Not Nuts, A 100 Word Tribute

peanuts came from Mexico
so they tell me, long ago

not on the plant, but underneath

protected by its outer sheath

it matures until its tasty meat

becomes a salty wonderous treat

there are some who like them roasted

some like 'em boiled instead of toasted

doesn't matter how you eat 'em

it sure is hard to try to beat 'em

I've put a plenty in my belly

churned to butter with grape jelly

though I love these little tubers

can't get enough of eating goobers

legumes they be, no ifs or buts

closer to peas they are than nuts

I Just Live Here

A friend of mine just left town, and I mean just left town. She was a little cutie pie, but kind of an attitude. She was a bramaid at the pub, and I hung out with her and her friends quite a bit. She'd been here for about three years, and now she's gone. I'll miss her... For a while...
This town, and the people I know here seem to always be in flux. I think the only person I really know from Austin is my friend Austin, who is in school in Denver right now. Go figure.

James McMurtry, son of Larry McMurtry (author of Lonesome Dove) is an Austin resident, and lives right down from my friend John who runs the pub. (Hows that for continuity) James McMurtry is an acomplished musician and one of his songs has been running through my head today.

I'm not from here
I just live here
grew up somewhere far away
come here thinking I'd never stay long
I'd be going back soon someday

it's been a few years
since I got here
seen 'em come and I've seen 'em go
crowds assemble, they hang out awhile
then they melt away like an early snow

onto some bright future somewhere
down the road to points unknown
sending postcards when they get there
wherever it is they think they're goin'

I'm not from here
I just live here
can't see that it matters much
I read the papers and I watch the nightly news
who's to say I'm out of touch

nobody's from here
most of us just live here
locals long since moved away
sold the played-out farms for parking lots
went off looking for a better way

onto some bright future somewhere
better times on down the road
wonder if they ever got there
wherever it was they thought they'd go

hit my home town
a couple years back
hard to say just how it felt
but it looked like so many towns I might've been through
on my way to somewhere else

I'm not from here
but people tell me
it's not like it used to be
they say I should have been here
back about ten years
before it got ruined by folks like me

we can't help it
we just keep moving
it's been that way since long ago
since the stone age, chasing the great herds
we mostly go where we have to go

onto some bright future somewhere
down the road to points unknown
sending post cards when we get there
wherever it is we think we'll go

Happy Birthday Ma!

This is my mother (on the right) and one of her friends when they were teenagers (I think). Ma didn't grow up with a lot, but she never remembers being without (she says). Grandpa lost most everything in durring the depression, and died pretty young. Grandma lived with her old maid sister, my mother and her 4 sisters and little brother.

She grew up in Murfreesboro, NC and Mapleton, a township of Murfreesboro. She and my Aunt Frances took me to see the falling down old house where they lived in Mapleton when I was little. All I really remember about the trip was we got stuck, pulled out by a tractor and I spilled my bubble stuff in the dirt.

She worked for a while and as a book keeper in Virginia, taking the train back and forth home for the weekend and later for the phone company in Ahoskie.

After Pop came home from the war his father made him go see her in the hospital (appendix? I don't remember), and soon after they started dating.

I suppose that you could say the rest is history...

Come To Past

Speaking of things that were going to happen in a future past, in 1987 (The year I graduated HS) Buck Rogers was launched into space... It seems he was supposed to hook up with hot chicks in tinfoil bikinis to a really bad power ballad.

And lest we forget, on my buddy Doc's birthday in 1999 Moon Base Alpha broke away and drifted out into space.

Oh, the things we should've seen.

Where's my Jetpack MoFo's?

Goin' Ape

The Planet of the Apes was and is one of my favorite movies. I own the box set of DVD's. Everyone remembers the movies, but who remembers the TV series? I watched it religiously when I was 5 and six. One of the coolest things was that the astronauts were going to leave earth on my eleventh birthday. Check out the ship time in the intro.

And of course there were the toys, and the commercials for the toys. I had some planet of the apes toys, but I'm not sure if these were them.

It's amazing the things that we were going to be doing with space travel by 1980.

Let Them Eat Cake

Tomorrow, August 19th is the auspicious occasion of my birth. As fortold by the sages of old, a man would arise and he shall be named K-nine. With the courage of the Irish Wolfhound, the loyalty of an Akita, the strength of the Mastiff and the attention span of a Jack Russell Terrier he shall mark his domain and bark at anything that startles him or seems unusual... or his reflection... or an odd smell... or because he's not getting the attention he wants... or just because...
Alright, enough of that crap. Happy freakin' birthday to me. As I've stated before I will be incommunicado in the am hours. Sometime after lunch I will emerge and eventually show myself at the Paramount Theater on Congress ave. at 3pm for the showing of Seven Samurai. If you are in ATX join us, if not at the movie probably BD Riley's Pub on 6th and Brazos after 5 or so... It's a long movie. If I don't see you 'round here, I'll see you 'round, hear?

Reel Lines (17)

Blake: We're adding a little something to this month's sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody want to see second prize? [Holds up prize] Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired.

You Bet

So, This guy is sitting at work when he hears this voice in his head, "Quit your job, sell your house, go to Vegas"
All day every day, over and over, "Quit your job, sell your house, go to Vegas, Quit your job, sell your house, go to Vegas, Quit your job, sell your house, go to Vegas"
Finally he quits his job, but the voice won't let up, "Sell your house, go to Vegas"
All day and all night, "Sell your house, go to Vegas, Sell your house, go to Vegas, Sell your house, go to Vegas"
So he sells his house and the voice gets louder, "Go to Vegas, Go to Vegas, Go to Vegas"
It's so bad he can barely stand it. He buy tickets and flys to Vegas. Upon landing the voice is calmer but still there. "Go to the Sands, go to the Sands."
Once inside the door the voice says, "Third Roulette table from the door."
Now very confident the voice says, "Put every penny you have on thirteen black."
He places the bet with his entire life savings, the wheel spins, the ball goes round and round.
Finally everything stops and the ball is on 23 red.
The voice says, "FUCK!"

2 days to my birthday.

Long Live The King

Just 3 days before my eighth birthday, I was swinging from the rail of the porch on the clubhouse Pop and his friends built for me. Not a tree house, but an eight by eight one room clubhouse with a rollaway bed a lawnchair and an old endtable.
My youngest sister was in the yard and there were a few other people standing around, but I don't remember who off the top of my head.
Ma came out and told us Elvis was dead. At the time I had no idea why this was a big deal, but I remember just the same.
Since then I've figured out why this was a big deal... The King is dead, long live The King.

Greasy Kid Stuff

I have been feeling a little put upon these past few weeks. Work has been rough, and my personal life's no picnic either. I have been daydreaming about being a little boy in North Carolina a lot lately. Nothing in particular, just random thoughts.

The bench seat in Pop's Chevy truck. Hot sticky blue vinyl seats that smelled of mildew, sweat and stale cigarette smoke. Listening to country music on the am radio in the shade while Pop did something around the garden, yanking the steering wheel side to side pretending to drive.

The smell of mud and dirty water in a farm pond with a beat up rod and reel using beetle spinners to catch bream... and then just throwing them back.

Cut off bluejeans. A style I adopted from the middle brother (14 years my elder) whom I idolized. One year he got us matching football jerseys. His was a 7 mine 19.

Being afraid of the dark. Not the dark per se, but dark nights... Forcing myself to walk further and further away from the porch light and then that giddy feeling of running back to it's safety.

Tromping through the woods, just me and my dog, pushing down old dead trees like Hercules at the temple, and swinging broadswords made of branches like some demented knight errant.

Daisy BB gun. Enough said.

Having my sister-in-law (oldest brother's now ex-wife) drop me off at the movies (Jungle book with a Zorro pre-feature) and after Zorro not realizing that there was another movie, crying because I thought I'd been abandoned. Being ushered back inside (with fresh popcorn) and watching Mowgli and Balu and singing along with King Louie... "I wanna be like youuuuuuu... Walk like you, talk like you..."

Any road trip... "Ma! She's on my side of the car!"

Star Wars in the theater. I was so engrossed in it that I never realized until Ma told me years later that she spent a lot of the movie in the lobby talking to the snack vendor.

Lightning bugs and June bug shells. One year we saw a June bug shedding it's exoskeleton. we stood with a flashlight and watched the whole thing.

Dirt and leaves and sweat and sun and grass and trees and rocks... And being happy without knowing how happy I was.

4 days till my birthday.

Ah Women...

They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent. ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

I never went through that stage as a little boy where girls were icky to me. I was always facinated with the fairer sex... and then just with sex... And back to the women again.

I remember my first crush as clear as a Texas summer sky. I was, I suppose, around six or so and it was kindergarten. I had no idea why, still don't. She was a beautiful little girl, and last I saw her a beautiful young woman, but that was twenty years ago.

I havn't a clue what attracts me to certain women and not to others. I have a picture in my head that I call the ideal (physically anyway) woman.

I've never dated anyone who looked like that. My ex-wife came close, but there were differences... Some bigger than others... (I really didn't mean that to be funny, but it is, isn't it?)

I didn't really date in high school. I was a little bookwormish and weird. By the time I was a senior I was alternately shy and overly agressive (I suppose I am over the shy part of that equation). I did OK as long as I was outside of elements that were familiar enough to make me regress. My first true love came along about this time. Any other time earlier or much later, and that may have ended differently.

When I got out into the real world, I did much better. I had a whole "bad boy" thing going on. Truth is that it was insanity. I had a string of attractive, but amazingly vacant girlfriends. I wasn't very nice to many of them...

Then along came my Ex. Things were never perfect, but things never are. She taught me to think as part of a couple... Tough duty for one such as myself. I loved her more than anything. She very nearly destroyed me for it.

I spent a few years alone since then. I did away with my freewheeling/whoredoggin' days. At night somtimes, when I sit on my back porch, smoking a cigar, sipping a glass of good whiskey listening to music or just the wind and the trains off in the distance, I think about times gone by... Different girls, different times...

Laying on the hood of my '77 Dodge watching a meteor shower with my shoulder touching hers, her blonde hair blowing in my face.

Breaking into the swimming pool at the golf course only to find it empty. Sitting in the deep end howling like dogs, listening to the echoes.

Standing in the ocean, handing her a silver ring with a black onyx stone, only to see her drop it and watch it dissappear beneath the waves. Sleeping in a rubber raft on the porch in the cool breeze that night, unable to move because her long black hair was wrapped around my arm and I would have woken her up.

Looking into her sea green eyes and holding her hand the first time I told her I loved her... And meant it.

I think because of this I can sleep at night. Because of this I'll be OK.

Truth Hurts

It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved. -Niccolo Machiavelli

Reel Lines (16)

Chris: There's a job for six men, watching over a village, south of the border.

O'Reilly: How big's the opposition?

Chris: Thirty guns.

O'Reilly: I admire your notion of fair odds, mister.

Just Because...

Following Instructions

Do not push the red button Please, don`t push it.

Reel Lines (15)

Gisaku: What's the use of worrying about your beard when your head's about to be taken?

Samurai Matinee

Sunday, August the 19th is my birthday. Following my more recent custom of something good for the soul in the morning, and small party in the evening I will be in an undisclosed location till around lunchtime... And then...
At 3pm at the Paramount Theater is a screening of The Seven Samurai, the 1956 Japanese precursor to The Magnificent Seven. It's an incredible black and white action feature. I am inviting all of my friends... and some folks who may not be... to come to the Paramount on Congress Ave, join me in a cocktail or ten and indulge in one of the best movies ever. I'll need volunteers to help me walk to the pub when the movie is over... And someone to pour me in a cab at the end of the night.

What A Character

The Simp-sons... Daa da da tada da ta dadadada... D'oh!

K-nine at the Kwik-E-Mart.

Simpsonize Yourself!

I Hate Cutesy Crap

Be a man...

Damnit.

I feel better now.

Hat Tip to JRB

Reel Lines (14)

Robert Graham: Boy, if I can still raise an arm when we get out of this place, I'm gonna show you just how saturated "I" can get.

Another Paramont feature film... Woo Hooo!