Category: New York City

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Dylan In One Paragraph: Going Electric And Country


Bob was a restless cat. His hair was longer and wilder now. Minnesota was a dream or at best, a faded picture on a postcard from home. The Martin guitar didn’t do it for him anymore, nor did Pete, Woodie, or Joan. He hooked up with some Canadian boys with electric guitars and organs and traded the acoustic for a Fender Strat and a Super Reverb Amplifier. He was hip…he was in the scene…current and cool. He was tired of writing songs about nothing that seemed like something after a few bottles of wine and some grass. All these young hippie kids thought he was the Messiah of music..the second coming, he tried walking on water and almost drowned, all for believing the hype. He was done. Joan B. was clingy, handsy, folksy, and too natural for his taste. She didn’t shave her armpits or legs and he was sick of her traditional whiney folk music. He had been to Monterey and played grab-ass with Janis. New York can go to hell. He was going to Nashville and pick with them cats that played cool as country water. Chet Atkins invited him to dinner. Johnny Cash invited him into the fold. He was sold on country cooking and Gibson guitars. Nashville Skyline was his opus. Cash led him to the promised land. He found Baby Jesus in a snow globe at the Bluebird Cafe. He put the Menorah in his pantry and laid out the “Good Book” on his coffee table, next to the crystal ashtray and his roll-your-own cigarettes. Bob was a Christian now, his Jewish days behind him for a while, but he would revisit them often. Joanie wanted a rematch..said she would be less competitive and write even crappier songs, Bob said no way, he couldn’t take another round of her. He thought about buying another motorcycle, but just for a minute. Naw…I don’t need another broken neck and leg. He purchased a machine gun in case the Black Panthers came to Woodstock, he would be ready. He wrote ten thousand songs and won the Pulitzer Prize. He kept the money. His son, Jacob is too hip and hangs out with girls from Laurel Canyon that have no talent for anything except spending his money and wailing. Bob tells him to get a haircut and a real job, he is now his own father back in Minnesota. Bob sells his song catalog for a Billion dollars to a group of Japanese. He’s flush with cash. He calls Paul and Ringo and tells them to stick it, he’s richer than they are now. Paul writes a song about it. Ringo sends him some Kale cupcakes. He revisits the Village. All the old hangouts are now fast food joints and iPhone shops. He walks the street, but no one recognizes him..he’s good with that. His cell phone rings, it’s Joan B., and she wants to meet for a salad and mineral water lunch. He wants a burger, he tells her he loves meat, and she gags and pukes on her Samsung phone. Bob laughs and walks into McDonalds for a Big Mac. The girl behind the counter asks him if he’s that guy on that “Survivor.” TV show. He says “No, I am a survivor.”

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Ask A Texan: Wife Moves To New York City To Be A Social Worker


Advice For Non-Texan Husbands Who Are Hearing Impaired

This Texan received a letter from Mr. Bobby Joe Boudreaux from Chigger Bayou, Louisiana. Seems his wife is determined to go to New York City and work as a social worker for the new communist mayor, Mamdani.

Mr. Boudreaux: My wife of thirty years, Lolita Belle, says she is moving to New York City to work for that commie whack job, Mamdani. Since he is replacing the police force with social workers who will talk to the criminals instead of arresting them. Lolita Belle is a world champion talker. She starts in around 7 am and goes until after bedtime. She even talks in her sleep, so I have to wear earplugs or turn my hearing aids off. She’s worn our four iPhones in the last year, talking to her relatives over in Shreveport. She stops folks in the grocery store and starts telling them about the nutritional values of the food they are buying. The poor folks are cornered and can’t escape. Our preacher at the Chigger Bayou Fourth Baptist let her lead communion one Sunday, and she got carried away, talking for an hour about why the church should be using real wine and Ritz crackers instead of Welch’s grape juice and crunchy bread. Now the church won’t let us in the door. She got stopped by a policeman for speeding, and she gave the poor cop a thirty-minute explanation on speed limits and why his uniform didn’t fit properly, and he needed to get his teeth whitened. The poor policeman finally gave her twenty dollars just to stop, and he got on his motorcycle and took off. She thinks if she can talk a policeman out of a ticket, then she can speak a criminal into being a good guy, just like that socialist street rat, Mamadami, who isn’t even an American, thinks will work. She read that all his new staff will be women, so she can have some sisters to talk to. I need some help down here.

The Texan: I hear your pain. ( pun intended ). Some folks are born with a genetic predisposition to constantly orate. My late, late, late, aunt, Beulah, from Santa Anna, Texas, ran off three husbands and at least a dozen dogs and cats for the same reason. When her priest was giving her the last rites before she passed away, she wouldn’t stop telling him what to say, so he just left. Short of using a shock collar like folks do with those noisy Beagles, I would let her go on up to New York and work for that commie pinko rat. If she can talk a cop out of a ticket, the poor criminal will probably give up and beg to be arrested just to shut her up. I’m sending her a CD language course on how to talk like a New Yorker, and to help a brother out, I’ll cover the cost of the airfare. I’m also sending you a box of Cherry Bombs to help relieve your anxiety. There’s nothing like blowing up Fire Ant mounds to calm a man down. Keep in touch.

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Why I Missed My Calling as a Writer


I was born too late to meet my calling as a writer. Instead of being birthed in 1949, I should have appeared in 1931, no later than 1933, then I may have had a fighting chance. By the time I began writing about serious topics, I was in high school, in the mid-1960s. We had the Vietnam War, Hippies, rock music, and pot to contend with. Writing about Hippies held no interest for me, but the war, music, and politics did, and so I wrote a few things for my high school paper and journalism class that brought instant grief my way. My mentor and writing coach, Mrs. Mischen, chastised me for the language I used, which, in retrospect, was a bit crude and too hip for a high school paper. However, she also gave me an “atta-boy” for having the courage to put myself out there. I wasn’t anti-establishment, anti-war, or anti-Hippie; I wasn’t anti-anything: only a rock musician playing in a popular band, and that’s about all I had to offer the world at that point. That’s why I should have been a writer in the 1950s, hanging out in the Village with Kerouac and Boroughs, and even Hemingway and Steinbeck in late-night bars, smoking unfiltered cigarettes, drinking whiskey, and arguing about the fate of America after the two recent wars that had led to a drastic shift in our country. I would have been a perfect cohort. Instead, I spent my childhood years writing in a Big Chief Tablet about neighborhood shenanigans and mailing my articles to the Fort Worth Press, hoping for a spot in the Sunday news, all the time, believing I was the incarnation of Mark Twain. Now, I’m too damn old to be the incarnation of anyone, and can’t remember what to write, and can’t find my notebooks full of ideas.

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Is This The Real Life? Is This Just Fantasy? Caught In A Landslide, No Escape From Reality


Me Before I Quit Smoking

Perhaps Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty had it right? Drive a beat-up car across the country, searching for the real America; find that touchable and believable reality. The young Marylou is along for the ride; she adds the angst to their search: a real woman, one to drive the two of them mad. Three is a tangled mess. Two recovering Catholic boys question their upbringing. Harsh realisms, self-flagellating, pot smoking, cheap liquor guzzling, teetering on becoming a criminal or a saint.

Roughians, hooligans, hipsters, Bohemians, and rapscallions. These were the self-educated beast shaped by the great depression that taught us that America isn’t perfect and never can be as long as flawed and greedy people make decisions for the masses. Lords and Cerfs; Alms for the poor, sir?

The late 1940s was a time of realism. Fantasy was for the dreams of children. The recent brutal world war ended the tragic depression years, and sacrifices and loss of human life in far-off lands all played out in real-time, not on a roll of film. There was no “escape from reality.”

The coterie of Bohemian writers and artists was forming. Jackson Pollock was dripping paint, Picasso was mutilating women on canvas, and Papa Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Alan Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Jack Kerouac sat around small tables in dingy cafes and bars slamming down hooch, and writing the real stuff that made us smile, think, cry, or recoil in disgust. They took the American reality from the 1930s and 1940s and gave it to us with a backhanded slap to the face. It awakened some of us, the ones that paid attention.

Jack Kerouac and the rest of his group weren’t meant for literary sainthood; they were too stained, too fallible, and over-baptized. America was real; life was not always the astringed family of mom and pop, two kids, and a cocker spaniel. Sometimes it hurt. More often than not, it was damned good. Men were riddled with imperfections but still knew how to be male, and women were as perfect as they were created to be.

Somewhere on this trip, along the road, America lost its reality, and people turned to fantasy. Now, we are lost in a landslide, with no escape from a warped reality. The road goes on.

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Hello Dalai…


Dalai “Tex” Lama

My sainted Mother’s second cousin, Elfinian Keebler, owned one of the largest cattle ranches in Texas. Located between Mineral Wells and Ranger, Texas. It took four days to cover the width and another two days or so to ride the length. By Texas standards, it was a residential lot, but 3,800 acres ain’t what it used to be in the 1950s.

Elfinian’s daughter, Cookie, wasn’t into raising cattle, although she was the proverbial FFA queen. She had gone steady with every boy in high school and most of the ranch hands and had been riding horses since she could crawl. Her older brother, Chip, was a knock off the old Keebler block; he was a cowboy to the bone, raised on Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. His mama, Piddle, fancied herself as a debutant who married low and wanted her baby boy to be a doctor of some sort, but Chip was a dunce and had the IQ of a piss-ant: riding the range was about all he was good for, and his horse did most of the thinking. Cookie was the plucky little prickly one and decided she was taking the ranch in a different direction, creating a stink between her and Daddy Elfinian. Cookie wanted to raise Llamas and Highland goats. In Texas, anything but cattle and horses is considered blasphemy, and sheep and goats aren’t welcome except on the supper menu.

A year into her Llama plan, Daddy put the brakes on. One Hundred Llamas, forty donkeys to guard the Llamas against Coyotes, and half a dozen cow dogs to keep the donkeys under control were more than Papa Keebler could swallow. The donkeys and dogs had lost interest in the Llamas and had gone back to hanging out with the cattle. The critters were pretty, but they were no better than a cow: eat, spit, and crap.

A contingent of robe-wearing folks in limousines arrived at the ranch house on a Saturday afternoon. A realtor from Mineral Wells introduced them as followers of the Dalai Lama, most recently of Tibet, a tiny country in Asia. Elfinian had never heard of this Lama guy, but he invited them in for a set down, some of Piddles’s baked cookies, and a drink of Jack Daniels. The head robe-wearing spokesperson was the Dalai Lama’s sister, Deli Lama. She wanted to buy a piece of the Keebler Ranch so the Dalai could have refuge from the Chinese who had booted him out of Tibet, and he wanted to raise a Llama or some hairy sheep, his favorite spirit animal.

Papa Keebler sold the group three hundred acres, including the existing herd of Llamas and all the donkeys and cow dogs. It was a win-win deal. Cookie volunteered to help get the ranch workable and show the tinder-foots the art of Texas ranching.

Eight weeks later, the Dalai Llama arrived in a private helicopter, touching down on the new helipad next to the ranch house an army of Monks and Hari Krishna volunteers had constructed for his holiness. His sister, Deli, her daughter Carol, and The Keebler family were there to welcome him to Texas. He stepped out of the chopper wearing a white Stetson from Leddy’s Western Store over in Fort Worth. The multi-talented Monks also played many instruments, so they broke into a rousing rendition of San Antonio Rose and then The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You. The Dalai felt right at home and immediately asked for a “coldbeer.”

After an all-nighter traditional Texas BBQ and a dozen kegs of Pearl and Tibetian Beer, The Dalai Lama surprised everyone by mounting a horse at sunrise and touring the ranch with Cookie and Elfinian. He had picked up a pair of jeans, some Justin boots, and a 44 Colt pistol in Fort Worth, and like in the movies, he was itching to plug him some Hombres. He also had purchased a twin-engine Cesena T50 airplane like Sky King flew and wanted Cookie to be his sidekick. Elfinian managed to wrangle the pistola from the Dalai before someone wound up planted, and he damned sure didn’t want his daughter flying in a plane with this loco-Lama.

The Dalai’s sister, Deli, and her daughter, Carol, were huge fans of New York musicals, especially Carol Channing. Miss Channing was in Fort Worth appearing at the Casa Manana production of “Hello Dolly,” so the Dalai Lama arranged for Carol and the entire theater company to put on an open-air show at his new Llama ranch. A cast of a hundred, the orchestra and sets were delivered by trucks, rigged, and a portable stage was built near the Llama corral. Half the ranching community was seated on the tailgate of their pickups, beer coolers stocked with Pearl and Mama’s, and babies scurried around the grassy lawn in front of the ranch house. The sun went down, the lights came up, and Carol Channing, as “Dolly,” walked up to the mike and sang, ” Hello Dalai, it’s so nice to have you back where you belong.” This kind of stuff can only happen in Texas.

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Dispatches From The Cactus Patch: April 19th, 2024


Doing my best Joe Walsh impression

It’s been a taxing week in The Cactus Patch. I’ve discovered that the television news makes my face break out. During my teenage years, I had but a few dozen pimples, while my buddies’ tortured faces resembled a Fire Ant attack. Now at almost 75, my facial skin is red, rashy, bumpy, and pissed off. I fear it may be the newscast that causes stress and anxiety, which leads to the facial condition. I plan a visit to a Dermatologist to assess the damage.

Headlines That Will Make Your Head Explode And Require You To Wrap Yourself In Cottenelle Toilet Paper and Duct Tape To Stop The Splatter On Your Wife’s Newley Painted Walls…

Couldn’t find Cottonelle, so I used the Happy Bear’s Butt paper.

The attack on Israel from 12th-century Iran, a land full of self-flagellating fanatics with modern weapons and TikTok, has America in a tizzy, and it’s likely the cause of my skin condition. If the Shah and his Missus, two well-dressed cafeteria Muslims, were still alive and in charge, there would be large air-conditioned shopping malls, Starbucks, and Ikea stores, giving the citizens something more to do than mill around in the street and shout, “Death to Isreal, Death to the great Satan, America.” I would think this behavior would get as stale as last week’s bagels after forty years. I read that Israel counter-attacked the Mullahs overnight. A well-planned strategic Puma-pounce, carried out by young pilots, both men and women who are wide-eyed and prickly aware of the unfolding biblical implications. Mainstream media, meaning all the morning propaganda shows disguised as “drink your coffee with us while you shoot up with your Ozempic,” programming says “Israel is to blame” for the attack on Iran. Well, no kidding. The Israelis were reluctant to contact the White Nursing Home for fear that Old Sniffer would rat them out to the Mullahs, which it appears is what Blinken may have done. The word BLAME in their statements should tell us all we need to know about their true feelings.

Coming To America…not the Eddie Murphy movie

Job? I Don’t Need No Stinking Job!

NPR Field reporter Maya Sharona was at the Texas/Mexico border on Thursday morning, interviewing ” future citizens” as they wiggled under the razor wire.

An invader dressed in a new jogging suit and Nike sneakers agreed to speak to her.

Maya Sharona: Sir, welcome to our country, could I have your name and your destination?

Invader: “Oh, Hi there, you scurrilous bitch of a white woman; my name is Juan Valdez from Venezuela, and I am headed to New York City to join up with my compadres in MS-13, you know, the gang boys. I’m real excited about my prospects in your weak stupid country.”

Maya Sharona: “Sir, do you plan to find a job once you reach the Big Apple?”

Invader: ” Job? I don’t need no stinking job. Papa Joe is giving me a 10 thousand-dollar debit card, free housing in a five-star hotel, a new iPhone, a Social Security Card, A voting card, Welfare, free food, a new car of my choice, and all the white girls I can assault all your daughters and wives..where are the white girls? A job would get in the way. Say, you are a nice looking chica, how about we step behind that large steel wall, and by the way, how do you like my new 9MM Glock? gimme your purse.”

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Snack Time In New Guinea


” Yum Yum eatum up”

The old Chief Sniffer should have been a dime novel author.

“My uncle was eaten by cannibals on the island of New Guinea” is his latest contribution to his resume of fantastical yarns. That could have certainly happened; the tribes in New Guinea are renowned for their culinary skills. Now, come to find out, it’s a whopper of a lie. He was fact-checked in-depth and has told this one before. His poor uncle perished in a plane crash near New Guinea in WW2: And why would Sniffer tell a group of United Steel Workers this story? The fun begins when this guy goes off script or loses a notecard; that’s when he fancies himself to be good old Will Rogers from Scranton, PA.

Behavior like this is quite normal for folks with Dementia or drunk authors. I should know: my two late uncles were masterful spinners of incredible yarns and a few lies here and there. My cousins tell me I am afflicted with the same virus.

Hemmingway never wrote a line without the accompaniment of liquor, and Edger Poe didn’t draw a sober breath for decades: a serious conversation with a Raven made him famous.

President Sniffer is no Hemmingway or Poe, just a mentally ill old man that folks feel sorry for while he destroys our Republic. Maybe Jill should publish his yarns? You know it would be a New York Times bestseller.

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I’m Going To Graceland,Graceland,Memphis Tennessee


The Mississippi Delta was shining like a National guitar

I am following the river down the highway

through the cradle of the Civil War

I can’t think of a better opening lyric than the first verse of Paul Simon’s song, Graceland, from his acclaimed album of the same name. I’m a Simon fan from way back in the caveman days when he and Art Garfunkle made all the hippies and folkies stop and listen to their lyrics. Simon and Garfunkle were cerebral before it was cool or hip; holdovers from the coffee house Greenwich Village days. One guitar and two voices, no feedback, no pounding drums or wall of sound, just pure, beautiful talent. One could say that Paul and Art ” knew their groceries.” An old Beat term used by the hep-cats.

I’ve played a National Guitar, and it’s a tough hombre. Made from shining chromed steel with a resonator instead of a sound hole, the instrument is a beast that will shred your fingertips in record time. The sound, like the guitar, is unique, so I can see why Simon weaved it into the lyrics. The guitar does shine like the Delta, which I have seen from the air, and it does glow to the point of breaking out the Raybans or at least a $10.00 pair of gas station shades.

Graceland, yes, I have been there too, but it was “back in the day” while Elvis still called it home and was in and out of his kitchen making “peanut butter and nanner” sandwiches when he wasn’t shooting up color televisions or yukking it up with his entourage of buddies.

Memphis, back in the 1960s, when I used to visit, was once a happening city, and Graceland was in a good part of town. Now, you had better be packing if you visit that neighborhood. Beall Street was legendary, Sun Records was still operating, and the best rock n roll acts came to town like clockwork. Perhaps the city intrigued Simon when the boys played there in the 60s. He was biding his time, waiting for the right moment to pen a great tune about the southland. Having South African musicians on the album was the mint in the julip.

Paul and Art are old men now; aren’t we all that played music back then? I doubt there is much more left in the two of them, but man…those guys gifted us with some great music and lyrics that made us stop and think about a winter day in a deep and dark December, being an island, riding a bus while watching the moon rise over an open field, and writings on subway walls. Let’s see if anybody beats that.

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New York Gives All The Key’s To The City To Thankful Zombies


Jaques Coustou holds Mayor Adams’s Voodoo Doll

Not that Momo and I plan to visit New York in our lifetime, which has shortened considerably in the last three years due to calculated circumstances. Today, I read in the New York Press that Mayor Adams is begging fellow New Yorkers to house migrants/invaders in their private residences. What..are all the four and five-star hotels full? It’s reported by untrusted and misinformed sources that the hordes of illegal river rafters have trashed most of the hotels in New York to the point that they will need total reconstruction if the verminatosious are ever evicted.

One well-meaning moronic family in Long Island, feeling all warm and fuzzy after a Saturday morning trip to Starbucks and Barnes and Noble Bookstore, offered two rooms of their luxurious home as a safe haven for a poor migrant family. They called the appropriate agency, and within an hour, a family of four from Haiti was knocking at their door, ready to move into their new “forever home.” The Haitian family needed a few extra rooms for their goats and chickens, which would be used in voodoo ceremonies, and one of their children, a certified living dead Zombie, ate the family’s pet cat, Doonsbury Jr. After a week of torment, finding voodoo dolls in their likeness all over the house, and fearing for their lives, B.D. and Joanie Caucus and their two children, Zonker and Lacy fled in the dead of night from their 2.5 Million Dollar abode and are now staying at the Fredrick Mercury homeless shelter in Queens. The Haitian family has had the locks and the alarm code changed and has run up a $2,000.00 DoorDash bill using Mrs. Caucus’s credit cards found in a desk drawer. Bet they’re feeling all warm and fuzzy about now.

Tay-Tay Kicks Kanye’s Ta-Ta…Elly Mae Jets In From Beverley Hills

This will be my last paragraph about Tay-Tay Swifter. The Super Bowl did me in. Momo and I went down in flames. Eleven times, the cameras cut to the “anoited one” and her entourage of hangers-on instead of showing the game. Now, I learn that she had poor, old, downtrodden Kanye West barred from attending the event after he had purchased seats in front of her private suite. “Like…you know….like…ain’t nobody gonna…like…. steal my camera time,” she was overheard saying to her new bestie, Elly Mae Mahomes. Poor old Travis, her knuckle-dragging fiance, has been forced to move out of his home because manic packs of young “Swifties” invaded his residence and are refusing to leave until Tay-Tay comes to the house and gives them a blessed Swiftie communion. There’s a song in there somewhere.

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“Things That Keep Me Awake On A Sunday Night, But I Forgot To Write About Until Monday Night”


Jeez-al-mighty, the radicals have kicked Joe Bee to the curb. He is officially a useless old man that has outlived his pecker. Willie Nelson said it first, and he should know; he’s much older than JB and has access to better weed.

With Joe Bee soon to be in the memory care home, that cute dancing Latino congress girl from New York is now free to roam the hallowed halls of Congress and possibly the White House acting like Castro’s daughter while bossing everyone around. But, of course, Jill ( not a doctor) Biden doesn’t give a street rat’s ass if she does; she got Joe Bee to sign everything over to her, even Hunter’s laptop and collection of ancient Mayan crack pipes.

Since a handful of NFL games were canceled, ratings are up!

My wife and I thought we had the Omicron. Watery eyes, coughing, tearing up, a snotty nose, then we realized we were watching The Sound of Music. I’m better today.

Senator Manchin just bitch slapped the radical Democratic party. He saved the country, the economy, and every God-fearing citizen that lives here. Hats off to Mr. Manchin. The only thing that would be sweeter would be for him to sucker punch Pelosi while she’s drinking her Gin and Tonic ice cream float.

I visited our local on the square bookstore today; I purchased a Christmas gift for my wife. It’s a hometown place with a great assortment of the latest books, hot tea and biscuits, and friendly folks. The business was great, and the place was packed to the walls, and not one person was looking at their phone. Imagine that.