Category: February 2024

(Trigger warnings: explicit language, violence, sex, gender, race and socioeconomic political ranting, and you-name-it.)

I’ve found myself in the strange position of not having anyone to go with me to a country music festival because none of my people are country music people. And until recently I would never have considered myself a country music person either. Turn on some 1970’s sorry-for-yourself twang and I’m going to run screaming from the room.

I like almost all other music genres. I like rock and metal. I like Spanish guitar. I like blues and grunge. I like Latin pop. I like dance-house-techno-electronic because I love to dance. I will also enjoy hip-hop and R&B if it’s got a good fast dance beat. I even sometimes like classical and opera (I have tickets to Verdi’s Requiem coming up in March!) I used to always say, “I like everything except country.”

Here’s what happened. Laura, who lives in the California Bay Area, discovered a local Oakland musician, Fantastic Negrito. According to the internet, his music “spans blues, R&B, and roots music”. Well, I love contemporary blues. I don’t tend to like the misogynistic lyrics of older blues, but Fantastic Negrito’s lyrics are interesting. He has a very urban black edge to his lyrics. I bought two or three of his albums and started following him. Turns out he won the “Best Contemporary Blues Album” grammy three times in a row.

On one of his albums, Fantastic Negrito teamed up with a younger, white female musician named ZZ Ward to do a song called Cannonball. In the song they are talking back and forth to each other. She is saying, essentially, “you are messing up my life” and he is saying, essentially, “yeah but you keep coming back for more” (lyrics here).

This song could be interpreted in a lot of ways. It’s clearly about drug addiction, and also about addiction to an abusive relationship. But I also think that it could illustrate an abusive relationship in our society between different subcultures; specifically between the urban elite of the Bay Area and the poor whites in the rural areas of the west.

Fantastic Negrito is my age. He’s an older, urban black male who overcame a crime and drug-infused youth in Oakland, CA to become an outstanding musician. ZZ Ward is a generation younger, coming from rural Oregon. She’s blond and blue-eyed and wears a cowboy hat. What they have in common is they are both excellent blues musicians.

After discovering her via Fantastic Negrito, I started listening to ZZ Ward’s music on Spotify. Soon I was wading around up to my knees in the bayous of Texas and Louisiana. I slid in the mud from “roots” to “Americana”, all the way down until I had landed flat on my butt in the cowpie that is country music.

Nobody in my life is going to be willing to go with me to something called a “Cattle Country Fest” in a place called “Gonzales, Texas” to listen to a white chick in a cowboy hat sing the blues. In the promo photos the women (all white) have long, Farrah Fawcett hair dangling in loose curls out from under their cowboy hats; every single one of them. One of the logos shows a cowboy riding a beer bottle, as if the beer were a steer in a rodeo. I mean, these are the kind of idiots who wave guns around and vote for Trump! Right? Let’s just come right out and say it. So obviously, nobody I know wants to go there with me.

I was raised not very far from where ZZ Ward was raised, in rural western Oregon. Many of my peer’s parents, having lost the farm the previous generation, were now loggers – if they were employed at all. Some of them had come out west from Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas during the dust bowl. Some had come from farther, like Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee. When I was a child, I picked up a drawl every bit as heavy as a native Texan. People used to always ask about my southern accent, wondering where exactly in the south I came from.

BTW, we locals called Oregon “or-ruh-gun”, with the accent on the first syllable, and there’s a dropping drawl in the “or-ruh”, and don’t forget to swallow the “gun” at the end. There’s no “re” and there’s no “gone”.

I practiced for years to train myself to quit talking like a hick. I didn’t think I would make any money as a life coach if I sounded like I grew up in the hollows. When I was doing my life coaching training over 20 years ago in the Bay Area and Vancouver BC, I got shamed for my accent (and lack of money, and lack of social skills, and even the mud on my crappy old car). They called me “provincial”, and not in a nice way. Laura says I still sound like a redneck when I get mad. Lol.

All this to say, yeah, it’s true that we, as a society, are treating our urban blacks like shit and we need to do far, far, better. But we are also treating our rural whites like shit and we need to wake up and smell the bacon. On one hand, we’ve got male-against-male violence in the streets, and on the other hand, we’ve got male-against-female violence hidden in the homes. And drugs everywhere – somewhat different drugs, but still, drugs – permeating all of it, killing people. We’ve got to stop being arrogant and stop making fun of poor whites and their ignorance, and start caring about their living conditions.

Trump’s a criminal and a fraud and he doesn’t care one iota about our democracy or the rural people that he pretends to care about. But either does Biden. I know it’s hard to get past the “other side’s” love of guns and their shockingly ignorant beliefs about science. And it’s true that the anti-vax ignorance led to additional covid deaths. Real people died because of it. A lot of them. And it’s tragic. But that wasn’t anyone’s intent.

The majority of these folks aren’t worried about science or guns. They just want to make rent. That’s all. They just want to pay their fucking rent, and have enough food for their kids. And they want to keep their kids off of drugs. And find a better job. And they want to get their bad knee fixed without feeling like a government-handout loser. They’re just people.

Most of them know that astronauts did indeed fly to the moon back around the time I was born, and that burning fossil fuels is indeed messing with our climate. Yeah, ok, there are apparently a few people who actually don’t believe that. Life is getting so dang complicated. I’m trying to read the science magazines and it’s not even believable anymore. Have you read a recent in-depth astronomy article? It’s insane and incomprehensible what they’re discovering about the origins of the universe. And physics? Reality isn’t remotely what we thought it was. And now AI is going to take over the world? What even is that? AI can’t even answer a phone call right.

So much of the science that we learned as kids is turning out to be wrong. And we’re making fun of people for being confused? When they’re busy working two shit jobs and trying to kick a habit and single-handedly raising two kids, they don’t have time to keep up with whatever Elon Musk may or may not be doing with his inconceivable amount of money. They’re just trying to help their kid figure out how to deal with their third, long-term substitute teacher of the school year.

Meanwhile, two weeks ago I was walking with Biska at lunchtime and I came across a guy completely naked and very, very pink, jerking off in an alley right next to the neighborhood children’s park near my house. I was walking around the park with my dog, distracted with my birdsong identification app on my phone (there are so many amazing birds in Tucson in the winter), when I heard a weird noise and looked up to see it all, right at his peak moment. OMG. It was horrible. I grabbed Biska and ran, and called the cops from a safe distance. I am unhurt but traumatized.

Wanker is probably more crazy than dangerous, and I don’t know if our local police even handled it very well; I didn’t stick around to find out. Biska and I ran home and I spent the rest of the afternoon contemplating the cost of building more and higher walls around my property, and whether or not I was still willing to take out my own trash, given that the neighborhood trash cans belong in the alleys behind our houses.

Then last week an elderly friend of mine, who I met recently at the botanical gardens, was walking the short distance from her home to her gym at 11:00 in the morning when she was attacked by a guy with a knife. Last week. Here, in the broad daylight, a few miles from my house, in a decent area of Tucson.

She’s ok. And why is she ok? A maga-type young guy (probably packing heat) driving by in a jacked-up pickup truck, blared his horn and gunned his monster truck at her attacker and then leaped out and rescued her. She is unhurt, but very traumatized. And she is very, very grateful for this guy – exactly the sort of Trump-addled, coal rolling, crazy-flag guy that we are making fun of, and that I am (frankly) a little bit scared of. White guys with hidden guns scare me, even though I am not their target. In fact, maybe someday one of them could save me from an even crazier guy.

And now my friend is afraid to leave her modest, gated retirement community, when she used to walk a mile each way to the botanical gardens and her gym. So what are we old ladies supposed to make of all this? Which crazy guys should we be afraid of? What’s anyone supposed to make of all this?

I get the irony. These same folks who are supposedly the patriotic ones, ready to point their guns and defend our constitution with their lives, turn around and vote for the president most likely, in the entire history of the US, to try to annul our constitution. Trump doesn’t give a shit about our constitution. Dictatorship is in his DNA. I don’t understand why constitution supporters would support a wanna-be dictator. It does seem a bit stupid. And they don’t want government healthcare either, even though they’re the ones who need it. I don’t get it.

But…people aren’t stupid. I mean, we’re all the same amount stupid – we’ve got stupid pretty evenly on both sides of the political divide. So why would huge numbers of average, good-enough, not-particularly-stupid people support a narcissistic, criminal sociopath who wants to scrap our constitution? We should at least seriously ask ourselves the question. I don’t know – maybe because they’re desperate? Maybe because we’ve got a problem in the hinterlands, eh?

People are suffering. People are dying. We need to care. If we want to explain to people that they are planning to vote for the very guy most likely to destroy the constitution that they genuinely value, then we need to do so without arrogance. Nobody listens when they’re being made fun of.

It’s not like they don’t know that children are being shot by the guns. They know this. They don’t like it either. Can we stop for a minute and ask ourselves why are children shooting other children (and themselves) with guns? Why?!? I mean obviously if we had fewer guns we would have fewer gun deaths. So yes, get rid of the damn guns. But we need to figure out why children are shooting each other – on purpose! For no apparent reason.

Maybe something about their lives is deeply not ok? And as a society, that is our fault. All of us. We need to stop fighting with other reasonably well-meaning adults about things that aren’t going to matter in 100 years (I mean, Trump and Biden will both be dead in less than a decade). We need to start trying to figure out what’s wrong in the lives of our children.

We worry about inequity in our country, and yet no one questions the inequity in our school systems. That’s one thing the ruling democrats and republicans and the mainstream media all seem to be fine with, because their kids aren’t in these horrible schools. We have huge, shocking and devastating inequalities in our school systems. We’ve got a few school districts in multi-million dollar neighborhoods with every privilege imaginable and we have districts with no textbooks, impossible teacher-turnover rates, and barely functioning, crumbling buildings – both in inner cities and in the rural areas.

If we want racial equality, we need to start with funding school districts equally so all the kids have a chance. And who wants to fund other people’s schools? Nobody, on either side of the political spectrum. The elites on both sides just move their own kids to the elite neighborhoods and nobody is adequately funding the schools. And if we’re worried about the consequences of ignorance, well maybe we could fund some rural schools too, instead of funneling all the tax dollars to the privileged suburbs.

We could start there, with the kids, supporting the kids – all the kids – together. The black kids, the white kids, the brown kids, the inner city kids, the kids out in trailer parks in west Texas, the English-as-a-second language kids, the republican kids, the democrat kids, the gay and trans kids, the smart kids, the dumb kids, all the neurodiverse kids, the religious kids, the mentally ill kids, the homeless kids, and the kids whose parents are fucked up and tripped out, and the kids who are themselves fucked up and tripped out. We need to fund the schools equally. That won’t solve all the individual problems, but only then could we start imagining having an equal opportunity society and healing the great divides.

OMG, deep breath. Talk about a long rant. Whew! All that just because this old lady wanted to go to a country music festival and can’t. Plus, I’m worried about the sudden apparent violence around me in my own average, modest, quiet 1960’s neighborhood, where we were planning to retire and live out our golden years.

So when I briefly considered going to a music festival that’s two-days drive away, I realized I’m too tired, too old, too anxiety prone, and too much of a vulnerable female to go alone. And I don’t like being old. And tired. And vulnerable.

I’ve got yet another migraine, again. Oh, right. I’m also not healthy enough to be trying to drive across the country in my beloved camper van chasing a music festival. I will have to find another festival to attend closer to home, which, unfortunately, won’t include ZZ Ward. She just had a baby and is, wisely, staying close to home herself.

And anyway, I still don’t like country music! I need to remind myself that I wouldn’t even like 95% of that cowpie festival in rural Texas. Twang is still really not my thing. Sooo, how about a fast & heavy, modern blues festival somewhere…anyone? I’ll let you know if I find one. Or if you find one, take me with you.

To send me a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

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