1st TAKE/2nd LOOK: #28
Let's pull back. Take a 30,000 foot view. Use 360 vision. We'll work backwards.
Let’s kick the tires and light the fires!
At least that’s how it always rolled off of my tongue. It’s a go-to (eye roll long-time colleagues) I use to wrap up a pre-shift huddle, whether it’s hourly worker-bees pulling a double or C-Level suits “executing their activation” in matching polo shirts and khaki shorts.
It always works. People laugh, briefly ponder the abstract of it, and then disperse to activate their execution, as it were. But my cherished cliché was contorted. Channel surfing crashed me onto a mega-evangelical beach where some Hawaiian-shirt wearing preacher was pumping his flock for all they got.
I was trapped, and was reaching for my credit card because it was only two easy payments and, after all, it was for JEEEEZ-ZUS! Then he lost me. Total E-Brake moment almost popped my elbow out shoving the empty-bill-carrier back in.
Let’s kick the tires and start the fires!
Holy Hell Bro! Where do you come off using that language on the Beach of the Lord? Ballsy dude here, all laid-back, then totally misfires the money moment. Talk about a climatic collapse. Now I know how she feels when the little general shoots a blank. If. I mean. Askin for a friend, right?
"Start the fires”? No. Don’t work that way. Say it out loud both ways. Completely different alliteration, sound, and effect. Technically, start is a one-syllable word. But think of our Spanish-speaking friends, and of their interpretation of the letter “s”. Let’s let George tell us about it
I worked the drive-thru window at a fast-food joint. True shit there. The “s” in '“start” the fires makes it an almost two-syllable-word. Like a baby beginning sound. I don’t like it. There’s something jarring about it to my ear.
Let’s kick the tires and ezstart the fires!
Kind of like finding an abandoned chair sitting all crooked on the parkway. You know it’s a chair. And that’s a tree. And astro-turf. Next to the curb. Find what doesn’t belong. Hell, isn’t that what covid did to us? And now, all we have to do is make meaning of all the random shit in our lives. Now-Normal.
I guess that’s where I come in. I observe so much randomness in my life that I have to share it with you. In the hopes my idle randomness intersects with your random idleness so that we all arrive at the same moment of sublime serendipity.
Under a sunny backlit tree on an old armchair with a preacher on the beach.
Point me to another free-thinker that can tie all that up in a pretty little package. Or point at me. Love me or Hate me - it is me that drives the emotion. The spotlight shines on the object of desire. You control the spotlight. Shine on what?
Ask me and I will tell you to look in the mirror. Humans are great at compiling shit in our brains, and, at least in my case, I never had a dump-it-out-button.
It just sat in there and fermented. I wonder if that’s why I describe my writing as “words falling out of my head”? Seem as valid a thought as any others I have. And now you’ve become co-owners in all that. Your invested in my Empire of Dirt.
My gig at The Hollywood Bowl is great and amazing and all-consuming at this point. You may have noticed that since I started, making my Friday and Monday posts have been increasingly difficult to hit.
It got me freaking out and putting all of this stress on myself. Then I remembered who I write this thing for. You guys, my readers. My family. That stress, I discovered, was me not trusting all of you to understand what’s going on in my life.
Thank you for allowing me to miss a self-imposed deadline. I trust you. I’m busy and you get it.
Check out this playlist. I put some brain-jelly into this thing. Would love your feedback on what this music adds to the post. I’m listening to it as a proof and deny myself editing privileges. I like.
