Save Your Quarters

Another installment -- thanks for reading! I'll be finished with "Spanish Trace" by Sunday and ready for a whole new round of blogs. Hope you're having a great week!

"Bad day, buddy?" I asked.

"Not really. Found some more stuff at that antique place in Fort Worth," Jimmy said. Every time he said something, he'd go into a small spasm and start licking the air. I could barely stand to watch.

"What do you with all that Nazi shit? What's the fucking point?"

"You got me," he said. "I just like it. What, you don't think it's bad, do you?"

"No man, it's great." It was times like these that made me wish the entire world were as adept at picking up tone and nuance as Jimmy Sanders. Tone and nuance had gotten me into a lot of trouble. "I got to get back out front. Take it easy on that stuff, will you?"

He took another hit off the flask and put it away. He started to say something, but began licking the air instead while the musak pumped in Louis Armstrong's "What A Wonderful World." That's the kind of shit that can make a guy feel pretty low.


I guess I should have to tell anyone that Lori never got used to it. She'd say, You're not working at the Ponderosa forever, Mark. It's stagnant. You're stagnant. And my stagnant ass would head out the door and end up at Woody's, a small dive just west of town. Woody's might have been a shithole, but it had a decent jukebox in which I spent many a quarter playing George Jones singing "Yabba Dabba Doo, the King Is Gone and So Are You" until this old guy yells, Save your quarters son and buy the tape. And I wanted to say, It's all cds now, pops, but then the old guy smiled and I could see that he didn't have all his teeth and had lost them fighting and probably wouldn't mind losing a few more. And I liked my teeth. So I sat down and drank the rest of my Shiner without George.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses." Colette

Cocktail Hour
Drinking television suggestion: Escape From Jonestown -- CNN tonight!

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Thursday! Much love to my mother, seven years gone today.