Good Wolves (Slight Return)

Good Wolves (Slight Return)

OK, here's that post from yesterday again:

A GREAT day with Katie today, following a very good day with the band. And a good week for that matter.

I was reminded on my first two days of teaching guitar out of a store in five years (Wednesday and Thursday) of the day I walked out of the theater with Sheryl after watching Jack Black in School Of Rock. I turned to her and said, "I am the lamest fucking guitar teacher on the planet." The kids I'm teching now have SEEN that movie. I have some catching up to do.

I got my oil changed Saturday and drove the short distance to my new insurance agent, who I found Tuesday. A VERY cool husband and wife team. The wife is my "real" agent, but her husband is the coolest hippie insurance guy around. He turns 57 on Tuesday. We exchanged some interesting road stories and philosophies (how often does an insurance salesman tell you that "life is like a stream, catch a leaf and float on?"? and he turned me onto a few potentially interesting (and well-paying gigs) for the band. I have two promo packs to pass out this week.

The gig was fun. Not a killer, but the best in a while. The time flew by. My hands are feeling it, but I got through and there was little to complain about, except for my throat being a bit ragged, possibly the reason Mark didn't call on me to do a song by myself. I have Just Like A Woman down to a T now, along with Lay Lady Lay and Here Comes The Sun. I can pull two dozen more out of my ass if I have to, but those three were down and ready to go. Oh well, maybe next time.

I did enjoy singing the harmony on Jumping Jack Flash. I don't know why I get off on that song so much, but my weenus gets erect every time we do it, and I love the way my voice mixes with Mark's on that. Usually the guitarist is singing backup too, but not on this one. It's a nice feeling.

Got home at 2:30AM, still wired, and was out the door at 8AM for Cincy. I somehow got through the day fine, but I'll need to pace myself for a while. I've got a LOT of shit going on for the next couple months at least. It's a good thing, but it's tiring just to think about. Beats the fuck out of doing nothing, though. Been there.

Katie looked beautiful today. In my favorite dress of hers, with newly cut hair (just a basic trim, bot it really looked great) and even some lipstick. A four-year old. I told her that she does NOT need makeup to be the most beautiful little girl I know, but it is very cool that she's experimenting with it anyway. Let her have her fun. She's so cool.

On the way to the children's museum in Dayton, she told me about the wolves in the trees on the side of the road we were driving on. "They are killers. They kill people."

Uh...WHAT???

"But look! They decided to be nice! They're friendly wolves now! They want to be our friends! They'll never kill anyone again."

I was both weirded out and touched at once.

She spent the rest of the drive to Dayton petting invisible wolves (two of them strapped into her carseat on either side of her) and telling me how fast they were growing up to be big mommy and daddy wolves to have little baby wolves of their own. What a cool (if slightly warped, and I'm all for that) child I have.

We were at the museum for over three hours and she spent a third of that time playing with a little girl named Taylor, whose grandpa had her for the day. They even held hands as the went from place to place, sometimes Katie would have her hand on Taylor's back as she led her along. It was like they were best friends, and they only knew each other for that hour. Katie can be very shy, but she gets over it VERY quickly with the right person. It broke my heart to have to tell her it was time to go and say goodbye (in all likelihood forever) to her new friend, and she spent a moment staring at the wall looking SO fucking sad, but it's my job to be daddy/time-cop, and it was time to leave. She got over it quickly, and we had a great rest of the day.

We ate at her favorite Chinese place (she loves General Tso's chicken, and I've developed one hell of a taste for sushi rolls and mussels. Best damn egg drop soup I've had in eons) then we hung out at Half Price Books. (I got her a Strawberry Shortaake book and myself an unauthorized biography of Hunter Thompson i've been craving for months, which should derail me from reading Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, which I just started yesterday.) Then back home.

I felt more pain leaving her than I have in a while, not helped by our extra week apart between this and the last time, but we'll be back on track again and next week should be fun, probably staying in the Cincy area and visiting our friend Bill. The week after that, I'll take her for the whole weekend and she can see the band play at the Eagles again.

We played an American Legion last night, and kids can get in there until 10:00, but even though it's a huge room, the smoke is thick and the ventiliation bad (this coming from a guy who's been into Winchesters for a year or two) so I'm not taking her there. I'm all for lung cancer. If you choose to get it ON YOUR OWN.

Left Cincy on I-74 to an XTC compilation. If you should doubt the utter fucking genius of Andy Goddamn Partridge, read THIS motherfucker from their Nonesuch album, and consider that he wed these lyrics to a bouncy, confidence-filled, almost STRUTTING pop number, which lends a sense of hopefulness to the overall proceedings that is not found in the words themselves:

The disappointed
All shuffle round in circles
Their placards look the same
With a picture and a name
Of the ones who broke their hearts

The disappointed
All congregate at my house
Their voices sob with grief
That they want me to be chief
Of the tribe of broken hearts

Once, I had no sympathy
For those destroyed and thrown away by love
Seems, your ring upon my finger
Signifies that I've become the spokesman of...

The disappointed
Will bear me on their shoulders
To a secret shadow land
Where a sombre marching band
Plays a tune for broken hearts

And day grows darker now
Everywhere, everywhere

The disappointed
Are coming in their millions
They're spilling from the bus
As a monument to us
Made of bits of broken hearts

The disappointed
Are growing every second
They blot the sun to black
At the bottom of the pack
I'm the king of broken hearts

I want to FUCK that song. Sweet, tender fucking.

Then, just as I went past the new rest area east of Batesville, I swtiched from XTC to The Donnas. Talk about fuckin'. My innermost dirtiest dreams are of being gang-fucked by these four little vixens. Brett, Torry, Alison, and Maya...my weiner is hard...

Alison is a fucking goddess whose pussy I'd glady worship at the altar of at the drop of a hat. But Brett...mmmm...what a voice. Just the way she says "honey, please" in Take Me To The Backseat (my fave toon of theirs) is enough to make me abandon all pretense towards logic and reason and plunge myself into that wonderous...wet...oh FUUUUUUUUCK.

It's one of the grest it'll-never-happen fantasies of our times, but hey. Some women still believe in fairy tales, so let a guy have his bullshit fantasies he knows full well will never happen. There's certainly more Dirty Sluts than Prince Charmings out there. A fact no woman likes to hear, but a fact nonetheless.

I admire The Donnas for their raw rockin' energy, with balls most guys will never have. I admire the way they turn sexist rock cliches on their head with a killer sense of smarts and humour. I admire their utter luscious HOTNESS. But above all, it's just nice to hear women be HONEST about their sexual priorities in a way that 98% of the women *I'VE* met are incapable of. With the kind of riffs that AC/DC would give a nut for.

Listening now to Cream at the Royal Albert Hall. The new double live CD. Hmmm...I WANT to love this. I can't. I like it. Don't love it. It has its moments. But damn...all the proof I've ever needed that rock reunions are unnecessary is summed up right here. It's good. It's not needed. The best that can be said about it is that at least it makes Clapton actually PLAY something for maybe the third or fourth time in twenty years. Tasty shit from EC in lots of places.

But I never listened to Cream for Clapton, except inasmuch as I wanted to hear that slow-handed motherfucker BURIED by Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. Doesn't happen here. They do well, but it's not the Cream of old. It's just old. Jack nearly died a few years back, Ginger LOOKS dead. There's more spark than SOME old fuckers could muster, but these guys used to rip the goddamn sky apart. They used to SURPRISE me, even with the same out-of-nowhere lick I'd heard a thousand times playing the goddamn thing over and over again pointing to the speakers and screaming "FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCC CCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!" like a drooling idiot.

Jack Bruce is God, don't let the graffiti fool you. FUCK Eric Clapton. My personal lord and savior plays a Gibson EB-3 through the nastiest, fartiest tone the '60s could POSSIBLY have produced, a James Jamerson/Charles Mingus-emulating white boy jazzhead from Glasgow with an ego the size of Scotland and the killer back-catalog to back the shit up. He even confused Zappa, for fuck's sake. How cool is THAT?

He played a lot of notes. Way the fuck too many notes. And did it with a sense of personal groove-osity and twisted appropriateness that I've spent twenty years now trying to cop the tiniest shred of. The Jack Bruce I love is on this new Cream album, but only as a ghost, a memory. The Jack I love ripped my speaker cones to hell and back some seven minutes into a live version of I'm So Glad that changed my life forever and taught me that BALLS means far more in this bullshit world of rock and roll than "good taste" EVER will. The guy still plugging along in 2006 still beats the hell out of that lameass shitstain J.J. Cale wannabe on the six-string, but he ain't the same. Which is sad. But there's just enough of the old Jack Bruce breathing roughly through the toned-down strains of the new album to keep me interested. And I suppose that's better than nothing.

I'm tired and need a shower. Be well, motherfuckers.

Dougie