TomFlannery.com

Strange days. Strange Christmas.

Rushing out on Christmas Eve for some last minute guy shopping….I pass a dude in a convertible. Top down. T-shirt. Shorts. The only thing keeping him warm was his hipster beard. I can only guess what he was blaring on his stereo, because all my windows were closed and my air-conditioner was on. On my radio was news of snow in Las Vegas. Ho ho ho.

Dinner with extended family that night. Nice restaurant. Things are going reasonable well. Nobody pulled a gun. About an hour in I notice a distinct breeze. Like I’m sitting on a sea-side patio. Patrons were requesting the air be turned on…and said air was blowing directly above my head…..onto the back of my neck and snaking its way down my spine. It was the first time all day I needed a jacket. It finally felt like Christmas. Then the bill came. It really felt like Christmas now.

It’s all over now. The big comedown is upon us. All that’s between us and more than 2 months of cold, dark depression and a really lousy Super Bowl half-time show is a set of New Year’s Eve declarations that will be forgotten as soon as the bowl games are over. Turn off the lights, the party is over. Drag the tree down the steps….or better yet just release it so it slides down the steps on its own. I threw out my back for 3 days dragging the thing up….so it can fend for itself as far as I’m concerned.

What’s ahead is the vast waste-land of 2016. A frozen-tundra of uncertainty that, if political polls are any indication, could very well lead us into a self-made catastrophe brought on by an excessive amount of Jesus, guns, hypocrisy, and stupid. It will also be my daughter’s first year in college, the cost of which I am unable to fathom without hyperventilating. Ho ho ho.

Last night I sat up really late….watching my Xmas present…..the DVD portion of Bruce Springsteen’s “The River” box set. A documentary about the making of the album and a complete 1980 concert. My daughter kept walking in saying…”how long is this?”…..not being familiar with Bruce’s 3+ hour, multi-encore extravaganzas. She does think that Bruce is “kinda hot for an old guy”, and asked me to get some tickets so we could go see him on this tour. To this I laughed….the same kind of laugh I emit when I consider her upcoming college tuition. From what I can tell the price tags are comparable.

Music is the soundtrack to my life. And no music reminds me of growing up more than Springsteen’s. As a teen I devoured his records….and The River….a sprawling double album (ah….the days of double albums…) of dark laments and bar-band rave-ups thrown together as if the two belonged together, which of course they do, was a milestone. It was the first record I’d heard that encompassed the drudgery of the work-week and the false hopes of the weekend. If was the kind of record that you had to dance to to keep from crying. Of course only weirdos like me think this way. Most just bought it because it contained “Hungry Heart”….a huge sounding single that became a concert singalong despite its subject matter (summed up nicely in its opening couplet) being as dark and depressing as anything ever heard on the radio. But still, there were some who listened to “Stolen Car” and “Wreck on the Highway” obsessively, and took from those 3 chord songs (simple…that was so important to those of us still fumbling for chords on the guitar..these songs were simple….so maybe there was a chance…) that maybe….if we thought real hard….we just could stop this rain.

All this is a long-winded way of saying that I probably got drunk to this record more than any other. It was the kind of record that could serve as the soundtrack to an outdoor party…..blaring from a boom-box near the bon-fire. Or could serve as a companion piece to a lonely dark night of the soul. A neat trick that.

I don’t get drunk these days. It’s too much work really. A few beers and my eyelids go into overdrive. I miss being young. I miss looking forward to nothing more than music and bon-fires and quarter kegs and dreams we didn’t know at the time that kids from NEPA mining towns weren’t allowed to have. “Is a dream a lie it it don’t come true, or is it something worse”. What difference does it make? Sucks either way.

And so enough of all that. The important thing is that everything doesn’t die…..and that’s a fact. The music lasts forever. And maybe….just maybe….that’s enough sometimes. Last night….as I sat up alone….for about 4 hours…it was indeed.

In a bit..

–tf

I have friends who live in Europe. Lately they’ve been asking me only one thing. “What the fuck is wrong with you people over there? What are you gonna propose next? Easy-bake ovens?”

I don’t have much of an answer really. I stutter and mumble and write sentences and then delete them…because they sound so inane. All I can do is assure my European friends that we’re not all racist nazi assholes. And then I turn on the TV and it’s wall to wall coverage of racist nazi assholes waving American flags….so I can’t really blame any outsider for thinking that our nation is in the middle of a long night of the long knives.

I used to think that the dangerous mainstream haters existed only in the past. My generation has been oh-so smug…knowing that Hitler and Stalin and Japanese internment camps and Joe McCarthy walked the earth before we were born. When we arrived our cleansed souls dealt with the most extreme fuckwits….banishing the true haters to the fringes of the Westboro Baptist Church and the trailer parks of the Klan Klaverns, where they provide comic relief. We might have to put up with the occasional Dick Cheney or Antonin Scalia, but even that was more like a cautionary tale. If we let our guard down long enough snakes could slither under the door. Clearly nobody ever takes the comic-book hate of these two fools seriously enough to become inspired. Unless you are…..you know….mentally disabled and stuff. Even Cheney’s own daughter thinks he’s an asshole. So we’re cool. Right?

Well…

This Trump fella. It’s certainly looking like he is going to be the Republican nominee for President of the United States. The more unhinged he and his rhetoric becomes, the more his poll number rise. In the beginning it was good for a laugh. Watch the goobers gather and hold anti-Obama signs filled with misspelled words and wildly inventive grammar. Watch the poor angry white people congregate to pledge to vote against their own interests because Jesus loves them best and doesn’t like the brown fella who never took anybody’s guns away but was gonna take their guns away anyway because…well….just because. Plus Hillary is a bitch.

And then I started hearing it. From people who could spell and didn’t have grammar issues and really had no reason to be angry. “Hey…that Trump…he speaks his mind doesn’t he?”

Um…well….ok. But I know lots of people who “speak their mind”. So do you. How many of them are fit to be the leader of the free world?

I mean….I like drinking with them and stuff, don’t get me wrong. They are entertaining and usually good for a few rounds at least. But the novelty wears off the first time somebody punches them in the face and you have to step in to keep them alive.

I have Republican friends. You probably do too. They are easy to spot these days. Half of them are squirming in acute embarrassment, and the other half are acting like rabid dogs who smell a fresh steak on the other side of a mine field. It’s an uneasy truce to say the least. Like Philadelphia Eagle fans dealing with Chip Kelly.

Watching the so-called “establishment” Republican candidates deal with Trump is like having a front row seat to the circus. All of them are navigating the 24-hour news cycle like infants holding in a huge shit. To their credit, some have mildly repudiated Trump’s latest nugget……banning all Muslims from entering the United States…although others, like Ted Cruz, just seem relieved that Trump didn’t suggest banning Cubans.

So yea….Trump wants to ban all Muslims from entering the United States. No word on how he plans on dealing with the Muslims already in the United States. Maybe he can trick them all into attending the Rose Bowl?

For those about to rock, I salute you. And for those who thought that this sort of knuckle-dragging went out with George Wallace and Bull Connor and Richard Nixon after half a bottle of scotch…..I ask that you visit Fox News on the web and randomly read through the user comments.

Make no mistake. The world is laughing at us. Sometimes it’s a guffaw and sometimes it’s one of those uneasy laughs that comes from a combination of absurdity and fear because the absurdity part seems lost on a lot of us. But the result is the same. A man who could very well become the next President of the United States just co-oped an idea from Adolf Hitler.

And in doing so got a bounce in the polls.

America. 2015.

Our generation can no longer afford to be smug.

In a bit..

–tf

I’ve been thinking a lot about music. Why I listen to what I listen to and write what I write and hate what I hate and don’t trust what I don’t trust.

And to quote my guru….”remembering distant memories and recalling other names…”

That first Beatles record. Records plural, actually. It was the Red and the Blue double albums. I was about 10 and must have been a very good boy because Santa left ’em both under the tree. That year I had a bad flu and Christmas morning found me lying on the couch, delirious with fever….alternating between chattering teeth and sweat-soaked blankets. You know the drill. Somehow I rose from the dead and put “Paperback Writer” on the living room stereo, and my fever broke.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Music could raise the dead. It was a lesson I’ve never forgotten.

There was something about those Brits though. Beatles. Stones. Kinks. Who. Faces. Glorious noise and great accents. If you didn’t have a cockney accent rock magazines banished you to 1 star oblivion. Like every other shot-and-a-beer teen I had my Rolling Stones phase (learned that 5 string open G tuning Keith used and felt like the cock of the walk) and my Led Zeppelin phase. By that time I’d heard the tale of blues-men selling their soul to the devil….and one look at Jimmy Page in “The Song Remains the Same” convinced me that he was probably the guy with the clip-board. Whip-thin, eyes heavily lidded…dressed like a Star-Trek villain…he looked preposterous. But you couldn’t take your eyes off him. He was such a force that nobody ever held him accountable for “Dazed and Confused”…..which is extraordinary when you think about it but…well….whatever. Robert Plant was the original Derek Smalls passing through the airport scanner with a vegetable down his pants…and nobody ever held him accountable for that either because there was no such thing as airport security in them days. Such were the strange days of the 1970s.

Strange Days indeed. I read that hilarious Jim Morrison book when I was in 8th grade and swallowed every word of it, even the part about him being part god, part misunderstood Rimbaud. I tried in vain to find one of those long, loose white shirts with the shoelace threaded through the neck…..although I drew the line at the leather pants…not willing to take punches in the face for my new flame. It wasn’t until I actually bought the album “American Prayer”, in which a drunken Lizard King recites what sounds like random pages from the dictionary that my love for the Doors passed from Morrison to how fucking good and unique his band was. Manzarek and Kreiger are the only reason I can still listen to the Doors now. Morrison reminds me too much of how fat Val Kilmer got. It’s depressing.

I spent the summer of my 16th year devouring the Who and Pete Townshend…a love affair that has hit some black ice (“It’s Hard” anyone?) but has never died. “Quadrophenia” was my first Who record….and still remains an endless source of fascination all these years later, mostly because it reminds me of what it felt like to be a teenager, a topic which remains an endless source of fascination for a man rubbing up against the inner thigh of 50. Townshend was the first person who made me want to play the guitar….or at the very least stand in front of a mirror and pretend to play the guitar. Until such funding could be caged, however, a tennis racket would have to do. I never truly learned how to play “The Real Me” until a few years ago, but you’d never know it if you saw what I saw in that mirror all those years ago. Rock and roll never forgets, and neither do I.

One of the all time great rock songs is barely 2 minutes long and is about not knowing to say. “Can’t Explain” is sorta what all songwriters are up again. We have no idea why we feel this way…..but are forever attempt to articulate it anyway. If we can’t find the words we reach for the melody. And if that doesn’t quite do it we can always turn it up to 11 and hope for the best. When I was in college I heard this band called REM, and they took articulation to places it had never been before. I can still listen to “Sitting Still” and “Carnival of Sorts” and dance to their stuttering melodies and sing along to words that nobody really knows because they are utterly intelligible. But it didn’t matter. “Murmur” and “Reckoning” and “Chronic Town” changed lives. I know this because they changed mine. REM were as good a rock and roll band as our nation ever produced….and I shudder to think what synthesizers and the huge drum sound of the 80s would have done to my brain-stem without their musical antidote.

And then Cobain blew up the world with those 4 chords and all the pretenders grabbed their hair-spray and ran screaming from the room. Pretty heady stuff for a mixed up kid from a dead town who never believed a word of what all these strange people were saying about him.

He was listening to REM when he died. Trying to decipher rock and roll.

In a bit..

–tf

I’ve reached that age. It’s not a number, more like a feeling. It’s called “old”….and it creeps up on you. Things hurt you didn’t even know you had. The nights are shorter and the days are longer and the couch beckons the way a long-legged cheerleader sitting alone at the back of the bus used to. Most things you used to do you can’t do anymore. Those you can do….take a lot longer….and if they take too long you wonder why they were so fucking important in the first place. I’m way smarter than I used to be, but I don’t have the energy to mobilize my brain-power. In other words, I’m asleep by the time the 3rd quarter of Monday Night Football starts and need 2 days to recover if I stay out past midnight….which I rarely do of course, because I’m old.

But I sometimes do…and it’s because I still play music. Music is the only thing that makes an old person feel not so old. If it’s 1am and I’m singing “Won’t Get Fooled Again” in a smokey bar filled with empty chairs and a handful of people who know the words and aren’t shy about sharing…..I get a second wind that even drugs can’t touch, and I should know because….well….never mind. That was a long time ago….when I was young and stupid and happier than I am now but I was happier probably because I was stupid. Yea, that must have been it.

I spent the last few hours playing music with another old guy….whose identity I’ll protect because he probably doesn’t want you to know that he’s even older than me. We sat knee to knee and sang songs and tossed ideas back and forth and said “yea, that works”, or “no…that don’t move me” and tried to make things right with the world for 3 minutes at a time. We spoke of Levon Helm and eating pizza with Van Morrison and having Dylan peer over your shoulder and why it’s perfectly normal that the same guy who wrote “Jungleland” also wrote “Crush On You” and was proud of both……and we spoke of making movies and rum commercials and writing plays and having daughters and being blown away when others are as passionate about their craft as we are about ours…..which in turn means we give our shit away for free when we should probably ask for at least beer money….but no matter. It’s only rock and roll and we like it even though we’re broke as shit.

And then it was time to go home and feel old again because nothing this good lasts forever.

On my way home I had the music blaring so loud that I lost track of the fact that I was merging into a single lane construction zone….blowing past a yield sign and nearly getting flattened by a meth-fueled 18 wheeler in the process…piloted by a driver who clearly did not understand or much care that my muse was working overtime…and that singing along with Richard Manuel to “King Harvest” was way more important to me at the time than not being killed. At least that’s how I took the long, hideous blast of his wretched horn. Perhaps he meant something else by it, but I doubt it.

Probably an old bastard in the cab. Can’t you just spot them a mile away? I sang these lines tonight. “I don’t wanna grow old / rather run out of time…” and now I know why I wrote them in the first place.

And so it goes. The things that make me feel old work on me like a masseuse, so maybe the music gods try to even the odds a bit by granting me a few hours with a kindred spirit.

In a world gone mad we’re all keen to find a temporary oasis….and if you can bring your guitar with you so much the better. When the world comes crashing down I’d much rather be found playing a loud A chord than worrying about the ecumenical details….because any angels worth believing in would never turn their backs on a dude banging out an A chord. This I know to be true because I’ve been praying to Pete Townshend since I was 16 and the fucker always answers me.

I’ll keep chasing these shadows across the borderline, because it makes me feel less old. And that beats shit out of being old.

Thus endeth the lesson.

In a bit..

–tf

I don’t know what to say but feel the urge to say something….anything….so I can at least look back on today and have a record of what was going through my head.

We’re no longer shocked I don’t think. The world we live in no longer has that power over us. Instead we kinda live in a perpetual holding pattern, hoping that what we all know is going to happen, at the very least, doesn’t happen today.

Today it happened. I watched the body count grow higher every hour. As I type these words the reported number of dead in Paris is “more than 150”. Are we to say….”well….at least it wasn’t 3000?” Is that how we measure victories in times such as these?

So what can we offer? Prayers? Please. If there’s one thing we don’t need it’s fucking prayers. The assorted invisible men in the sky we’re praying too are the same ones in whose name warped fanatics kill. If prayers are all we can offer….this war is lost. If organized religion isn’t the root of all evil, it sure as shit is the root of most of it. Virgins armed with automatic rifles are bad enough. When they think they’re gonna be ravished by multiple virgins after they blow themselves up, well….that’s a special kind of anti-social. The next person who offers “thoughts and prayers” to Paris should never be invited to another dinner-party. Ever. It’s pissing on a forest fire and calling yourself a fireman.

I had a gig tonight. I didn’t want to go. That last thing in the world I felt like doing was playing music. I wanted to stay home and huddle with my family. I wanted to hold them and watch them sleep. I wanted to barricade myself and not venture out into the wild blue yonder.

But the show must go on and all that. When you have a gig booked, you play. I was fortunate that the gig was a duo show with Joe “Wiggy” Wegleski…a musical soul brother who happens to be one of my closest friends. We talked a little bit about what was happening as we set up. We were both shocked. Saddened. Pissed off. Confused. But what can 2 poor boys do? So we played our asses off for 3 hours. It was a decent crowd. Good folk. Nobody fucking shot anybody over the ecumenical details. A few even danced in front of us. They drank beer and sang along and yelled out requests and when it was over said “you guys were great”….and we said thank you and meant it. I drove home listening to music in the car…loudly….and as soon as I got into the house I checked on my wife and kids. Safe and sound. Sleeping. I poured myself a beer and nursed it. I checked the clock. Late. But I can’t sleep. Not now. After a gig you need to wind down. Your ass may be dragging in the hours leading up to it, but when it’s over the second wind has doubled. It’ll be a while. That’s why I’m doing this now.

I feel older than I used to. That sounds funny and all that, but I didn’t used to feel old at all. I look at myself in the mirror and sometimes I hardly recognize the gaze. My eyes seem hazy. Confused. Like they’d rather not be subjected to what they’re forced to see.

The shouters are out in full force now. They’ve got all the answers. The lower your IQ the easier things are to fix. Who says being a fucking moron is detrimental? I’ve been cursed with what I take to be somewhat average intelligence….along with the ability to feel the pain of others. Empathy is the word. The lack of it is, for some, is the best definition of evil ever devised.

I presume this is the work of ISIS. Fuck ISIS. Fuck any religious zealot. If you want to fuck a virgin, buy her roses and tell her you love her and make sure she believes you. Then hold her hand and promise to love and honor and protect her….and love and honor and protect her. Trust me son. You’ll be in and it’ll be magical. There ain’t no short cuts. Patience is always rewarded.

I want to sleep and wake up tomorrow and find out that these “more than 150” people are still alive.

In other words…I want to dream.

In a bit..

–tf

Sometimes you sit down with the guitar….or face the piano keys….and the music flows.

Sometimes you sit with pad and pen….and the words flow.

As a songwriter, both of these things have to happen at the same time. And therein lies the rub. Because they rarely do.

Make no mistake. You CAN force it. If you paid me to write songs……I could make a fortune. If you paid me to write good songs….I might have to live on Mac and Cheese and Pabst Blue Ribbon…..but still that would be preferable to actually working for a living, which is what I’m forced to do now.

Come to think of it, even with a real job Mac and Cheese and PBRs are never far away. So what gives? Well…a “real job” guarantees that I don’t have to charge them. I have to charge just about everything else, but still. Living the American Dream and all that. That’s me.

Songwriting feels like work when you’re doing it, but when you do it right and look back on it you realize you were having the time of your life. That’s the power of music.

Real work feels like work and when you look back on it you wonder how you hell you ever got through it. Which is why so many of us sit at our desks with headphones on listening to music.

See how it all fits together?

You’re welcome.

In a bit..

–tf

Got To Be the Change
Old Chairs
Do You Wanna Be My Friend?
Got To Be a Better Home Than ‘Round Here
I Wish I Wasn’t Missing You
Wishing On a Train

all songs written by Tom Flannery
recorded live on 9/29/2015 at the Home Office in Archbald, PA
Tom Flannery – guitar, vocals *
* I didn’t use a pick and sang in a near whisper so I didn’t wake my family….which is the definition of rock and roll when you are 49 years old…

for Angela and Martin

…or Stream Below

It’s fall again. Finally. I’ve broken out the flannels and the extra-large sweater that my dog always uses as a chew-toy (doesn’t stop me from wearing it….she only gnaws on the wrists…). The awning guys came and took the shades down. The trees are yearning to turn….and on cloudless days the sky is so blue it almost hurts to look at it. Football is back. Notre Dame and the Steelers are just good enough to keep me hoping but probably not good enough to make me any money. Stores are hawking pumpkin flavored just-about-everything. The bars are open on Sundays (well….the ones with the NFL ticket anyway) so a day of rest can finally be shared with a pint and some yelling at various TV screens with other communicants. I get screamed at every week by my fantasy football brethren for leaving guys in my lineup who aren’t active.

It’s getting darker earlier. The live music is moving from the patios back inside. The summer tans are fading. We’re starting to look like ourselves again. Sometimes that’s a good thing.

Work settles a bit. Routines are hardened. The kids are back in school. The buses are running. We start to look forward to different types of things. Hot coffee on the back porch over cold drinks at the shore. We prep for October baseball by finally paying attention to baseball pennant races. You mean the Astros are in first place? What the hell?

Homework takes over the kitchen table. School clothes dominate the wash. The grass stops growing. So we ponder….should I give it one more going over with the mower? Or shall I save it for the spring? Decisions decisions. The leaves you took for granted in the trees now flutter to the ground. Leaves are one of the few things that look better when they are officially discarded by their maker.

Summer might be a few months of stronger light bulbs, but the fall is more illuminating. Every day is a new painting on a new canvas. Simple things like driving to work can leave you in wonder….like browsing an art gallery with no one behind you.

I miss people I’ve lost more in the fall. I don’t know why this is. It just is. Summer is too fast. Too frenetic. Too much pressure. “You better have fun or else….” Well…no. I have this book, this iced tea….and this chair. We can speak again in 5 or 6 hours if you’d like. If not, that would be good too…

So yea, if you’re gonna be misunderstood, it’s gonna happen in the summer. I don’t trust people who pine for summer to come and then won’t let go of it. These are people who never go to the movies by themselves, lest somebody make fun of them (“on a sunny day like this? are you crazy? I’m not spending it inside….”).

I don’t completely trust anybody who has never gone to the movies alone.

Less explaining is required in the fall. Less justification. We roam freer. And we slow down, breathe deep, button up, and sometimes even smile.

And who ain’t for that?

In a bit..

–tf

My friend Mike Lambert passed away last night. Musicians in NEPA are a pretty tight lot. Everybody knows everybody. Everybody supports everybody else. But I don’t think I’ll get an argument in saying that nobody was more supportive than Mike Lambert. And nobody had more friends.

Mike was one of those rare people who went eye-to-eye with you. If you were talking with him, you were the only person in the room. He wasn’t pretending. He genuinely gave a shit. And this is why today so many people aren’t just saying, “I knew Mike Lambert”. They’re saying “I was friends with Mike Lambert.” The difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

Because in allowing us to make that connection, he gave us a glimpse into how special he was. (He’d probably look at me over the top of his Lennon glasses like I was nuts if I told him that, which is probably why I never did.)

A monster talent it goes without saying. He could make 6 strings cry or scream, depending on his mood or the size of his amp. He could play just about anything. When most folks think about the Allman Brothers they think Greg or Duane. But cats in NEPA think “Lamdog”. He’s been gracing NEPA stages since before anybody knew who U2 or REM were….and nailing Peter Buck’s and Edge’s guitar parts the whole time. You remember The Bratz? Of course you do. Because you danced to them. And drank to them. And rolled home with their volume in your ears. And told your friends…”you’ve got to see this band…” If they weren’t the best they’ll surely do until somebody tells me who the best was.

He knew when to play, and he knew when not to play. He had taste, in other words. Of course you could learn from listening…..but for me it was even better to watch. He was, to quote the great Fairport Convention song “Come All Ye”…..the ” possessor of the magic touch…”

We talked about making a record together. He recorded a song of mine called “Old Chairs”, a performance I treasure. He’d send me text messages asking me when I was gonna write another song for him and I’d tell him…”it’s coming man…I got one coming..”

I waited too long.

A lot of us feel shitty tonight. My hands started shaking when I got the news…..and carrying on at work today was impossible. So I bailed and sat in my car for about an hour….then took an extra long way home. I played the Allman’s “Jessica” in the car to keep me company. The song seems sacred now. It made me feel better. Music always does.

Regrets? Hell yea. That’s normal. I don’t think many of us did for Mike what he did for us. And that’s not really a knock on us, but sorta lights up the fact that the rascal set the friendship bar pretty fucking high. And oh what I wouldn’t give for a do-over about now.

But to me the mark of a true friendship is being able to say…”I’m a better person for knowing Mike Lambert”. Shit, that’s easy. I sure as hell am. And I think I can speak for my fellow NEPA musician brothers and sisters in saying that you are too. Mike Lambert didn’t just say hello. He said….”How the hell are you?….and actually waited for the answer. He didn’t just shake your hand and walk away….he hugged you and told you how great it was to see you. And when he got up and played he damn near made you cry.

Cliches are cliches because they are mostly true. So when I say don’t wait until tomorrow to do what you can do today, I fucking mean it. Because there’s no guarantees. If you want to hug someone stand up and hug them. If you want to know how somebody is doing, walk over and ask them. If you’re wondering how to play that lick in “Little Martha”, ask the guy who’s up there playing it flawlessly before he packs up and leaves.

Because if you miss out, it hurts like hell.

There’s a few lines from “Old Chairs” that seem so suddenly sad now..

How many hearts come here to live
how many beggars come here to give
from what I can see
trying to separate me…from you
take me away from you

Old chairs pass through hands
making other plans
generations on the wall
high wire act for one and all
’round here

Good night Michael. Thank you for everything…

–tf

There are days. Damn. There are DAYS.

There are days worth remembering. The kind of days you’ll conjure up with a grandkid on the knee. You’ll say…..”I’ll never forget the day…let me tell you all about it…”

And the kid will look at you, and probably wonder what the big deal was. “Two people who love each other getting married. You mean….that wasn’t allowed? Wow….how old ARE you anyway Grandpa?”

Strange days mister. Strange days.

The last time I felt this way was when a black man was made President of the United States, less than a life-span from the time when he wasn’t allowed to order a cup of coffee at certain lunch counters or piss in certain urinals.

I sat there watching that inauguration in 2008, and I cried. I watched it alone. One of the reasons it was so monumental was because, to my kids, it wasn’t monumental at all.

Progress. We move. Sometimes at the pace of a glacier. But we move. Sometimes the right stuff is buried in a piece of rock…and it takes the patience and skill of a sculptor to hammer it out into something recognizable. Something that contains all the colors of the rainbow.

My kids don’t understand baby-boomer bigotry either. Or the kind cloaked in Bible-speak that has been around ever longer. They’ve known gays their whole life. They are friends with them. They are related to them. They don’t give a fiddler’s fart, and it’s the type of not giving a fiddler’s fart that we can all learn from. It’s glorious apathy. And, I might add, democratic as hell. Kids don’t hate by instinct. Only grown-ups do that.

But kids know this is special. They KNOW. This one touches them. This is the parting of the red-sea. They’re not about to CONGRATULATE anyone, least of all 5 near-octogenarians dressed in robes, for doing what should not have been necessary in the first place. Making love legal. But they can exhale and say…”well…at least the grown-ups FIXED something for a change.”

And yea, America is used to leading, or at least used to bragging about leading. In this case we dragged ass. The Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, South Africa, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, Iceland, Argentina, Denmark, France, Brazil, Uruguay, New Zealand, Britain, Luxembourg, Finland, Ireland, all of them beat us like a gong here….but…well….once we were blind and now we see.

Or at least some of us do. The rest are like that asshole who insists on wearing sunglasses indoors.

It’s absurd, on the face of it. And underneath the face too. That it HAD to come to this. But we’re a broken nation, living on fault lines manufactured by past haters and kept in working order by present ones. Hate drives us apart for sure, but it also brings us together, which is one of the reasons it’s so easy to fall into its ditch. So you’re some social misfit sitting in your basement on the weekends with your joy-stick in your hands? You know what….that’s probably somebody’s FAULT. And the only thing easier than finding somebody to hate is finding somebody to hate with.

Those who hate the most always seem to be the most “god fearing”. In the US nobody hates with more white-hot intensity than a lower to middle class white Christian egged on by a way upper-class white Christian. I don’t know why this is so. I stopped believing in an invisible man in the sky when I realized the Easter Bunny was a hoax, so those who think the lesbians across the street signify the end of America are a source of endless wonder to me…sort of like talking to a 50 year old who is afraid of short changing the tooth fairy. I do know that nothing divides us more than religion….and that all of the major ones seem equally intolerant, especially of each other. Talk about a crap shoot. There’s too much pressure choosing your god these days. You think people fucking hate you for loving the Dallas Cowboys? Try drawing a picture of Muhammad on the wall. Then wear a turtleneck.

And really, can you imagine Jesus coming back today? A socialist dark-skinned Jew who trashes capitalism and befriends the poor, lepers, the IRS, and whores? Poor wretch would be tasered in about 15 seconds. If he showed up in Texas he wouldn’t last that long.

(I wonder how long it would take Hannity or O’Reily to cut off his mic?)

But I digress. Because digression is fun sometimes.

Until this sort of mindless ideological jabbering goes the way of the statue of Baal and Tim Tebow….days like today will continue to be necessary.

But still, what a day.

Hug who you want. Kiss who you want. Love who you want. Drink yourself stinky tonight. And sleep in tomorrow.

But then come back. Because there’s so much left to do. Hate is nothing if not resilient.

Reptiles like Antonin Scalia (today his legacy as the Roger B. Taney of our time was, with his hilariously unhinged dissent, cemented in stone) are still out there….but they are a necessary evil, for they give a face to the abyss they represent.

And he is one ugly motherfucker.

In a bit..

–tf