Carolyn G. Thornhill, the girls across the hall, and I went to see a porno at the theater. An actual big-screen porno. None of us had ever seen a porno, even on the small screen, well, unless you count me seeing Fritz the Cat which was a cartoon. An X-rated cartoon. I think maybe the only X-rated cartoon ever. It was dirty! You wonder how a cartoon cat can be filthy? Watch the movie. Actually, Fritz the Cat is kind of interesting. He was one of the first Robert Crumb underground comix characters. It was a cartoon-ation of the 60s, Fritz gets high, has sex, goes to peace rallies, like that.

Anyway, the  porno we went to see was called, "Beneath the Valley of the UltraVixens." Funny how some things you never forget. It was really bad. There was a character named "Mr. Peterbuilt." He drove a semi.

My roommate, Carolyn G. Thornhill, came to Duke so repressed and uptight that she literally had to dip her tampons in Vaseline to insert them. I'm not joking. I found that out the awful, horrible way one morning as I fumbled to open the door to our room only to stagger back when my digits encountered slime. I shrieked, she confessed. I was quite amazed and concerned at her level of repression, you know, given my own heathen hippie upbringing. Carolyn was anxious about pretty much everything. And unhappy. With all my 18-year old sagaciousness I recommended to Carolyn that she have some sex, post haste. As it turns out, she didn't need my counsel, sex had been her plan all along. She began a full-bore campaign to get laid that was military in precision and persistence. I watched in fascination as she marched through more than half the freshman guys in our dorm before ultimately settling on my boyfriend's roommate. Charlie would not have been my choice for her. His dad called him "Sport." No, really, he did. You think that kind of shit is only on TV but no.

I guess I get why she chose Charlie, he was the male equivalent of herself, but I held out little hope for the anxiety and tension reducing tonic of sex with Charlie. But I was wrong. On the night of her de-flowering, Carolyn G. Thornhill kicked out the window of Charlie's truck. Kicked it clean out! Now that's some sex people. Wow. Was I ever impressed. Window-kicking sex? In the Duke Freshman dorm parking lot? Hell yeah!  My estimation of Carolyn rose drastically. Well, and of Charlie too. Kicked out the window. She never needed Vaseline to insert tampons after that I'll tell you and thank goodness. That was disgusting.

My oh My

My mother isn't speaking to me. She yelled at me, un-invited me home to Sanibel for Christmas, hung up on me, and now isn't speaking to me.

My mom's pretty much the psycho bitch from hell. Fun times there. So I'm going to my sister's house in South Carolina which actually should be great. We're going to take a road trip to Charleston, I'm really looking forward to that. I'll miss Florida though.

My house smells doggy. Very, very doggy. I've had the next-door neighbor dog in here almost 24 hours a day for three weeks now. Somehow dog smell is exponential or something: two dogs aren't twice as smelly, they're like four times as smelly. Very, very doggy. Plus, it's been raining for days so my kitchen is like a linoleum-bottomed mud puddle. My house needs to be cleaned. Vigorously.

My band account is low. My refrigerator is almost empty. I've been eating lots of rice and beans. I want-slash-need beer. Tomorrow is finally payday, hopefully I'll be able to buy groceries by Tuesday. And beer. Beer's food, right? Pork chop in every bottle.

My friend's band is playing a big show on Friday. I've been working every day for almost a month now to promote the show. I did a photo shoot to generate pictures for the poster. I made the poster. I got the poster copied. I made leaflets to leave on car windshields. I wrote a press release. I sent the press release to all the local papers and radio stations. I've posted the flyers all over Nashville, this side of Nashville, my friend did East Nashville. I leafleted cars in sports bar and music venue parking lots. I've commented all over MySpace. I made a second flyer for bulletins and blogs, both of which I've posted. I guess I'm pretty much done. I actually need to hang more street flyers, there's two spots I didn't get, but I'll have to wait until after I get paid so I can copy more flyers. But after that I'm done.

My life is better for doing all that stuff, I love it. It's fun and interesting and I love helping my friend more than anything but man oh man is it a lot of work. So much work. It's crazy. And here's the thing, I've got to do it all again. It's got to be done for every show. Yikes. And I can't be using all the same people's MySpace pages every time, people will get tired of that. This is a special show, it's his birthday show, so people are being super nice about it, leaving me lovely comments in return. And I haven't done this kind of blanket commenting in a long time so it's cool for now but I've got to figure out how I'm going to do this for the next show. And how I'm going to gear up for it. That's the trick. And it has to be done. We haven't even gotten the January show scheduled yet though and that's worrying me.

My other project is getting his press kit ready. I've done one bio I think will work but I need to get proofs printed on that shiny, glossy paper. He's going to record, I hope in January. After he records I need to make labels for CDs and make folders to contain the CD and the press release. Then I need to figure out which picture we need and get glossy 8x10s printed. Custom printed folders with our logo are cost-prohibitive so I've come up with a low-cost solution using stickers and plain black folders. I need to get all that stuff done so he's ready to send his music out in January or February. At the same time we've got to book and promote the shows. I'll tell you, this is hard freaking work, this rock star stuff.

My back is all tweaked from reaching up to hang the flyers and from swinging the stapler with the heavy bag of flyers over my shoulder.

My friend is into this girl, really into this girl. I'm doing what we've all done. I'm listening and offering support and watching warily through the hands I've thrown over my eyes in hopes of not having to witness the emotional carnage.

My experience is that we women do this for our girlfriends. I've done if for lots of friends before and I've got friends who have done it for me. It's hard, right? You have to be excited they've found someone they are so crazy about no matter how you feel about the person. You have to listen. A lot. Lots of listening and uh-huhing. You have to try to be honest without ever breaking the unspoken rule "thou shalt not bad-mouth the new love until thy friend does it first." Even then you have to be careful. And, what, do you let them walk straight into disaster? Is that the right thing to do or do you try to subtly warn them? You help your friend analyze every phone call, text message and email. You agree that they make a stunningly good looking couple. You tastefully refrain from comment as they send-slash-receive their tenth text message of the hour. You tactfully pretend not to notice that they're suddenly second guessing their entire wardrobe and cutting their hair when it doesn't need cutting. Meanwhile, you're attempting to pull off this super human friendship trick while you're being COMPLETELY ignored by the besotted love-sick fool. You essentially loose your friend to temporary insanity.

My rational brain says, "nothing new, we've all been on both sides of this situation." But here's the thing, when the friend is a guy, it's a million times worse. Oh my gosh is it worse. For one thing, with a female friend when you finally get to that point where you seriously can't talk about the love interest one more time without throwing up you let your friend know. She gets it immediately and does something to swing the pendulum back your way. Tell a guy friend that you've reached that point and he says something brilliant like "I'll never talk about her again" and storms off mad. Great. Now he's lost your support and you've lost his. Good solution. Boys. They kind of suck. PLUS, they are so darn competitive that they think if the relationship with the girl doesn't happen or doesn't happen fast enough it's a failure or something and they veer wildly between being forlorn and woebegone and all this obnoxious macho posturing and defensiveness which makes it almost impossible to encourage or comfort them.

My friend and I will get through this just fine but possibly not before I kill him....or her...or myself. Calgon, take me away.

Hills of Kentucky

In far away Kentucky

Upon the rolling hills

A girl wandered to the river

And watched the ripples still

 

She swam against the current

Played upon the shore

Jumped off the crooked oak tree

Couldn’t stay there anymore


She sat on sun warmed rocks

Dreamed of being free

Cried beneath the water

Where no else could see


Her sister walked there with her

Swam right by her side

They played mostly in silence

Each trying hard to hide


They painted pretty mud clothes

Upon each other’s back

Jumped into the water

When the mud began to crack


Sometimes when I’m sleeping

I can hear those two girls sing

They sing of old Kentucky

And what the day would bring

 

Call 1-800-Henchmen

Because Sully was here last weekend we only ended up watching one Netflix movie. The rest of the time we watched made for TV holiday movies, those are for another blog.

The Netflix flick this past weekend was Live Free or Die Hard. I've previously confessed to my Bruce Willis thing. I just love me a good Bruce Willis movie. Like an Arnie movie, I love an Arnie movie. The Terminator trilogy of course, but also Predator, Commando and Raw Deal. Love those. Best Arnie line from Raw Deal, "it is not wise to drink and bake." You can't beat that. And don't get me started on the "it is not a tumor" line from Kindergarten Cop Not to mention my odd obsession with Jingle All the Way  and Christmas in Connecticut in which he has but a brief cameo. I blame the former on the fact that it was shot in Minneapolis where I used to live and I recognize 3/4 of the locations. I blame the latter on Dyan Cannon.

Dyan Cannon? Yes, and I really can't explain it. I know it started with that Willie Nelson road picture, Honeysuckle Rose. Dyan Cannon was in that, playing Willie Nelson's wife. Why she captured my attention I can't tell you. Later, as I watched her cheering for the Lakers in floor seats near Jack Nicholson, I decided she was really cool. I don't really know if she is or not, probably not, but I started watching for her in movies. She didn't do very many, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice was great though. That's how I ended up watching Christmas in Connecticut, Dyan Cannon.

The original Christmas in Connecticut, by the way, with Barbara Stanwyck, is very enjoyable.

My favorite person in Honeysuckle Rose though is Slim Pickens. I love Slim Pickens. My favorite scene is the one in which he and Willie's character are driving an RV back from Mexico drunk off their asses on Tequila. The movie was pre-MADD, obviously! Great scene.

That was all way off topic! Back to Die Hard.

As the movie was just beginning Sully and I meandered through a brief conversation about how we both enjoy the Die Hard movies and Bruce Willis. A few minutes further into the movie I said, "it's really weird I know but I wish Bruce Willis was my father." Sully countered with, "I want to date him." Therein lies the stuff of therapy folks, I want Bruce Willis as my father and Sully wants to date him. Yikes.

Tangents R Us today.

I liked the kid from the Mac commercials, he was a good unwilling sidekick and was generally appealing in a Seth Cohen kind of way. He was no Samuel L. Jackson but he was good.

I'll admit to being enough of a geek that I kind of love nerd drama, thus, I think, my love of Chuck. It's nerd drama. I loved The Net when it came out, even though it was a pretty awful. I still watch it when it comes on cable, it's great now to remember how "Whois" and online pizza ordering seemed like amazing technological innovations.

This Die Hard was about computer terrorism and I found it geekily interesting. The best thing about the nerd drama aspect of the movie was Kevin Smith playing the "Warlock," a mother-basement-dwelling computer guru. I love Kevin Smith.

I do wonder about the on-going movie and television fascination with the mother-basement-dwelling geek. I guess the obvious answer is that the dudes writing the scripts are writing them from their mom's basements

The villians  in this installment weren't nearly as well-fleshed and mean as in previous Die Hards. It worked though because the movie was more Bruce and sidekick Mac-kid versus technology.

The best action sequence in the flick was an elevator shaft fire and vehicle extravaganza. The Die Hard franchise does great vertical drama. It's practically their visual calling card: dangling danger.

There are, of course, some gaping holes in the plot but clearly we don't turn to Die Hard movies for logic and credibility.

The movie was shot in super de-saturated cool tones. Mostly a blue-gray-green cast. I'd guess they chose that palate  to mimic the glow from a computer screen, to emphasize the dystopian themes, and to dramatize not only the inhumanity of the bad guys but the literally non-human nature of the movie's villiany.

Only one shot in the movie is filmed outside the cool blue-gray range. It's a "teaming humanity" shot; to put a human face on the terrorism we get a panic in the streets scene. That shot is filmed in warm colors but the range of colors is still severely restricted making everyone look very much the same. I'm not sure if that was an intentional statement on conformity or not. A Terminator-esq thing: humans, too quick to acquiesce to progress without examining the consequences, have created machines which will be our undoing. Maybe.

I found the constant blue-gray tones pretty distracting actually. Other than that though I enjoyed my Bruce movie. Now I'm off to book therapy sessions for Sully and I to examine our "I want to be his child she wants to date him" issues. On second thought, I don't really think I want to know more.