Off the Road
Brew was back at home, after driving to Tallahassee for the FLAC conference.
On the drive over, he thought about his college days, living in Tallahassee, going
to hear Owen and Balder play, at The Pearl, with The Bottom Dollar Boys, or at The
Warehouse, opening for Barefoot Manner, he thought about driving Owen and Balder
places, to do with music, or driving to folk art shows, and he knew a book fair might
not be the answer, he always felt excluded, at book fairs, like he was doing something
the other writers weren't, but he realized, suddenly, that a bluegrass festival might
not be the answer, either, or the only answer, a folk art powwow might be the answer.
I dream of playing the swinette on stage, at Americana music festivals, selling my books at the record table afterwards. A swinette, you stretch two horsehairs across a hog's ass and pick it with your teeth. Brew mounts the steps, walks across the stage with great dignity, takes a stuffed Miss Piggy doll out from under his robes, lifts her skirt, presses her butt to his face, and squeals like a stuck pig. Great cry and little wool, as the Devil said when he sheared the hogs.
What if he did that at a folk art powwow. Sold Root Doctor and Dread
Clampitt CDs.
Wrote a book about doing that.
With poems and prose
vignettes and interviews and letters larded in the book like memory paintings, or
story songs. Antique Florida postcards.
And the hero didn't go anywhere
so much as he wrote about places he had gone to, in the past, or hoped to go to,
in the future.
In the present, he sat at his writing desk and wrote. Immobilized.
Ranging across the Alps of Night.