Notes From The Cactus Patch

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Working In Heaven

/ Phil Strawn / 9 Comments

Knocking On Heaven’s Door, Who Will Answer?

When I was ten, the world of writing came to me. I had been reading for years, thanks to my persistent Aunt Norma, my father’s older sister, who got her hands on some Fun With Dick And Jane books. Dick and Jane soon took the back seat to Mickey Spillane, Mark Twain, and John Steinbeck. I was more than smug, quite the little dandy, reading at five years old, while my neighborhood gang of idiots couldn’t spell their name.

Around that time, my mentor, Mr. Cohen, a master gardener, the man who passed on his love of horticulture to a young boy, lost his wife to cancer, then my grandfather, the tough old World War 1 vet, caught a case of it and was wasting away before my eyes. I didn’t know what devastation meant, but it had grabbed me by the collar and shook me good.

Before my grandfather left for the hospital for the last time, he spent a few hours alone with me in his sickroom. Still able to speak and make sense. He told me of his experiences in the war, the trenches in France, the gas attacks, the men he killed in hand-to-hand combat, and the ones he killed from afar with a bullet that had no consciousness. I listened intently, absorbing every detail. War was not like it was presented on television or in the movies; it was raw, cruel, unforgiving, and mentally destroyed many men, including him. He knew it was his last roundup and accepted it with dignity. I didn’t.

The mind of a ten-year-old is wired backward from that of an adult. So, without thinking of what I asked, I said,

“Grandad, when you get to Heaven, what will you do. Are there jobs there? Will you have friends?”

He thought for a while, then answered,

” There might be work, something to keep us busy, but the main thing I want to do is apologize and ask forgiveness for the young Germans I killed in the war. I didn’t want to kill them, but it was my job, and it was theirs to do the same to me. That’s if I get to Heaven, which is a mystery to me, cause I have done some bad things in life, asked for forgiveness, but who knows how much the good Lord is willing to forgive.”

I partially understood: I was a Baptist, but a fearful one, not one of faith, but feared the outcome if I didn’t toe the line. He passed a week later, lying in a bed, reliving the hell of war that he carried till the end.

Not long after that, I was at my other grandparents’ farm in Santa Anna, Texas. My grandfather, a nice man but not particularly fond of the other cousins or me, was working on his tractor and stopped for a rest. I was nearby and sat beside him. He was aloof from us children, seeing us as farmhands, not children to be nurtured or molded, but only as labor, expected to keep our mouths shut and our eyes downcast. He made me nervous; I feared him in a way I shouldn’t have. I did mention that the brain of a ten-year-old is wired backward, so that being said, this is what I asked.

” Grandpa, when you get to Heaven, will you still have to work on the farm?” I said.

He looked at me like there was a third eye in my forehead.

” He sat for a moment and then said,

” The good book says many times that everyone has to work. If you don’t have a trade or labor for your fruits, you don’t eat, you don’t survive, and your family suffers and perishes. God is forgiving, but I think he has a limit to that forgiveness. I expect to be a farmer in Heaven, just as I am here on this God-awful piece of land, and I will do what is required of me. The Angels can’t do everything. I’ve repented for my wagon load of sin, and I think the good Lord has forgiven me, but I won’t know until I get there.” This was a few years after the small miracle that had saved his crops and brought him back to church. He was a different man religiously, but still didn’t have much use for children. He passed away a year later from Diabetes and other illnesses related to my grandmother cooking everything in bacon grease for fifty years.

Two different men, ones that I admired, two individuals that molded me, had given me advice that is with me to this day. We all must repent our sins, ask forgiveness, live with our shortcomings, and we all must work for a living, eke out what we can: dig a ditch, plant a seed, pick cotton, do what we must to survive and give our family and ourselves sustenance and a roof over our head. All these years later, those two bits of advice still make me what I am.

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What’s Going On

/ Phil Strawn / 16 Comments

Marvin Gaye had it right…

Here we are, nearly 60 years later, and the lyrics to his song, “What’s Going On,” have never rung truer. War, riots in the street, brother killing brother, mothers grieving over their dead sons and daughters, fathers and sons disagree over almost everything, and the socialists and foreign invaders are taking over our country. Karl Marx is celebrating in Hell along with Adolph and the rest of humanity’s demons.

I was a teenager graduating high school in the late sixties, and in that first Vietnam draft. I knew there was a good chance I would wind up in Asia, either killing to survive or being killed. I stayed in a 1-A, draft status through college, vowing that if I was drafted, I would join the Navy and follow in my father’s footsteps. Sure, it was a family thing: my great-grandfather was a Texas Ranger for a while, a deputy; my grandfather fought in the trenches of France in WWI; and my father served at Pearl Harbor in WWII. So was it expected of me to be part of what Vietnam had become? To this day, I am not sure, and age has made my memory of then cloudier than it should be. But I still remember the music that kept those young men and women over there sane. Some of it was harsh, mean, belligerent protest; much of it was peaceful, but forceful in its own way.

My wife, Momo, and I were the Woodstock generation. Me, a rock n roll guitarist, her a straight-laced, Catholic school girl, plaid skirts, fish sticks on Friday, and bruised knuckles, compliments of the nuns’ rulers: a jarringly intelligent girl with a protest gene that led her to speak her voice about the war. I wasn’t as forceful about it as she was. Now we have much of the same things Marvin Gaye sang about happening in our country. What goes around comes around, and it’s not always good.

Back then, it was us young folks against the establishment, our parents’ views, and our grandparents’ staunch loyalty to this Republic; don’t trust anyone over thirty. We didn’t see it; we were too busy being young, idealistic, and, most of the time, plain stupid about the reality of what was carrying us on top of the wave of discontent.We would give others the two-finger peace sign as we passed them by, not knowing that it meant “victory” and that Winston Churchill made it famous. Our parents had fought the evil that wanted to end America and knew, at best, it was a temporary fix. They tried to tell us, but we didn’t listen; the music and the evening news rewired our thinking, taking away our logic.

Will our grown, adult children teach their children well? Momo and I carry our own fears and insecurities from our upbringing and subliminally pass them on to our children, who will do the same with theirs. We have to ask ourselves: did we teach them well enough to overcome those moments? Will they see their parents’ hell slowly go by?

Do our children and grandchildren have the fortitude to stand up for this country and lay down their lives for the good of it? Ben Franklin was a genius when he told a woman, when asked, ” Do we have a monarchy or a Republic, he replied, “Madam, we have given you a Republic, if you can keep it.” Can we? Will we? Lord, put your divine hand on every citizen of this country and lead us to victory over the forces of evil that are real and coming for us.

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Cobblestone Street By The A.T.N.T.

/ Phil Strawn / 7 Comments

This is the song that our band recorded at Summit Sounds in Dallas, Texas, in 1968. Produced by Marvin (Smokey) Montgomery and Artie Glen. Both Marvin and Artie were Light Crust Doughboys and record producers. Marvin produced the song ” Hey Paula,” and many of Delbert McClinton’s, and Bruce Channels records. Delbert played harmonica on “Hey Baby”. Artie Glen wrote the famous hit for Elvis, “Crying In The Chapel.” Bob Sullivan was the sound engineer on our record, and he also worked as the sound engineer for the Rolling Stones and a few other famous rock groups that chose to record in Dallas. The original recording featured guitars and organ, but Marvin wrote horn parts and added them later, giving it that Chicago and Tijuana Brass sound, which was just emerging around that time.

Say It Ain’t So, Billy Joe…An Ode To Rock Music And Bobbi Gentry

/ Phil Strawn / 36 Comments

After a few months of rehearsals and gigs with our new members, Danny and Marshall, Alice, our manager, announced that she had arranged an audition for a female singer for the band. No consulting the boys on this one; it was full ahead. Alice had good ideas, so we rolled with them. She thought some familiarity would add depth and make us more audience-friendly, since we were a bunch of surly young men with longish hair and the attitude to accompany our looks.

She knew someone who had a neighbor who knew another neighbor of a family who lived next door to a lady who attended church with a woman who had a daughter who sang in the choir at school and did solos at church, so Alice, one step ahead of us, escorted her into the practice room and announced, ” Boys, this is Miss Janelle.”

In walks this teenage girl with a full-grown woman’s head of long hair piled up in a big bump on top, then falling down past her shoulders. She was a dead ringer for Bobbie Gentry. But could she sing?

A TV dinner tray sat by Marshall’s organ, used for drinks and lyric sheets, so the auditioning singer pulled from a Coppertone beach bag a few record albums, a book of lyrics, a TAB cola, and a framed 8×10 autographed photo of Bobbie Gentry. Now we knew why she looked so much like Bobbie Gentry…she dug the gal.

Danny asked Miss Janelle what songs she knew. ”

Do ya’ll know any Dusty Springfield, Petula Clark, Diana Ross, LuLu, Sonny and Cher, Marianne Faithfull, April and the Flowers, Dione Warwick, Lesli Gore, Ronnie Spector?” she asked.

Danny said, “Nope, we are a rock band, not the Ed Sullivan Show.

That kind of busted her bubble a little bit. “Well,” she says, ” How bout some Bobbie Gentry? I just love her, and she is my favorite singer in my whole life.” We had already figured that out from the picture and the hair-du.

Our inquisitive drummer, Barry, interrupted her: “Isn’t that the song where she and the boyfriend throw a baby child off a bridge into the muddy river?”

Miss Janelle whirled around and yelled, ” No, moron, she didn’t throw no itty-bitty-baby off a bridge; it was a bouquet of Mississippi wildflowers to solidify her big love for her man Billy Joe Macallister, but then he got caught dating his auntie’s pet sheep, causing him to jump off the old bridge into the muddy Tallachee River. Bobbie sent me a letter, along with this picture, explaining the whole song, but I promised to keep it a secret. We’re friends, you know.”

She thinks hard for a minute, then says, ” The only Rock-N-Roll song I know is Gracie Slick’s Somebody To Love. Ya’ll know that one?” We sort of knew it, so we gave it a go.

The lass let loose and was jumping around like Tina Turner, hair flying everywhere, strutting and shimmying, doing the Bug-a-loo, the Monkey, the Watusi, and a few others while singing. When we ended the tune, Marshall, our organ player, was staring her down with those big pansy-boy watery Puss-N-Boots eyes. He clearly had a severe case of the “Hubba Hubba’s” for this gal. Danny told us that this happens about once a week, and he will be alright once he gets home and eats his mama’s hot supper. Alice announces she is marvelous and is now part of the band. Okey-dokey.

At the next rehearsal, Miss Janelle comes in with red eyes and mascara trails down her cheeks. All sniffily and weepy, she says, ” My boyfriend said I can’t sing with a bunch of degenerate rock musicians. We are in love, big-time, and I must quit the band now.” Still in the grip of the Hubbas-Hubbas, Marshall puts a consoling arm around her shoulders and tells her, “It can’t be all that bad.”

She barks at him, ” Shut up, Moon Doggy….It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to.”

And with that, she packed her Coppertone beach bag with her albums, lyrics book, TAB cola, and the autographed picture of Bobbie Gentry and left, leaving the air heavy with teenage perfume, hair spray, and juicy fruit gum. Then…..More to come in my series.

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So You Want To Be A Rock N Roll Star? 1966-67 – Part 2

/ Phil Strawn / 13 Comments
“So you want to be a rock and roll star?
Then listen now to what I say
Just get an electric guitar
Then take some time and learn how to play”…The Byrds 1967

After the family moved from Fort Worth to Wichita Falls for six painful months and then to Plano, Texas, I met a classmate and fellow guitar player who was also bitten by the “rock-a-rolla” bug. He knew another guy on his block who played guitar and owned a Fender Bassman amp, which automatically made him a band member, and he knew a neighbor across the street who was a drummer with a snare and one cymbal. He also knew a kid with another cheap Japanese guitar who would part with it for $10.00. I snatched it, bought his Sears amp for another $15.00, and was back in “the biz.” Hours of practice produced twenty songs, which we could repeat at least once or twice by shuffling them around and changing singers and keys. Our first gig was at the Harrington Park Swimming Pool, Plano, Texas, in the early summer of 1965.

The Dolphins: left to right: Jarry Boy Davis, Warren Whitworth, Ron Miller, Jay-Roe-Nelson, Phil Strawn

Guitar tuners hadn’t been invented yet, so we used a pitch pipe and got as close as possible to A440, and apparently it wasn’t close enough; we sounded like hammered Raccoon crap on grandma’s china plate. It was a humiliating experience. In my playing frenzy, I broke my B string and had to play with five strings. Then our amplifiers went south because the outside temperature was over 100 degrees and we were in the direct sun. Then, the drummer’s head on his snare split, his cymbal fell over and cracked, and Jerry Nelson, another guitar flanger, tripped on an extension cord and fell flat, damaging his Silvertone guitar. Our third guitar player, Warren, came into contact with water splashed from the pool onto the concrete while touching the strings of his electrified, ungrounded guitar, resulting in a bad electrical shock. Hair frizzed out, smoking from his ears, and burns on his fingers; he finished the gig, not knowing who or where he was. The grand debut ended with sympathetic applause, and the pool manager refused to pay us, even though our contract stipulated free burgers and shakes. Warren, our previously electrocuted guitar player, got into a fight with our drummer, and the two rolled around in the gravel parking lot for a while with no clear victor. We thought Warren was a trooper, considering the amount of electricity that had almost fried him an hour before. Bad music tends to piss folks off. The final curtain was when my pal Jarry discovered his Mustang had a flat tire, so we had to call our parents to rescue us. Welcome to the rock n’ roll music business.

From 1966 into 1967, the band continued with better gear, a new drummer and bass player, and a different name. We were now known as “The Orphans.” A strange pick since we were all middle-class guys with full sets of parents, but Barry Corbett, our drummer, thought it sounded tough and a bit rebellious. Barry may have been the biggest rebel of the four members, listening to Frank Zappa and Spike Jones and teaching himself to play the Sitar. George Harrison’s influence led him into the realm of Indian music, which he fully embraced to the point of obsession. He developed a strange Peter Sellers-type accent, wore a red dot on his forehead, and had two high school girls follow him around town, wearing white robes and playing with small cymbals attached to their fingers. He was also a rudderless musical genius and would soon lead us into the semi-big time and the really big show.

Alice Davis, Jarry’s mother, was now our official manager and did a wonderful job. She knew people and had connections and was not afraid to use them or to press a business contact into hiring her band. We were booked around Dallas and Fort Worth most Friday and Saturday nights. We made some good cash from high school kids, but spent it all on new equipment and clothing. Band members were in constant rotation. Teenage musicians proved to be an unreliable commodity.

Our keyboard and bass player left us for high school football, again, leaving three of us. Calls went out, Alice worked the phones and contacts, and we auditioned two musicians from McKinney, Texas. Danny Goode, a bass player/singer and former member of the Excels, and Marshall Sartin, church organist, classically trained pianist, and blues guitar player. We played a few songs as a five-member band and almost passed out. It was as if the ghost of Phil Spector had brought us into that practice room at this appointed time in the universe, which was strange because Spector was still alive and kicking in Los Angeles.

The Orphans. Left to right front: Jarry Davis, Danny Goode. Left to right rear: Barry “Lil Spector” Corbett, Phil Strawn, Marshal Sartin

Miss Alice was religiously overcome with musical emotion and experienced a spell of the rock n’ roll vapors that led to seating herself with a double Jack Daniels and branch water. Barry, our drummer and musical genius, had an epiphany and went to work on arranging our music and vocal parts, showing Marshall how to play them on his Farfisa Organ, which was another strange thing; Jarry and I didn’t know Barry could play the piano, or, as we soon found out, the guitar, the trumpet, the sax, or the vibes. We dubbed him “Lil Spector” in honor of the famous Wall of Sound producer.

After the Miss Janelle Bobbie Gentry-infused tenure that ended in a puff of hairspray and perfume, the band took a vote: no females allowed. Marshall was still recovering from a severe case of the Love Fever Hubba Hubba’s, and we needed him in good condition for our upcoming gigs.

Miss Alice grew weary of working the phones, dealing with clubs and booking gigs, her realty business was suffering and needed her attention. She arranged for us to be managed by an upstart agency called Mark Lee Productions of Dallas, Texas. Mark was a go-getter and had more connections than Bell Telephone. His one and only main band, Kenny And The Kasuals, had just released a great 45 that was climbing the charts, so we were excited about working with him. We signed on the dotted line of a ten-page contract that not one of us read. Why bother? We were young and full of piss and vinegar: point us in the direction of the stage and plug us in!

Within twenty-four hours, The Orphans were booked into some of the hottest venues in the DFW: The Studio Club, LuAnns, The Pirates Nook, Phantasmagoria, Teen A-Go-Go, and The Box in Fort Worth. Mark Lee was turning down gigs because he had only two bands. We wouldn’t have Friday and Saturday nights free for two years, and even less free time in the summer, when bookings took up most of each week.

We were booked to play a Christmas party for Parkland Hospital at the famous Adolphus Hotel in downtown Dallas. Pulling up to the front in our 57 Caddie Hearse caused a stir. The bellman politely told us the bodies were picked up at the rear. We got the joke and proceeded to the loading docks. The party turned out to be for the doctors, nurses, and administration folks. In the next ballroom, Braniff Airlines was having its Christmas party, but with no band. It didn’t take long before the airline parties spilled over into the hospital party, and that’s when it got crazy.

These people, supposedly responsible adults, were dancing on the tables, had a conga line going on the bar top, and we had our own go-go dancers on either side of the stage. Three of us were under the age of 18, but that didn’t stop the inebriated partiers from pumping us full of hooch in the form of cute little airline bottles. By the last set, we had gone from charming and talented to stupid drunk and were glad the gig ended. We couldn’t locate our keyboardist, Marshall, so we loaded up his gear and headed out. He showed up a few days later with some dumb-assed story he couldn’t talk about: the Hubba-Hubba’s got him again.

More to come in Part 3

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Ohhh, The Hot Mess We’re In

/ Phil Strawn / 14 Comments

Here in Texas, we have a pickup truck full of local sayings and down-home descriptions, and one of our favorites that covers most of our female-induced situations is called ” A Hot Mess.” Sounds sort of like a hormonal-induced biography of Marilyn Monroe’s or Elizabeth Taylor’s life. What it really means is everything is “FUBAR,” another good one that came out of WWII. My father wouldn’t tell me the real meaning until I was a teenager. F…. Up Beyond Any Repair, you get the drift. All of us kids used it, because all of our fathers served in WWII. We heard it daily.

I can clearly hear those angelic acidic voices of my mother and grandmother talking about an unruly cousin (usually Cookie) or an aunt or uncle, or a neighbor being a “hot mess,” or a situation that is out of their control, which was usually me.

I wasn’t a bad kid; like Sinatra, I did things my way and paid for it in the usual way: a Tupperware, 9″ x 12″ hard plastic cake storage container to the butt. I still have a faint Tupperware emblem scar embedded in my left buttock, a free lifelong birthmark compliments of my sainted mother with the arm strength of an NBL pitcher. Then, to make matters worse, she put my birthday cake in the same container, and I had to suffer the humility of blowing out those candles of that lovely cake sitting atop that cruel instrument of punishment. Dr. Johnson, my pediatric MD, would always ask me about that scar when giving me my monthly penicillin shot in the butt for whatever ailed me. It was a fairly new drug back then, so you got a shot for everything. He would say, “Well, at least she made you a cake.” He was an old Army doctor and smoked unfiltered Camels while he examined me. I think he died young while mowing his lawn.

If I’m seeing things right, this country is in a “hot mess.” We got ragheads with missles and exploding drones blowing up large oil filled ships sitting in bean bag chairs working their Gameboy controllers, I-ugh-atolla’s killing all the young folks that want a normal life, crazy ass socialist trying to take over our governement, and are succeeding, a smiling sleezy-assed commie mayor of New York trying to turn one of our greatest cities into a third-world shithole, a million Somali’s ripping off us taxpayers and driving around in Lamborginis and Porsches, Lake Wobegon has gone to hell, and all the strong women and good looking men and above average children have left and moved to Texas and Florida, even old Garrison split for New York and is now trying to escape from Madison Ave to somewhrere where he can go for a walk without hearing a call to prayer five times a day on a sound system bigger than Lynard Skynner’s. I’m telling you folks, we are in a “Hot Mess.” One thing about Texas is, we all have guns, ammo, lots of coldbeer and pork rinds, HEB frozen pizzas, and we are pissed off most of the time because it’s so hot, so the “Hot Mess” the rest of the world is in doesn’t faze us that much. Governor Abbott already issued hunting tags for all the terrorists we want to shoot; limits don’t apply, and the taxidermy mounting fee is fifty percent off.

Don’t get me wrong, we still have a “hot mess” down here, but ours isn’t as bad as it is where you are. So, if it gets unbearable in your hometown, come on down to Texas; we’ll watch out for ya.

“

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Don’t Ask The Addled Texan Floating On The Lone Prairie

/ Phil Strawn / 16 Comments
This picture is only partially AI-generated. Me, the hair, the hat, the background, and the Mandolin are real; the suit is taken from Porter Waggoner. I hate AI.

Being a native Texan is a damn challenge, and not every one of us can pull it off without a series of small nervous breakdowns, panic attacks, and, of course, a few bottles of coldbeer (it’s considered a form of cultural blasphemy to pronounce it as two words in Texas). So, we tend to meld our words into one; it makes it easier to speak without sounding like a high roller walking around in high cotton. We do have our own language down here in the Lone Star State.

I consider writing my job now, perhaps my trade. So far, I’ve not made a nickel for any of my literature, possibly because it’s about Texas, my childhood, country music, and all the characters I’ve met along my journey on the lone prairie. There is a book of short stories in the works, but an addled mind has a problem picking out twenty of the four hundred I’ve written over the decades.

Gardening was a passion for a while; I became a master gardener and imagined my landscape to equal George Harrison’s Friar Park or Martha Stewart’s backyard. It’s too hot in this part of Texas to keep anything alive, so all of my plants are expiring, begging for me to put them out of their misery. I had a small service for two purple Salvias this morning, and last night, I saw another Rat at our bird feeder. Momo would cook for the little Avians every morning if I didn’t stop her.

Music would be my other pursuit of happiness. Still, I mostley play with our church band, which is primaraly worship songs: ain’t no Amie, The Weight, or Like A Rolling Stone getting played in the sanctuarary, even though we have the intrumentation to pull it off, and some of the musicians actually can play that type of music, mostley myself since I am the oldest old codger on stage and the rest of the bunch is in their 40s, and that leaves me as the “old relic from another era, the Woodstock generation, that played Hendrix and The Band, and tried to change the world, but failed miserably and had to go back home with our collective tails between our legs. Our parents laughed, “See, you stupid ass, we told you so.” They were half-right.

My main interest now is Mandolin: bluegrass, jazz, country, the music played by Ricky Skaggs, Sierra Hull, Mike Marshall, Sam Bush, Molly Tuttle, and Billy Strings, and of course Bill Monroe.

When I was a wee child, maybe five, my father brought home a tater-bug mandolin, likely given to him by a musician friend. I learned four or five two-finger chords, and then grew bored with the instrument: Cartoons were more interesting. My father was a professional country fiddle player, so he should have whooped my butt and made me stick with it, but my mother intervened. One musician in the home was more than enough. Now, that I’m older and bored with the guitar I’ve been playing since the age of twelve, I’ve gone back to the Mandolin and fiddle. I’m much too far down that rabbit hole to stop, and Momo, my wife, says it’s the only thing, except a trunk full of medications, keeping me alive: she is always right. If I stopped playing, within twenty-four hours I would assume room temperature and the paramedics would have to bag me and haul me away. So, I keep playing and writing. It’s a vicious circle, one that I created for myself. There is no escape, and I can’t take it with me when I go, and neither can any of you reading this. Everything stays here except your new suit and no shoes.

We are taking a road trip to Mount Rushmore in September, and I hope that seeing those big faces, Custer’s Last Stand, and maybe Yellowstone will revive us and add a few more years on our punch card. I plan to watch Not by Northwest before we go, so I can see how I could climb on Teddy Roosevelt’s nose and not fall off. I also have plans to run with the Bison, which is the newest form of self-destructive dopamine hits that old folks do these days. I’ve always wanted to pet a Buffalo, or a wolf, so this will be my chance.

I’m no travel writer or influencer, so don’t expect anything spectacular or even interesting when we return. I may do a Podcast full of rants, but that would be it. God Bless the Alamo and Texas.

The Texan

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AI Has Ruined Writing, And Will Eventually Get Around To Us

/ Phil Strawn / 10 Comments

I recently joined Substack, a supposedly writer-friendly site. I may be leaving it as soon as today. AI has taken over the site and flags most everything written on there as AI-generated or assisted. I put a few of my stories from WordPress on there, and it was immediately labeled AI-generated: I’ll call bullshit on that one. Many of you, like me, have read the great authors over the years and remember their writing, so yes, we might be influenced by their ability to weave a story. There are only so many words and ways you can use them, and AI has taken everything into a database that thinks it knows best. So, why write at all? Is the day of writing over for the non-educators? I say that with a bit of menace in my mouth. I took a poll a while back at Half Price Books and found that most of the writers who are selling are women, past and present educators or professors of whatever, and spit out garbage. Gone are the days of Wolfe, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Welty, Stein, and others. Amor Towles may be the exception, but there aren’t many. At this point, I am pondering whether I should even bother.

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Scratch A Little To The Left

/ Phil Strawn / 8 Comments

I ran into old buddy Mooch at Whataburger a week back. I was waiting on my Number 1 meal, large fries, and Dr Pepper when he walked in with his little cloned Chihuahua, Gravy, attached to his chest via a baby papoose holder. Giblet, the original mean-as-hell Chihuahua, finally bit the dust, and he had him cloned, as well as his wife’s cat, Here Kitty, which is now the clone cat called Here Kitty Kitty. You have to live in Texas to understand the way we think down here.

Mooch looked pretty good, even though his overalls still had the same Ketchup stains as they did last year. What I did notice was that his fingernails were perfect and he was wearing an expensive Rolex watch. What the hell? Mooch has always been poor as a hobo with no train to ride, so this was perplexing. I knew better to ask but it had to be done.

I spit it out, ” Mooch, where did the Rolex watch and the fingernails come from, did you win the Texas two step or sell a body part?”

No, little buddy, he says, ” Me and the missus started us a nail and back scratching salon over by the old McDonald’s. She got a bunch of these little Vietnamese girls to do the nails, and with those long nails, they also do back scratching while you’re having your nails done. Feels real good, and they finally got that one spot that’s been itching for years; turns out it was a big old blackhead, and that little gal dug it right out with that sharp little fingernail. Now we’re rolling in the dough. Miss Mooch got her a new Kia, and I got a new bass boat and a pickup. Lunch is on me today.” I appreciated that; I usually pay, and that damn dog bites me. Gravy is more mild-mannered than the long-dead little demon dog, Giblet.

I will admit, I have some scratchy spots on my back, and Momo scratches me like a mongrel dog once in a while, so I said I’ll stop by for a manicure and some scratching. Every man needs a good back scratching once in a while by a little dragon lady with talons.

Happy trials, God bless the Alamo, and I’ll catch on down the line.

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New York, New York: Old Blue Eyes Would Have A Stroke.

/ Phil Strawn / 8 Comments

If Frank were still around, he would be giving his mafia buddies a call to do something about this grinning commie Rat-bastard who got himself elected mayor by the young nepo-elitist children of the rich democrats. Frank was a Dem, but from a different era, when it meant love of country and, of course, JFK, Jackie, Marilyn, and Ava. I read today that the old handsy storyteller from Minnesota, Garrison Keillor, is pissed that his taxes on his multi-million dollar townhouse are going to be doubled, so he is going back to his cozy little Lake Wobegon, that mythical magical place where all the women are strong, the men good-looking, and the children above average. Sounds like a tidy place to reside.

Give New York City a year, and all the party girls will be covered in Burkas, the single Beta-sexual men will be dating goats, and the Build A Bear stores will be converted to “Build A Bomb” stores for all the newly indoctrinated child terrorists. Sounds like we need Supergirl, Superman, Super Dog, Cat Woman, Soupy Sales, the Fantastic Four, and maybe Batman to fly into Laguardia. My son and his family briefly visited there on their way to Niagara Falls, and he thinks his DNA may have been damaged.

So this is what our nation has come down to: Socialists, communists, foreigners, and non-citizens calling the shots, and we sit back and do nothing while they steal our country and tax money from us. If you are a Democrat and read my blog, I’m calling you out. It’s nothing personal, only the way 88 million more Americans and I feel.

Let me rub some more Gulf of America sea salt into our gaping national wound: guess what! Hollywood is as dead as a Rat that just ate a piece of yummy bait inside the guts of my hot tub. Fort Worth, Cowtown, home of the shit-kicking, rodeo-riding, pickup-driving, cowboy-boot-wearing country music playing and listening boys and girls, is now the new Hollywood, thanks to a real cowboy-turned-producer, Taylor Sheridan. The girls here in Fort Worth don’t need Ozempic; they look quite nice in their Wrangler jeans and Justin boots, and they live off of Mexican food, Whataburgers, and Shiner Bock.

It would be nice if old Blue Eyes could come back for one more concert at Madison Square Garden, now that Taylor Swift is a has-been and Ella Langley, a true country artist, has outsold Mariah Cary and the long-gone Whitney Houston for fourteen straight weeks with “Choosing Texas.” Yeah, take that LA music machine.

None of this is political; it’s just how I feel most of the time. Hold my beer and watch this, hide and watch, and get off of my lawn.