Crow Medicine

I've written elsewhere that I believe that Old Crow Medicine Show, besides just being good, are in fact important. Of course, I'm certainly not immune to simply aggrandizing my preferences to make them appear founded in some greater truth and thereby elevate my tastes to something profound. Whatever the verdict on their importance, they are good music.

I first heard Old Crow on KPFA ("KPFB in Berkeley, KFCF in Fresno") in the late evening driving into town off highway 99 to see my girlfriend – 20 minutes on the road burning gas for a conversation about God and a donut. It was crossing the dry sandy river when I heard a song from the back of my mind, something I'd heard earlier but could never quite remember. KPFA has good music at night; it was "I Hear Them All," with some of the most sophisticated lyrics written, to say nothing of written by an old-time folk and bluegrass band.

I hear the sounds of tearing pages
And the roar of burning paper
All the crimes in acquisition
Turn to air and ash and vapor

* * *

Have you ever kissed in a riverbed, surrounded by weeds and pushed into coarse sand on the bottom? A dry river is such a good, dangerous place to kiss. They say fear sometimes feels like love; the reverse is certainly true. Passion is a panic, a giddy terrified rush to be consumed by something external, to lose your self – to die, in other words. A river is such a wonderful place to die with someone.

* * *

I haven't been writing much lately. My poetry has become too content with speaking to people who already know what it's saying – my dad, Patrick, fM. Magazine back in high school – or worse, talking to itself. I read that when Nietzsche got a typewriter he wrote differently, changing his style, even some of his thoughts; of course by that point he was already starting to go insane. I'm desperate to reach the poetic in Arabic – to read and to write and to submerge myself, be consumed by it. Passion is a suicide. You can hide from yourself in another language, but wouldn't that be fantastic? "Dad, I wrote this poem in Arabic, what do you think-oh-wait-you-can't-translate-poetry-sorry-Dad."

I think I'm good with a sort of wandering prose. Especially late at night, the time in the few hours just before dawn, known traditionally as the "blogging hour."