2/8/2024 america the load-o'bull
Adam recently posted to his website about how he pays attention to even the most minute details of events occurring around him and then related a short encounter with a man who seemed eager to talk to him and that he, Adam, decided to avoid the encounter. I try to do the same: pay attention to minute details and take my life's course into my own hands because I have been a long time coming to realize that one way or another, pretty much everyone is lying, if not about one thing, then another. As the Po character in ConAir says, "Sorry boss, but there's only two men I trust. One of them's me. The other's not you."
Last week, I went out to pick up some supplies. Because the eSIM I recently downloaded from a new-to-me network provider is not connecting to the network, I cannot make calls, except emergency calls, send or receive texts, or use the internet on my phone. As a side note: when my mom and I called the service provider on a 3-way call to try and get it worked out, the man, Jack, on the other end said that my phone does not have eSIM capabilities which is patently untrue. My phone indeed has an eSIM slot. In fact, it has 2. I assume if it didn't have eSIM capabilities, there would have been an error, and it would not have downloaded the eSIM via the QR code that the provider sent. Anyway, I decided to, this time, use public wifi while I was in town so that I could clip some digital coupons. I also browsed the ad for the grocery store in the town nearer to our camp to see if they had on sale any of the items I was planning to pick up. It turned out they did. I finished my errands in the farther and larger of the two towns and headed back home, making a quick stop at the smaller town's grocery store on the way. When I arrived at the store, there was a moderately older man busking immediately adjacent to the only door. He was using an electric guitar and a small amplifier to which he had also hooked up some preset background music. I'm not fully familiar with how this type of thing works, so it could be that the preset music was stored in the amplifier. At any rate, the music this man and the machine were playing was very similar to what can be heard here in this video, from the sound of the guitar right down to the reverb and the supporting instruments. Adam and I had been listening to this song quite a bit in the days leading up to this particular trip in to town. We like it. I suspect the setup is exactly the same. The man in front of the store was just playing different tunes.
Anyway, I did my shopping and when I came out and started to pack up my bike, he started in on a tune that was vaguely familiar that, as he progressed, became exceedingly familiar. It was that song about David playing Hallelujah for god. Rewind a few decades, and you see that this is not only a song that affected me as an adolescent when I saw a dance performed to it, but also one that I heard over and over (and over and over) another decade after that, when Adam and I lived with one of his former co-workers. The co-worker, an alcoholic who had given up, would play this song relentlessly both on the piano and a recorded version of it.
Back in front of the grocery store, as I'm about finished packing up, I pass in front of the store's entrance and in front of the guitar player to replace the shopping cart. As I'm passing in front of the guitar player, he suddenly but smoothly switches his tune to that of "america the stolen" better known as "america the beautiful." I give an audible disapproving chortle at this piece of obvious nationalist propaganda. As I cross in front of the man for the second time to return to my bike, the man says, "I saw you on your bike on my way here," in that cheerful tone that I know all to well that suggests that they want me postpone the rest of my life to start telling them all about where I ride my bike and why. Personally, I don't have time for rapists, so I just say, equally cheerfully, "okay!" and proceeded to my bike. I get all my bits and bobs tucked in and take off, telling him to "Have a good one!" as I roll away. He smiled, and hollered, still cheerful, "yeah, you too!" And I went home. Fast forward to the next day in the morning, and I'm noodling around with some color placement on my phone for a crochet blanket I'm making. Earlier, the tune of "america the stolen" had slinked its way into the forefront of my mind, and I'd hummed about 7 syllables of it when I noticed what was happening and said, "no, we're not doin' that." So I popped on Tenacious D's "Beelzeboss (The Final Showdown)". I listened to that 5 or 6 times (I do so enjoy the song) before deciding to change it up. I switched over to the version of The Gael (the song from the film The Last of the Mohicans) which I shared above. Suddenly, having nothing to do with the colors I was fiddling with, it all congealed. Something Adam wrote in his Vae Victis post popped into my head almost simultaneously with the memory of the man that I encountered in front of the store. Adam had written: "Before you hit the internet to find that your search results for Vae Victis all say it means America is great and free thinkers are evil, it's actually a latin phrase meaning "woe to the vanquished." america the beautiful, huh? Comments are closed.
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February 2024
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