NE 23rd St.
OKC

I read somewhere that linguists say language came after music and we sang nonsense syllables before we invented a rational speech to order our days.  I like to think this explains the utter centrality of music in most peoples' lives as if it was somehow inseparable from life itself. 

Here’s a “don’t even ask” picture from the other day of me climbing on someone’s vintage Honda because it was cool and I couldn’t help myself.  I have a bad habit of doing this and am surprised I’ve never been caught.  My daughter cringes when I do this, especially when I ask her to take a picture.

 

Last night I was watching Jimmy Fallon and had the thought that he is a genius.   I just chuckled because I tried to spell genius with a "j" and also because for some reason I felt compelled to take a picture of my lobster socks framing Jimmy Fallon's head.  With me there’s usually a story which is no less true in this case.  Last year I ordered a bowl of lobster bisque soup from a deli in Arkansas.  But before doing so the waiter whispered, "are you sure you want a bowl and not a cup . . . it's quite rich?"  Well I was craving seafood and also feeling nostalgic about a Boston soup memory, so I ordered the bowl.  Of course one should know better than to order lobster bisque in Arkansas, especially if the waiter does everything he can to covertly warn against such an endeavor.  To make a long story short it tasted like gritty fish infused beach sand and smelled of dirty socks.  Needless to say my pride got the best of me so I tried really hard to finish the bowl but only made it half way before a stomach ache set in.  And then a few months later some lobster socks showed up in my Christmas stocking courtesy of my daughter and her wicked sense of humor.

 

 

Lucinda and I have been out and about all day riding the old highway into OKC and then buzzing around town.  This morning I gave five bucks to the guitar picker on the patio at the Red Cup coffee shop as he was busking for his bread and beer.  His songs weren’t original but who cares when he played like Dave Rawlings. 

I’m surprised the republicans haven’t found a way to shutter that ramshackle coffee shop, the belly button of OKC progressivism and counter-culture, with perhaps a major health code violation or well-placed cooking oil fire in the kitchen.  There were scatterings of plotters and bull shit artists sitting here and there on second hand restaurant chairs behind mismatched tables with wobbly legs.  There were poets of the windy plains and of its cities . . . professors and subversives, sinners and stoners and a tattooed chef.  There was even a senator from the woebegone Oklahoma Democratic Party.

There wasn’t much plotting going though.  Some guy name dropped three times and then rambled on about how a buck twenty nine for a gallon of gas is reversing the need to “go small”.  Then he spouted some banal chatter about the importance of frequent lawn mower maintenance and the diversification of the local economy.

I fully admit my tendency to idealize but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t any less disappointed.  Where were the subversive whispers?  Rumors of war?  Or at least a public sex scandal?  And then I heard the name dropper proclaim he’d invented a new term for any “self-righteous prick wearing religion on his shirt sleeves”.  The new word was “Santorum” as in Rick Santorum.  I chuckled a bit and then walked back out on the patio to hear the busker sing and play the sweet song “Ruby” by Dave Rawlings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x668-BgXDMM

Sitting there on the patio of the Red Cup under an expansive blue sky I saw a girl carrying a gallon milk jug of pink water with a white fuzzy ball the size of a baseball tied to the plastic handle.  WTF?  My café Americano was really good but for Pete’s sake the coffee cup was sans handle which annoyed me.  At a nearby table, as some poet was typing away, she said, “hey, what are you writing?”  Then she tried to turn his tiny screen towards her for a peek.  For a brief moment I saw a murderous look in his eyes before he went back to typing.

 

Later I had lunch at a bar downtown and saw the city police chief with the last name of “Citty” stare at me suspiciously across the bar when I ordered a second Negra Modelo.  Perhaps I’d broken the unwritten rule of not ordering alcohol before noon (It was 1130).  I’m not sure.  Anyway the spicy Sriracha tacos were excellent.    

 

As I was riding home I noticed a faded, peeling mural of two soul singers on the side of an abandoned nightclub in the worst part of town.  I pulled over to take some photos which elicited sneaky, criminal stares from the carwash across the street.  A moment longer and they would have come running but Lucinda is quick and nimble and we were out of there in a flash.