The last of the second round. Please share your opinions of things with me because it occupies my life as I wait for the second number to get carved into my tombstone while sitting at work waiting for it all to crumble in on me...
DAVID MANN vs. LEMMY KILMISTER
No matter how much Sons of Anarchy I watch, nothing will make me think David Mann posters are cooler than Lemmy Kilmister songs. Especially if you've ever heard that semi-acoustic version of "Ironhorse/Born to Lose". I have it somewhere but I'm not going to find it and upload it. Just come by the house. We will plug in the camper and the backyard speaker and I'll play it real fucking loud while we get up a game of bones or huvna at the picnic table. I found a couple of boxes of our spring lemon homebrew and have been drinking brown and tans with that and Guinness lately. It's a lovely combo, the perfect double dropkick of your daily blues.
Advantage: Lemmy Kilmister.
DAVID ALLAN COE vs. WILLIE NELSON
In case you haven't noticed, I pair these match-up of similar people, so as to avoid something stupid like all five of the final people being wrestlers or all five being musicians, or whatever catches my personal interior pop culture retard flow at an awkward angle just perfectly while I'm doing this. This really isn't a fair battle for the second round because both of these guys are not only immense figures in the wacky real world, but immense figures in my real life. I grew up with my dad usually drinking and stoning til all hours of the morning. Many late Friday and Saturday nights were spent with him demon driving a car home from Cumberland county all the way to the south end of Prince Edward after a long night of small stakes poker playing, with me laying down sideways in the back seat so as to not see the outside world swerving past, and to hope I made it home alive. And God bless the old man, he never killed me once. We never even wrecked. And if it was a good night at the kitchen poker table at Tip's house, and we were coming home late enough, he'd buy me some cinnamon-n-raisin biscuits from Hardee's on the drunken sneak through Farmville. When I was about ten or eleven, I used to get to sit with the grown folks and play poker too, with my parents giving me like five or six dollars in change to gamble. Really, it showed how much they trusted me, because no other kids ever got to do that in all the time (we're talking years) these weekends went on. And if there weren't enough grown folks chairs for all the grown folks players, I would sit in Tip's son's high chair with the top off of it (rest in peace Tony Tipton... shit rest in peace all of them, Tony, Tip, my dad, Stuart just died from cancer, memories full of wild back roads ghosts), so we'd joke, "Raven's been playing poker since he was sittin' in a high chair."
Anyways, the ol' man would wake up early in the morning, probably about the time his drunk wore off, and start playing music loud as fuck and cooking up big fat breakfasts and cleaning the house and just generally, it seems to me in retrospect, cleansing himself with a good life. Of course, come dark, if it was the weekend, he was right back at it. But a lot of Willie Nelson and David Allan Coe got played. And though I think that "Redheaded Stranger" may be one of the greatest songs ever (and definitely the best country album ever made), David Allan Coe is just such a lifelong kook. Finding his underground stuff, or all the full albums that the For the Record was compiled from, or even his early post-prison insane rock-n-roll blues country drunken nightmare shit that it's hard to believe people actually made back in the late '60s/early '70s. Willie Nelson is amazing, but there's a lot of square ass people who love them some Willie Nelson. You go to a David Allan Coe show, yeah there'll be some bullshit fratboys, but there's gonna be some real shit there. Bikers staring at cowboys who are laughing at the hippies, so to speak.
Advantage: David Allan Coe.
CHARLES MANSON vs. LEONARD PELTIER
Not even close.
Advantage: Charles Manson.
MIROSLAV TICHY vs. VOLLIS SIMPSON
Oh man, this is another pair that I kinda wish could both be the final five, except I'm matching them now because they are both crazy self-taught artist types. I seriously cannot say how much I love Vollis Simpson and the idea of this wacky Carolina farmer dude starting to weld metal things together to blow in the wind, with them growing ever larger and gaining notoriety worldwide for what he does. But Miroslav Tichy did a similar thing but more anonymously, taking pictures with a homemade camera. And Tichy resents the fame he has achieved, because he is just an old man who wants to be left the fuck alone by society. I can understand that all too well, and probably more so than I should at my age.
Advantage: Miroslav Tichy.
GARY SNYDER vs. HARRY CREWS
Two of my favorite writers that are living and breathing and have rarely let me down. Hard to pick either or because they both have great books that are bibles in my mind, and I've read through things they've both done that did not interest me even slightly. But I guess if this dude writing in the Huffington Post about me said I was the "literary and philoshopical heir to Harry Crews," as sad as it sounds to say, he must not be as great as Gary Snyder if some raggedy blog-having piece of shit like me is his heir apparent.
Advantage: Gary Snyder.
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