Trigger's Revenge

Looking out his front door that cold winter afternoon he found himself lost in the fields just across the road. They must belong to someone, he thought, but to whom? He hadn't a clue. There were times he'd taken a fancy to calling them his own, seeing as how his family had shared the house for most of his 55 years. But the livestock that grazed the dry Oklahoma "cold-weather grass" didn't belong to him, nor did the wild animals and feral cats which lived nocturnally in those woods.

He wished he owned horses. Equine beasts would make good companions for the cows and a particularly large bull penned in behind cheap farmer's wire line. Barbed wire kept them from escaping their universe...his universe...the one where his father raised a beautiful black mare and a shetland pony someone had named Trigger.

It dawned on him, perhaps for the first time, that he never knew who had named the small horse. It didn't seem like the kind of name that would come from the imagination of the same person behind Tootsie (the well groomed female) and Penny (the foal, only recently born and still a tad wobbly in the legs). "Trigger" had to have been from the mind of a child.

Who knows? he thought. It could have been me that named her.

It may well have been, or more likely from his father's favorite, his brother that the moniker had been fitted for the animal, although it must be noted that Trigger's overall sluggish demeanor never merited the kind of vigorous nature you'd expect from Roy Rogers' steed. Heavy odds would pay off for any gambler who made a bet on Mr. Rogers being the sole inspiration...the only triggers he and his brother had ever known of were clutched between the fingers of heroes like Marshall Dillon, the Rifleman, the Cartwright family on the Ponderosa (and just what does the word "Bonanza" even mean???)...Have gun will travel, it was a strange saying to their pacifist ears, unfamiliar with violence.

Though he preferred the Sunday afternoon Monster Movie on Mystery Theater he would sometimes hold back pestering his old man long enough so that the part-time cowboy could finish watching a western. Somewhere along the line he'd picked up a taste for them, though he could not recall when it had happened or over which overwrought melodrama the conversion was experienced. He came to relish the time spent with his father and grew to love the look that came over the bearded face when the bad guy hit the ground.

And the horses. Of course. All the cowboys seemed to have been assigned a horse to convey them across desserts and plains, like indestructable automobiles that seemed awfully fun to ride. In those younger days he couldn't conceive of the downside, the saddle soreness, the need to be groomed, not to mention fed and watered...those responsibilities did not come across well on the cheap black and white television his mother had bought at an OTASCO store.

Fact is he may not have loved horses so much if he'd paid attention to his father's burden in caring for them and less about Hollywood cowboys. Like Dracula and Frankenstein those horses were nothing like real life. Real horses can cause heartbreak and despair just as easily as they can win events in races and rodeos.

The "pacifist cowboy" had grown up. He continued staring at the pasture land. Even now, knowing full well the investment of a good, healthy beast, he persisted in his self-inflicted ennui.

He must have a horse!

I could take care of at least a couple now, his train of thought obsessed with the idea. At last he caved in to a memory that reminded him why it had taken most of his life to even consider owning one.

He was perhaps seven or eight years old. He measured the age by how long his family lived in the Morgan road house subtracted from how many years since the move to the west side of town. He knew that anything that happened before that migration would place him at no older than nine at the very most. The horses had to be sacrificed in that move because the house his parents had bought shared no adjacent pasture land. It surely broke his dad's heart to lose those animals...knowing him, he probably cried...

He knew he was awfully young and this was one of his oldest recollections...

A black and white photo of him astride the pony was further evidence that it took place "at the old house". Apparently Trigger had been tamed when that picture was taken...

Or perhaps it was taken just before...

On that hot summer afternoon he spooked the horse. Maybe he accidentally kicked him, he never knew what enraged the Shetland but most definitely something had.

Bucking like the most fierce bronco in the Pro Rodeo circuit he took off running as if ponies were somehow capable of winning the Kentucky Derby and the Remington Park Annual race in one fell swoop. His rear end rose from the saddle involuntarily.

He screamed but held on to the reins for as long as he could. Now that the memory had lost much of it's sheen he would not be able to tell you just how far he'd flown before being rescued by gravity. Lucky, however, that he didn't break his neck, it was an extremely young age to have cheated the Reaper but only now did he think of it in those macabre terms.

How his father must have worried. How his mother must have yelled at him for letting "the kids" get on those horses in the first place, obviously they were too young. But his father wouldn't hear of it. He'd been forced at a very young age, by a death in the family, to work the Arkansas farm land from whence his family migrated to Oklahoma. He had a lot of expectations for his own offspring but lacked the education to understand what his mother saw so clearly...they had not raised cowboys. They were bringing up rock stars and you know what that means: a latent inability to recognize responsibility in favor of the dream that never comes true.

Trigger had his revenge, that was for sure, and he continued daydreaming about the scene, playing it backwards and forwards in his mind. He chopped it into a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle and relished each piece he found that fit into what he'd been able to retain...

His father, calling out his name, leaving his brother and the horses free to escape the pasture to run towards the inert body. The fear that would have been inescapable and easy to detect in his face...one of those bad TV westerns turned all too real... The sense of relief he must have felt like a wave when it was obvious there was no serious damage here, only a few bruises and a miracle.

Father was gone now and he came to one last realization. It wasn't the horses he'd wanted to roam in those woods across the old highway. It was the memory of the times shared with the rough handed full-time cowboy who gave it up to raise his children.

The dream wasn't even his, it belonged to dad who had already proven he could more than hold his own with the best equine breeds in local rodeos and in parades through town on Festival day... A man who made a name for himself not just as a working man, which is exactly what he was, but as a friend to many and well beloved. To be respected like that, yes, that's what he hoped he'd inherited from the man.

He turned away from the fogged pane of glass which had become a time machine and looked at his wife sitting in his favorite chair quietly darning her worn socks. He felt a wave of love rush over him so much like a tsunami that he was compelled to walk across the room and surprise her with a kiss. No particular reason.

She accepted it with a smile and a look in her eyes he recognized as true love. Closing his eyes he said a silent prayer for guidance and strength. Before he reached the Amen one last image of his own father broke through and he couldn't help but interrupt the communion with a sincere, heartfelt sentiment...

"Thank you, dad".

Music Must Change?

Here I am...57 years old and my taste in music constantly evolving. Sometimes I wonder if I'll lose the capacity to enjoy music but then next thing  you know I put on my Spotify playlist, the one with over 4000 of my favorite songs, and I realize that there is still much that moves me. Music...I've danced with you, I've cried with you and I've cried for the ones who made you, the ones I've lost...to whatever it was that tore us apart, from heroin to the blade to the gun...my heroes get cut down in their prime.

I've lived vicariously through the tropes, the fantasies, never wanting to admit that my own talent paled next to the ones I idolized. And yet even so I lived those fantasies out in real life, playing music in bands and the whole nine yards (minus the heroin, mind you...and the majority of wild sex haha).

I've written so much over these past what? 40 years? A lot of it comes back to haunt me. But I do my best to keep it in perspective and see it for what it is. Despite the fact that I am a "musical schizophrenic" I know that I'll always be able to ground myself in that one band of the moment, and that moment will take me back to the decade, the year, sometimes even to the day. Music is like that. What a powerful force it is.

Many times it inspires me to write, and I suppose that's what this is all about. I would love to publish a book of my writing but I come from simple means and I will not beg or presume that any of it is good enough that someone would pay their hard earned cash to buy a copy (even a cheap digital copy for the Kindle). I am perhaps, too humble in real life even though my style of writing is, as I like to describe it, in the gonzo vein of Lester Bangs. When I hit my stride I think I can do a decent Cameron Crowe. But I never put myself in their league because they helped invent the "rockcrit" gentre. I feel a kinship with Chuck Klosterman that I never did with Rolling Stone's Rob Sheffeild and I don't know why. Perhaps I see that old Creem magazine spirit in Klosterman's work while Sheffeild comes across as a hack.

Then again it's probably just me. I have friends who record their music on CASSETTES and somehow manage to sell them so that should be inspiration for me to move some archival blog material from this one (and other sources that have been published for gratis) to a medium which is supported by Amazon, Apple, wherever e-books are published...or even better, to see them printed in an actual book form. That would be a real dream come true but trust me, for I am a humble man, I know my limits.

So how do I get from that paragraph to the next without looking as if I'm soliciting funds for a book? I know more about how journalism and advertising work (and work together) than most journalism graduates and have honed some semblance of grammatical skills throughout the years (nope, I don't have a college degree in English or else I'd be teaching and let's not go into why I would make a horrible teacher).

Where's all this coming from, you may ask? Probably from watching the 2020 Grammies last night when I realized that the Real World and the world of Popular Music have merged into some kind of healing force that I am just not feelin'. Marred by the death of Kobe Bryant earlier in the evening the whole affair, at least the 2 hours I sat through, felt uncomfortable, like something really WAS missing from what Alicia Keyes described as "the house that Kobe built". Billie Eilish won best new artist and the facebook trolls were out in full force to cut her down based on her looks, her stage-prop fingernails and everything else BESIDES her angelic voice (at least it was angelic in the song she performed, she's no goody-two-shoes in most of her own music).

Pete Townsend wrote "the music must change" and he got his wish. I don't expect my music criticism to pull in cash money but I don't think it will ever change. So I'm content and hope to continue writing about the stuff I love as well as what I hate (and I hate a lot of music, people!). Same goes with the movies, though I don't watch nearly as many as I once did, for obviously they, too, "must change" and have. Case in point: Martin Scorcese's The Irishman. Has he (or anyone) ever produced a more violent film involving actual human beings that isn't in the horror genre? And yet I tortured myself by sitting through it's overlong 3 hour running time.

I'm a masochist...that has to be it. Then again, you kind of have to be to survive in these times.

Can I get an Amen?