In our last interlude, I mentioned that Wild Horses by the Sundays is a great song.  Our readership responded that while that may be true, the song Wildfire by Michael Martin Murphey is a horrible song.  Generally, I find my readership to be rather base and ill-tempered and probably not deserving of my acknowledgement.  However, in this instance I must heartily agree that both Wildfire and its alliterative author should pretty much be banned from existence.

“There’s been a hoot owl howling by my window now for six days in a row?”  WTF?  Owls don’t howl, genius.  They hoot.  You even called it a “hoot owl.”  And why did you find it necessary to write a song about a horse lost in a snowstorm?  That isn’t tragic.  It is negligent horse ownership.  It should have been called “Susie Has No Damn Brains and Needs to Take Some Accountability for Her Actions Before She Ends Up on the Street with a Needle in Her Arm.”

This heroin burns like Whyyyyy-aisle-Fir-errrrrrr.  Anyway, Wildfire makes my bottom 5 of all-time shitty songs.  Number 4 on the list?  Achy-Breaky Heart by Billy Ray Cyrus.

Even among country music, this tune stands out as a golden turd.  First of all, it was sung by a guy in a cut off shirt wearing a mullet.  It is a rule in life that anything associated with guys in cut off shirts and wearing mullets is probably bad.  YouTube is stuffed full of these clowns running their four wheeler off a cliff or running over their sister with their monster truck.

“You can tell your ma I move to Arkansas” isn’t that profound.  “Myself already knows I’m not okay?”  What?  No learn English in West Virginia thinks myself.  Regardless, the song sounds like it was written by a dumb eight year old.  Stop tryin’ to rhyme, your song is a crime.  See how annoying that is?

In third place stands the Thong Song.  Honestly, the first half dozen times I heard it played I thought it was a novelty song.  Or that Weird Al Yankovic was parodying some rap song I didn’t know.  Incorrect, myself.  It was a serious effort.  And a monumental failure.  “Thong, thong, thong, thong.”  Gong.

Speaking of lyrics, try this one on for size.

She had dumps like a truck, truck, truck
Thighs like what, what, what
Baby move your butt, butt, butt
I think I’ll sing it again

Do us a favor.  Never sing it again.  Also, what are dumps?  Speaking of rhyming (and an Honorable Mention) – my humps, my humps, my humps, my humps, my humps.  This lyric only makes sense if you are a camel.  Or a deformed Parisian bell ringer.

Number 2?  A tie!  Islands in the Stream and Ebony and Ivory.  Both are horrid songs sung by people who should have known better.  Why?  You were all rich and famous.  There was no need for this.  No need at all.

And the worst song ever?  Hey 19 by Steely Dan (which is also the worst band ever).  This song makes me want to vomit.  And why did you have to drag Aretha Franklin into it?  She should have sued.

I know I would like to.

Want to hear a good lyric?

“Grandpa pissed his pants again, he don’t give a damn.  Brother Billy’s got both guns drawn, he ain’t been right since Viet-nam.”  That’s what I’m talking about, Warren Zevon.

Awooooooooooooooooooo.  And a pow pow pow.

My wife forced me to listen to country music this weekend.  Perhaps forced is not truly accurate.  It is just that we have a rule that the person who is driving gets to listen to the radio station of his or her choice.  I didn’t make the rule.  But I have to abide by it.  Without the rule of law, man is nothing more than a dirty animal.  And who wants to be that?  Well, there is that guy who lives with a wolf pack and thinks he is a wolf.  That guy sure seems to want to be a dirty animal.

Wooooooowhoooooooo!!!!  Take a shower, wolf guy.  It isn’t cool to let wolves piss on you.  Though some people let people piss on them.  I hear it is good for staving off infection.  Like when you don’t have access to antibiotics, I guess.

Speaking of distasteful things, back to the country music torturing.  You know, it isn’t that I think that country music is terrible.  (It is better than jazz.  Probably on par with techno.  It gives reggae a run for its money.)  The thing I can’t stand about it is that it has lost touch with its roots.  Once, country music was about divorce and bar fights and dead dogs and wolf piss.  Now, it is about some pretty boy from the city faking a southern accent and talking about the dirt roads where he and the boys used ta’ go frog giggin’ and drinkin’ beers (when they weren’t chasing Daisy Sue).

As a rural person, let me set something straight.  Nobody wants to be catching frogs and drinking cheap beer with their buddies.  They would rather be hanging out with a girl and watching a movie (preferably on SyFy, but one shouldn’t be greedy).  The problem is that there aren’t any girls in a rural area.  Or damn few.  And the good ones get snapped up by twenty-three year old guys with their own trucks.  There is nothing cool or romantic about this.  Plus, nobody actually ever catches any frogs.  They are too elusive.  “Ninjas of the Night” I call them.  Ribbit.  Ribbit.  Can’t catch me, hillbilly.  Why don’t you get a girlfriend?  Loser.  Ribbit.

Of course, my wife doesn’t care if I’m tortured by country music.  She has a mean streak, I suppose.  Ten foot wide.  That she learnt while growing up in a trailer.  And drinkin’ in a honky tonk down by the river.  If only this were true.

In reality, she grew up in a nice house on the hill and vacationed with her family at the lake.  See?  Fraudulent.  She did ride horses, though.  Partially fraudulent.  Best horse song?

Wild Horses by the Sundays.  Hands down.  Not a country song, mind you.

And one more thing.  Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Eageles and the Marshall Tucker Band aren’t country music.  Stop your revisionist history, bumpkins.  Have you no shame?

Best country song?  Ruby by Kenny Rogers (of all people).  For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Ruby is about a paraplegic Vietnam vet whose wife is stepping out on him.   The final line of the song is “if I could move, I’d get my gun and put her in the ground.”  Hahahaha.  Bitch.  Pow Pow Pow.

Now that’s America.

Y’all.

I just returned from my trip to grizzly country.  Luckily, I didn’t see any grizzlies.  Not that I have anything against grizzlies.  After all, grizzly bears have many positive attributes. They look cool.  They have nice, warm fur.  They are an important part of the ecosystem.  Really, the only problem is that grizzly bears sometimes kill and consume human beings.

Generally speaking, I really don’t have too much of a problem with this.  There are a lot of people.  And lots of them are highly annoying.  Honestly, I would cheer a grizzly on if it got its paws on a hedge fund manager.

“Eat his head, eat his head,” I would chant.  “Sis, boom, baaaa.”

“Grrrrrrrr,” says the bear as he chomps down on the hedge fund manager’s leg.

“Help meeeeeee,” says the pathetic stock market manipulator.

“Ain’t no way, ain’t no way, all you do is steal money all day.”

Why do my dreams never come true?  Maybe if I pray harder, the Flying Spaghetti Monster will hear my pleas.

Anyway, bear killing fantasies aside, it is a little dangerous to be in grizzly country.  They can’t, unfortunately, tell the difference between a nice human being like myself and, say, a bank CEO.  To grizzly bears, all human beings are assholes.  Given our general behavior, who could blame them?

Regardless, I was on high alert as we hiked through the Beartooth mountains.  In fact, I was on high, high, high alert.  This is because my wife was reading Night of the Grizzly while we were in Montana.  Unfamiliar with this particular tome?  Let me summarize.  This book chronicles grizzly attacks in gory detail.  One after another.  Hiker goes into woods, sees grizzly, tries to fight, gets mauled and eaten.  And then is cached under a tree to be snacked upon at a later date.

Hunters are quartering a recently shot elk.  They aren’t paying attention.  Grizzly ambushes them before they can get to their guns.  Grizzly mauls and partially eats them.  Caches them for later.

A young woman is sleeping in her tent.  A grizzly pokes around the campground.  The grizzly decides to reach in and drag the girl from her tent.  Maul, kill, eat, cache.

Needless to say, I saw no reason to read this book.  Luckily, my wife saved me the trouble by providing a running synopsis of each maul, kill, eat, cache.  As you might imagine, I began to see and hear grizzly bears whenever we walked in the woods.  It didn’t help that every trail head had a stern warning to be “Bear Aware.”  No problem there.  My awareness level was at peak capacity.

As you might have already gathered, we saw no grizzlies.  They were either sleeping or eating someone else.  So long as it wasn’t me.  This is America.  Every man for himself.  I can’t make America Great Again if some grizzly bear is grinding my skull between her teeth.

We did, however, see a rattlesnake on the road.  It slithered away without bothering anyone.  Not before making an impression, however.  While trout fishing the next day, a small garter snake darted from beneath my feet.  It was obviously frightened and wanted to avoid me at all costs.  In these thoughts, we were of one mind.  Unfortunately, I was unable to hide my anxiety from my bride.  This wouldn’t have been too big of an issue, if that would have been our only snake encounter.  But it wasn’t.  In fact, there was pretty much another snake every ten feet.  It did not make for my most courageous day.  At least my wife found the humor in it.

On the walk back, I found myself hoping we would see a grizzly bear.  I wanted to see the fear in my wife’s eyes.  Ridicule me for being scared of snakes.  I can’t wait to see how scared you are when the grizzly comes firing out of the brush.  Then I remembered that the grizzly almost always grabs the husband first.

Even on vacation, life is not fair.

At least we were able to stop in Bismarck on the way back.

 

 

Every day I take tea to work.  I used to take coffee, but it gave me stomach problems.  So I had to give it up.  It was for my own good.  Anyway, with the tea I now take to work there comes a tag with a little saying on it.  Generally, these sayings are meant to be inspirational – if you are into that sort of thing.  I read them, but have seldom been inspired.  Until today.  Because today’s saying is utterly ridiculous.

“An attitude of gratitude brings opportunities.”

Now, to be fair, I like the rhyming scheme.  Particularly with two three syllable words.  Try rhyming something with syllable.  Not easy.  Spillable.  Ok.  Maybe not that difficult.  If you are a literary genius.  Anyway, I digress.

As I was writing, there is nothing inspirational about this morning’s teabag.  Gratitude doesn’t bring opportunities.  It brings more assignments at work.  Greed brings opportunity.  A well-connected relative brings opportunity.  Fake breasts bring opportunity.

“Hulk Smash.”  Not, “Hulk say thank you.”  Did Dirty Harry keep his job by showing gratitude?  Hells no, as the kids say.  He kept his job by mouthing off to the mayor and telling punks to make his day.  And then shooting said punks with his .44 Magnum.  Pow Pow Pow.  No gratitude to be found.

When Mark Zuckerberg had a guy write the initial code for Facebook, did he say thank you?  I think not.  He stole it from him.  After he stole the idea for Facebook in the first place!  Boom!!  And Pow!!  Thievery and duplicity brings opportunity.  That is what Zuckerberg gets with his teabag.

Zuckerberg is a funny name.  He should have been a fat kid with a lisp.  Who played catcher on his little league team.  But not very well.

Speaking of dorky rich kids, do you think that Donald Trump ever said “thank you” for anything?  Never.  He said “gimme, gimme”  and “mine, mine” and “why is my penis so much smaller than the other boys?”  And now he will probably be your president.

“Hulk Smash!  Hulk Smash!!!”

I know, Hulk.  It disturbs me as well.  What can I tell you?  Nothing.  Because you are a giant, green-skinned behemoth with only rudimentary language skills.  I’m talking about the real Hulk, not the new, wanker Hulk.  I do not recognize any Hulk’s existence unless that Hulk is pretty much nothing but a mindless brute bent on destruction.  Hulk Smash or nothing.  Why ruin a good thing?

No gratitude, that’s why.  And what was the reward?  They made a bunch of movies with the Hulk in it and everybody got rich.  Except for the Hulk.

“Hulk Smash!!!  Hulk Smash!!!”

On the other hand, a hillbilly in a rusty truck turned right in front of me yesterday.  Luckily, due to the MO’s superior reflexes and driving ability, I remain unscathed.

You know who that hillbilly is voting for?

Hulk Smash.  Hulk Smash.  Hulk Smash.

Thank you, Hulk.