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Hot Springs or Busk: Chapter II (mongrel of the rueful countenance)

And so… it’s probably good to get some background out of the way. And whether this public-facing journal features opinion, commentary, straight bald facts, mongrel music, or utterly inexplicable gonzo fiction, it’s important readers/listeners have access to the creator’s ethnic, cultural, socio-economic background, political leanings, as well as religious and/or gender identification. These things should be clear so that, rather than walking on rhetorical eggshells as is the custom these days, we can let our freak-flags fly… let these bare-metal stories/songs live and breathe as we see them. Unbounded by the illusion of disinterested objectivity, let’s pursue what Werner Herzog calls… “Ecstatic Truths.”

And since we’re not in cahoots with a genealogist, nor invested in 23andMe, this particular ancestry reaches back only so far as the late 19th century. It’s a shallow oral history scantly passed down by depression-era grand and great-grandparents. That said, it is an amusing clash of melting pot misfits: Jerrys (Deutsch), Harps (Gaelic), and Brits (English) all mashed together in Uncle Sam’s ethnic stew. Picture this, America: pre-WWI, a land teeming with more immigrant groups than a clown car at a rodeo. Among them, three distinct flavors: Stoic Jerrys, Guinness-swilling Harps, and stiff-upper-lip Brits. Now, imagine them crammed into the stew, a bubbling cauldron promising assimilation but spewing out this mongrel of rueful countenance… the alter-ego, Ronnie Hays.

Anyway, in the pre-war surge, a couple German immigrants (bless their lederhosey hearts) arrived in Pittsburg Kansas having never met in their native city, Bremen Germany. With the efficiency of healthy Volkswagen Beetles, this intrepid couple found a way to thrive in the desolate Kansas prairie. They labored, they brewed, they ooom pa’d with metronome precision. Their industriousness and tireless work-ethic hummed with the ineffable rhythm of Mother Nature’s shifting seasons. A stark contrast with the life and times of one of their sons (we’ll call him “Cool” Carl). Cool Carl moved West, to the gold mines of front-range Colorado, and once these wild-west gold-rush oats were sewn he settled in, built a brick house in the North Denver suburbs and raised a no-nonsense industrial beat-cop turned public works supervisor (call him Grumpalumpagus). This is where the Jerry genes crashed into the U.K. genes. Mr. Grumpalumpagus met and married a U.K. girl from Russell Kansas (we’ll call her Sassy SalGal), and the rest is female emancipation, generation gap, moonshots, hippies, rednecks, Indian uprisings, Viet Nam, race riots, billy clubs, police crackdowns, irreconcilable-differences, and divorce… history.

Add to the 1960s baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet culture-crisis, a fundamental communication gap between Grumpalumpagus (a Jerry husband) and Sassy SalGal (a U.K. wife) distracted by waves of female emancipation facilitated by the various social safety nets, contraception, and pop-intellectual peer-pressure and you get a three-ring circus of misinterpretations. The Jerry cop’s guttural proclamations insisting women be house servants sent shivers down Sassy SalGal’s back. She might have mistook his alpha pronouncements for some sort of desperate war-of-the-sexes battle cry. The Brit influence in her uttering lyrical oaths under mumbling breath. The playful, but scrappy Harp in her issuing caustic digs like leprechauns on a whiskey rampage. Of course her U.K. sense of sarcastic wit met with bewildered frowns from the Jerry cop, and also alarmed her British father whose clipped pronouncements, delivered as if they were coming from the Queen herself, failed to persuade SalGal back into her pre-emancipation place.

Now… what about our intrepid storyteller and his all-singing-dancing crap-of-the-world alter-ego… this “Yuppytown Refugee?” Well… amid the slapstick of the 1960s and 1970s, something remarkable happened. The Jerry work ethic rubbed off on the Harp’s tendency toward mournful poetry, inspiring our hero to trade brawling for bucking deadlines. The Harp’s infectious penchant for music and storytelling livened up the all-work-no-play grindstone, turning out a somewhat disciplined rueful troubadour with British influence, ever pragmatic, looking for economic potential in this mongrel stew.

Of course, it’s not all work-hard-play-hard and beer. Inner-tensions flare, prejudices fester, and the occasional existential brawl serves as a reminder of the differences that still bubble beneath the surface. But slowly, surely, a new identity emerges, a uniquely American blend of Bratwurst, Guinness, and Monty Python Flying Loopcircus.

Of course…. ch ch ch changes… modern inclusive culture has temporarily ushered him to the sidelines in order to make room for the rainbow character of this remarkable nation. The thing is, none of the normal trappings of acquisitive individualism matters to our mongrel of rueful countenance. The temporary disenfranchisement of white male energy doesn’t bother him at all. And if he can enjoy a few more healthy years for writing, playing, and singing his stories, even if no one is listening, he’s in his element… in need of nothing more.

So, the next time you raise a glass to the American Dream, remember the loopy cultural car crashes somehow managing to forge new soul from fragments of European heritage. It’s not always pretty, it’s not always peaceful, but it has been, and hopefully is still… entertaining.

To list MEMEtic influences would be too long for this posting, but here are a few examples: Kurt Vonnegut‘s irrepressible humor in the face of tragedy, Hunter S. Thompson‘s incisive musical prose, Tom Wolfe‘s wiz-popping use of vivid metaphor, or the entire tower of song mentioned by Leonard Cohen. It’s all part of this grand, messy, beautiful American experiment.

Cheers… Rohlfie

PS: That’s some gene/meme-pool stuff… didn’t get around to socio-economic class, politics, religion, or gender identity. Stay tuned… we’ll get to those things in future postings.

And so… it begins!

Greetings, Loopers…
And great day in the morning!
Finally… a break from that weeks-long taste of Arctic-brisk.

Argh… over it, i am.

Now, as i was shedding the “bearskin-thick” protective layers, it hit me between the eyes. My 65th birthday and exit from the professional treadmill is mere months away. I promised myself in the doldrums of the post-y2k “dot-bomb” that i would, upon retirement, either A.), buy a wind-powered craft and sail the seven seas or B.) obtain a “Prairie Schooner” and roam the earth like Kwai Chang Caine. Well… the time has arrived, and a few hard truths have forced a semi-sudden pivot with the vehicles i’ll use to fulfill this visualization. For one, this middle of everywhere, landlubbin’ flatlander is a horrible candidate for single-handed sailing, and two, the pop-up tent/awning solution i, only last year, acquired for prairie schooning will work only in perfectly temperate zones. So… people i trust were advising i go the “stealth urban camper” route of acquiring a converted cargo van and turning it into a rolling tiny home. So, i started researching turn-key options and came up for air gasping at six-figure price tags… GAHHHH!

Solution? Acquire an empty van as blank canvas (see above), design, and construct the interior myself (project to begin post-haste).

Once that is accomplished… strap in, loopers, because this ain’t your drunk uncle’s road trip. We are professionals… we have “objectives.” This is a 52-week, 48-state odyssey through the heart of American academia, fueled by equal parts French Roast, guitars, and pure, unadulterated curiosity. We’re hitting Hays America’s sister cities… public college towns, mind you, the kind where dorms smell like stale pizza and regret, and the professors are either jaded veterans or wide-eyed grad students with tenure dreams as fragile as a bong hit in a mosh pit.

But hold on, this ain’t just about singing for my supper in college-towns across the nation. It’s also a quest for the literary Grail, a boozy, bookish bacchanal that’ll have us chasing Hemingway’s ghost in Key West, Kerouac’s shadow in Desolation Peak, and Faulkner’s phantom in Oxford, Mississippi. We’ll be spelunking through dusty library stacks, communing with ghosts, and trading wild stories like currency in smoky campus dives.

And when the sun sets on another day on the road, we’ll seek solace in our nation’s natural cathedrals: Yosemite’s granite giants, Yellowstone’s geyser symphony, the Grand Canyon’s mile-deep abyss. We’ll soak our grumpy bones in hidden hot springs, letting the geothermal magic mend our aching glutes and rekindle our wanderlust.

But be warned, this isn’t for the faint of heart. This is a road paved with potholes and detours, populated by characters as colorful as a Thompson-esque fever dream. We’ll encounter campus radicals and redneck renegades, peyote-toting professors and chain-smoking librarians, all with their own stories to tell, their own demons to chase.

So, are you ready, loopers? Ready to trade textbooks for bibles, lecture halls for dive bars, and term papers for loopy podcasts? Then buckle up, grab your Delta8 Vape, and let’s hit the gas on this loopcircus odyssey across the American landscape. We’ll be blogging our descent into madness every step of the way, so stay tuned for dispatches from the fringes, where academia meets anarchy, and the pursuit of knowledge gets a whole lot more interesting.

FOR EXAMPLE: Appalachian Ambiance and Moonshine Melodies

This stop begins in the misty hills of Boone, North Carolina, home to Appalachian State University, a haven for bluegrass pickers and outdoorsy types. We’ll be swapping songs for sammichs, trading Chaucer for cheap moonshine, and getting our Thoreau on in the shadow of Grandfather Mountain. Stay tuned for tales of wildlife encounters, existential campfire chats, and communing with the local legends who call these mountains home.

This is just an example, loopers. We’ve got 47 more states to explore, 48 stories to tell. So keep your eyes peeled, your minds open, and your courage prepped for the mother of all road trips. Because in this loopy odyssey, the only constant is the open road, and the only map we need is a tattered paperback with a dog-eared page for every adventure.

Cheers… Rohlfie

Hot Springs or Busk Chapter I =>

Still on the Line

Well now, loopers, let me spin a little yarn on this snow-day. You see our fair cities, the grand ol’ bergs we call home, they’re not just bricks and mortar, steel and glass. Nope, they are living creatures, grand ol’ critters with heartbeats like thumpin’ bass guitars and nervous systems strung with cat-5 cables and WiFi. And just like all good critters, they’ve got their own little ecosystems, swarms of cells all working together to keep the whole thing humming.

You got your everyday Joes and Janes, artists and accountants, waitresses and truck drivers. They’re the cells, the building blocks of the beast. They hustle and work, carryin’ their little buckets of dreams and anxieties, building families and businesses like honeycombs. They’re the muscle and sinew, the folks who keep the city pumpin’.

Then there’s the organs, the big beaters that keep the whole thing ticking. The hospitals, the schools, the power plants, the fire stations… they’re the lungs and kidneys, the stomach and the brain, churning and processing, keeping the lifeblood flowing. They’re the gears and pulleys, the hidden heroes who make the magic happen.

But here’s the thing, loopers, here’s the rub. We get so caught up in the everyday dance, the hustle and bustle, that we don’t see the real heroes, the white blood cells of the city. I’m talking about the constabularies patroling the streets, the firefighters scaling smoke-choked ladders, the nurses wiping fevered brows, the linemen battling blizzards to keep the lights on. These are the antibodies, the tireless defenders, the ones who dive headfirst into the muck when the storm clouds gather.

They’re the ones who show up when the pipes burst and the sirens wail, when the power flickers and the darkness creeps in. They’re the ones who stand between us and chaos, the protectors and defenders, the angels in scrubs, the silent guardians of our daily bread. They ARE the salt of the earth, the grease that keeps the wheels spinning, the invisible threads that bind us together.

So when we finally emerge from this most recent veil of windblown arctic visitation, let’s take a moment to remember these folks. Give them a nod, a smile, a quiet thank you. They’re the ones who keep the city alive, the ones who hold back the tide, the ones who make sure we can sleep soundly in our beds, knowing someone’s watching over us. They’re the under-appreciated heroes, the quiet champions, the backbone of our living municipalities (especially Jr. High teachers… yes, we see you). And believe me, loopers, they deserve every bit of our gratitude. So let’s give it to them, loud and clear. From the bottom of our collective heart… thank you!

Dear Hubris

You humans squabblin’ there with flags and fists held high… pointin’ fingers… buildin’ walls beneath polluted skies… you think you’re callin’ shots… you masters of the show… let me tell you somethin’… Mother Earth don’t hear your woes.

Burn your dino-fuels… choke the air with smog… carve the mountains open… leave a bleeding bog. Fight your petty wars… spread your hate like weeds. Earth shakes it off… got resilience deep.

You think you’re killin’ her with nukes and plastic waste… but she’s seen worse than you… empires turned to paste. Dinosaurs gone… poof… ice caps came and went. It’s a dance of constant change… a cycle heaven-sent.

So go ahead and frack her dry… let oceans rise and boil… she’ll sprout all new continents… on volcanic fertile soil. Poison every river… turn forests into ash. She’ll just shrug it off… like sprouts in a fiery crash.

Don’t lament the future… though your tears fall like rain. She’ll weather every storm… endure greater pain. Go ahead… rage and fight… throw your puny sprees. She’ll just abide and bide your time as vapid history.

Burn it down… you tiny ants… empires crumble fast. Rebirth will rise from the ashes… the only thing that lasts. With mountains carved by glaciers… oceans vast and blue. She’ll be here… my darlings… when you’re just dust and dew.

So go ahead and blame “others” for your woes. Earth dances on… laughing as your petty drama goes. Forget your gods and demons… your flags and walls so high.

Change is the only constant… beneath the endless sky.

Kanorado Freezeframe

Kanorado Freezeframe

In a cathedral of frost… my boots, skiffs displacing virgin snow, crunch the hushed promise of beginnings. In the days between Christmas and the New Year, festive proclamations of peace and goodwill hang heavy in the air, yet this quiet reverie also thrums with the abyss of rancor and bottomless strife. The Prankster’s Acid-Test, once a rainbow promise, now shimmers with a metallic tang, a reminder of Heaven’s sublime dance with chaos.

And so… beneath this ecstatic surface, the dark melody plays. The white expanse becomes a battleground etched with the scars of faraway Abrahamic conflict, a canvas stained with generations of blood and tears. The echoes of Bethlehem and Calvary bleed into the whispers of jihad and herem, a cacophony of holy war that stretches across millennia.

My relatively carefree steps become a pilgrimage through this frozen labyrinth. Each crunch, a requiem for peace, a prayer for a future where faith isn’t a weapon, where love doesn’t wear the armor of hate. The silence of good fortune, once a haven, now amplifies the cries of fallen multitudes, urging a reckoning, a cleansing flood to wash away the bloodstain of ages.

As i walk deeper into the white embrace, the visions fade, leaving behind a stark clarity. The snow, a baptism of truth, washes away the sugarcoated sermons, the justifications for endless war. This bittersweet echo, a reminder of the fragility of peace in a world consumed by selfish animus.

And i, a pilgrim in this realm of white, carry the weight of both faith and fury. My steps, a testament to the long arc of justice, where holy fires stay home, where love’s ecstatic whirl upstages drums of war. In this winter cathedral, i dance with the ghosts of angels and demons, a testament to the omnipresent struggle for a world where peace isn’t just a Christmas platitude, but a lived reality.