I just did that one of those things I try not to do. I put on some music from my childhood.
This will be a late drunken night, followed by dreams of livestock.
You have no idea how much I hate dreaming about cattle. On those rare occasions when I hit the sack while sober, I have terrible dreams but the worst are the ones about cattle. Those are the only nightmares I have that come in smell-o-vision.
No bestiality jokes in the comments, please. Shoveling that much shit over that many years was traumatizing enough, thank you. The only solace I had was the fact that playing the Vanilla Fudge on my portable 8-track player bothered my Dad almost as much as shoveling shit bothered me.
My rules for living are pretty simple but to this day one of them is, if you breathe with your mouth open, you shouldn’t be able to taste the air.
UPDATE: Well, this was unexpected. In between the memories of shoveling shit, driving tractors and fighting with my brothers, I had a sudden revelation about Team Hillary.
[drumroll please — I'm drunk and entitled to courtesies]
Hillary Clinton lost in ‘08 for the same reasons that Ted Kennedy lost in ‘80: overconfidence and a failure to recognize the strength of the opposition. The more I think back to that campaign, the more parallels I see: old hands fighting with one another, too many voices speaking for the candidate, and a candidate unwilling to provide the necessary leadership to straighten out the mess within their own campaign organization.
The only difference is that Teddy knew immediately that he was licked, and transformed his campaign into a forum on what it means to be an American liberal. Clinton, otoh, kept running like she thought she could still win long after Super Tuesday made that math impossible.
When you’re bigger than life, you don’t get to lose. Every state is a referendum, and you have to pass all their tests.
And before I finish passing out at my keyboard, I’d like to say that Great Divide’s Hercules Double IPA has to be stronger than just 9.1%.
[belch]
Shit, now I’m thinking about cattle again.
I really need to put on some different music.
UPDATE: Clearly my biggest mistake was not turning off the music (the first runner up being my decision to open the Maharaja Imperial I.P.A. right away, instead of slowing down with the stray Furious hiding in the back of the fridge — 6% vs. 11% is not a casual argument, especially after months of beer fasting). Stoked instead of merely fueled, I stayed with the Fudge — right through Season of the Witch, which I am now, again, convinced is the greatest song known to humankind.
An eye-opener for the kids, at least.
So yes, I ripped a copy and uploaded it to my old server (a tacky thing to do as I’m no longer paying for it — sorry James!) so you can click (just once!) to listen to the world’s greatest song ever (per my 1968 high school sophomore self who, god help us, walks among us tonight).
One bad thing, however. The CD has some songs that weren’t on my vinyl copy from back in the ’60s. I’d never heard Vanilla Fudge’s cover of The Look of Love before, and god willing, I never will again. And for those of you who are suddenly tripping down memory lane, here’s the antidote (again, sorry about the bandwidth James).
UPDATE: Like I said, this one’s going late, and you’re the beneficiary of that. If I didn’t know that the Stones covered Gimme Shelter, then I’m betting you haven’t heard Texas psychedelic band Josefus’ original version either.
Better, imho, but that may just reflect the place I’m in tonight.
LASTUPDATEIPROMISE: Not to get too Joycean (or Drostian), but:
If I should die at any time in the next six months or so, Xerox this and pass it out at my funeral. I suspect it sums up my existence in a way that poetry could never hope to capture. My life has been lived through a prism of bad ’60s psychedelic music, and no, the humor was never intentional.
Ditto the cattle.
Fucking cattle.
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Did you ever eat “lambs quarters”. That is what my aunt called a weed that grew on the manure pile, which she was quite fond of. I do not eat any sort of greens or beets to this day, because you never know. (Swiss Chard – another manure growing special on the farm.)
Although I do eat steak and hamburger. Sorry Elsie. All right, I’m a hypocrite, and I drink milk too. But only skim. None of that unpasturized crap for me.
Some plants grow well on a diet of shit, but my Dad’s favorite story is about the time his German neighbors brought over some asparagus. As with everything else in their garden, they’d fertilized the asparagus bed with manure. Asparagus, as my Dad and Grandparents quickly found out, picks up the flavor of manure quite handily. Dad says it was the only time he remembered his folks ever throwing food away.
“If I didn’t know that the Stones covered Gimme Shelter, then I’m betting you haven’t heard Texas psychedelic band Josefus’ original version either.”
According to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimme_Shelter
Tthe Stones get credit for the song. The line above gives the impression that Josefus wrote it, due to the words “covered” and “original”.
Seems to me the writing in this blog is similarly fertilized in BS, since the “flavors” reveal their origins.
http://www.instantrimshot.com/
Time for a beer. I don’t work until Tuesday.
Moo.