I have inherited an inflatable river boat from a dude I used to work for who is now swashbuckling in Middle Arabia somewhere, so it has been a summertime goal to float the fam down the James now and then, to just get outside on the water and soak up the goddamned barely left freedom of our modern American lives. This entails dropping the truck off at the second spot, and then shooting up to the first launching spot with the uninflated boat in the back of our Subaru (R.I.P.) and pumping it up, loading kids, loading ourselves, and then meandering the fuck back to the truck. We did this last time, and did a different pair of points, which caused boredom and complaining to kick in for the last half hour of the trip, so rolled back to the Subaru to load up and roll home for cooking out.
The center child stayed in the truck with me, enjoying quality one-on-one time, plus they dig my wild mood after being on the river, playing music really loud, laughing because I have relapsed into 1970s mode being my wife has to sit in the back of the truck being we can't fit everybody in the cab with all three kids, so we sing lyrics loud as fuck out the back sliding window at her, and usually I hang my soaking wet shirt over the side of the truck like a flag, hooked onto my tie-down that never leaves my truck bed, because I am the type of guy that kinda needs to have a tie-down strap at any given point suddenly. As we rolled back into town, past the farm supply place with the quality lounger that works there, I saw three dudes just sitting in front of a trailer, doing nothing but sitting there. I said, "Whoa, check out those loungers." So the center child goes, "Daddy, why do you always say 'lounging'?"
So I went into an explanation of what loungin' means to me, being laid back against all odds, and just generally trying to be a good person, more caught up in helping out someone else or having a good easy time than chasing dollars or scams or schemes or memes or tired routines that get you nowhere. If you're going to get nowhere, you might as well just flip over a goddamn 5-gallon bucket there at nowhere, and go ahead and enjoy the scenery instead of running all over local creation for 60 hours a week only to end up right back at nowhere and nothing.
This lead me to also explain what unloungin' meant, and how it's easy to become an unlounger, and why it's important to not lie, to be a good-hearted person, and to think of the other angle when interacting with folks. At that point, "Every Rose Has A Thorn" came on my J.J. Krupert, so I started singing the lyrics really loud, but making them different to fit Phoenix, my center child. This caused her to smile that perfect Phoenix smile that she rarely kicks because she can be a broody sort at times, but you know when she's got it, she's letting her guard down and being happy. And she'll stare at me in those moments, like "Who is this crazy awesome man?" I try not to think about how that man probably ain't there big parts of the week when overstressed by Other People's Drama and getting caught in the ringer of work-a-day bull tripe.
(I should point out that I thought Poison was gay in high school, and never listened to them. There was a fine line between acceptable glammy stuff like GNR or Faster Pussycat and stupid glammy stuff like Poison, Cinderella, or Warrant. The former was for solid dudes who wanted to get fucked up, and the latter was for girls not dudes. But I have come to enjoy a few of these more stupider selections for their overall pop cultural value, and ain't afraid to listen to them, even if I rode by another me, the other me might be like, "Whoa, what the fuck is up with That Guy?")
The next morning was Sunday morning, which usually means dumpster diving through a giant loop to hit the four stores I hit on Sundays, because ain't no trash service on weekends and they can be loaded. Phoenix absolutely loves to go with me on these, and we caught a bounty at one store, like a ton of cakes and bread and donuts, at least 40 pounds of it, plus plenty vegetables at my favorite Sunday spot. Sundays are my favorite day, when I can sort through trash and give it to my animals and walk my property calmly, and hang with the kids. Even in our western world, with our spiritless Gods of Capitalism, Sunday mornings every thing slows down a little and is less frenetic. Stores open later, and smaller businesses ain't even fucking with a Sunday. I dream of our society collapsing to the point all day every day is like a Sunday morning - free and easy and chill as fuck.
It's bothersome to me how much work gets in the way of actual life, and actual loungin', and it's a shame we've been taught to think by chasing the endless circles to nowhere, we'll somehow be rewarded with some sort of bounty of free time and loungin' days that never come. We have been duped, and continue to be duped, but not many of us are confident enough in ourselves to really make a break off that grid of normal life.
All of this has nothing to do with the song here (as if that should surprise me if you've been a regular reader of this blog), but I imagine at least one of my kids is going to have children, and probably a son, and being I have all daughters, there's not as much room for me to ramble about shit like Guy Clark, because it doesn't strike a chord at this point. So maybe by the time I'm an old dude with a tagalong grandson, and he's hanging out while I'm playing dominoes with three dudes at a picnic table we dragged to the end of a logging road by the river somewhere near Shores, and we have an old boombox we tuck under an empty bucket down there to not forget to bring but also not get ruined by the rain, and we play cassettes, not because they are cool or hip but because shit, it's a tape player. And each time, the batteries die on tape mode, so we switch to radio, which doesn't take as much battery power, and squeeze a few more songs out of it before the sun goes down, and the CSX coal line will shoot east from the mountains, full of mountain raped energy bounty, and the train will sound as great as ever clack-a-clack-a-clacking over those old tracks, and "Desperadoes Waiting For a Train" will come on whatever new-fangled audio device they've installed into our vehicles at that point while me and the grandson ride home to grandma's house where a fresh apple crisp is waiting, and my grandboy will be like, "Whoa, this song is my shit kinda" in his head, and he'll ask, "Grandpa, what is this?" and I'll tell him about loungin' and unloungin' and then start yelling nonsense lyrics out the window like I always do when I feel good as fuck from the river aura cleansing my goddamned money sins away.
STEAL "Desperadoes Waiting For A Train"
NEXT: throwback rap!
1 comment:
godfuckingdammit, i love this.
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