Don't Do Your Cornhole Around Here, Boy

Don't Do Your Cornhole Around Here, Boy

08.28.04 (7:18 pm)   [edit]
Get your ass over to radiokeneally.com right now. Goddamn, I love it.

We've been trying to get out on the weekends and do fun family stuff. There's tons of things in our area to do, lots of great state and county parks, etc. A few weeks ago we went to Ft. Ancient, a 2000-year old earthworks built by the Hopewell Indians overlooking the Little Miami River. This shit is 15 minutes away! I grew up in the middle of a fuckin' cornfield in Buttlick, Indiana surrounded by people who think Mounds is a goddamn candy bar. If you stand on top of your car, you might be able to see for twelve miles. It's flat as fuck there. Actually, when I go home now, (like I'm going to next weekend) I've learned a certain weird appreciation for the shithol..er, I mean place I grew up. It's kinda neat in a...uh...OK, maybe not. But I don't mind it now. Southwest Ohio is certainly not one of the wonders of the world (though I'm definitely wondering how the fuck my town's "heritage festival" suddenly came to spawn an American Idol ripoff/contest, and you can bet I ain't going out THERE tonight. I'm trying to reject evil in all forms, it's my way of showing my eternal undying love for Jesus and stuff) but we've got things that kinda look like hills (my wife will laugh now) and the areas along the rivers can be rather beautiful, and Indians built cool shit here before we white folk came along and gave them smallpox and killed them and stuff, so it's pretty nifty. I wish I could drive 15 minutes one way to this stuff and 15 minutes in the other direction and see the California desert (which *I* love, goddammit) but hey, you can't have everything. Where would you put it?


So we went to a county park today. Which was what I was going to say before I wrote all that other shit. Sheryl found out that it had a petting zoo, so with the promise of animals for Katie to enjoy, we drove off into the sunset. Well, down I-275. When we got there, we found that the park had been taken over for the day by a Christian music festival. We went in anyway. Katie got to see animals (watching her following a goat around and petting him was rather cute) and we played in the "playbarn" which was full of climbing and sliding and stuff and most the kids were three times bigger than Katie but she had a great time anyway once she got into it.

Outside, one was assaulted (or should I say, bored to fuck by) a non-variety of live "Christian rock" music, coming at you from two directions because they had two stages. Just to share the love, I guess. When I was a Jeezo-junkie fifteen years ago, it was fairly obvious that Christians were for the most part incapable of writing rock music that wasn't wholly dependant on stealing ideas from that evil "secular" rock that was of course, the devil's music, but Satan got there first and so let's steal his tunes and write God lyrics. THERE'S a great way of serving out Lord! I mean, fuck that J.S. Bach guy and his brilliantly conceived works made in service to God, what the fuck did HE know?

But there were exceptions, and 80s God-rock suddenly sounds pretty good to me compared to this current shit. And I don't care if you worship Mickey Mantle's underpants, you really need to hear some Phil Keaggy. Still one of the finest guitarists I've heard anywhere, Phil is often a bit too mellow for his own good these days (though I've got recent bootlegs that kick ass. In a loving Christian way, of course.) but at his best, he's a fabulous player, singer, and writer and my idea of "Christian rock." Look him up. He sure beats the crap out of the lame-ass copy-of-Creed-doing-a-cop y-of-Pearl-Jam shit I heard this afternoon. The Wonderbread wonders in question (I dont know the name of the band, and I hardly give two fucks) closed their show with some kind of generic Jeezo-hymn that apparantly was about the Holy Spirit coming to fill this place. I think that's what it was about anyway, seeing as how they said it about 47,000 times. And they must really be into the Holy Spirit and the concept of the Trinity, because they sure couldn't be bothered to find a fourth CHORD to play. Jesus Chr...oh, just forget it.

But really, we had a nice time and people seemed to be more into the bad food and the cute animals and stuff. Katie was one pooped-out little booger afterwards and got a nice nap. And I listened to Robin Trower while making a stir-fry for dinner, so I barely even rememebr the Jesus music. Not like you could remember it four seconds after it was done anyway.

(To be fair, one of my students is a huge Jars Of Clay fan, and while a little of it goes a long way, they've proven to be an enjoyable way of spending guitar lessons. Nice chord voicings and stuff.)

I did a blood test last week and got the results back a few days ago. Looks like my cholesterol levels have dropped into the good range for the first time in the three years we've been checking. Triglycerates are lower than before as well, though still a bit too high. Not a big deal though, and significantly lower than a couple years ago. The main reason for the test was to check my lithium levels. My little happy-drug can fuck me up if I have too much of it. But the levels were actually a bit low, probably because I'm sometimes bad about my second dose at night. I think the shit is working fairly well, but I've still had a shitty week, and I spent most of last night wondering if every single atom in the fucking universe wasn't corrupted by the stain of Satan's evil. But at least I wasn't SURE of it. That's an improvement. No, really it is.

Looks like the "controversy" over John Kerry's Vietnam service is finally dying down. And it makes me sad. Sad to know that now our shitty excuse for a news media has to find something else to distract us from reality with. Sad that this couldn't be as effective as Bill Clinton's Cock at wasting months of our time with trivial bullshit that has no true bearing on where our country is at and is headed. Sad that we might have to actually notice people dying in Iraq instead of arguing about how many yards Kerry was from Cambodia 35-years ago. Because THAT'S the shit we need to hear. And hey, didja know that Tommy Hilfiger has a new reality show coming out? Ain't that GREAT! It was on the news! Because it IS news! It's really fucking important news! Oh, by the way, five guys got killed in Iraq. But Tommy Hilfiger has a reality show! God bless America!

I think the Christians are right. We're going to Hell.

Another of my fun hobbies this week has been reading about cocaine smuggling. Yeah, I'm a real renaissance kinda guy. I saw a two hour show on the History Channel about Pablo Escobar, everybody's favorite Colombian drug lord. The show was based on a book by Mark Bowden called Killing Pablo. This is the same guy who wrote Black Hawk Down, by the way. I found Killing Pablo in the bargain section of a bookstore for five bucks a couple days after seeing the show. This is not normally my idea of light reading, I might have watched Miami Vice maybe twice in my life, I think Coke is the other thing I drink besides Pepsi when I want too much sugar and caffeine, and it's been long enough since my geography class that I thought Columbia was where Peru is and vice versa. So I didn't know shit about any of this until this week. Everybody else has probably read it already, for all I know.

But man, what a bad guy. Pablo was an evil sonofabitch. And the story of how his country developed in the last century, how he manipulated public opinion to the point of even being a congressman for a short time, and what happened to anyone who got in his way (the motherfucker killed 11 members of the country's supreme court, for fuck's sake) just fascinates the fuck out of me. Not to mention the US involvement in bringing him down, and the "death squads" that used his own tactics against him. It's a fucked-up story. I'm not quite halfway through the book right now, so I'm still enjoying having the story fleshed out beyond what the TV show could do.

Well, Radio Keneally is still kicking my ass. Y'all have a good one, y'here?

Love,
Dougie