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Showing posts from April, 2015

Leatherbacks and Syrup

I never considered myself a troubadour, or a traveller or a restless soul. I always felt I was a solid, down-to-earth dude with his roots firm and deep in that part of the earth upon which I happened to live at those times when I had such thoughts. I don't just write sentences that way... it's the way I speak, too. Only thing that's removed with the written word are the often-times very long pauses in between thoughts. That sentence might have taken a week to write. That’s the majesty of the written word. You can figure it out over time. That's why I often use so many dots. Some people hate little dots. "Over-punctuation"  they call it. “Sloppy, juvenile.” To me they are essential.  At their most powerful they are like punctuative footprints walking across a literary gravesite. You can hear the silence in them ...  Sssshhhhshshshsh ... hush ... quiet ... They are made of sheepskin ... I remember when I wrote certain songs because I remember wh

she

Sure. She appeared as if through a tear in the fabric of time and space, plonked her gorgeous ass on the front bench, reaching distance from the stage, and took it all in. The concert. The opening act. The nods and hellos. She was unshakable in how much she did not fit in. Everyone else, pretty much, was a silver-hair. A gramma or granpa. Their handclaps were light and ineffectual and full of self-preservation. You could hear the lack of strength in their bones and ligaments and tendons. When they applauded after each song it sounded like a stack of dried out, fifteen-year-old rubber bands falling down a wooden staircase. It didn't make you want to do better, up there on the tiny stage in the corner. It made you want to cut a swathe through the field of them with your hollowed-out acoustical guitar. Her eyes sparkled and shone rainbows of greens and blues in great arcs from wall to wall.

The Necessary Accessory

Mexican four-piece flamenco guitar bands confuse the living daylights out of me.  Not because of any flamenco rhythm they got going on, or the wild Disneyland-Zorro-Exhibition-tourist-office hats or anything like that.  No. It’s none of that. It's the short dude with the handlebar moustache and the jumbo guitar. He blows my mind, every single time. I'm like: "Is that guy really short, or just a long way away...? And if he's such a long way away... why IS that?  And why is his moustache so... so... present and enlarged?" And then I'm like: "But his guitar looks so much bigger than everybody else's guitar. So maybe the guitar is like real real close, up against the camera lens, with the moustache, and the dude himself is way way back." And then I'm like: "But how can it beeeeeee???"