Now there’s a title you don’t see every day, and the guys who made it possible aren’t everyday fellows, either.

How it turned out that in my advanced decreptitude I’ve finally found friends who not only share many of my own predilections and cultural underpinnings but also take care of each other is mildly astounding to me. I say “mildly” because I always figured it was possible to live like that, but the actualization seemed to elude me. Probably I was too fucked up myself, not to put too fine a point on it. If that’s the case, then I must have evolved in recent years, or else I just hit the jackpot. Call it grace and good luck.

But these two fine companions, both outstanding musicians, having followed my recent travails as best they could from my raging emails, wanted to give me a chance to vent. I was invited to a night of therapeutic drinking and gentlemanly pursuits — well, mostly drinking — and vent I did. First I sang them a song I’d written yesterday afternoon, one that you’ll be able to hear soon. [See below*] In the course of the evening, we finished a fifth of Cuervo 1800 and I got dog hair all over my clothes. That would be from Popeye, the resident terrier (?). Much hilarity ensued after the venting, and I even got fed. I also heard an earful about another mother, and it shook me to the bone.

(How did we ever survive???)

When I got back to the run-down adobe on the side of the hill and sat down at my MacBook to catch up on my emails before crawling into bed, there was a message from my brother Rob. It was a beautiful message in many ways and ended with the declaration that the next time, we would both go to Tucson. That remains to be seen, of course, since I’ve said I won’t go back unless Helen is dead or in protective custody, but if she’s really out of it (say, crawling around in circles on the floor and drooling), then a guardianship hearing might prove productive. Time will tell.

What hit me hardest in the email, however, were a few sentences summarizing what life had been like at home in Houston during my younger siblings’ high school years, a period I knew little about. At that time I was at UT-Austin learning where to put it and getting my hippie credentials, so I hardly ever went “home” at all. Guana santo, man!

Remember, I was down in Houston living the hellhouse - ruled by an hourly cycle of shouting fights despite counseling and over God knows what while Mom was going for shock treatments and then the brain tumor. Back then I was hoping they’d divorce and I could move in with Dad. (Dad may have had his issues, but at least he seemed reasonable to me, and I now understand how he got so frustrated when I couldn’t grok his attempts to tutor me in Algebra II).

I got into bike riding back then as a means of staying detached from the madness at home. B____ stayed home and cried a lot. M____ practiced her saxophone and we both spent as much time at school as we could. Band, we called it. B____, not so lucky. He stuck around stuffing his face with chips while attempting to drown out the madness with a television set.

I had literally no idea. Dear God in heaven.

* Oh yes, the song. It’s the first one I’ve written in years, and the rest of the lyrics will fall into place shortly. This is all I have so far, but it sounds great accompanied by my resophonic bouzouki in Appalachian death-stomp mode. In a few days, I hope to have a recording posted here, so keep your eyes and ears open. In the meantime, here’s what I have so far. The title of this piece is [ahem], “Mother Don’t Kill Me,” and it’s a sure-fire hit in hell:

Mother I beg you don’t kill me
don’t throw me outside with the trash
it don’t matter how much you’ve gone crazy
I’d be happy to turn you to ash

Well I came ‘cause you said you were dyin’
I came ‘cause my siblings were scared
but the nightmare I found down in Tucson
was worse than I ever had dared

So Mother I beg you don’t kill me
don’t throw me outside with the trash
it don’t matter how much you’ve gone crazy
I’d be happy to turn you to ash

Then I’d take you on back to Kent County
put you down in the ground next to Dad
there’d me no more abusin’ and fightin’
be the best time that I ever had

Transmutation, chilluns!