On to Montana

"To Augustus's surprise, Call sat down on the porch and took a big swallow from the jug. He felt curious -- not sick but suddenly empty -- it was the way a kick in the stomach could make you feel. It was an odd thing, but true, that the death of an enemy could affect you almost as much as the death of a friend. He had experienced it before, when news reached them that Kicking Wolf was dead. Some young soldier on his second patrol had made a lucky shot and killed him, on the Clear Fork of the Brazos -- and Kicking Wolf had kept two companies of Rangers busy for twenty years. Killed by a private. Call had been shoeing a horse when Pea brought him that piece of news, and he felt so empty for a spell that he had to put off finishing the job.

That had been ten years ago, and he and Gus soon quit rangering. So far as Call was concerned, the death of Kicking Wolf meant the end of the Comanches, and thus the end of their real job. There were other chiefs, true, and the final fights were yet to be fought, but he had never had the vengeful nature of some Rangers and had no interest in spending a decade mopping up renegades and stragglers.

Pedro Flores was a far cry from being the fighter Kicking Wolf had been. Pedro seldom rode without twenty or thirty vaqueros to back him up, whereas Kicking Wolf, a small man no bigger than the boy, would raid San Antonio with five or six braves and manage to carry off three women and scare all the whites out of seven or eight counties just by traveling through them. But Pedro was of the same time, and had occupied them just as long.

"I didn't know you liked that old bandit so much," Augustus said.

"I didn't like him," Call said. "I just didn't expect him to die."

"He probably never expected it neither," Augustus said. "He was a rough old cob."

After a few minutes the empty feeling passed, but Call didn't get to his feet. The sense that he needed to hurry, which had been with him most of his life, had disappeared for a space.

"We might as well go on to Montana," he said. "The fun's over around here.""

- Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

January Books

I had a cure, for your disease

But you threw it away

And you made it clear I was not welcome on these seas

And you threw it away

So I sailed and I sailed for so long

My hair grew long and my heart grew cold

I face certain death without you near

And I felt the storm and swam until the skies were clear

And I found a home along this crooked road

And all of this would have been

All of this could have been yours

All of this should have been

All of this could have been yours

Black clouds roll, right over red doors

As the waves were high

So was I

And the moon never looked so angry

As when our walls came crumbling down

It was so peaceful

It was so beautiful

All the destruction, it was quiet

All of this would have been 

All of this could have been yours

All that you love, will be carried away

Oh all that you love, will be carried away

All of my pain, that you put on my name

All of my doubt, and all of my shame

All of my guilt, my denial and fear

All of my hatred and all of my tears

All of the time that I couldn't go home

All of the times that I froze alone

All of the sadness all of the lies

All of the shadows that blackened my eyes

All of the servants, who cheated, who stole

All of the colors from the depths of my soul

All of the wounded, that you left for dead

Now creep in the corner, they're all in my head

- Shooter Jennings, "All of This Could Have Been Yours"

My Friends in the Pre-dawn Silence

"We had known each other for eight years at that point, and our flat, fierce disagreement over virtually every line of this ditty for Tracks (an Australian surf mag) made me wonder when our literary differences had become so pronounced. When we first met, in Lahaina, what drew us together was discovering we loved the same books. In fact, the first words I ever spoke to Bryan were, "What are you doing with that book?" He was crossing a post office parking lot with a Ulysses in hand, and the familiar prongs of the big "U" on the Random House paperback cover had caught my eye. We stood there in the sun talking about Joyce, and then the Beats, for an hour or two -- while Dominic waited impatiently in the shade -- and it seemed inevitable that we would meet again. Of course, our tastes had never been exactly the same. I was the more dedicated Joyce fan -- I later spent a year studying Finnegan's Wake with Norman O. Brown, an exercise in masturbatory obscurantism that Bryan would have never undertaken -- and he had an eye for genre fiction, including westerns, that I lacked. I liked Pynchos; Bryan thought his prose awful. And so on. But we were always turning each other on to new writers and, more often than not, finding the same virtues in their stuff. Bryan tended to be years ahead of the reading public -- he was extolling Cormac McCarthy's work long before most critics had heard of him -- and I was glad to follow his leads. In Australia we were digging into Patrick White and Thomas Kenneally and turning up our noses at Colleen McCullough. So why did every sentence he write about Aussie surfing annoy me, and vice versa?

We were headed in different directions, clearly. I had started as a teenage lyric surrealist, language drunk a la Dylan Thomas, and had been slowly trying to sober up. I was now more interested in transparency and accuracy, less enamored of showy originality. Bryan remained enchanted by the music of words -- what he once called the 'incredible foot-stomping joy of a well-turned phrase'. He loved pure captured dialect, cracked vernacular humor, vivid physicality, and a knockout metaphor, and he disliked nothing more than a lazy stock expression."

- William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

visions from high school, levagood park

The last horizons I can see are filled with bars and factories
and in them all we fight to stay awake...
Drink enough of anything to make this world look new again
Drunk drunk drunk in the gardens and the graves
She had nothing left to say so she said she loved me
I stood there grateful for the lie...
Drink enough of anything to make this girl look new again
Drunk drunk drunk in the gardens and the graves
Turn summer trees to bones and ice
Turn insect songs against the night
With words we build and words we break
I'm drunk drunk drunk in the gardens and the graves...
Drink enough of anything to make myself look new again
Drunk drunk drunk in the gardens and the graves

- Gin Blossoms, "Lost Horizons"

Mich Football 2018

"[Whatever]. Maybe it'll be better next year. Maybe it won't. Either way it's a meaningless distraction on the way to the grave."

- Brian Cook, Mgoblog