March 14, 2010

There are many things that make living on a farm “hard”. Some of these things are mucking out stalls, stacking hay, weeding rows, getting stung by bees and being butted by a goat, bit by a duck, bit by a horse, bit by the duck again, and getting kicked in the head by a spooked horse and needing 23 stitches…but these don’t compare to the challenge that I have now come face to face with.

I call it “despair with a twang”. My wife calls it country music.

Its not that I am against country music, because I’m not. It’s ok…but how I feel about country music is how I feel about monkeys – real cute, but I don’t want one sitting on my shoulder.

It’s the lyrics mostly that scratch my blackboard. Pulitzer lines like “working hard all week puts the beer on the table” does not take me to the deep end which is where I like to be. I like lyrics and music that I can interpret different ways and that make me work my mind back and forth to figure out meanings… “puttin’ beer on the table” doesn’t do it for me. I can figure it out way to easily. No metaphors there to ponder - its not anywhere close to the cryptic and sometimes whimsical wanderings of Devendra Banhart. Still, it’s not a bad song. Monkeys aren’t too bad either.

To be fair, my wife doesn’t like what I listen to anymore than I like her country. Playing Tom Waites curdles her skin. Once, on a trip back from Connecticut, she couldn’t take his gravel voice any longer and, well, let’s just say that for my own safety, I put in a different cd. Damn if I wasn’t looking at what I was putting in next and put in some John Coltrane…that’s when the roof blew off.(She hates jazz even more) Next thing ya know, for my own safety, I turned on the radio and found a song that went something like this, “I found the tractor of my dreams when you walked out that door after my last beer and my dog died before my truck got stuck in the mud while I was a four wheeling on my way to the bar after working hard for a bad boss before my spit cup fell out of my camper truck”. Peace at last! I know what’s best for me.

But seriously, there is a song we both like and can listen to and that makes us happy- it stirs up my imagination and allows me some meaningful interpretation. My wife likes it because it has a happy-go-lucky country theme and can be hummed to. It makes us both smile. It goes something like this: “rain makes corn, corn makes whiskey, and whiskey makes my girlfriend feel a little frisky”.

It’s the best song there ever was! Trust me!