There’s a chain across this dump and a sign that says “Closed on Thanksgiving.”
The tears in your eyes notwithstanding, you’re gonna have to find another place to put the garbage.
Hope you have a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat. Keep an eye out for Officer Obie. You know what to tell the shrink.
The headline is an inside joke among family and friends, a line of dialogue lifted from the 1978 novel “Panama,” by Thomas McGuane.
And now it’s the title of a Radio Free Dogpatch podcast, an unsubtle bit of misdirection concerning an oversized orange turd that has proven impossible for a confused and bilious nation to flush.
There was no such turd when Chet Pomeroy spoke the line in McGuane’s book. But there is in the podcast. My apologies to Mr. McGuane. I hope he thinks of me, if he thinks of me at all, as having conducted myself with some forethought “as a screaming misfit, a little on the laid-back side.”
Meanwhile, always flush at least twice. It’s a long way to Mar-a-Lago.
• Technical notes: RFD favors the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a sonic colonic. Sly and The Family Stone come to you from their YouTube channel. From Freesound we get a dog whining, a power failure, an Internet outage, a garbage truck, and an elephant trumpeting. Judge Dredd issues his opinions via YouTube. All the other evil racket is courtesy of Your Humble Narrator.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings just before Thanksgiving, but you can’t get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant. The restaurant is long gone, and now, so is Alice.
WBUR has a remembrance, and so does The New York Times. Arlo Guthrie, of course, weighed in as well, on Facebook.
Extra Special Bonus Fact: Did you know Alice was a Pelkey? Neither did I. I’ll consult the Counselor, see if he was aware that he was related to criminal and culinary royalty.
We’ll give a thought (and an ear) to Alice and Arlo on Thursday as we have another Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat.
Peter Sinfield, the lyricist for King Crimson’s first four albums, has toddled off to the Court of the Crimson King. He was 80.
Progressive rockers like King Crimson and Pink Floyd were big on my personal hit parade in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Probably the upshot of taking piano and flute lessons, playing in school orchestras, digging the big-band music my parents loved, and like that there. A “more-is-more sensibility,” as The New York Times obit puts it.
The single “21st Century Schizoid Man” was killer, you should pardon the expression, since it took actual killers to task with lyrics like “Blood rack, barbed wire/Politicians’ funeral pyre/Innocents raped with napalm fire. …”
Eventually my musical tastes became less grandiose, more stripped down. Even so, I still prefer bombast to bombs.
Why, hello there, October. Nice to see you could finally make it.
Yesterday we enjoyed a chilly eastern breeze, which by evening was expected to pack a bit more of a wallop — say, 30-40 mph with gusts to 55, plus rain — and with any luck at all this seasonal weather will strip our pines of their remaining brown needles.
On Thursday I filled three 39-gallon bags with downed needles from the last blustery day after a friend complained that she needed 4WD to scale our driveway with a load of product for Herself’s eBay sideline. The bags filled our trash bin to overflowing with three days before pickup. I had to pull one back out to shoehorn a sack of kitchen garbage redolent of jambalaya fixins into the sonofabitch. The raccoons will rejoice.
Not so the deer, who have eaten all the class foliage in the back yard. They’ll have to settle for silverleaf nightshade going forward or start mowing the lawn.
But yeah, rain. I can’t remember when last it rained. Mid-September, maybe? That’s the most recent mention I can find in the training log. I described it as “a short, sharp downpour” that I just beat home at the end of a 25-mile ride.
This latest blessing from heaven started coming down around bedtime last night and it hasn’t let up yet. We might see a quarter inch before the second cup of joe, which, yay, etc.
I can almost accept that it’s 45° outside, and that the sun doesn’t show its face until breakfast is a fading memory, and that I may be forced to start wearing pants in the morning.
No, not that. Not yet, goddamnit. It’s not even Halloween, f’chrissakes.
