Years ago, I had a themeless website where I collected and recorded things that interested me. I don't know what became of most of the stuff, but one thing I managed to save was a series of posts I wrote that I titled: "John Prine, You Wrote My Life."
In honor of John
I have no doubt John's songs have written millions of folks' experiences. These are mine.
John Prine, You Wrote My Life
a life unstuck in time (to borrow a phrase from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr),
so this story can go on and on in dis-order, added to at any time the whim (or need) arises
Chapter 15
Big Old Goofy World©
---The Missing Years
Up in the mornin', work like a dog
Is better than sittin' like a bump on a log
Mind all your manners. Be quiet as a mouse
Some day you'll own a home that's as big as a house
Kiss a little baby. Give the world a smile
If you take an inch, give 'em back a mile
'Cause if you lie like a rug and you don't give a damn
You're never gonna be as happy as a clam
There's big old goofy man
Dancing with a big old goofy girl
Ooh baby
It's a big old goofy world
"Do you know anything about horses? Not much? Well, I'll make this short. In the quarter-horse world there are three primo lines. This horse I got has two of those lines on both sides of his parentage. The lady I got him from drinks a little too much. By noon she can't say her own name, and so she doesn't take very good care of her animals. He was in clover up to his knees, and I found out he had a condition called founder. So when I told her, she felt so bad about trying to sell me a damaged horse that she GAVE him to me."
He actually whispered the word "gave", but with great emphasis and an upward toss of his eyebrows, which his eyes followed. He was quite serious, as though it were no stretch to think being so drunk by noon that you can't say your own name is only drinking "a little too much", and the tone and animation of his story telling made me laugh. "You Texans are all such characters," I said.
The look of puzzled surprise on Toot's face (that's what the name on his business card said: "Toot" Barkley) made me add, "I'm sure it seems normal to you, but to the rest of the world, you Texans are characters."
Toot showed me pictures of this new horse which he's very proud of. He's particularly proud that the horse has finally grown to trust and respond to him. He looked surprised and puzzled again when he told me that the horse had only been handled by a woman and it disliked and mistrusted men, and I said I could understand that stance.
I spent the whole following day in a little motel room, trying to get a note of some quality and duration from my newly purchased violin. I don't know how to play. I wonder if I can learn. It came into my possession in De Queen, Arkansas just a couple days before. Not so much on a whim as it was on a schedule. For many years the idea of playing a fiddle had floated in my subconscious, surfacing only momentarily from time to time, and now it had manifested. Well, the instrument at least.
After I bought the violin, I drove straight on to the Gulf of Mexico, expecting a much needed healing of big water and salt air. What came first, however, was Port Arthur, Texas. Oil refineries, swampland, alligators. Rain. Lots of rain. And a large, probably endangered species, bird on a wildlife preserve swept up and into the grill of my truck, thudding dead in the road. This was turning out to be just what the cards had foreseen - disastrous.
So I drove on, and when the road ended in a ferry with only one spot left, I drove on and filled it. Crossing the water, I crossed the border from what was ailing me to the healing power of Gulf waters at Galveston. The following day I found a nearly deserted beach where I opened the tailgate of my truck at water's edge and tried some more to play my violin. Soon enough I gave over and got in the waves. What cares can you have when you're playing with pelicans and fish that spurt up out of the water like popcorn? And dolphins!
Movement through time. Moments. Maybe they just arrive. Maybe you force their hand. Electron excitation. They say the electron eventually loses the energetic charge that made it jump to its higher orbit and finds its way back into its original shell.
At some point the world may shift. You won't feel it coming, and you won't be able to look back on the moment that it shifted and say you felt it moving. It just takes a little hop, like in the Rocky Horror song, and there you are. In something not entirely unfamiliar, but certainly shifted. And it's there that you realize you will never end. You will just keep shifting. And you will go on and on and on and on and on. And that realization is immediately both maddening and sorrowful. And then you accept it. Same as the steps in the grieving process. The compensation for this realization is that this shifted dimension is one of heightened awareness, synchronicities, and ephemeral eureka moments of understanding. And so, with your new eyes, you travel with a sense of adventure and wonder.
Except for the times when you slip back into your pre-revelation state of third-dimensionally limited reality. And then you vibrate with the same frequency as the world around you, and so you interact with it according to its rules and seem like an 'ordinary' human creature...dull, slow, frustrated, ignorant and tired. Maybe moreso than you were before you experienced the shift.
And when you get stuck there, you take a drive to Texas.
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And that's the last chapter of my story before I got stuck in time again.
Wash your hands. Don't touch your face. It's not over.
And bless John Prine. He left us treasures.
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