J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '11 #7: The Ballad Of Curtis Loew" by Lynyrd Skynyrd

At one time in my life, I lived in a dilapidated trailer number seven in a magical trailer park run by a chill ass old dude along the edge of his tobacco farm. A trailer park is often looked down upon by the socio-economic types who proliferate the interwebs, as is a single solitary trailer, but there's something really stimulating psychologically when living inside of one, which I have done multiple times in my life. A trailer is a pretty bare-bones, so it's not too far from rustic camping at times, and true to this, our trailer had a busted doorknob, so we kept a butter knife hidden under a cinderblock outside the door to open the door with. It was our key. But the cramped confines of a trailer make your brain go in strange patterns, which is why I think so many people who live too long in trailers tend to have fairly wild personalities, which of course just reinforces the negative perception of trailers. But when you are cramped into a long, slender rowhouse of a home that you can feel shake when the wind blows too strong, that'll create in you the type of attitude that tends to holler loudly at full moons or large crowds and will make you think wearing shirts is not a requirement for public appearances. I understand this, because I am this.
Anyways, in this trailer, we tried to spruce it up, with nice shit like a Steve McQueen tapestry, leopard print fabric over most of our sitting furniture, and I think some sort of weird ass velvet painting. But the main piece of decor ended up being my roommate getting a fish tank. Fish tanks are a funny thing.
The hobbyist ownage of a fish tank is as close to being a stoner that a non-stoner person can be. In fact, you will find fish tank enthusiasts to really mirror the behavioral patterns of actual stoners, but without actually smoking reefer regularly, if at all. I mean, what do you do to enjoy a fish tank? You look at it, and watch the fish. Apparently, this has some sort of scientific therapeutic value, which is why everybody had those stupid fish tank screensavers briefly, or at least I think that was the justification. But there's no doubt sitting around watching little tiny neon fish pop around in some water will put you on chill mode, much like weed smoking, but without the weed. This is probably why a lot of professional athletes have ridiculous fish tanks, because they are drug tested but want to be high, so the do this instead. And there can be no one to deny it is a stoner-style mind that can ramble on and on about the fourteen different types of tetras floating around in his tank, with personality traits for each one, even if that person does not or has never smoked weed. It's still the same type of dude in the brain.
So in our decrepit little trailer's fish tank, we had a pair of really bright ass tetra that were named Curtis Loew and Kurtis Blow, because honestly you couldn't tell them apart, no matter how stoned you got, and that's a funny pair of names. If I ever had twin sons, that's what I would named them - Curtis Loew Stone Mack and Kurtis Blow Nation Mack. But I never had twin sons, though I tried many many times. Zygotes are hard to train with internal thought processes.
So Curtis Loew and Kurtis Blow were pretty chill, and we had those slave scrub fish that never get names because they are basically just weird little wretched of the fish world fish that just suck the scum off the edges and you ignore because they look like shit eels or something. And we added a couple other small bright fish I think. But then we got a channel cat, for whatever reason, probably because they looked gangsta as fuck, and if you are going to have a fish tank and look at it instead of getting stoned, you will eventually want something gangsta as fuck in there. This is also why professional athletes end up having shark tanks. It's all a very logical progression.
The channel cat we got was a dick though, and started eating everything, but not like whole. He'd just kill them and leave them floating as a warning to the others, which I guess was gangsta as fuck. Eventually I came home from work one day and there was either Curtis Loew or Kurtis Blow laying there sideways at the top of the tank, both his eyeballs gone, and the other one hiding in the little castle that had a Lexus Hot Wheels parked out front (which I still have, and my kids play with, oddly enough), and the channel cat just lurking along the bottom of the tank. Next thing you know, Kurtis Blow or Curtis Loew or whichever one was the other one was dead a few days later, and nothing was left - no scrubs no tetras no nothing, but the goddamned channel cat.
So we figured it was survivalism, and put a second channel cat in there to keep each other company. Except the first channel cat was more gangsta than the second and killed him too. I did not get to see this happen, or else perhaps we would have encouraged fish fights as a gambling activity while we drank Private Stocks on our leopard print covered furniture, but it sort of was the final straw with that channel cat. He was too gangsta for this earth, at least the little part of the earth that was a 10-gallon fish tank in trailer number seven of Lindy Hamlet's trailer park. So I took an empty coffee can and scooped out the channel cat, and then flushed him down the toilet, to give him a fighting chance.
I often imagine that channel cat grew to be 100 pounds, and is still alive (because catfish can live for upwards of 40-some years) and he's lurking in a river bed somewhere in southside Virginia to this day, fucking up everything in sight. And he probably acts this way because he spent so much of his formative fish years living in a trailer. That's just how things work in life.
STEAL "The Ballad Of Curtis Loew"
NEXT: another awesome song no one's ever heard from Heartworn Highways!