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Here We Go Again (a recap)

3/7/06
Like Porgy Tirebiter before me, I'm beginning to believe that I'm never going to get out of this place.

Anyone can start a website. Between the massively redundant online resources for free server space (complete with free advertising -- such a deal!) and do it yourself design tools, a dog could probably paw together a MySpace page complete with redundant animated gifs of cats being trampled by Arnold Schwartznegger and links to his food dish. Or whatever.

The trick, as has been noted by more than one sage of questionable influence in the past, is to maintain momentum.

Well glory be if I ain't got a bellyful of that. Momentum seems to be what I do best these days. I'm a walking talking posterboy of consistency and perseverance, a law-abiding, mortgage-paying thriftstore model of the Great White American Delirium. My stars, I have a credit rating.

Which condition only descends to a status concomitant with peepee jokes and rude noises if you reflect on my previous history. Frankly, I haven't presented as a successful candidate for anything remotely resembling constancy since I got straight A's in high school and, in honor of four years of gut-spindling effort, was awarded a fabulous faux-plywood commemorative plaque about two inches square equally suitable for hanging over the fireplace or stoking the fire therein. That taught me.

I blew the next few decades ricocheting around the highly-overrated landscape of free willynilly, doing what I fucking well pleased and taking no shame in it. Along the way I fulfilled both of my lifetime ambitions, to become a wandering minstrel and to find my soulmate. It didn't hurt even a little that my soulmate turned out to be a wandering minstrel herself, not to mention a hot black blues chick with a voice as big as all the outdoors we rambled through. We worked together like ham and eggs, like Lewis and Clark, like noneuclidian geometry and general relativity. We strode the earth like tiny tinfoil idols, and tiny tinfoil crowds fell at our feet.

The wild goose was our totem, and we flew. Ye gods, we flew.

In all this unrelenting frivolous revelry it never mattered that I wasn't fulfilling my duty as a productive citizen or building a future or breeding Workforce TNG. I was a child of Da Bomb. I knew that vanity vanity all was vanity in the crosshairs of whatever homicidal moran happened to inhabit the Oval Office or the Kremlin or wherever else fine weapons of mass destruction were dispensed. If life is short and death stands around humming and checking his watch, what else is there to do but rock on? Talkin' 'bout my generation.

All this changed, of course, after my sweetie got served up a great big steaming bowl of the galloping nevergetovers and we landed, through a descending series of short sharp shocks, kneedeep in our present digs in beautiful Chickadee Glen, where the blackberry brambles grow all year round and the sun shines daily on the other side of the clouds. Landlocked. Stuck in the mud. Grounded. Shorn of our wings, we were migratory fowl forever denied our southern nesting grounds, feasting emptily in deserted golf courses of conventionality, dreaming of flight, our wandering days done.

Worse, we couldn't go on being minstrels either. Frank Zappa once asserted, "Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid." His definition of music was more metaphorical than most, but in our case it was literally true. Performing together was a lynchpin of our lives, our marriage -- let's not even go into our budget. The hardest part of staying in one place was not getting to go play music in all the other places we used to.

Don't get me maladroit, I'm not complaining. Okay, I'm complaining, but I'm not resisting. We led the steamroller of history a merry chase over hill and dale, but in the end, like the jugglers say, gravity always wins. And while I hate to admit it, having to hold still has had its benefits. There, I said it. For all my kicking and heehawing, domestically I'm in the best shape of my life. Despite any instincts or impulses to the contrary, there's a lot to be said for a home (even a mortgaged one) and a job (even a sketchy one) and a crazy clown's chalk impression of a normal life. At least I know which side of bed I'm getting up on in the morning.

Still, it's a tad humiliating to have spent the better part of my life (and it was the better part, believe me) avoiding the trippy little trappings, the rusty chains and cryptic combination locks of getalong-goalong society, only to have them heaped upon my quaking body in all their clanking glory just the same. The good burgers of the workaday world can all nod their cosmetically-altered heads in prim satisfaction to see the old wildman, head-down in the traces, the bit embedded in his overly-long teeth, dragging his penitent plow down the long, narrow furrow as the day grows old and shadows crawl from beneath the obdurate stones.

I mean, I'm so stankin' conventional and methodical and persistent that here I am, flogging this dead horse of a website back to Frankensteinian animation, willingly strapping on the old hair shirt one more time for God, country and a better cup of coffee. What the bullflop am I thinking?

Probably not much -- thishere's an art project, bucko, none of your common cornpone e-commerce. It's a private gallery with a target audience of one, and I'm increasingly disdainful of any other uses for it. If I must be a crass commercial hack, I'll do it with music -- live music, spank you very much. Less competition. Apart from band PR, here on the web I'll just have to content myself with spilling my entrails in blessed anonymity.

I'm a big boy. I can take it.


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