Your travel agent doesn't have any deals for these places but, this is Florida.
A spring that feeds into the Swanee river. It's actually two pools with a cave that connects them. The Northern part of the state sits on a spongy mixture of sand, clay and roots...over a honeycomb of caves and underwater rivers. Sink holes are a common problem.
Don't know what's up with the date...it's an old camera.
There's Bambi.
Blue Springs on the Withacochee. Even I can remember before it became a State Park and you could dive out of the trees.
Not anymore. This is, as the sign says, the Real Florida...a state full of bureaucratic fundamentalists. I don't know what that jibbersh means and for the life of me I can't understand why anyone would think I'd have access to it.
Over the decades, a certain group of people have come down and invaded Florida and tried to shape it into the sorta busy-body nanny states they come from. You can't smoke at the Yella Pine Truck Stop because some lady from New Jersey, down in Boca Raton can't sleep at night thinkin' about it.
I love to visit, I was born there, but you couldn't drag me there to live.
Mack Donalds on Government St. in Mobile, Alabama.
Forced off the interstate by traffic. I've come this way 855 times in my life and I've never seen anything like it. It's a parking lot 20 miles from the tunnel. 'Course Government and Canal are starting to back up now too.
Mostly the usual in here...20 minutes in line to get a cup of coffee that's so hot I have blood trickling down my chin. I have to say...it's the first time I've ever been asked if the coffee was "for here or to go." Funniest thing though was the yankee in line with us...you can spot them immediately in these situations. All you have to do is turn around to see who's breathing down your neck. They really can't help it, especially the northeasterners, there is no space where they live...personal or otherwise. Plus people will cut your throat to get in front of you...even if it's just for a mcnugget. This dood...geeze, his man boobs were almost brushing the fella in front of me (I was a respectable two feet off to the side...just like the good'un that came in behind me...we are loath to do lines.
Somewhere on 49 S between Camp Shelby and Wiggins I heard a thumping sound for a second...followed by a flopping sound...then a grinding sound.
It's a horrible sound anytime you've got a steering wheel in your hand but on 49 it's particularly dreadful. It's the main highway between Jackson and The Coast...and it has no shoulder. I ground along, the pit in my stomach getting bigger, until I came to a little bridge with just enough room to pull the car over on level ground with about 2 foot between it and the highway.
First I had to find the jack...which turned out to 8" tall...who the...the car is barely 8" off the ground when the tires are inflated. So between packs of cars screaming by at 70 miles an hour...I would dash out and try to find a place to put the jack. It was my left front tire...which in the U.S. puts it right out there in traffic. Just I had finally found a place to jam the jack in, a very nice couple pulled up behind me with a scissor jack and we got it knocked out.
I would have gotten the car jacked up and would've gotten tire off without BUT, I would never in a million years have gotten the spare off if they hadn't been there. It involved a rod with a square end, a tiny hidden hole and a cable. All I can say is thank God they showed up. I'd probably still be there now propped up under a pine, gnawin' on a piece of frozen chicken, throwin' rocks at cars.
There was a Kangaroo station just up the road...I pulled in to get air in the spare and change my britches. They were filthy. Once a gain, my glamorous life on the road had me half-naked in a public restroom.
From Pascagoula to Holly Springs and a lot of in between.
Usually I spend my time in the car turning the dial trying to find Brittany and Pink songs...or searching in vain for the rowdy preacher I once heard in L'usiana. He was givin' a sermon on sess and pawnografry. He got so fired up describing his former wicked ways that he completely lost track of his Amens and Hallalujahs ...
"I read yo Playboys magazeems, AMEEEEEEEEENS...and yo prenthouses Halllujjjhaaaaa!!!"
In South Louisiana I can pick up Catholic radio programs (not too many of those in my neck of the woods) which are interesting...don't usually hear a lot of discussion on transubstantiation...or hear well reasoned arguments against birth control. I spent an hour once listening to a fella explain how the prohibition against birth control was not a ban on casual hanky-panky within marriage.
I heard Hunka Burnin Love twice last week...with a steering wheel in your hand, that's livin'.
I love the radio but, sometimes I need a break from it...I can only turn the dial on With or Without You, Sweet Emotion and Tom Sawyer so many times before wanting to punch it...screaming about a conspiracy to ruin my road trips.
So sometimes I bring CDs...zip into the office here at the house and grab a few off the shelf without much thought. This time I saw a familiar pink cover and sitting on top of it was this....
I don't know how I feel about Captain Beefheart as Captain Beefheart...there are moments of blues brilliance like the above, pure genius and then there's weirdness for the sake of being weird...like I rapped the vegetable satellite with a chocolate covered cue stick...or whatever. It just seems so contrived...or worse desperate to be different. Then there's the voice...I don't know if an intimate familiarity with Howlin' Wolf makes it better or worse...sometimes it sounds like a brilliant reinterpretation. Sometimes it sounds worse than George Thourogood doing One Bourbon One Scotch...
All that's not much of an issue here. Safe as Milk is a transition record and there's plenty of fuzzed out straight up R&B left on it to get past some awkward moments...and its got Ry Cooder.
Fantastic record and it'll have me breakin' out The Make Up by next week...
Hey Don...and Frank...especially you Frank...that's what truely strange imagery sounds like.
but, I couldn't not post this one. I would stop flipping pages on this one...cut it out and find an old frame to put it in. If I quit now my career as a painter would have to be considered an unqualified flash of genius in the history of the universe. If you look close you'll see a bag of chips. I'm almost afraid to attempt another.
'Course, Allan hates it...and that's not speculation. Martha gave it a quick glance and in her best Stepford wife, "Oh is this another one of your masterpieces?" She stopped short of calling me darling but, the glazed look in her eyes said it all. I don't even have to ask Adam...The Sister is more certain now in her suspicions that I've completely lost my mind...and whatever Nat has to say will only make her more sure of her stance on my mental health.
Don't care haters...don't care.
I know it's better than this...
I was gonna be less hateful about Haring but, I been thinking about it today...I just can't get down with his cartoons. I watched the Universe of Kieth Haring this weekend. Obviously his work's not garbage but, I just do not like it. Too deliberate I guess. One of the interviewees talked about artists having a strong hand..."all you have to see is a couple of lines and you know it's Keith." Well yeah...it's the same male cartoon over and over again.
Have any of y'all seen the story boards he did, I guess, as a way of releasing the guilt he felt over racism...even though on the inside he supposedly "never really felt white". You let me know your reaction when you get to the panel of the white man raping the black man. This is what happens in the minds of people who grow up in lily white northern towns when they think about race. Bizarre!
Strong hand maybe but, an identity that in some ways was as weak and foul as stagnant water.
He's from the same scene as Basquiat, the no wave crowd, Fab Five Freddy and them...New York in the early 80's but, I just don't dig it...at all.
Last night The Sister had her little Supper Party...which means I spent most of Friday night and Saturday morning with this....
I was tasked with, ripping cds, finding and arranging songs, burning discs and creating an 80's themed cover for the compilation that we discussed a few weeks back.
Finding the songs was a challenge...these compilations are all the same except for one or two tracks (it's great for the artists...if you want Jukebox (Don't Put Another Dime In The) you're gonna have to buy 867-5309 for the fifth time). Rippin the dodgy discs, which hadn't seen the inside of a jewel case since CD's were packaged in long boxes, wasn't as easy as it should have been. The cover was no problem for a high-stepper...but, listening to The Sister try and decipher the legal consequences of signing up for a free trial on Rhapsody was tedious (as was having to explain to her that stealing, even anonymously in the privacy of your own home, is still stealing). D*&^$# if the song she was trying to track down (Hold Me Now - Thompson Twins) didn't turn out to be on one the discs...those comps are impossible to tell apart.
All that was a chore, but the biggest pain in the butt of all...was finding a place in the sequence for Heat of the Moment by Asia...Seriously? Not only is it a dreadful piece of super-rock trash ...there's just no comfortable place for it between Der Kommisar and Shake it Up. In a move of quiet retaliation, I stuck the German version of 99 Red Balloons on the disc.
Yet despite it all...I managed.
So now you are presented with the sound of woman...who has called me an idiot and a demon, called me a moron in icing, who has told me to kiss her grits and threatened my life all on these very pages...eating crow.
