It’s funny… once (or twice) a month, some friends & I (all of us had very young children at the time) used to sneak off from the homefronts to this patch of desert hill off Hwy. 138 that we dubbed the burning bush. It was a little oasis of lone desert trees & bushes just below a cliff where the hang-gliders leapt from on Saturdays. Far enough away from any houses that we could crank the boombox & bark @ the moon until sunrise if we wanted to ~~ just some dad’s letting off a little steam. We’d haul a cooler of beer, the boombox & CDs, & whatever anybody thought would be a fascinating distraction, up this hill that was usually lit well enough by the moon. Smoke a little spliff, …drink a lot o beer and, as the blokes over there in the UK might say, “get real fackin pissed.”
What’s funny is the connection: Amongst the favorite albums @ the burning bush was New York…& when Last Great American Whale came on we, through repetition all knew the lyrics and, rapped along unto the winds…and it meant something more than it should of at the time. It felt like a battle cry gone sour, like we felt we all knew the next couple decades were gona suck on the whole…and all the notions we had of a great resurgence of human inspiration were going to go out the window with something more indicative of hardball politics, repressive chains & tightened reigns & bloody stains. & I suppose we were correct in our angst. But we always ended up enjoying the night; …well not always, sometimes there was a fight, but even then eventually it came back around to not too shabby a night, away from the house until morning…barking @ the moon. I haven’t seen all but one of those guys in years. One of ‘em, who lives in Colorado Springs these days, fell 30’ off a ladder onto frozen Denver ground and telescoped both his legs into near dust. After three years of reconstructive surgery and therapy and this bitchin electronic appliance he has that allows him to hook sticky probes up to any muscles on any body part and oscillate them into peace & tranquility (a very cool device), he’s been able to walk pretty well now on twisted bowed legs. Anyway, he & his family of 5 visited for a few days and we talked about the burning bush, even tried to figure-out a way to revisit it to some extent…but instead just drank a twelve of Rolling Rock out by the fire and played with that electronic gismo of his ~~ everybody should be able to get one of those (& an oxygen tank, regulator & nasal canula) without a prescription! Like cyanaura’s post lyricized, you can’t recreate those times. All & all, now’s good enough. But, with some thought ~~ & a little integrity, it could get better.
