It's fun catching up with tunes on Bandcamp by guys and gals I don't get to see much anymore. Last I saw Barry was at a BJ and The Tanks gig in the basement venue Shady Pines on West 11th in Eugene. They played "Give Me Back My Bullets." I love the way this record turns from porch recordings to ambient soundscapes and even mutated country gold. It keeps my attention in a way a whole record of any one of these vibes might not, and the songs are good.
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I've circled back to a moment in my life many times, when I was riding in the car with my mom on 291 Hiway by the TG & Y in Liberty. I was older than 4 but younger than 6, I think, and I had been reading books about planets and stars, and I knew intuitively that our car was equal to or interdependent with or not that different from Saturn or a red dwarf star or a galaxy a trillion light years away. I had a big imagination and imagined my Mom and me flying through space in the Impala station wagon, and I reckoned that wasn't really any different than tooling down 291 on errands. I didn't have any sense that God made the car, or that the car was necessarily ordained as a standard psychic attachment point of consensual reality. LIKE A ROCK.
I guess I saw consensual reality and cosmic reality as one thing and then I probably wanted to go to DQ and get a fish sandwich and a cherry mister misty, and wasn't thinking along those lines any more. But I've always come back to that moment as a time I could have gone a number of ways: the dude on the corner talking to a baby doll head was one possible outcome, I guess. You can't see through culture too much, you have to participate, it's like clothing or insulation in a house.
When you call entire countries and cultures "shit-holes" it's such a small, ugly point of view. The complex mysteries of creation and the possibility we can do good things with it are more on my mind than a loudmouthed jerk engaging racists to maintain a burnt-out political party's cynical coalition. Working the margins with attention-seeking blurts between rounds of golf, to maintain a statistical edge.
Jeff Flake moral call-out in 3-2-1...then let's deregulate some banks. It's like a high school basketball team executing a crisp, effective give-and-go. Nothing NCAA or NBA about it.
So there I was, riding in the car with my mom, thinking trippy thoughts that other folks probably have on acid freakouts: we woke up here and we're not exactly sure why and it's scary and wonderful and interconnected and it's a miracle and you got to bring home the bacon and we should do our best and it's fun to ride around town and hang out with Mom. The true "shit-hole" in this news cycle is the cynical, ugly mind of the guy talking.
