My wife’s dead watch batteries (both of ‘em!) presented a curious opportunity.

Since the Radio Shack store was just a couple of blocks from Rick Smith’s Brodsky Bookshop, I could fulfill my manly obligation to buy replacement watch batteries and also redeem last year’s $35 Christmas gift certificate from Brodsky’s, which I’d only recently belatedly unearthed and rediscovered. Rick has lots of new and used books, all of them either esoteric in some way or specialty New Mexico items (local writers, histories, reference books, etc.). He also sells CDs and unusual LPs, so you never know just what you’ll find.

What I found was a vintage Rip Off Press reprint of Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comics. I’d actually looked through it on an earlier visit. The book brought back my past, all right, but I didn’t exactly want to “go there” then — as I stood turning the pages again this afternoon, I still wasn’t sure. And then I found a familiar story with one of Shelton’s impossibly funny drawings and laughed out loud! A few pages later: oh my God, Fat Freddie’s cat! I laughed again and again. Okay, I told myself, if this edition has the lyrics to “When I Set My Chickens Free,” I’m buyin’.

On page 39, it did…

Glorious, glorious stuff. The hyper-exaggeration, the cinematic story-boarding, the insane energy. It comes across now like the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin on acid with their hair on fire! How I loved these comics when they first came out. My friends and I would incorporate Freak Brothers’ sayings into our conversation like we did with Dylan lyrics… (or was it just the one, by Freewheelin’ Franklin?) Some of these strips are so funny. I never realized Gilbert Shelton’s appreciation for great movie comedy before, but I see it all now. What a difference 40 years makes!

I even met Gilbert Shelton in Austin once, way WAY back when, before he moved to San Francisco, before the Freak Brothers. He and a friend of mine had just opened “Oat Willie’s,” an eventually-to-become-locally-famous head shop and comic store branded with a character Shelton had invented for his “Wonder Wart-Hog” comics. I happened to be in there when my friend walked in with Señor Shelton and introduced us. I got to shake his hand, and that was that, but I never forgot. During this same period of my life, I once held a door open for Linda Bird, and I haven’t forgotten that, either. Heh. Someone’s probably saying now, “Who the hell is ‘Linda Bird’?” Just never you mind. But if you have to ask, “Who the hell is Wonder Wart-Hog?!” — or Fat Freddie, or his cat — well, that’s another matter. I’m looking at my culture here, at least a part of it. I doubt it really translates outside the generation, though. Too bad!

The watches run now, of course, and so do I.

Bud Grace draws this comic strip. I’ve considered him a genius for years. The current theme of Ernie’s evil nephew Spencer tormenting his dad into buying him a weasel for a pet is fantastic laugh medicine — in this frame, Spencer is in the “weasel store. ” Just the way Bud draws the weasel cracks me up!

The strip is always like this. An earlier story line about a family of Mongolian throat singers living inside a giant pumpkin that Ernie had grown in his backyard garden was explosively funny for days.

My wife doesn’t read Piranha Club, nor did she read it back when it was called Ernie. I can’t for the life of me understand why, but I can make her laugh, regardless.

See, this is why it’s good to be an adaptable, creative fellow.

I thought things were going pretty well, until I went ballistic on a mailing list and sent people here who don’t need to see these things. VERY unprofessional, shows how serious this is for me and how much I need to take care of myself. Moment to moment, I forget that I just had a piano dropped on my stomach. (That’s the third body region I’ve tried with that metaphor, the best one yet.) Now people can tell stories about me, if they already don’t, or I can take lessons from my mother in how to think they are. These have not been my favorite two-and-a-half weeks on the planet.

Just amazing, isn’t it? This is 1945…

Accordingly, I decided to do more processing, spending a few hours working on my latest song. You have no idea what a relief it is to realize that writing-wise, nothing is taboo any longer. (If it were, I’d have to violate taboo to breathe.) Anyway, here are the most current lyrics. I tried recording this today, but that’s just not working — probably wasn’t done yet. Here we go, then. Transmutation through art, remember:

MOTHER DON’T KILL ME
© 2008 John H. Farr

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

—————————-

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

—————————-

You gave up on gardens and painting
abandoned your beautiful home
and pretended that nobody loved you
now you live in a world all your own

(Chorus)

I know that you’ve always been hurtin’
I realize you never were whole
now I know how the best parts went missin’
and I’m busy backfillin’ my soul

(Chorus)

Well I thought we could make a connectiion
in the middle where nobody goes
but that’s just a little boy’s longing
maybe this time the door’s gonna close

(Chorus)

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

(Chorus)

Quite the exercise, dealing with my own personal hurricane. I hope someone learns something from this. (Ask me later.)

I forgot to get this posted a couple of weeks ago — gee, I wonder why? — but here it is.

Regular readers of this blog will recognize elements of previous blog posts assembled into a new whole. Not quite like building Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, although related, and with much better results. This was just published in the August edition of Horse Fly. What’s more, the publisher thought it was so good, he paid me extra, a thing possibly unprecedented in the history of writing. At any rate, you can read it now without coming here to buy a paper:

JOHNNY & THE HORNED TOADS

Years ago in Texas (sorry), we called them “horny toads.”

I’d just turned 13 and didn’t know what “horny” meant, outside of the context of the critters — adolescent urges notwithstanding — but you could find the lizards everywhere, even in town. Back in junior high school in Abilene, in those glorious pre-air-conditioned days when just surviving until the final bell was an accomplishment, the reptiles were a God-given source of distraction from the heat of study hall.

We sat at actual wooden desks with inkwells and lids that opened up. Nobody used fountain pens or had any ink, so dipping pigtails wasn’t an option. But you could grab a “horny toad” at recess, lightly scratch its scaly belly to put it to sleep, and set it gently on its back inside the desk where Peggy Sue would sit. After everyone had taken their seats and study hall had settled into a sodden stupor broken only occasionally by yawns and sounds of shuffling papers, the animal would wake up and start skittering around. The victim usually opened her desk to see what was the matter, and you can guess the rest. This trick only worked with girls, of course, because they screamed so well. The perpetrator generally came to the rescue while his comrades smirked, scooping the lizard up and dropping it out the window. (Why this reminds me now of Homeland Security, I’m not sure, but see what you can do with it.)

Three years ago in Llano Quemado, I missed the photo of a lifetime. I’d taken a walk without my camera — guaranteeing at least a miracle — and sure enough there was one. About halfway up the dirt track on the mesa, something wriggled in the road 20 feet ahead and then sat still. As I approached, I saw it move again: a horned toad trying to get traction in the fine brown sand. But what was that on its right hind leg? Good Lord, a baby horned toad riding on its mother’s back! I honestly couldn’t believe it. The lizards froze when I squatted down beside them, and then I saw a second baby in the dust a couple of inches to the rear. The baby on its mothers back was spotted just like she was, while this one matched the color and texture of the ground it sat on. The mimicry was perfect. The late afternoon sun illuminated the camouflaged tableau with golden yellow light. My camera, if I’d had it, would have been 18 inches from the horned toad family, who held their position until I stood.

* * *

This summer, for whatever reasons, I see horned toad hatchlings all the time, and I’m amazed. There’s just a twitch, a thing that might be real or not, like a floater in your eye, and there they are, fully formed and no bigger than a thumbnail! Yesterday I took my camera on a hike and finally got a close-up shot: the piñon needles on the ground are longer than the tiny beast… They must be like Fritos for the magpies. How ever do they make it?

Try to find out anything about horned toads, and you’ll encounter contradictions. They’re disappearing, or they’re not, for one thing. The young receive no parental care, supposedly, although I saw differently here in Llano. New Mexico writer S. Omar Baker, who died at the age of 90 in 1953, once wrote,

“The horny toad, ill-graced but harmless
Is thought by some to be quite charmless
At least he helps eat garden ants up
And does not try to crawl your pants up.”

The easy familiarity with something few see or take notice of today disturbs me, even as I smile. A couple of weeks ago, I was driving down a twisty, rocky lane. The air was sharply cool and damp from the previous night’s rain, the warm sunlight welcome by comparison. Halfway down the hill I stopped, incredulous: sitting in the road looking up at me below the open driver’s window was a HUGE GREEN BULLFROG the size of a cantaloupe! We stared at each other for a long moment, and then I drove off, checking in my rearview mirror that I hadn’t seen a mirage.

Sometimes I feel I’ve won the lotto on another planet, and then I wake up, remembering I’ve always been right here. What happens in the in-between, though, and where did everybody go?

Oops, fell three days behind again. Now fixed! Almost done with the Arizona trip now. Next up, Los Changos del Mar (“New Mexico’s only extraterrestrial, psycho-surf-punk, spy-billy, harem conjunto!”) at Taos Plaza, then a custom car show. Heh.

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!

“The planet is asleep and it’s the fault of musicians who are untrue to themselves.” (Sun Ra)

Is that COOL or what? I grabbed the quotation from the comments section of an article by ex-Fug and founding member of the False Prophets, Steven Taylor, at Reality Sandwich entitled “Is That a Real Reality, or Did You Make It Up Yourself?” Highly recommended, though I had to consult my MacBook’s onboard dictionary a few times! (limen, phatic, instantiate, etc.)

(Truth = flux, and boy is that ever a relief…)

I’ve been gone all day and most of the night, plus northern New Mexico was offline all day. We were in Las Vegas, NM, where I took this shot playing with my new telephoto lens. It’ll will show up later on FotoFeed, but I just couldn’t wait.

Just say whoa

An excellent day!

After submitting my column for this month’s Horse Fly, the head honcho and publisher emailed me in his usual terse manner and said, “Your piece isn’t good, it’s damn good. Thanks.” Someone else reported the boss also said, “it’s Taos!” and I kinda thought it was.

There are many different kinds of writing. This was driven by the need to transmute a sack of pythons into art, but I also had to pay attention to the craft. For a couple of weeks, at least, I’ve been needing to express something important that has to do with other people’s psychic landscapes. I think I nailed it in the 743-word column entitled “Compulsion,” which I’ll post here when the paper comes out next week.

What makes it work is less holding back. It’s risky, but the time is now. The all-too-common foibles of a few unidentified people (as well as my own) get gracefully skewered, and they’re going to have feelings. But as my wife said, “You have a right to be a writer.” Now that’s an interesting way to put it, but I thought of something I could do: whenever I caused offense that mattered, I’d give the injured party a rose.

Ignoring the obvious flaw in this approach, my wife said it was sweet. But what about pre-emptive flowers?

“Look, Farr sent us a rose. OH NO!”

Oh, I’m a sucker for this:

Members of the iconic ’60s band said Friday they will hold a one-time-only jam session to drum up support for the Illinois lawmaker ahead of the “Super Tuesday” caucuses and primary elections.

“Deadheads for Obama” will feature Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, Phil Lesh & Friends at San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre on Monday night. It will be the first time that the band has performed together since 2004.