This will likely be a brief one--it's getting hot out there already, and I have work to do outside around the farm. And I need to golf, having found the course closed yesterday afternoon after a nine hour day of billing and cleaning up the curtilage.
Hot or not, it's beautiful here. Never a bad day.
On the right you can see the outbuilding where P has fixed up an office, the place I'm sitting right now in fact behind those two a/c units. Above that is a studio apartment where I need to make the bed after washing sheets last night in the wake of our guests' departure a couple weekends ago. There on the left is the pumphouse, with the propane tank the horrible prior tenant left us peeking out from below the wild plum (he stole one that's about four times that size). Then there's Splinters, a/k/a the Good Place, our luxury guesthouse that was once Issac's tool shed. In the distance is the barn, still largely stuffed full of leftover chattel in search of a home after our post-hurricane moves. Anyone need an antique upright grand piano?
And you can tell I need to edge, after the crappy Homelife weed whacker failed on me yesterday, belching smoke from the drive shaft and vibrating so violently I couldn't hold it without my hands going numb. That will be this morning's project, after I replaced it yesterday afternoon with a more robust Husqvarna.
I'm avoiding Facebook this Father's Day, with all of it's "here's me and Dad, my best friend, blah blah blah." Screw them.
Here's a pic of Dad and me in 2017, when he could still sort of walk and my midsection hadn't turned to jello, standing in his and Johnnie's kitchen in Plano.
I'll call him later, of course. May even call Bobby, my mom's longtime husband who stuffed her into an assisted living home because he was afraid a home health nurse would steal his bank records.
I figure the odds of hearing from all three of my amigos fall near zero, given that I haven't heard from one of them in three years. I'll call it a win if I hear from even one.
Yep, Dad and I share one thing--our forays into fatherhood weren't particularly successful, for very different reasons. We both tried our asses off, however. That's why I call him most every Sunday, and have for years. I know he did his best, and sometimes he even succeeded, sort of.
So let's move on, shall we?
Yesterday as I was grousing over the golf course being closed, denying me my reward for working myself into a heat-exhausted puddle of old man over a day spent lopping limbs, climbing ladders, and cutting grass, I directed Spotify to leave Jimmy Buffett crooning Bama Breeze"for something a little more, well, angry.
And ended up immersed in one of the greatest albums of all time, London Calling by the Clash.
Maybe it came to mind because I felt like the bassist on the cover, only with a golf club, when I found the clubhouse locked.
London Calling was sort of the soundtrack of my last year of high school and first year of college, or at least a regular and compelling part of that soundtrack. Released in 1980, it touched on themes ranging from nuclear policy and its failures to growing up to be a crappy father. Yeah, maybe the old subconscious was working overtime last night.
The latter issue was framed in the pounding but good-natured rhythms of Death or Glory, in which Joe Strummer ruminates on what he's become without making the song overtly autobiographical:
Now every cheap hood strikes a bargain with the world And ends up making payments on a sofa or a girl "Love and hate" tattooed across the knuckles of his hands Hands that slap his kids around 'cause they don't understand how
Death or glory Becomes just another story Death or glory Becomes just another story
Yep, we've come a long way from Jimmy Buffett recounting the highlights of life in a comfortable Gulf front bar.
London Calling is also prescient, in its own way, with regard to the arc of our politics.
Clampdown could be describing this very week, with Proud Boys, calculated misinformation, and stoking grievances for political gain.
What are we going to do now?
Taking off his turban, they said, is this man a Jew? 'Cause working for the clampdown They put up a poster saying we earn more than you When we're working for the clampdown
We will teach our twisted speech To the young believers We will train our blue-eyed men To be young believers . . .
Kick over the wall 'cause government's to fall How can you refuse it? Let fury have the hour, anger can be power
Do you know that you can use it?
Maybe that was what had me thinking about this album--one of my news feed/commentary sources this weekend posted a link to an article about the Justice Department pursuing insurrection charges against the leaders of the Proud Boys. The title of the blogpost was "We Will Train Our Blue-Eyed Men." Of course the author was about my age. We all get the reference.
Spanish Bombs is undoubtedly the most lovely and approachable song on the two-record set (remember those?), with an almost elegaic feel carried along by minor chord guitar riffs that seem transported from the '60s. The lyrics recall those who fought in the Spanish Civil War, and then brings the listener up short with the modern, suggesting we're really talking about the then-proxy war in Central America:
The hillsides ring with "Free the people"
Or can I hear the echo from the days of '39?
With trenches full of poets
The ragged army, fixin' bayonets to fight the other line
Spanish bombs rock the province
I'm hearing music from another time
Spanish bombs on the Costa Brava
I'm flying in on a DC 10 tonight
Sort of a squirmy moment recalling those days, and looking askance at my high school classmates who went downtown to protest the atrocities our government was sponsoring in El Salvador right about then. They were right, absolutely right, it went against everything we supposedly stand for as a nation. But the grouchy old retirees in the Hemet Valley had nothing nice to say as they drove by, and I stayed home and said nothing. Shame on me. Shame on all of us.
But the title song is what folks most remember about the album, what you'd hear on KROQ Los Angeles, or even KMET or KLOS (our "classic rock" stations) if you weren't familiar with the Clash before then. London Calling is pounding, manic, demanding, indicting. The world is ending, and it's all our fault. Joe Everyman looks about him in London, and like a prophet describes the end times.
The ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in
Engines stop running, the wheat is growing thin
A nuclear error, but I have no fear
'Cause London is drowning
And I, I live by the river
There's an unfortunate timelessness to all that, isn't there? And isn't that one mark of the prophet? Those horsemen are still riding down on us today, maybe more so as things in Ukraine creep out of their boundaries, famine looms for much of the world this summer, and the heat, good God, the heat.
Speaking of which, I need to leave all this behind and start weed-whacking before it hits 96 again.
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