She Come Walking Over

Here is my question. Here you have this song that is filled with a kind of stoner aesthtetic. It builds and builds with a desire that can’t quite get off the couch. It’s like slow, slow, rising tension, rising tension, drop back down. Slow build, slow build, drop back into a kind of funky guitar solo. Clearly, someone wants to get laid, but let’s be honest, each thrust has got to take like a minute, if he can even get it up. And just when you think nothing, nothing at all is going to happen at a pace that allows anything to happen for you and maybe your time would be better spent thinking about dinner, it builds one more time and then… I’m sorry. But isn’t this just the best fucking thing ever?

Okay, not best. But most surprising thing? Of all the ways you expect this song to end, do you expect it to end with the noises a kid makes when he’s talking to you through a bunch of milk bubbles?

This has to be the greatest WTF moment of 20th century music.

Writing Has Taken a Turn for Yeats

Last night, I had to do some back-filling. Someone had to go get The Thing from Colonel Baxter Smith, who it chased home from the seance. A fight over the Dawes act at Bobby Overton and Nancy Baxter’s engagement party (I had to move up their engagement a few years to fit my timeline.) leads Jere Baxter and Judge Dickinson to have a fight over the new black high school which leads Dickinson to say some things that reflect the bullshit I found from him at the TSLA archives. And then Lee appears!

And steals Sue’s dead people. Which leads to her being so pissed that she’s got her mom helping her get dressed so that she can drive down to Traveller’s Rest and… well, she hasn’t thought that far, being livid. But here’s the interesting thing. As she’s like “I will fucking kill that evil bastard jackass low-pants wearing white-toothed smug fool” (not in so many words), Ben tries to hypnotize her to calm her down.

I hadn’t really realized I was going to have him do that, but when it happened, it seemed right. But it made me realize that, of all my main characters, Ben is the one I have the least good handle on (everyone else might be poorly realized, since it’s just my shitty first draft, but at least I think I know who they are and what they’re doing and why). But this is the first inkling I had of Ben as someone with an almost obsessive need to calm things down and smooth things over and be in control of the situation, even if it pisses people off.

So, that was nice. But I realized I’ve been reading a shit ton about folks like him, but nothing from folks like him. So, I’ve got a couple of biographies of Yeats coming and a collection of letters between Yeats and that Irish nationalist chick whose name I can’t quite remember. Which means I need to hurry up and finish Always Coming Home.