An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 7)

 An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 7)

originally written on September 18, 1995

Slightly revised on August 25, 2021

She walked away from home, from her family, when I was 17 years old. It took me by surprise. Sure, things had been bad with lots of arguing but that had been going on for so long maybe I'd become immune to it. I can't say how well Charles took it but I do know that we both fared MUCH better than my old man. He was devastated. I t was like the only thing in the world that mattered to him was gone. In my time I've fallen on many black days but that one was probably the absolute worst, most likely a contributing factor to dark days to come. 

It was bad enough I had to watch my father cry like a baby. I didn't feel sorry for him at the time. I'd become used to it and it made me angry. He was convinced that my mother would only listen to me - if I'd only speak to her I could convince her she should come home (a lot like dragging me into an argument, don't you think?) What he couldn't/didn't want to see was that it was a useless hope thata they could ever live together again. Their love had died years ago, maybe it wasn't all my fault or my brother's fault after all... Who knows but that their love had been dead ever since the time we were babies? Does that happen? Of course it does. I never heard either one of them say "I love you" to one another. Hell, I don't think I heard my dad say them to ME more than 10 times in his life but what are they but words, right? Three stupid little words that don't seem to add up to much unless you put them in the proper order. By the time he'd come around to saying them to me it was difficult to hear them. They just didn't seem natural coming from his lips (or my mom for that matter because she wasn't one to say them much either, if at all). 

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To this day I know so little about my parents... one of the reasons I've been writing this bio is so that my daughter Aubrey Lynn and my son Bryan James might know me better than I knew my own dad. 

My father insists that my mother was unfaithful to him. This is very possible because she certainly wasn't satisfied by him. She denies this and I have to believe her but what then? Why would my dad make up a story about catching another man in the closet? That's exactly what he told me, that he'd found this "other man" in their bedroom. When I last saw my mother (it's been years ago) I confronted her with this accusation and she laughed like I was telling a joke on the Carol Burnett show. WTF, right? 

So she denies the accusation...is she being honest or does she not want me to know the Truth? I can understand that, I suppose, but it's hard not knowing my pa wasn't delusional, now that he's been gone for so long and I can't talk about these things. God knows I would have talked to him about it whenever he'd let me, but then again I'm sure he wouldn't want me to dredge it up so often as I might. I'm ashamed to say that we got into a few arguments not too long before he died and I'm even more concerned because they seemed like old times, like we were doing what we were supposed to be doing. Only these arguments were different because I'd already proven that I could be a decent father to my own son having been given the opportunity, the blessing, the responsibility, having it thrust upon me. Knowing what love feels like once again, Love, capital L. 

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(I've veered from the original manuscript somewhat, now I will return to 1995, so some dates may be off)

Does it even matter? It's been over a year since I last saw my mother. I know where she lives and it's not far from my where I live now - so why don't I go visit? I'm not mad at her. Her second husband, who never liked me and the feeling was mutual, the man she left my circle for is dead now so I can't use him for an excuse for not at least checking on her. 

I suppose some part of me is still pissed off at her for walking away. For putting me in the position I wound up in. Surely she had no idea that my dad would carry on like he did. Surely she didn't expect me to carry such an enormous burden... She says I could have come and stayed with her had I wanted, at least that's how I remember some kind of choice being offered back in 1977. I don't think of it as a choice these days but I guess it was and I also have to consider that I made that choice to stay with my father and that there was no turning back for any of us. 

I was too naive to realize that she'd already put the divorce in motion. I remember thinking she was starting a new life and had nothing, not even a place of her own, which was only half true, I just wasn't privy to the "where" of this domicile, at least not at first. She gave me the address and let me drive to OKC to visit her anytime I wanted, she gave me stuff just like my dad gave me stuff to go fetch her for him. She gave me a cool new suit that made me look like a new romantic with my long hair finally straightening out. I was looking pretty damn good in those days but I couldn't see it because I wasn't looking at through the right "lens". My mother saw it. My first girlfriend/wife Barbara McLaughlin saw it. We drag the pictures out nowadays and my beloved wife Stacie sees it. What's most important though is that *I* see it now. When I was free, when I was given the freedom to make myself whatever I wanted to be I was happy in the midst of all the chaos that was going on around me. I pretended I was in a band when I was a kid and I never stopped pretending and look what I got. A talent for drumming, singing, playing soprano, alto, baritone saxophones, keyboards (though I never learned to play with music), and now a new suit my mom bought for me at one of the malls in Oklahoma City... I remember getting a Clash button from Friends Records when they were only located in Norman, OK and wearing it on the lapel of my suit jacket, skinny tie and all. [Those "tacky" badges were really cool, you could show your respect for your favorite band by wearing them in your coat, shirt, wherever a sharp pin wouldn't jab you...the import copy of Joy Division's double album Still had one of these pins included and it was my pride and joy in 1980, the design on the pin was the cover art for the band's first proper LP Unknown Pleasures... I went on to be the biggest Joy Division fan in Oklahoma.]

As for my mother...she never asked for custody and therefore she didn't have to fight for it. That's the black and white of it. That's the stuff I didn't understand at 15 years of age. I knew what divorce was... I had seen Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep in "Kramer vs. Kramer" at the Ritz theater in Shawnee (or it may have been the Penthouse theater a couple of blocks away) so I had at least some kind of experience with the concept of the ravages of divorce, even if it was only a movie... it was a great movie and I recommend it to anyone whose children (and grown up children) might have a hard time understanding the pain of the "big D".

(I only have one more page of the original manuscript for this autobioraphy so I'll probably dig deeper into my hand written archives for future facebook and blogger posts. Just so you know, they aren't all in this biography form but there is much there to laugh and cry at. If you've been keeping up with these posts I can only say thank you. It makes me feel better knowing that I'm not the only one who understands or who might wish to understand. And I'm not. 

Peace OUT!

Head...Oklahoma's first truly original alternative band

HEAD, left to right
Gregg Dobbs - guitars, backing vocals
Jimmy Casey - Vocals, bass guitar, acoustic guitar
Charles Casey - Drums, vocals, cowbell

Head was an alternative rock band which consisted of Singer-bassist Jimmy Casey, Guitarist/E-Bow master Gregg Dobbs and drummer Charles Casey, who also sang backing vocals with the group. Though there was much confusion as to their band name, Jimmy told Genius, "It was lifted from an old Man Ray piece entitled 'Head Found Underneath a Bed'. There was something I found singularly absurd about the title and I wanted to infuse the sound of the band with it." Apparently they were successful, as many took it to mean everything from an actual head to a myriad other possibilities.

"We were serious about it," Casey continued. "Dead serious."

Indeed they were, for within a matter of less than a year they found themselves playing in dive bars, at weddings and even opening for national acts The Call, and soon to be local 90s legends, The Nixons ("Sister"). Lesser known local Oklahoma band The Wake also shared the stage with Head on at least one occasion.

Gregg Dobbs

Gregg Dobbs' mesmerizing mix of rhythm and lead guitars, often sounding like space wars waging in the distant night, also bore the distinct distractions of Peter Buck and Angus Young influences.

Charles Casey played the drums like John Bonham ina jazz club, with finesse and power. Though his role was almost always confined to the traps he was also quite a versatile background singer. Known to friends simply as "Chuck" he was a personable comrade and fans loved him.

An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 6)

 An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 6)

originally written on September 18, 1995

Slightly revised on August 23, 2021

My brother and I got used to being alone together. My mom had to take a job at the Sooner Cafe and she would have us stay in the car for a couple of hours until her shift ended. This was NOT fun, for one reason our car was a tiny Ford Maverick. We needed more of our own space but there was nothing to help matters. It was the family car and it got great gas mileage and I eventually learned to drive in it. I thoght of it as my car for a long time even though it still belonged to dad and Charles drove it at times as well (I think). 

Sometimes we were allowed to come into the Cafe if it wasn't too busy and we stayed out of trouble. That's where I saw one of the first jukeboxes I ever saw and heard. I definitely remember playing Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Run Through the Jungle" and The Doors "Love Her Madly" which didn't seem much to me even then as dining music but they were in the nationwide top 20 so their popularity got them through the door and into the jukebox service guys box of stocked 45s. Sometimes when a record "ran it's run", as it were, falling off the charts or whatever reason, the juke box guy would sell them for a pittance. This was circa 69-70 and most of the records were crap pop music we were growing out of. The Osmonds was a band you grew out of. The Jackson 5 was a group you grew out of. No matter how many more hits they made there was a point in time when they, to coin an outdated Internet term, "jumped the shark" and became completely irrelavent to us, consigned now to the nostalgia factor, resurrected now by Google on YouTube if you really want to make yourself feel old because you actually find something in those jubilant young faces, still too young and innocent to know that the world has in store for the aging musician. 

I seem to remember we were out in the car, and expected to stay there, much more often than when we were welcomed into the Sooner, out of the way. Oh well.

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[the following portion of the original manuscript has been touched upon in this revision but I will copy it here faithfully because it is of such importance]

My mom and dad fought a lot. I never saw violence but they sure did wear thin on each other's nerves. My dad would often try to drag Charles and myself into these fights and this, my mother has told me, was the main reason she left him. In retrospect that reason, even when she told me at the time, was pretty lame. My mom is still alive, praise the Lord, but she's locked herself out of my life as I see it as well as the life of my wife, my son, and for all I know my brother and his extended family. That's a lot to lose out on...but on the other hand I have not felt right reconnecting with her either. As I get older I try to understand her better and I think I do to a very good extent (although obviously not enough to go pay a visit). She is probably where I get my love of reading from, God knows she wanted me to be a doctor or a scholar and let me know it from a very young age. She likes to read Harlequin romance books and she reads them voraciously. She will sit on the floor on a blanket and smoke pack after pack of nasty cigarettes (the gross kind made with tobacco har har har). I don't judge her for that, I actually kind of admire the ability to enjoy something as simple as a cheap subscription romance novel that she buys in garage sales and I'm sure at the library sales here in town. I was thinking of her the other day when to the library and out of the blue I got the urge to buy her as many romance novels I could fit into a large paper bag at our library sale. Our sale is ridiculous, any book for 5 cents and 50 cents for a huge paper sack filled with your choice of what they have to offer. I'm not sure how often they rotate and add new books but lately I've been going more often and I'm finding more that interests me. The only down side to the library sale is that I don't have room for all I would eventually buy if given the oppurtunity (and at those prices it is easy to buy stuff I know I'll never read just to have them in my collection. Like an entire World Book encyclopedia for instance which I can't even read because the print is too small...did I tell you I have a voracious "quest for knowledge", as it were? I've found Wisdom in God, now I want to understand his works through schooling. Which is my way of saying I want to go back to college and pick up where I left off when my first wife left me...that's a story I'm not looking forward to telling and probably won't in this Autobography, at least not for a long time. Divorce is one of the most painful emotional responses one can live through on both sides...but it's water under the bridge as far as I'm concerned).

She walked away from home, from her most immediate family, in December 1977. I was 17 and you can quote any statistic you can find from anywnere and by anyone, doctors and psychologists, counselors and gurus, if any one of them tells you 17 is old enough to deal with a parents' divorce I will call you a fool. Is there an age when divorce is going to be just a-okay by everyone involved? Maybe. For me 17 was the age when my world was turned upside down.

Sure, things had been bad with lots of arguing leading up to her leaving but I suppose I'd become immune to it because it didn't take me by surprise and I feel like maybe it should have been discussed by all of us together...but no, the last I saw of my mother while she still considered herself a CASEY was before I left to vent in the truck. 

She left and I took it fairly well at the start. I broke down and cried that night during choir practice at the First Baptist Church where I'd been attending at the behest of a friend (I'm pretty sure it was my best bud David McCurley). The music director was also the youth director, a tall skinny dude named Alan Tinsley. He pulled me through that first wave of pain and though I've fallen from grace with him I have to confess that I appreciate what he did all those years ago. Thing is I don't remember what it was that HE did. Nowadays I give glory to God for using Alan as a vessel to bring some healing to me and I know it was the Holy Ghost (aka Holy Spirit) that brought me to the other side of those bad times filled with pain and sorrow, insecurity and fear, so deeply hurtful that they would cause me to tell the pillow that I hated him and I may have said those words but if I did I've blocked it out because what I now realize I felt was summed up in one word: PITY. 

No one should feel pity for their own father. No one should be put in that place where it feels like pity. That's where I was though. And my pity turned to revenge and I started listening to music that bled pity and revenge, aimed at no one necessarilly so it was easy to assign it to my dad since I suppose I blamed for the whole mess. I still love those old punk records I had currently streaming on Spotify of course but Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Psychedelic Furs had come to replace the Be Bop Deluxe, Cheap Trick and a good chunk of everything else. Nowadays I listen to black metal to cleanse my soul but I wouldn't do that if I didn't know that I have the Holy Spirit in me to protect me from the negative vibes that are part and parcel of most black metal. 

Black metal...can believe that? Just another aspect of my morbid soul. 

An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 5)

 An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 5)

originally written on September 18, 1995

Slightly revised on August 21, 2021

(When I last left off it was about 1977-1977 and my mom and dad were trying to rekindle their romance by weekly visits to the BJ Corall then I got a little side-tracked. Now we return to the original manuscript...)

Charles and i were left alone on these Saturday nights. That didn't bother us, however and we actually began to look forward to having the run of the house at such young ages (I was 16, I think, and my brother one year behind). They would buy us Fox DeLuxe and Tony's pizzas to fix for our dinner(perhaps this is why I have such well-documented love for pizza even today)...cooked 'em straight from the freezer and into the stove, no mamby pamby microwave for us country boys who hated country music. We also got a six-pack EACH of Coca Cola so we learned quickly how to process caffeine and use it in the service of staying up as late as we possibly could. There was nothing stopping us from staying up until mom and dad came home but I don't remember them coming back and in retrospect they probably left us to fall asleep on our own until the bars closed down at 2:00. I may have been young but I knew even then that this place was no more than a glorified bar out just side of the county line. The law concerning alcohol was known as B.Y.O.B. (Bring Your Own Bottle) but the news kept talking about a new law that essential would supplant pseudo-dry counties: Liquor By The Drink. I don't remember the essentials of that mandate, it just meant that the Oklahoma was catching up with the Coasts and Las Vegas concerning alcohol consumption. Pretty sure it had a lot to do with taxing the hooch much like we now tax "medical" marijuana in Oklahoma and let the more "pious" of us call it a "sin tax". Tobacco has always been a huge player in collecting Oklahoma's sin tax and it looks like ganja could well surpass it in sheer dollars and cents within a short period of time...hell, I haven't looked at the numbers, our marijuana taxes may already have surpassed tobacco. I wouldn't be surprised what with dispensaries popping up in every crevice of every small town and blossoming like the wild west in the bigger cities. Oklahoma City and Tulsa, for instance, have countless dispensaries already in full operation. 

What will be the future of marijuana in Oklahoma? In the long run we'll just have to find out.

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Back to the autobiography...

So...here's me and my brother all alone in the house, I suppose some would say these days that we were being "neglected" but that would be plain silly. It's not as if we lived in Chicago. Remember, the town I grew up in was small. Somehow it's been classified as a "city" as of not many years ago but make no mistake, it's a small town, always was and always will be. Small town gossips, small town churches (except for the beautiful Catholic Church which hosts the supposedly infamous Shrine of the Infant Jesus), small town schools, small town shutting the doors down at 10 PM and except on special occassions everyone was expected to be at home with his/her family. And we were, most of us. There were some names that were infamous for being outlaws...Fawcett, MacAnally, Griffith...I grew up with a sense of fear for this lot...except for Justin Fawcett, who, along with his sidekick Russell Drury became my first "partner in crime". 

Justin and I had a wooden box with a lock on it. I suppose I should say it was Justin's, he had the key to the lock, but he let me see what was in it...just more of the "adult books" that I'd been developing a taste for. We would take magic markers and write coded messages all over that box so there was no mistaking who it belonged to. Like a club. I also remember a small metal box where someone had cut out individual pictures of nude women from Playboy and Penthouse and me receiving these on the cusp of my pubescence makes the memory of that box strong even though I was the one who threw it away. Why did I throw it away? I suppose I didn't want my mom and dad to catch me with it, I don't think I ever even showed it to Charles, this was my own secret box.

Time marches on. I was not damaged by my appreciation, as a pre-teen, of what the prudes called "porn". It wasn't until several years later that I saw what I would consider actual "porn" and it was a different ball game indeed. 

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Back to those Saturday nights, slightly less outlandish. We'd stay up as late as we wanted to watch Mazeppa's Uncanny Film Festival (featuring Gaylord Sartain as Mazeppa and his many skit characters, and a young, less frazzled healthy Gary Busey whose main role was as a Tulsa Oklahoma version of a greaser named Teddy Jack Eddy. This stuff should still be on YouTube, I think you'd be amused to point your Google Antenna towards those keywords and see what you find in those waters).

This was also the era of the first few seasons of NBC's Saturday Night...as any true fan of the original show knows it wasn't called Saturday Night Live during at least the first one. No lazy initials of SNL and Chevy Chase were only on that first run before I assume he became too obnoxious and coke-addled to be relied upon (or even liked). It didn't matter because Charles and I only started watching it when the second season began, the one where Bill Murray joined the cast and the music guests began to get more eclectic (DEVO, Talking Heads, Elvis Costello & the Attractions to name a scant few of dozens of awesome, original music guests. Nothing like it is today, although I don't doubt that plenty of people who aren't really deep into music might think there's something there that just wasn't there before, I am here to tell you there was. Kanye West, face it, is his own biggest fan. Much of what passes for music on SNL these days is a pale imitation of honest working man's music or punk rock or progressive rock or anything that was happening in the 70s and most of the 80s (I'll give you a few from the 90s as well but Kurt Cobain killed alternative music when he shot his stupid ass self in the head having succumbed to every musicians' nightmare, the Siren of all artistic integrity and the killer, HEROIN. 

I have never done heroin in my lifetime and it is with a great degree of confidence that I will tell you that I'll never do it for the rest of my life. I can't say that I won't one day fall off the weed wagon (though I don't see it happening anytime in the future). But I swear with my hand on the Bible and the Rosetta Stone that I'll NEVER smoke crystal meth or crank or speed and even though I'd been open to it for a long time I don't want to trip on LSD or even mushrooms. Life on this planet is too bizarre on it's own terms for me to want to mess around with reality. 

Hugs not drugs. Sounds lame. Trust me, it's not. There comes a time when it catches up with you. You start to think you have the answer. You start to think of yourself as Buddha himself dispensing wisdom hither and yon. You start thinking that everything you see on the TV and in the movies is either real or intended to mess with your mind. Have you ever seen The Truman Show? I got to see it in the theater with a few of my friends from my stoner days. I was so brazen at the time that I took a wood pipe and a quarter sack in an Altoids box everywhere I went and once I even took a hit in the empty men's room of this particular theater. I don't think it was The Truman Show when I did this, but no matter, I was on Cloud 9 with my ganja gang and something about Truman's predicament as the unwitting star of a whole television show he knew nothing about made me feel paranoid. Looking back I'm surprised that it didn't push me into a psychotic episode, now that I understand better what a psychotic episode is like...and I have marijuana to thank for that. 

My story...I'll never be able to see it in a linear fashion. It will always be memories that trigger something within me that I recognize as my SELF. Is it starting to get weird? Trust me, it gets weirder and I'm not barely half through with the original manuscript I began transcribing a few days ago. This is not an invitation to pry into my private life. It is only a sharing, secure in the knowledge that NONE of you, not a single one of you is better or worse than I am and hence I am no better or worse than any of you. The great equalizer. So it is. Down to choices. 

I really need to listen to some music today! What will it be? Choices!

Choices! What should I listen to? I think I'm going to get out the old HP Computer that I put on the shelf when Microsoft killed Windows 7 (idiots...Windows 10 sucks big time next to Windows 7 Home Premium and that old computer will prove it. Now I'm happy to use a Lenovo with a slow Dell back up). There are a ton of videos I made of myself during various stages of learning to play guitar and singing, none of which would probably make the grade on a silly Tik Tok video, but they were recorded so long ago that I'd forgotten them. I think I'll spend most of my Saturday with headphones on my head a computer on my lap, laying on my back so it doesn't start hurting again...there's something I should figure out and chech with my doctor about, my back just kills me. He'll just say exercise more and he'd be right. He just doesn't know how much I can't stand the sun sometimes. 

Choices!

(Damn, I have a fine wife. A good wife. Thank you Jesus for sending her to me...I don't think I'd still be tethered to the mortal coil without her)

An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 4)

An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 4)

originally written on September 18, 1995

Slightly revised on August 20, 2021

Backing up a little - my next door neighbor (and also the nicest person I know) Randy Blemmel showed me some magazines which would prove to become favorites.  They were published by Warren Magazines and each one dealt with the macabre and the bizarre. Eerie and Creepy were black and white graphic pulp magazines that took the horror genre into realms that DC books never dared to go. Vampirella was similar although it was a serial title and focused on one main character, an out-of-this-world sexy female vampire named Vampirella. 

The best Warren magazine, in my opinion now and especially then was Famous Monsters of Filmland, which was primarilly filled with still photos from classic (and not-so-classic) horror films of the time. Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr. and Christopher Lee were the big boys here and the gorier the photograph the better I liked it. Perhaps this is strange but I was only like 10 years old and had a lot of curiosity to waste on these trivial things. (In 1995, when I originally wrote this, there were still monster magazines being published but nothing as good as Forest Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland...there could never be because modern horror, influenced by slasher films such as Halloween, Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street have little more to offer than blood and gore. That's not so much the case now, in 2021 as they have turned into a cliche)

The eternal vampire has been replaced by the psychotic knife weilding serial killer. Back then, in the late 60s and early 70s we were afraid of the monsters/villains for what they were (vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein's monster, on and on), not simply what they did (and could do) to their victims, though that was definately a part of it as well. Dracula was my childhood favorite because the idea of a living corpse feeding off of human blood seemed almost believable. (2021 update: I now see a lot of reasons to be afraid of such a creature not the least of which being summed up in the old saying "Who wants to live forever?" which is a flip-sided question of it's own)

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I started out writing about my mother and I've wound up with comics, magazines and Dracula. I guess that's because my mother and I were never really close (that can be said of my dad and me as well, I'm afraid). In these formidable comic book collecting years my mom and dad seemed to have been trying to recapture the lost romance of the years, I assume, before my brother and I were born. They'd begun visiting, every Saturday night, a country music "dance hall" (let's call it what it was, a honky tonk bar located a few miles out of town that obviously needed an outlet for adults at the time, worried about the war, having diffiulty bringing themselves to the point where they could see through the black and white). This place was called the BJ Corrall. Named after the owners Betty and Joe Sargent (I think that was thier last name, pretty sure about the first). It was apparently the "place to be" in Prague on the weekends. At least they had a live band, though I was not old enough to ever find out, I can only imagine it as a lame country and western cover group trying to churn out Hank Williams Sr., George Jones, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings you get the idea. 

Actually I feel kind of foolish suggesting any reason for why they went there. What did I know? And what do I know now? I just knew that they fought a lot still and I can speak for my brother and myself that we were too young to have to listen to that stuff so often. There were periods when they would argue days at a time although I never saw my dad lift a fist to hit her and I honestly don't think he had ever done that. I think he pushed himself to a line where he refused to cross with her and later with me when I was the one on the other end of his nightly arguing. It seemed as if he actually enjoyed fighting with me as I reached and crossed the line of puberty. Especially after my mom got tired of being on the recieving end of his rage and left us to fend for ourselves and take care of him on our own. It was a little too much, though. My brother and I had to figure out what was going on in front of us and it wasn't pretty. He was having a nervous breakdown but we had no idea, I don't think I even knew what a nervous breakdown was at that time or at least that I would recognize one as such. But he would go on about how his nerves "were shot". He was in agony, you could tell he was ashamed to be crying in front of you, he'd beg me to go after her, once he even hit the wall hard enough to put his fist through it. But never did he threaten us, that wasn't something he would have done. 

After he realized she wasn't coming back and that he'd given me a hundred dollar bill to drive to Oklahoma City and do this supposed magic spell he must have thought I had in bringing him back and in retrospect you're damn right I feel guilty for taking that money and not saying a thing to mom about coming home when I went there. I admit it, I didn't want her to come home. I didn't want her to face him again and argue like it was a part time job piled up on top of the full time job she left behind. Dad was desperate when he did that and I recognize it as such. I sometimes wonder if he ever "wised up" and realized that I'd stopped having anything to do with her...that wasn't my fault either, what I inherited were the arguments. Virulent and hateful we would stand at the end of the hall and hurl abuse towards each other. It's a blessing that I don't remember all the things that were said on my side as well as his. He made a lot of threats and so did I, it must have been comical to an educated outsider that we didn't just have at it and wrestle it all out, get it out of our systems physically but he was my dad and I'd never lay a hand on him as long as either of us lived and I kind of knew he would be the same. To be perfectly honest I think we did take each other down once but again, I've mentally blocked it if I did. 

It's strange, looking back (in 2021) but it's almost as if I subliminally learned to enjoy an argument now and then from him but trust me, that's not a place I need to be or ever want to be. My wife has taught me what a fool I am to want to argue about anything or everything. Lately I've been about keeping the Cynic at bay and this morning I feel pretty damned good even though I hated reliving this sad portion of my history, it's over, it's in the past, my father passed away in 1999 and the only thing I can think of is how happy I am that he never had to witness the World Trade Center attack. He had a soft heart and so much tragedy at one time would surely have put him over the edge. I don't know if I'll ever see him again, but I know there's a huge part of him in me, both the good and the bad. And what with all the hate we taught each other I think that IF we somehow wound up together on the other side of my life we would forgive each other as we have been forgiven on this side by the Lord Jesus Christ.

Then we can see each other as He sees us. Made perfect by His sacrifice.

An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 3)

 An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 3)

originally written on September 18, 1995

Slightly revised on August 19, 2021

I mentioned in the last segment that our new house was located directly behind the cement plant and Panell's Lumber Yard...in the lot east of those buildings was the first convenience store ever built in Prague. It was also the first "self service" gas station and it was called Mom's Minit Mart. This monumental structure was completed in the late 70s and as far as I know the whole c-store idea was a new thing across the country. Mom's was typical with it's gas pumps, microwave oven and sandwiches to microwave in it...microwave cooking had only recently arrived in our little town, it was amazing to see food cooked so hot in under a minute. 

Mom's had a walk-in refrigeration unit for cold beer, soda pop and other food items that might come in handy for the happy traveller who stopped in regularly or the truckers using Hwy 62 on the way to 99 and on to I-40. As a service to their customers they kept a stock of periodicals. Any magazine you could think of and a few, hidden on the shelf above the bottom row that you won't see these days with it's politically correct view of erotic magazines (Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler and a few other titles I called "dirties"). They wouldn't sell these to minors, ostensibly, although they did lose a lot of them to shrinkage (people stole them). I once obtained a huge bag of these treasures by stocking the walk-in for an older friend who happened to work there and didn't feel like going into the walk-in and freezing his ass off stocking cans and bottles of various drink and lunch meat and whatever else that was there to refill. 

My favorite thing in that store was a wire carousel comic book rack, well-stocked with new stuff arriving at least once a week, or so it seemed. Comics only cost a quarter (they'd raised the price by a nickle at the same time we moved into our new house) and it was a very short walk across the lumber yard to buy them at "the Minit Mart". Dad always had a spare quarter he would give me so I could amass a truly remarkable collection of these educational and entertaining books. 

I preferred DC comics. I liked the Justice League of America congregation and would buy lots of Batman and Superman titles but my true interests lie in much darker fare. House of Mystery was always a great cover-to-cover chill inducer. There were also specialty titles like Weird War Stories and Weird Sports which I would pick up with the rest. Marvel comics just didn't do it for me at the time and EC was badly drawn and written (though I must say I've read people proclaim EC as the veritable king of horror comics, I never saw it).

I had 'em all though.

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I always figured that all kids enjoy MAD magazine. I don't think they even publish it anymore so the youth may have moved on to something else but then again MAD wasn't just for the young 'uns. As a pubescent punk-rocker-to-be I identified with MAD's satirical style, poking fun at current movies and television shows as well as deflating cultural mores, etc. Much of my dark, cynical sense of humor was born in the pages of MAD.

I was also a regular reader of Cracked, another black and white large size comic magazine that never pretended to be anything more than a witty, slightly less virulent version of MAD. MAD had it's mascot, the toothless dork Alfred "What Me Worry?" Newman and Cracked had Sylvester P. Smythe. I think there's still a website based on Cracked though I don't imagine it has a whole lot more in common with the magazine than the font of the masthead. 

When I got a little older, an aging 15 or so, I switched from the cartoon style humor of MAD and Cracked to the slightly more literate National Lampoon, which I read faithfully for several years before growing out of it. The Lampoon had something that interested me at the time - photographs of naked women and the shop owners didn't seem to understand how much "adult content" was in the so they would sell them to pre-teens. 

Before long the few naked breasts in National Lampoon's Foto Funnies just weren't enough and I moved on to seriously reading Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, High Society, every title that would get me in trouble with the state of feminine women today...but in my own defense I have to say that my time spent learning to enjoy reading was done with the Playboy Interview, their Advisor, their Forum (which indoctrinated me for better or worse with the "Playboy Philosophy" that Hugh Hefner dreamed of) all the cartoons and party jokes...of course I looked at the women...I was a teenage heterosexual, it was in my veins...but that photography was art and the models were each and every one a Venus de Milo, I felt no guilt as my collection of what puritans would call "pornography" began to rival in size my box of pulp comics. I was learning a lot of valuable lessons in those magazines.

But enough of that, in Part 4 I will introduce my good friend Randy Blemmel as he introduces me to the Warren magazines Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella and the big daddy of them all, FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND. 

An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 2)

 An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 2)

originally written on September 18, 1995

Slightly revised on August 18, 2021

Besides the pecan picking they would take us to a stream filled with minnows that led to a quaint pond...here we would throw in our lines and if we were lucky we'd net a catfish or two. The first time I caught one I was probably only 8 years old (estimated) and foolishly grabbed it by the fins. Even novice fishermen know better than to do that because there's some kind of poison they secrete from their gills that may not be strong enough to kill a human most definitely does put the hurt on. 

I wasn't expecting that so after that experience I gave up fishing and opted to wade in the streambed with my brother Charles. The water was very clear and there were areas where you could see big schools of minnows flittering about, waiting to be caught and used as bait. 

Every once in a while the fishing excursions got out of  hand and the older kids would wind up jumping in the pond and swimming (we must have realized this was inevitable, as we all brought along our swim suits). I'll never forget the sight of my cousin Terry splashing into the water and accidently losing her bikini top on the way up. I hadn't even reached puberty yet so the sight of her naked breasts produced only a mild curiosity...a few years later that glimpse would have made a much more powerful impact. 

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We spent a lot of time at Wanda's house in Paden. The seven mile trip from Prague was spent gazing out of the backseat window at scenery which never struck me at the time as beautiful and majestic as it was. If we weren't at Paden we were home in Prague but I'm guessing my brother and I spent more time in Paden during our youngest years. I don't remember that far back and don't have any way to confirm this. All I know is that when we weren't in Paden there was a good chance that one of Wanda's daughters (my cousins) was in our house babysitting us. They weren't that much older than us. Terry was the worst, I have to admit and hopefully she won't read this because I've forgiven her long ago for her "babysitting style". Kristi and Cathy were much better. I remember Saturday mornings watching Dick Clark's American Bandstand and Ronnie Kaye's 30 minute Oklahoma City version of it, "The Scene". Lots of dancing on both of those shows so it was only natural that my cousins and I would dance the morning away. I loved those two young ladies so much although the time frame I'm talking about is still very much pre-puberty. Dancing was just dancing and we didn't care if the Baptists said it was a sin. We were too young to know what "sin" was, even with the Sunday school lessons. 

A propos of nothing Charles usually danced with Kristi and I did my own imitation of those people on TV with Cathy. We must have looked like fools but we had so much fun together. For some reason we never watched Soul Train. The people on that show actually really did dance a lot better than the ones on Bandstand and The Scene. Only a fool would say otherwise.

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My mother loved to watch Lucille Ball get herself into hopeless comic situations on I Love Lucy. She would sit on the couch chainsmoking cigarettes and laughing her ass off. You'd think it was the funniest thing ever known since the invention of television. She'd laugh until the tears came and then guffaw some more. To this day when I see a Lucy rerun I think of my mother's laughter. I watched it with her sometimes and though I found it amusing I was never the fan my mom was. 

She was also in the habit of staying up after bedtime to watch The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Johnny was right up there with Lucy as far as she was concerned. Sometimes she would let us stay up to watch the monologue and the pre-conversation comedy bits. I must say I enjoyed Carson much more than Lucille Ball. 

When I was growing up my mother did not sleep with my father. She would usually get tired of the television and pass out on the couch where she would remain until morning. Charles and I shared a big bed with our father, James Delmer Casey. We were very young at this time and there didn't seem as if there were anything wrong with this set up, and we were only there until we were "old enough" for our own bed. It's very likely that we didn't have our own beds at that time. We weren't poor but things were tough in those days of civil unrest and the Vietnam war on the television every single night reminding you how lucky you were to have a roof over your own head in a small town in Oklahoma. I was only 5 or 6 years old by this time. 

One night my mom in the living room and the rest of us sleeping in dad's bed, I had a dream. My mother was working at a diner called the Dairy Boat and we spent a lot of time there with her when school was over for the day or out for the summer. In my dream the Dairy Boat was on fire, I could see the flames, it was a very lucid dream. I woke up and smelled smoke. Apparently there was a tattered extension cord under our bed and a spark it had caused the bed to catch on fire. I woke up dad and Charles and we put it out. That was quite a miracle. 

Of course I give the glory to God.

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We moved from this house when I was 8 and though I could tell you all kinds of stories about the miracles that took place in that house I will save that for another time. For now we were stepping up into a brand new house on the west side of town, just a short jaunt to the city limits. Dad's first project on that house was to build an underground cellar, using his connections with the "Ready Mix" cement plant where he worked he was able to do most of the work all by himself. With the unstable weather here in Oklahoma and the regularity of thunderstorms and tornadoes this professionally installed cellar surely caused the market value of our home to expand by degrees. 

Dad worked for the cement plant for a long time and as he paid off the mortgage of this house my brother and I finally had a room of our own. Dad built shelves in our closets and mine eventually became the home of my HUGE record collection...but I'm getting ahead of myself. 

The new place was nice...certainly better than any house we'd lived in previously. Another perk for my dad was that his job was only a short walk away. At the time there was a lumber yard, Panell's Lumber company (the owner's son Greg was a great drummer though I never got to know him all that well). If you were to walk across that lumber yard you'd have nothing keeping you from getting into the "works" of what we called the cement plant...just a huge mound of rock and another pile of dirt were the only things keeping anyone out. When I got a little older I used to sneak over into the plant and check out all the cement mixing apparatus...definately a safety issue but I was careful and never let anyone know. The shops weren't even locked sometimes and I'd sneak into them on occasions. One in particular...

This shop had a bunch of catalogs and phone books beneath it's receiver which was mounted by the door. In addition to those greasy, dusty, cement mixing chemicals was an old copy of Playboy magazine. I don't think I ever removed it, though I wanted to. But looking through it's pages combined with having basically broken and entered the shop where I found it produced an almost electric desire to seek out more of these "adult books".  

An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 1)

 An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 1)

originally written on September 18, 1995

Slightly revised on August 17, 2021

My mother's name is Rose Marie Vanzant. She was, I think, a middle child of a large family which included 4 sisters and a brother. My aunts were/are Wanda, Joy, Delores and Shirley and my Uncle's name was John. He passed away a few years before this manuscript was written. 

My grandfather's name was Arthur - it is from him that I get my middle name. Unfortunately I didn't get much of a chance to know him, as he died when I was very young. His wife, my grandmother's name was Helen and though I was only 13 or 14 when she passed I regret that I have very few memories of her. 

Her house was spotless. That's something.

Thanksgivings were mostly spent at the Vanzants (my paternal grandmother, Anna Casey, went from house to house to each of her children for that holiday). At grandmothers' house the grownups sat at the big table in the dining room while me, my brother and our cousins would share a small table in the kitchen. 

Grandmother Helen was a very devout religious person and I seem to recall that Arthur was a deacon in a very small country church that we would attend. If memory serves it was of the Freewill Baptist denomination but I was way too young to understand anything about that. I used to think my visits to that church were a dreary experience which let up only when us children were allowed to sing during a service. Actually that's not the truth at all. I don't know why I've tainted that memory with the rebellion I was possessed by in my young teenage years. Might have something to do with my corrupted memory of her funeral. Those issues are for a psychologist to figure out. Truth be told I have a strong memory of one particular instance in which we sang "In the Garden" for the adults during a Sunday morning service. One of the most touching songs I've ever heard. Look up the lyrics or stream it sometime, you'll see what I mean. I spent most of the services outside, I'm guessing they didn't let kids under a certain age in the sanctuary on Sunday morning. 

I couldn't find that old church building now if I tried. I would guess that time has taken it's toll on its' wooden frame and the lumber that held it up. I said earlier that it was "dreary"...that's just the rebellion in me that's talking. If I'm honest, if I really had the ability to go back in time and see myself on those weekend mornings, I would have to admit that I was happy there. I loved my family and that's where we knew we would see each other at least once a week. That's worth something, right? 

At any rate I think of that building now as a beautiful place filled with bushes, flowers, trees...but it was so much more to everyone that congregated there...I kind of learned to likeall that quaint country church stuff. I sat through many Sunday School lessons and absorbed very little of what I was being taught.  For a long time in my life I've assumed that this was the case with all children being "trained" and "brought up" into the Church. I don't think that way anymore and the older I get the more I realize that there was a lot more going on in those classes than any of us could attempt to explain. 

Sacred stuff. 

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My grandmother used to make home-made butter. She had a churner and did it all by hand. The butter was very good. This was when Arthur and she lived out in the country, I suppose they were farmers at the time though I'm not certain. When grandpa died she moved into the "city limits" of Paden (Paden Oklahoma is the dictionary definition of "small town" but it's where my mother and her sisters and brother went to school). She lived in a nice home in the street behind my aunt Wanda and her husband Coy Shivers along with my cousins Terry, Gray, Kathy and Kristi (also affectionately known as Jeanie).

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The earliest memories I have of my mom are from pecan season, I'm guessing that could be any time of the year but my folks knew when there were more pecans on the ground than other, I suppose we could call it "peak" season for gathering them. It was also the season when they could be sold to the other folks in town. I think there was at least one "buyer". 

Anyway every year when the pecans fell from the trees my mom would take my brother Charles and I, along with Wanda and some of her brood (my cousins)  and we would go into the fields and woods near Paden where we would pick up what pecans we could find, then we'd put them in old potato sacks. Sometimes we would walk away with several of these sacks filled to the brim with nuts. The grass on the ground looked barren after we were finished picking them. The farmers who owned the land were probably ecstatic to have this done for them and it was worth the money they shelled out for the "service".

Truth be told Charles and I rarely picked any pecans. We were too busy romping around and playing in the pastures and fields. We loved to get inside of the empty grain silos just to holler and hear our voices bounce back and forth off of the cylindrical (?) metal walls. 

It was natural reverb.

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?