Volume 7 – #10 – October 2004

Hey Everybody! Lighten up. It’s time for fun. When I was a kid, my family’s favorite restaurant was The Coffee Cup. I remember the owner standing where you paid the bill, smoking cigarettes. He seemed a little hard-boiled, but was friendly enough. My mother would sometimes order the Midnight Special (ham and cheese on rye) and I thought it was adult and sophisticated. I wish I could see an old film of us sitting at The Coffee Cup. Texarkana was pretty cool in those days. Most towns were. Everyplace had a unique identity. Almost every business was locally owned. Well-known, high profile national chain stores or restaurants didn’t really exist. When Kentucky Fried Chicken came to town, it was big deal. We couldn’t get enough. It was exciting. It meant that Texarkana was getting plugged in. We couldn’t see the hideous outcome. Before long, Gibson’s, the first big discount store appeared and we freaked. Everything was really cheaper than anywhere else. Record albums cost significantly less than they did at the Melody Shop downtown. Plus, the Melody Shop smelled musty, which I kinda liked. Also, The Melody Shop had bawdy recordings by Red Foxx, Rusty Warren and The Hot Nuts. My parents didn’t listen to those kinds of records and my brother and I were into teen pop. However, I did love looking at Red’s and Rusty’s LP covers. They were cheap, but exotic. I knew their world was different from my world and I was intrigued. Eventually I heard something by the Hot Nuts. It was supposed to be funny, but it wasn’t, really. It was something else; eerie, maybe, and off-the-strip Las Vegas-style nasty, for sure, but something more. It seemed more real than regular records. But, as you know, I didn’t pursue a career as a standup comic. Well, actually, sometimes it seems I did. But I never told sex jokes to an audience at the Cabaret Lounge in Chicago in the early 1960s. As I mentioned, I was into teen pop and I remember so vividly, around age 8 or 9, going to bed with my transistor radio, night after night, and listening to KTFS-AM until I fell asleep. And I remember, years later, picking up WLS out of Chicago and KNOE out of New Orleans, again feeling the lure of a far away place. Jimi Hendrix would crackle in and out and my ears and eyes were wide open. The first time I heard “Third Stone From the Sun,” from ARE YOU EXPERIENCED, I was sitting in the family car, waiting for my parents to come out of church, at 4th and Pine (I ran to the car ahead of them) and, there it was, on the radio. I remember thinking, “Wow, this psychedelic thing is getting out of control. I wish we had better reception.” A few years later, I saw Jimi Hendrix in person in Shreveport, Louisiana. My parents took my brother and me, dropped us off at the concert hall and went to a movie. A band called The Soft Machine opened the show. I had their albums, too. Hardly anyone paid attention to The Soft Machine and their drummer was even playing topless. It’s too bad all that cool stuff eventually turned into something like a musical version of Kentucky Fried Chicken coming to town. Overkill always waters down interesting things and our culture is so good at overkill.

Fake Facts
Danny loves strawberry ice cream, sprinkled with garlic flakes.
Bubba often dreams about butterflies committing suicide.
Jeff has a fabulous collection of seashells painted by sad orphans.
Carl grew around his evil female twin.
Alan can count backwards really fast and recite the alphabet in a funny voice.

Let’s see. A powerful Saudi Arabian fanatic, Osama bin Laden, who leads a terrorist organization called Al-Queida, attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, killing 3000 innocent people. He sought refuge in Afghanistan, protected by hard-line Islamic fundamentalists, called The Taliban. The United States responded by dismantling the Taliban and freeing Afghanistan in an effort to locate Osama bin Laden. Then, almost inexplicably, the United States attacked a totally different country, Iraq, toppling the regime of an evil man, for sure, but also, killing lots and lots of innocent people in the ongoing process. Analysts recently reported that as many as 100,000 innocent Iraqis may have died so far as a result of our invasion. Stop and think about just that for a moment. Is my life more important than that of a frightened child in Baghdad, whose mother was blown apart by an American bomb, as he watched? We all have to try to fix this. In our hearts we have to try to fix this. We are all real people with real loved ones and real emotions and real skin and real pain. The United States is in danger of becoming a big scary monster. It wouldn’t surprise me if another country or group of countries decided it’s in their best interest to deal with the monster. The world is too small now to say we’re right and they’re wrong. We’re all earthlings. We’re all human.