Cup O' Joe

Jeremy and I have developed little bit of a tradition. On Sunday evenings we have taken to walking a block and a half to Joe's Cafe where they serve crunchy pizzas, mountains of spaghetti and meatballs, and the best mussels in red sauce around. Joe's is haven for the rotund and red-faced locals of Northampton who take over the bar for the entire evening and laugh loudly at their own jokes. Last night I witnessed one of these creatures order something for his equally rotund wife that she insisted she did not want. Chivalry, I bet he would claim. Assholery, I say. But what could I do? I could do nothing because I want to go back next week and get my mussels. (They also put pepperoni on salad! Incroyable!)

Silly Folks

Look at these silly old guys! They are Jerry Garcia, who is now dead, and David Grisman, whose mandolin sounds pretty. They look really happy in this picture, and they have matching beards. Look at Jerry's leatha' sleeves! He's silly! I like that!

Lately I've been listening to their album Shady Grove every time I'm in the car. It is a compilation of folk standards. My favorite song is "Stealin'," which is about being low-down, it seems. I like when Jerry says, "a married girl comes to see me sometimes." I sing along energetically, making up a third line of harmony sometimes, and imagine being a salty, Janis-Jopliny, one-of-the-boys folk singer.

But what I like most about how these guys play these songs is that they capture exactly what I think folk music is intended to do. Earlier, I called them silly, and I think that's a perfect word to describe this intention, especially considering the word's connotations of plainness and humility. Folk songs, even ones that deal with serious issues, capture something childish and imperfect. It's music that's meant to be sung along to as opposed to just listened to. The lyrics are meant to be changed in the great oral tradition. An example of this silliness and how these guys appreciate it is probably more obviously illustrated with the other folk album they recorded together. It's called The Pizza Tapes and was recorded in a couple of evenings with another gentleman named Tony Rice (who doesn't have a matching beard, but his mustache is pretty kick-ass). A pizza delivery boy stole Jerry's master copy and soon after it was bootlegged. Hence The Pizza Tapes! HaHa!

Great musicianship requires that musicians don't take themselves too seriously. So does folk music. These guys are perfect at both.

A Different Kind of Artist

There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!
—Mark Twain

Ever wake up with that delightful feeling of spongebrain after drinking a bottle of red wine? It's not quite as painful as a full-fledged whiskey hangover (though those can sometimes result in a tunnel of contemplative giddy). No, this means you can't sleep in, your stomach feels hollow, and you love yourself. Eggs are the only thing that matter, and the steak and eggs breakfast at Jake's could most likely be the only thing on earth to make you humble again (besides 24 hours and a good night's sleep, but I have the night off, so that probably won't happen.) Soon I will go there alone with a paper.

Anywho, hangovers always get me thinking about Bonnie, who you see here. She lives in my building and Jeremy once saw her half-naked (the bottom half). I can hear her now, sorting bottles, clinking their stinky and hollow shapes against each other. Once she gave us a grocery sack full of giant plastic jugs of vodka, accompanied with a note explaining why she could not keep them. She left them on our doorstep like a baby at a nunnery. I think she might have again picked up the habit of keeping and emptying similar jugs (which I totally understand), but I have no proof.

Bonnie lives in my building. Sometimes she can be mean, but most of the time she is in her own world. From what I understand, she is kind of a danger to herself, but she isn't dead yet, so good for her. She used to be institutionalized(?). She screams things like "Life is a horror story," and "I'm a fat cow," though she hasn't been doing that with as much frequency as when I first met her. Her family is affluent(?). Her main goals in life are to collect and redeem bottles, and to bitch about people parking in her parking space, even though she can't drive and doesn't own a car.

Bonnie is a reminder of what I (or anyone) could possibly become, though I seriously doubt that I would have the resolve to regularly sweep the street with a whispy broom and tell people to "fuck off, I'm working" when they ask me to get out of the middle of the road so they can drive by in their cars. I'm not saying I'm on the verge of flipping out or submitting to life-consuming addiction, but if I just stopped trying, it wouldn't take long for me to be homeless and crazy (Bonnie isn't homeless, but I think someone helps her, perhaps her aforementioned affluent (?) family). She understands no reality but her own. Neither do I, frankly.