The Robo-Ghost
The best thing about the internet dating sites is what they’ve done for her confidence. She used to think she was attractive, now she knows she is hot. Now she dresses hot, more revealing, while tight-roping on taller heels. She acts differently too, now, but that is the worst thing about the internet dating sites… what they have done to her confidence.
She only swipes on the best, and they always swipe back. Always. She is hot. Super hot. She must be. She is a princess. Doesn’t a princess deserve the best?
But dating is different these days. Men don’t buy dinner anymore. Movies are a thing of the past. Dating is drinks now, always drinks. After two she’s tipsy, having not eaten. Tipsy enough to be silly… and friendly. But guys like silly… and friendly. She is proof. They like her. They always like her. After her third drink she wants to dance. They accommodate her. Why not? Dancing is cheap enough.
There are more drinks at the club, and the pounding-rhythmic music she craves, and sensual, hypnotic gyrations. She finds herself all in, every time. After all he is tall, nicely dressed, and he smells fantastic. They all smell fantastic. Don’t they? Those most desirable guys on the dating apps? She could smell them all night, and she usually does.
There are mirrors at the club. She looks hot in the mirrors. So does he. She knows this because she sees other women looking. They’ll even pass him a napkin when her head is turned, forgetting the mirrors. This is ok though. She doesn’t mind it. She wants them to want him. Why not? She is super-hot. His eyes are only for her, and she knows it. She likes it. He knows where this night is heading. Where she is leading it. Besides. Would she even want him if no other women did? No, of course not. In fact, their interest fuels her. It excites her, so that she dances closer, backing herself against him, arching her back, watching herself in the mirror, moving to the music, fueling his excitement. And he is excited. She can feel his excitement. And she is hot. She can feel this, too. And knowing she is fuels her.
And the sex is always fantastic. Always… what she can remember of it. And there is always sex. And always at his place. Always. But somehow on the Uber ride home, she never feels hot. She never looks hot. Not ever. What she looks in the morning light, and what she feels, is washed out and ran through. But no worries. The feeling never lasts.
He won’t call her again.
That is dating today, for those like her, stuck in the robotic grind.
But next weekend she’ll swipe on another. As always, it will be another match. She is hot. So she puts the dress back on, the really tiny one. And the shoes, the really big ones. And she tells herself how hot she looks as she goes to meet this new guy for drinks.
News-flash: It appears that it’s not so much ‘how’ you cope as ‘where’ you cope
To all my friends who might happen to be Jewish,
I am truly sorry for the way you are being treated and will stand beside you to the end.
I hope you are seeing what is happening at the U Of F, Ole Miss, U of A, and UNC, among other great southern universities. For myself, I thank the good Lord for my Southern heritage, a heritage which might have been tainted a ways back, but is standing tall as toddy today. I am on my way this weekend to one of those Southern universities to see my grand-daughter graduate. I would like to thank those kids who have guaranteed that my trip is set off upon with a great amount of pride. I am somewhat ashamed to admit to having and sharing in my stories on this site my poor opinion of our colleges and universities (or more specifically of the educators who are filling those universities with rot), but I am so very proud to see that the rot has not infected you all. That shines!
God Bless America and Yeehaw you Intifada sons of biscuits. Go crawl back under whatever
rock you crawled out from.
Sincerely,
Huckleberry Hoo
A Brief Description of One Man’s Death (Repost)
I cannot presume to say what every death feels like. I can only speak to my own, and it was really not all that interesting once the knife was removed and the murderer escaped, but I will do my best to enlighten the reader as to its effects upon my body, and also to its effects on my inner thoughts at the curious moment of passing.
I can tell you that the wound succombed quickly to shock, so there was little pain, but there was the freightening knowledge of something terribly wrong, of some important thing inside of me being irreparably damaged. Having little knowledge of anatomy I cannot say for certain sure what that something was, but the blood was dark in color, almost black, so I suspect it was the liver, or possibly a kidney that suffered the injury.
The blood was also plentiful. It pooled quickly around me until every appendage of my body layed within it. It even touched my face so that its strangely sweet odor filled my nostrils until I accepted the smell of the blood as being the smell of death itself. I recall being shocked at the amount, and presumed correctly that a body cannot lose that amount of blood and survive.
With the shock and the blood loss came the cold... a deep, down to the bone cold that sent my muscles into spasms which served to push the blood out of the wound even faster than my heart-beat could push it alone. The spasms acted upon my blood vessels like squeezing a sponge as my body did what it could to speed up the natural process that it evidently knew had begun. In a final effort at self preservation I curled myself into a fetal position, my arms pressing into the wounded area in a feeble attempt at both warmth and to thwart the flow of blood. The effort was far too little, and it was far too late.
And finally came the exhaustion, an overwhelming desire to sleep that pressed against my eyelids with an enormous weight that willed them shut, a feeling not unlike that which the sun will give you through the windshield after a heavy afternoon meal. My eyes closed under that weight. Sleep massaged my temples with the gentlest of fingers, but something inside my head, something in the folded gray matter of my brain railed against it, knowing that at this point in time every second, every feeling, every thought was sacred and I must induce one more of each! To sleep was to never awaken, but I was so very tired. I wondered then that I could really die! I would be no more? In my vanity that did not seem plausible, that the world could carry on without me. Of course I had always known that I could die, that I would die... someday... but now that it was upon me it did not seem acceptable. Who gave that person, that murderer, the right to end me, to take the only thing that really belonged to me and to run away into the night? How is it that he should live and not me? I, to die? I, who was life's greatest advocate! I, who was filled only moments ago with joy and song? I, to vanish as though I had never existed?
But it was true, and so I did; while the earth continued its turning, and the heavens continued their expansions. A few tears were shed, perhaps, and then the life that I held so dear ceased of its importance, and its appointments, and its deadlines, and its pleasures so that the hole my absence left on the earth's face was no greater than the hole left when you pull your finger from a glass of water.
The End
Light and Set
The pair had put in a long day of travel and sought a place to ‘light and set’ awhile before continuing on. A cup of hot coffee would do some good for the one, and a rubdown for the other, and perhaps to gather some news on the lay of the land.
The hair curling down from under Johnny Cotton’s Stetson spilled over his collar as snowy white as his name. Another fine bit of it tickled his upper lip, while still a tad more curled over his bronzed and angular chin, the patchwork amounts of them all told the tale on Johnny’s youthfulness.
The gelding was equally as tired and dusty as his rider. The only accoutrement on man or beast still holding it’s shine was the well-oiled Colt’s revolver on the man’s thigh, but the shimmering pistol still remained as dark and nondescript as were the horse, the man’s clothing, and the Stetson covering his head. An admitted vanity, his hair was the only thing showy about our boy Johnny. Well, that and the perpetually high arc of a single, dubious brow. Aside from the gelding there had been little in Johnny’s past to allow for trust, not in his fellow man… nor in women, either.
The house Johnny reined the gelding up in front of was little more than a one room shack sitting on the farthest outskirts of a far away one street town. Several things caught Johnny’s eye about the shack, to include a white-washed picket fence which corralled nothing in it’s front yard save several water deprived flowers planted in a neat row along the shack’s front, those and a dead and leafless shade sapling which clung to the sandy soil on the one side of a barely discernible dirt path which led up to the cabin’s warped door; doomed luxuries these, luxuries which few frontiersmen had leftover time to care for, what with the nonstop and mostly brutal industries required just for survival. A man would only supply such things if he truly loved his woman… or if he was pushed to procure them.
The woman, or girl rather, who emerged from the door did not look to be the frontier type, but then, Johnny supposed, who did? Pioneers tended to come from all sorts. She was young, probably not much older than Johnny was. The woman, or girl rather, had the expected youngster on her hip, and another, larger one clinging to her aprons. The tight bun on her head was dark, just as her eyes were, and her expression. She did not appear happy with her life situation, but then, other than dance hall girls Johnny had not known many women who were happy. Nor men either, for that matter. But those dance hall girls sure seemed happy, didn’t they? And why wouldn’t they be happy, doing what they did for a living? And the men with them seemed happy enough too, so long as they were with them, though Johnny had seen plenty who had soured on that opinion come the morning after.
”You want something?” The woman‘s directness was not off-putting.
Despite the appearance of past gentrification her tone had taken on the more casual ‘prairie speak’ Johnny was accustomed to; her “want” coming out sounding more like “won’t”, and the “g” in her “something” remaining silent. “Good,“ Johnny thought. He would not have to ‘put on airs’ either, as the saying went.
”Naw, It’s just your fence is falling down, and your tree is dead.”
”Humph. Ain’t you somethin’.” It had not come out like a question.
”Just sayin’, is all.”
”Man’s gone. You wanna climb down and fix it? I could use another around here.” The hopeful list in her voice was undeniable, but the invitation was not especially appealing, despite her obvious beauty. ”Ain’t my affair.”
”Then why’d you stop?”
”Curious, was all. Don’t normally see these sorts of frew-frews like you’ve got, not out here on the prairie, leastways. How long‘d you say your man has been gone?”
”Didn’t say, but awhile.” The woman, or rather the girl, switched the baby over to her other hip while Johnny adjusted to a more comfortable position in the saddle.
”How come?”
”Nosey, ain’t ya?” She’d gotten pretty good at prairie speak, though the Virginia gentry in her still shone through it.”
”Like I said, curious is all. Though I expect I already know the answer.”
”You just want to hear me say it? All right, then. He was lazy.”
”Figured as much. Lazy, huh? Fields are empty, what happened to the cows?”
”Sold ’em to eat.”
”Pens are empty. You sell the chickens too?”
”Weasels.”
”Pig slough needs tending to.”
”No point. The pigs ran off.”
”And all this happened since your man left?”
”Yep.”
”Hmmm. You are partly right, Mam. Your man might have been lazy, I can’t speak to that, but he sure wasn’t dumb.”
Neither was the gelding dumb. The gelding’s rider might be young, but the youngster had never done nothing to spoil the beast’s trust. The pair had put in the miles together, and sensing his rider’s mood and needing neither a kick nor a cluck to start him, the gelding picked up where he’d left off on the long walk towards town.
This would not be a place to rest.
“Too bad.” The smarter of the pair ruminated. “It might have been nice to light and set, if only for a short while.”
Keeping it Real
Seems that people will do just about anything to gain the spotlight these days, prying themselves into it; fake tits, ass and all.
Think about it. Who is it you are trying to impress, anyways?
Fame is a strange thing to seek, especially that kind. Is fickle too, fame is. Especially that kind. Hare today, goat tomorrow.
You want them to cheer when you walk into the room? You want to dazzle them?
Then seek your fame from the right people, and for the right reasons. Who stands taller, shines brighter, or is remembered longer than a dad walking in from work?
Be famous to the right people, and for the right reasons.
Don’t those people deserve a forever G.O.A.T.?
Turn it Up
… turn it up!
Those quietly spoken words follow Ed King’s first, meticulous little guitar riff in the original recording of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.”
I clearly remember riding with my father in his pickup truck back when I was in the fourth or fifth grade (which, by the way, was a long, long time ago). It was the first time I remember hearing the song. Ronnie Van Zant’s words, “turn it up,” rattled in to us from the WANV radio station where my mother worked through the truck’s static-y, AM speakers. I remember watching in awe as my father’s hand subconsciously reached for the volume button. The singer of the song had asked my dad to “turn it up,” and the old man was actually doing it? It was both a mystery, and a revelation at once. My father liked to make it known that he had no use for what he called “hippie music,” yet here he was, “turning it up“ on command. Furthermore, as he was “turning it up” with the one hand his other one was tapping out the beat atop the steering wheel. And even more uncharacteristically yet, Pop was singing along with the chorus!
”Sweet home Alabama
where the skies are so blue.
Sweet home Alabama,
Lord I’m coming’ home to you.”
My father wasn’t big on singing, though he liked music well enough, Hee-Haw mostly, yet he somehow recognized this song well enough that he could sing along in parts. I’d only ever heard my dad attempt to sing a few times, and then he was more likely to be singing along with The Statler Brothers, or maybe The Temptations, some of his favorites. What can I say? The old man was partial to harmonies. At least I come by that right.
Yea, Pop!… turn it up!
I would learn later in life that while recording the song, what Ronnie was actually doing was asking the song’s producer to give him more sound in his headset before he started singing. “I need more volume,” he was telling Al Kooper. Upon hearing the recorded playback Al wanted to edit the words out, but Ronnie stopped him. Ronnie knew he had a great song, and he knew that kids listening in their cars would do exactly what he’d just been telling Al Kooper to do, and conversely what my father had done. Those kids would “turn it up!” And, as usual, Ronnie Van Zant’s instincts were spot on.
Speaking of instincts, less than a week before that recording session Ronnie had called Al up in the middle of the night. “I need some studio time,” he’d told Al. “We’ve got this song, and it’s perfect right now. If we wait the song is gonna change. They always do. We need to record it right now.” So The Lynyrd Skynyrd Band took the long bus ride to Doraville, Georgia, where they laid out their soon-to-be rock and roll classic nearly a full year before the rest of the album was cut. Apparently it paid to follow along with Ronnie’s instincts.
… turn it up, Al!
The funny thing about the song though is what I learned from my dad that day in his pickup truck. Sweet Home Alabama appeals to nearly everyone. While the song is unmistakably rock-n-roll, it somehow manages to take a savvy listener on a four and a half minute southern musical odyssey. The airy, initial pluckings of Ed King’s guitar have a blue-grassy sound, being almost mandolin-ish, while Gary’s country, slide guitar accompanies it. The rhythm section which follows in behind those guitars only complements that bluegrass sound with a slow, very steady, stand-up bass feeling. When Ronnie’s voice joins in it is light and articulate, coming off as being almost untrue to his redneck persona. When the Honkettes (JoJo, Leslie and Cassie) join Ronnie in the chorus their harmonies bring in an almost hymnal quality, their “ooohs and aaah’s“ raining down from the holier, upper pews. The guitar solos are steeped heavily in the Memphis blues, and the sprinkling in of boogie-woogie piano finishes it all off. The music itself is very nearly the coming together of all the great, southern musical styles into one pop-rock perfection.
And then you have the lyrics. Home is what the song is about. It tells you right there in the title. The song is about home, about wanting to be home after a long stint on the road, and about loving one’s home, warts and all. Yes, the song was inspired by Neil Young’s song “Southern Man”, and yes Ronnie takes a pretty good dig at Neil Young in the second verse, but that is all in loving one’s home, and in refusing to see it disparaged by someone who isn’t even American, much less southern. “Fix your own house before you stick your nose into mine,” Ronnie fairly enough reminds Neil Young, “A southern man don’t need you around, anyhow!” It was the early 1970’s, a time when it was already rightfully difficult being southern, but no weed-smoking, sandal-wearing Canadian had any business piling on, did he? Young had tried it twice now, beating up on southerner’s, but not again he wouldn’t. And the funniest thing about it was, Ronnie wasn’t even from Alabama. But even though he never lived there Ronnie felt a kinship to her people, people who were sharing the same struggles that his folks over in north Florida were.
“Big wheels keep on turning.
Carry me home to see my kin.
Singing songs about the southland.
I miss Alabamy once again (and I think it’s a sin, yea).”
For fifty years now I’ve rocked out to “Sweet Home Alabama.” I’ve heard it hundreds of times, maybe thousands, and I still “turn it up” every time it comes on, my toes instinctively tapping along to the radio. I heard it at the end of Forrest Gump, when Jenny and Forrest had become “like peas and carrots once again.” Reese Witherspoon made a whole movie out of “Sweet Home Alabama.“ The song has been covered by just about everyone; to include Nirvana, Rihanna, Poison, and Justin Bieber. Kidd Rock wrote a tribute song about this song that was a response to another song. I’ve heard symphony's attempt it, and marching bands, and even a bagpipe ensemble. I live in Nashville, where you cannot to this day walk down Broad Street without hearing it blare from at least one live music bar, and more often then not from two or three at once.
Oh yea. I’ve heard Neil Young do the song he inspired too (and he did it with much respect, too. Thank you for that, Friend).
Hey Neil! ... turn it up!
After much careful consideration about this prompt I have decided that “Sweet Home Alabama” has what it takes to be the “Soundtrack of my life” (which is not a mantle easily bestowed). It is not my favorite song. It is not even my favorite Lynyrd Skynyrd song, and may not even be my favorite song on its own album, Second Helping, which also boasts Curtis Loew and Swamp Music. But I am choosing it due to it’s popularity, and because the song is very nearly everything I believe I am while also managing to remain relevant for nearly as long as I have been around to hear it. The song is upbeat, straight shooting, contemplative, artistically diverse, it features a fantastic arrangement of driving guitar work, and it brings some attitude along to boot. Those are the very things I am about. That description happily meets me out there afloat somewhere on the big, slowly rolling river that is the Dixieland Twelve Bar Blues.
So take a tip from me, Ronnie, Al, Neil, and my old man. The next time you hear those light, plucky strings followed by Ronnie's suggestion that you, “turn it up,“ don’t just sit there...
Reach for the damned dial, already!
..…
By Candlelight (Repost)
It would be dark as death if not for the candle burning above the fireplace. The candle’s flame levitates above the mantle’s shelf as though it is alive, and possessed of a soul, or possessed by one, which of course it can be neither. While a flame may in some sense have a life, as it does eat, breathe, and die, it cannot be considered “alive” in a conscious, soulful sense, can it? We would not say that a tornado is “alive” would we, even though it eats, breathes and dies? No, and neither can we say that a flame is. To be “alive” requires an organic body, and some sort of instinct for survival, something more than just a raging, rampant energy. I would have laughed at the irony of that thought had I cared enough to do so, but affectivity, like the other perspectives, is long forgotten in my current state. Emotions are inconsequential to one who is no more “alive” than a candle’s flame.
The candle by itself is insufficient to illuminate the entire mantle, let alone the large, high ceilinged room, but it must suffice. Without it there is nothing but blackness... and there must be something. The flame is mine, the one thing I can control. I alone spark it to life, and I alone snuff the life from it. In between doing those things I am only a spectator as invisible drafts from the chimney bend the candle’s flame this way, and waft it that way. The flame seems to enjoy the drafts, spiraling on tiptoes, as she once did. It dances lightly, barely jiggling the lubricious surface of molten wax that collects in the hollow melt surrounding its wick. When the opportunity arises, the flame leans hungrily toward the ragged Victorian wallpaper, but barring an accident it remains tied to it‘s candle as I am tied to the room. The difference between us is that fire lacks conscious thought. It cannot be unhappy about it‘s situation, and so it twirls, bends, and illuminates, while I merely endure perpetuity.
The chimney’s antique flu sucks heavily at the outside air, pulling it through a creasote-crusted trachea filtered by an assortment of abandoned webs, and nests which thicken downward as the gales cascade through the depths of the shaft. The gusts whistle and howl with anger through the blockages. The steady, hollow clunk of a loose damper keeps unsteady time, it all supplying an eerie accompaniment to the candle flame’s gyrations.
Above the mantle, in the spotlight of the candle, hangs the portrait of a girl, a young woman rather. It is not a particularly good portrait, she was much more beautiful when seen in real life. But the painter needed renown, and the portrait received high reviews, so that other young ladies who saw it begged, demanded even, for the handsome painter to come and paint their portraits. The girl in this one begged him not to go, but he was young, and he needed the work. Besides, those other young ladies had beauty of their own, and even more money than this one, and the demands of success and fame are intoxicating, so he went.
But somehow those other portraits all took on the aspects of this one, their eyes with her luster, and their smiles with her benevolence. How could they not, with her picture framed forever in his mind’s eye? His hand painted what it saw, the tips of his brush blushing her cheek, or twirling her hair, even as he gazed upon another.
Of course, I am that painter. And, of course it was too late when I returned. She was gone, her home vacant but for the portrait I had painted of her hanging in it’s place above the mantle. And now for sixty years since, her house has remained empty of “life”.
“They” say it is haunted. “They” say that the painter did what he did in front of her portrait so that she might see him do it, and so that he could see her as he did.
They say that he lit the candle on the mantle, tied his rope to the crystal chandelier, and kicked away the velvet footstool those many years ago. Rumor has it that his bones lie there yet on the floor beneath the chandelier, just as they fell, one by one as the blackened flesh freed them from its moldering grip.
There is always some truth to rumors. “They” are never completely wrong.
It is true that the flesh has withered. It is true that the bones have piled. But some sort of life remains amongst the remains, some flame from the heart, some spark from the soul, something that remembers, and smolders, and sees her face through the dim light as it swings from the end of it’s rope.
A Cold, Hard, Philosophical Truth
“All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.” - Baruch Spinoza
Sometimes it’s easy to feel like you are on your own little purposeful island watching from a plentiful beach as others zig-zag through the waters of life in search of a dry shore. I stumbled across a quote from someone named Katelyn Gleason yesterday that spoke to my own personal truth.
”A decade or so of unreasonably hard work is the barrier of entry to a rare life.”
I found it somewhat ironic that the quote came from a woman, although it absolutely applies every bit as much to her as it does to a man, but it is a truth that almost any guy with any sense at all learns and understands from his very first day of high school, the day when that truth presents a glass barrier before him which he will never pass through any other way than to work his way through it. Let me explain.
Women are attracted to success. Due to this they intrinsically prefer older, confident men, as she can more easily determine that man’s value to her and her potential children. Has he sacrificed those years between he and she, putting in the work to improve himself? Or has he sloughed those years away, complaining that life is too hard, and that others only succeed because of their better educations, or their better looks, or their higher stations in life, or even their race? You have to wonder if the people who say such things actually put in the work required to find that out, but you don’t have to wonder about it for long. Those types always choose the easiest, quickest routes to nowhere.
People who work hard for success loathe a whiner.
It is no secret that boys are visually attracted to girls. It is why, on the whole, women are more attractive than men are. And a boy learns hard and fast that the pretty girls his own age who showed him any interest in middle school lose that interest on the very first day of high school, those girls now having eyes for the juniors and seniors as they seek to up their reputations. I cannot tell you how many times I was blown off by that girl who, “has a boyfriend in college.” Sheesh! But that freshman boy also sees that those older guys who are successful at something, at anything really, be it football, debate, auto-shop, or science; those are the guys who attract the attentions of the most girls, and the prettiest girls. It is one of those “ah-ha” moments for our young man. “If I put in the work now to raise my status in their eyes, it might pay off for me later.” And so he sacrifices now for then. His life actually starts on that day when work becomes his motivation, rather than play.
Some guys do luck out, admittedly, and girls pay them attention from the very start… at least through school days. But sooner or later those dudes will also hit that glass barrier, and when he does, if he has any sense, he will pick it up a notch. It is rarely too late to begin your ten years of unreasonably hard work, and is always better late than never, as the saying goes.
After ten years of improving himself and learning to be a man the guy who put in
those “years of unreasonably hard work” will find himself competent, confident, with a good job, and in the enviable position of having his pick of younger women, women who crave his newly higher status. But strangely, during those years our man’s tastes have changed. He finds that he is no longer necessarily interested in the prettiest, cheerleader type girl, at least not as a life partner, although there still is that in the short term, but he finds himself drawn more to the ones who have also sacrificed, holding on to their own values, and to their good reputations. A man who has sacrificed and put in the work does not want a woman who will embarrass him, or worse, might be an embarrassment to his family later on. Having worked so hard on improving himself, he finds himself drawn now to a woman‘s character as much as he is to her beauty, so he seeks the woman who has both. Has she worked to improve herself?
Those out there who do not understand these truths, male and female, are doomed either to “settle” for someone who shirks their way through life, believing that success only comes to those who are lucky or privileged without ever having really given it a go. Or they wind up depressed and alone. Both are pretty poopy options.
So, I say 10 years is about right, Katelyn Gleason. Ten years of sacrificing is what it ultimately requires; ten years of working longer than your scheduled hours, of holding off on a family, of sleeping alone, of both mental and physical learning, growing, and achieving. It takes ten years to make a better man; a better decision maker, a better husband, and a better father.
Ten years… if he puts in that unreasonably hard work.