Damn It, Tater Red

Once upon a time, the SuperGenius and I went to Memphis and got drunk and I accosted Tater Red about… something… I just remember being so sure I was right, but I cannot for the life of me remember what I was attempting to impart to this complete stranger. Or why. This, kids, is why getting drunk in Memphis is not wise. And it’s Memphis. If you want to sleep in the back of a leaky VW bus on Beale Street sober, you totally can.

Well, you can’t anymore. But you used to be able to.

This was not the VW trip, though, obviously. That was a million years ago.

This was more recently, within the past decade. And yet, who knows why I was so angry at Tater Red? Was I angry? Or just passionate? I just don’t know.

I’m hoping the Super Genius can remind me. I would have thought I wrote about it here, but I guess not.

But yesterday, Beth, knowing my love of Robert Johnson, sent me a link to this story. And there, in the second video, was Tater Red! Clearly, I should not have been drunkenly accosting Tater Red, but drunkenly celebrating our mutual love of Robert Johnson.

And here’s the weird thing. When I typed “Tater Red” into the search engine up there on the right, to see if I had mentioned him at all here, ever, this post came up. No mention of Tater Red in it, but there’s old Bob.

And can you believe I ever wrote anything so beautiful as

But then we came over the hill and there was my favorite stretch of road, fully puddled. And as we walked through the shallow water, the trees seemed to stretch down beneath us towards another sky in another world mirrored below us. For a moment, it felt like all that was keeping us from falling into that vast sky below was that we were standing on the feet of two folks on a walk in that world, who, when I looked down at them, were looking back at me just as curious.

?

Shoot, I should have just retired right after that. Mrs. Wigglebottom still annoys me sometimes, but I feel worse about it now, like I’m wasting our brief time wanting her to be different than she is. The truth is that she’s already over there more often than not. She sleeps so hard and she stands in the living room, distracted by something internal–a memory, maybe, a voice from some other place calling her–when I want her to go outside. I don’t think she’s in any pain or anything, though she eats a lot less than she used to. But she’s obviously practicing so she’s ready when Death finally calls her name.

I hope I did okay by her. If there’s someone who keeps track of how girls treat their dogs, I hope she reports that her experience was mostly pleasant. And I hope she just goes in her sleep. And goes someplace where, when she dreams, it’s of our time together.

Anyway, I made up this joke this morning and shared it on Facebook and then laughed and laughed. It goes like this:

A guy is getting ready to murder a Methodist, and, obviously, the Methodist is really upset. “Wait, wait,” he says, “Can I just sing one hymn before you kill me?”

The murderer thinks about it. I mean, he’s a murderer, but he’s not a bad guy. “Yeah, I guess.”

“The whole hymn? Start to finish?” The Methodist asks.

“Sure,” the murderer says.

The Methodist takes a deep breath and starts, “O, for a thousand tongues to sing…”

That’s a Charles Wesley joke. I’d bet there’s not a comedian alive making those. It’s special, folks. Ha ha ha.

Just a Couple of Things from SouthComm

Here’s the Pith post I told you I was going to write.

And here’s Jewly Hight’s take on the Patsy Cline exhibit. I notice she also fixates on the salt and pepper shakers. But it is because they are the means by which you can suddenly imagine Patsy Cline is your grandma or a gal you know.

Isaac

I know it’s probably not unusual, in the scheme of things, for a hurricane to get kind of stuck some place, but in the time I’ve lived here, I’ve grown used to them moving fairly quickly. If one comes ashore in the western part of the Gulf on Tuesday evening, we usually have the remnants of it as a tropical storm by Friday night.

And yet, here we are at Thursday and Isaac is still hovering over the same spot in Louisiana. That’s really bad.

We’re seeing some clouds here from it, but these are still reaching finger clouds. The monster sits far over the horizon.

That is another thing I didn’t really get about hurricanes until I moved down here. They are so enormous. I mean, I live far, far from the ocean. We’re a good ten hour drive from the Gulf of Mexico, at least. And a storm in Louisiana and Mississippi is so massive that we have fringe clouds from it.