SONG OF THE DAY: Ramblin' Gamblin' Man (45s on 33)

The other weekend, I was in a giant antique/junk/flea market with my girlfriend, and some stand had a whole bunch of car magazines marked down cheap (relatively speaking for a “serious” antique market). I thumbed through almost all of the stacks, hoping to find a bunch of Lowriders for a $1.30 each. In fact, any time I’m in a flea market, I hope I’m gonna stub my toe on a box full of old Lowriders with a “entire box $10” on it. I check ebay all the time looking for some but fuck they’re expensive. There’s an Orlie’s Lowriding magazine as well, which I’d be just as happy to find even though it’s not as well-known. And then there’s the holy grail of all low riding magazines – Teen Angel. Teen Angel was an artist who worked by that pen name at Lowrider magazine back in the late ‘70s, who was far more interested in the cholo/pachuco art and street culture than the vehicular owriders themselves, so branched out and began his own magazine specializing in the art, plus prison letters, since the majority of the art was done by prisoners. It basically became a popular underground magazine of its own, at stores and car shops related to Chicano culture, across the southwestern part of the US. It also became the reason Lowrider itself started carrying more art like this, and even had its own off-shoot magazine called Lowrider Arte. Most copies of Teen Angel go for a couple hundred dollars now, and the first issue goes for over a thousand, so if I ever happened across a box of those at a flea market for $10, I’d finally be able to afford to cover myself in horrible tattoos. I actually thought about that while thumbing through a seemingly endless stack of Truckin’ magazines that weekend, “What if I find a couple Teen Angels in here?” But that’s not practical, and even in this fantasy scenario of imaginary magazines stacks in a box at an undefined and probably non-existent flea market, I’m not gonna pretend Teen Angels would be there. Is that a lower class thing, where your imagination even in fantasy still limits itself? Is that why I’d be so fascinated with a sci-fi show about a spaceship custodian who just cleans the halls mostly? Even pretending has to be reasonable. I’m not no Rockefeller or Rothschild out, here imagining I’m gonna find a box full of exactly what I want, and be able to afford it. Haha, the privilege of dreaming whatever you want, imagine that shit.