Mexican hat in the clouds

Taken at Tejas Park, Georgetown Texas
May 12, 2018

A Horse is a Horse

     Once upon a time if you told someone you were from Texas the first thing they asked was 'Where is your Horse?' Now, you could probably find plenty of people from Texas who can only recognize a horse from seeing them on Television. Get them up close and personal with a horse and they would probably wet themselves. Horses can be mean, intimidating, smelly and down right unpleasant. You can't just get on a horse and ride it like you would a bike. They have personalities and they'll control you if you let them – I know this from personal experience.

    Everyone wants a pony when they're growing up. Okay maybe not everyone but enough people do that ponies remain a popular gift even today. I know I had a Shetland pony when I was a little boy. Its name was Tiny and it was about as unpleasant as the stomach flu. My fondest memory is of riding him one sunny summer afternoon when I was 5 or 6 years old and he took off across the yard and headed straight for a peach tree. One of the limbs caught me right across the chest, like you see in the movies and I was hurled to the ground landing hard on my back. Tiny seemed to think this was highly amusing and came trotting back to the scene of the crime and jumped over me. I'll admit I gave Tiny a wide berth after that. In the end, we sold Tiny to two girls I went to elementary school with – twin sisters named Randa and Rhonda. I hope they had better luck with Tiny than I did.

    Now, my brother and sister also had horses. My brother had a horse named King and my sister had a horse named Cherokee. King was an American Quarter horse that was about 16 hands high and Cherokee was a black and white appaloosa that was about 14 hands. We also boarded the neighbor's horse that was a green broke quarter horse named Starfire. Once I recovered from the trauma of the Shetland pony, I decided horses had to be better. They're bigger, faster and I had hoped better trained and behaved. This was not to be the case. That isn't to say I don't have some fond memories of horseback riding though.

    When I was around 8 or 9 years old a local radio station was having a live remote to promote the opening of a Jack in the Box about 2 miles from my house. They said that the first person to show up on a horse would get a gold belt buckle that was a popular item given away by the station. It was a country station of course. In any event, I quickly saddled up the appaloosa and headed up the road. When I got to the grand opening there were a bunch of people standing around, listening to the station and enjoying the day. Apparently Cherokee thought it was pretty exciting as well and took a dump right in the front door of the brand new Jack in the box. I got my belt buckle but I heard them saying over the radio as I rode off that the first person to show up with a shovel would get a T-shirt.

       I went on to become a relatively decent rider, I still got thrown on a regular basis, but I always got back on and tried to show the horse I was boss. I had been asked to ride a horse that had just been acquired by a friend of the family. It was a Tennessee walker that they had bought from Louisiana and had been told it was a gentle, well tempered horse. Well that may be but it also knew how to throw a rider like a pro. I was taking it across the field at a nice canter about to go to a gallop when instead of going forward I was going up and down. Now I don't know what set him off but he was bucking like a saddle bronco at the rodeo. I held on as long as I could but finally found myself hanging from his neck with no chance of regaining a seat in the saddle. So I let go. I came down hard and he came down harder – stepping squarely on my leg about 2 inches from the family jewels. I lay there a few minutes, breath knocked out of me, leg feeling half broken while the horse just stood there with the reins dragging the ground while he quietly grazed on some fresh grass. Gingerly, I got up, collected the reigns, got back on and rode him quietly around the pasture for a few more minutes before taking him back to the barn to unsaddle him and rub him down. I had a hoof shaped bruise on my leg for a couple of weeks after that but it could have been worse. In any event, the owner of the horse had been watching and he turned around and resold the horse a couple weeks later. He said it was too spirited for him to have around.

    Now, riding horses might look easy for the uninitiated but it takes some practice and control. Not everyone is willing to admit this. Case in point, I was riding my sisters horse barebacked (sans saddle) one afternoon and had ridden him over to my brothers house where a friend of his wife's was visiting. For some reason she had it in her head that if I could ride the horse bareback then surely she could too. Now, not to be impolite, but she was not a petite woman by any means and once she had mounted the horse it decided it didnt want to have anything to do with her and took off running. She started screaming. The horse started bucking. She started screaming louder. My brother, his wife and I just stood there laughing. The horse ran about 100 yards bucking all the time before he managed to catapult her into the air and send her crashing down on a suitably padded ass. She seemed utterly perplexed that no one had come to her rescue as she was screaming from the back of the horse. As it turns out, she was screaming my name but at the time we thought she was exuberantly screaming "Running, Running, Running."

Yeah, horses are great – but some of them are just great for making glue.

an experiment in mediums

A friend of mine was showing me some photos and sketches they had done and I wondered if I could combine the two mediums in a way that didn't necessarily look natural, but at the least, well blended. This was the end result. I hope you like it.

From my collection

Tribute to Van Goth

Am I a music snob?

When the question was first posed to me as to why I only listen to female singers I thought the answer would be fairly simple.  My toss off answer was that if I wanted to listen to men singing like women I may as well just listen to women; but perhaps it isn't as simple as that.

Even before I (almost) exclusively started listening to female singer/songwriters I realized that most of my favorite songs were by women. Sure, there were some bands that I liked without women but they tended to be the exception and even then I listened more for the lyrics or instrumentation than for the vocals. I found most male singers had droning or nasally voices, or they tried as hard as they could to sing like Mariah Carey at some point in the song. Considering I don't like her screeching, why would I like some dude doing it?

 Breaking it down even more, however, I found that in each genre or style of music the songs all seemed to be about the same thing. This is particularly true about the traditionally male dominated Country Music field. They sing about the South and "Murika" and how great the U.S. is and other patriotic crap like that; They sang about driving, tractors and  farms, trucks, drinking, or women. Sometimes all in one song. Oh and lets throw God or Jesus in there just for good measure.

Well, I don't drive a truck and really have no interest in hearing anyone sing about how much they love their truck or how they need a woman to sit next to them in their truck, or how the women aren't good enough to sit in their truck. Frankly guys that drive big trucks to validate their masculinity are seriously over compensating. I don't buy into all the patriotic crap that just gives lip service to the South and how they'll "Rise Again." The South lost, get over it and move on. I don't go out drinking every weekend so I have no desire to hear about how drunk they got, how drunk they were going to get, or how hung over they are before going out and getting drunk again. I'm not saying all country music is bad, but generally speaking, Good Ol' Boys have no room on my radio.

Pop/Rock music is another thing entirely. Here everyone thinks they need to scream at you or do runs upon runs. I don't care how many notes you can hit in one breath. It just means that your lyrics are so bad and you couldn't come up with anything that rhymed so you would just do runs for 30 seconds and hope nobody notices the utter lack of subtly or craft in your songs. That is of course, provided anyone can figure out what your song was about in the first place. Honestly, sometimes I think you just handed someone with tourette's a microphone and let them screech whatever random words come out into an auto-tuner. Again, why would I want to listen to someone's verbal vomit?

As for Jazz and the blues, do I even have to explain it? I mean every single song is the same. Same tempo, same instrumentation, same topics.....unless its Modern Jazz, then it just sounds like someone pushed a bunch of musicians down the stairs and recorded it for posterity. Or, they want to see how long they can play the same three notes over and over again. Doodly doo, doodly doo, doodly doo, doodly doo.....no doodly thank you.

So, I come to female singer/songwriters. I find that their lyrics (for the most part) contain some substance and thought. They approach life and the world from different perspectives, they look inside themselves, they take on taboo subjects, they care about connecting with their audience and their fans instead of trying to get them into their tour bus for a quick shag. They are inclusive and non-judgemental. In general they don't go around screaming all their lyrics or sound like someone stuffed olives up their nose. They let the lyrics speak for themselves without embellishing it with runs and rills. They make me think.

Does this make me a music snob....well, I'm okay with that.