I know, I know, sometimes it seems as though the bike biz is more about peddling than pedaling, but still, Wired, Jesus H., etc.
Fred neither pedaled nor peddled
Month: September 2018
This can’t go on forever
Back in August Friend of the Blog Carl Duelmann asked: “Do you ever listen to Jason Isbell? He might be too country for you but he is one of the best songwriters I’ve ever heard.”
The Guardian’s David Taylor caught up with the Grammy-winning Nashville musician and former Drive-By Trucker ahead of a gig today in Noo Yawk City and the interview is well worth your time.
Isbell is critical of our current “administration” without being shrill, and he doesn’t waste a lot of thought on the “shut up and sing” crowd. (Just how the hell are you supposed to shut up and sing at the same time, anyway?)
Isbell doesn’t even try, though he does prefer to let his music do the heavy lifting.
Asked if he intended to get political during an upcoming six-night run at the Ryman Auditorium, Isbell replied: “Well, my job is to write songs and if I feel like it is an emergency and I feel like I need to say something political between the songs, then I’ll do that.
“But normally, if it doesn’t rhyme and it doesn’t involve me introducing my band, I’m not gonna say it, because I’m not a standup comedian, I’m not a lecturer and I don’t give TED talks. If there’s not a melody and some rhyme there then you probably won’t hear it from me. But I think the songs speak enough.”
While we’re on the topic of songs that speak enough, FOTB Pat O’B. forwards an NPR note about a music video for John Prine’s song “Summer’s End,” the centerpiece to his latest release, “The Tree of Forgiveness.”
It must take a lot of practice to sing a song like this without bursting into tears.
Checks and imbalances
Speaking as an angry white man, all these angry white men are starting to piss me off.
That eternal sense of entitlement was on full peacock display in yesterday’s Cirque du SoWhat? over whether the mendacious and elusive Bart O’Kavanaugh can stand erect long enough to make it to the Supreme Court.
The well of privilege seems bottomless from the top, and these angry white men will continue to draw from it until the bucket finally comes up filled with their obituaries.
Then, I suppose, their angry white sons will inherit the family business.
That business is bankrupt, but failure is for lesser men, and women. The angry white man picks himself up using our bootstraps and plows forward, like the dolt who, when told that he’s penniless, broke, flat busted, says, “That can’t be true. I still have checks in my checkbook.”
Actually, it’s our checkbook. And one of these days the angry white man’s mouth is going to use it to write a check his ass can’t cash.
But I don’t think we’re there yet.
The angry white man still has that big orange credit card we gave him back in 2016. And he’s gonna use that to buy shit the country doesn’t need and can’t afford until we take it away from him.
Remember your Martin Luther King: “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
Night moves
You don’t even have to be on the plane for air travel to suck.
Herself was wheels down at the Sunport around 10 in the peeyem last night, and her luggage took a while to show up, as it will, which meant we were motoring home around the time I usually devote to inspecting the inside of my eyelids while beered-up Burqueños cap each other over right-of-way issues.
I saw one helmetless eejit on a crotch rocket thread various needles at about 20 mph over the posted limit, using all the eastbound lanes on I-40, without signaling, right in front of two cops working a traffic stop. I’m surprised the backup officer didn’t shoot him. Hell, I wanted to shoot him myself.
Anyway, we weren’t lights-out until midnight, morning comes early with a pair of cats in the vicinity, and a darkly comic opera is anticipated at the Senate Judiciary Committee, so if I were you I’d be prepared for all manner of outré behavior in this space today.
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!
• Late addendum: Jaysis, it’s worse than I had feared. To call this hearing a shitshow is to libel shitshows. Primate houses have a keener sense of the distinction between order and ordure. They’re quieter, too.
Mooned
Tonight is the Harvest Moon.
That’s not it up there. That’s a view of the north end of Duke City from just below the Tramway. And it looks much better in that photo than 11 p.m. does on the Timex, especially if you went to sleep, or thought you did, at 10.
I blame the moon. But what actually woke me last night after an hour of sleep was probably Spike the Terrorist Deer noshing on our pear tree, or Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Home Defense Regiment), trash-talking at him.
“Yaaaaaaaah! Gedoudaheeeeeah! ’Member what happened to your momma, Bambi?”
Naturally, I hollered for my momma, but she’s been dead almost as long as Bambi’s, and having seen way too many horror movies I really didn’t want her coming back on my account. She might have her own agenda.
So as a sort of substitute and/or magic potion I’m making her famous chili from a stained, tattered recipe card the old gal typed up herself. It was one of the rare occasions when I asked her for something other than money to buy drugs.
And if that’s not weird enough for you, how ’bout this?
When I woke up at 11, I felt rested.
But I went back to sleep anyway.
Mad Blog Media 