7th Ward Roosters, Flightless Angels of Death

"Run, chicken, run. Don't you lose your breath. Chickens don't get no life after death."

The New Orleans Times Picayune was covering a murder and a news story broke out. Apparently, there is a substantial population of feral chickens across several New Orleans wards that has grown post-Katrina. Blown out of their coups during the storm, and then afforded plenty of places to hide and squat amongst some still un-recovered parts of the city, they apparently have thrived.

From the Times Picayune, Michale DeMocker

Here's a short chicken lesson, brought to good residents of New Orleans by the wise musings of one Frank Costanza: 

"You got the hen, the chicken and the rooster. The rooster goes with the chicken. So, who's having sex with the hen?"

"They're all chickens the rooster has sex with all of them."

"That's perverse."

Hens are largely docile creatures. They cluck, but generally don't crow. They lay delicious eggs for omelets and, once captured, they can be fried, smoked, baked, stewed or broiled into delicious bits and pieces. 

Roosters are the tweaked-out redneck boyfriends of the fowl world. They're over-caffeinated 7 year old boys with razors strapped to their wrists, and they will put a blade in you for even the mildest of perceived offenses. If they are captured and cooked, they taste a bit like a well-oiled softball mitt. What they lack in size, taste or intelligence, they make up for in wily, fluttering, kamikaze spastic fury. They take no notice of friends nor foes or hands that feed them versus those that wring their necks (though, historically, these hands have been pretty interchangeable).

Given the opportunity, the uptown coyote may eat your baby. The rooster will cut him just to watch him bleed. 

There's this urbanite perception of the noble cock climbing triumphantly to the top of the hen house, puffing out his brilliant chest and issuing a single proud reveille to start the day, silhouetted by the rising sun. Then, clearing his throat, hopping down and going about his business of makin' the love (and more tasty chickens). 

This is a lie. Roosters are sick sadists who engage in a U.S. Panamanian campaign against the unjust oppressors of their brood. From the earliest cracks of morning light till well into the brunching hour and even then sporadically through the day, they let loose with this psychological warfare. You've never known true pain until you've had a hungover morning begin pre-sunrise with incessant, unstoppable crowing. Every shrieking syllable finds its way into the parched cracks of your abused brain and then explodes and reverberates against the membranes...that should go over well in a place like New Orleans.

Between the coyotes, foxes, feral chickens and wild parrots, New Orleans is turning into the model for the modern urban ecosystem. The greatest menace, without a doubt, the rooster.

There Ain't No God In Mexico, Ain't No Comfort In The Cane

I generally believe something needs moving parts to have a soul. That would explain why my iPod still has a clickwheel. But sometimes, these electronical devices do something that makes me step back and rethink that theory...because Pandora smacked me in the face this morning with a sweaty, bearded Waylon Jennings belting out some Billy Joe Shaver lyrics in "There Ain't No God In Mexico."

I don't have an extensive record collection and despite my general luddite tendencies, I've never fully bought into the "it sounds better on vinyl" belief. I really don't believe it for music that was recorded on modern, digital equipment. But, I do lend some credence to the idea that things should be heard in the context of their own time. Music of the 50s, 60s, 70s was recorded with the intention of putting it on vinyl, with all its crackling imperfections. Listening to these albums this way is the reason to have a working turntable. To be able to hear the thing in all its non-remastered, non-digitized glory, the same way people heard it when it was first created, generates a connection to the era from which it came.

All this and more is why I own "Waylon Live" on vinyl. I mean look at the cover art. That's how babies are made, right there-- hairy-chested, mustachioed indestructible redneck babies whose piss smells like straight Dickel for the first three weeks of life. Just touching this album cover is not recommended for pre-teen girls, as it might accelerate them into premature womanhood and virgin pregnancies. I haven't listened to it in probably three years. But yes, Pandora, it's time to break it back out. I need some Waylon.

"Down the road a-ways I've heard said there's a new day comin'. Where the womenfolk are friendly and the law leaves you alone. Well, I'll believe it when I see it and I ain't seen it yet. Don't mind me, just keep on talkin'. I'm just looking for my hat."

It's Rush Hour in Cumberland County, But They Ain't Heard The News (Travelogue Part 2)

I spent rush hour in Cumberland County, Tennessee, somewhere between Nashville and Knoxville. Rush hour arrives in Cumberland with about as much fanfare as the Muslim Hajj. Maybe sometime, someone heard something about a bunch of people moving around at the same time for some unknown purpose. But nobody really understood why or believed that such a thing went on in the world. It passes unnoticed. Needless to say, this was good timing on my part.

Loosely translated, this sign reads "Next Exit, Cool Springs Mall."

Look at this Pho-to-Graph! While I did not have time to explore and experience the important historical sites passed along the way, I'm certainly not above pulling over to the side of any road in any vehicle for unexpected photo opportunities that present themselves on the side of the road. Traffic, pride, parking accommodations be damned. 

Unfortunately, in what was a major oversight, my camera was packed somewhere in the madness of the back of the Uhaul. Given the questionable structural integrity of my packing at the beginning of the trip and the possibility of contents shifting during flight, I thought it best not to attempt to recover it. 

Along the Interstates, everything basically looks the same. But once I pulled off south of Nashville onto highway 45...there's stuff. As part of the as-yet-unplanned return trip where I will take in the wonders of the Natural Bridge and Rock City, a ready camera will be a necessity. Somewhere outside of Jackson, Tennessee, I passed by a burned-out shell of a house with a swimming pool slide still standing behind it. With the right angle, it could've looked like a slide that let out directly into the doorway of the house. It was almost enough to get me to tempt unleashing the chaos of the truck cargo bay to get to the camera.

Green and White Jesus. They started appearing somewhere around Nashville, gained strength outside Jackson, but persisted throughout most of midwestern Tennessee. Green yard signs that just said "JESUS" in white block lettering. No context, no further information. Just "JESUS." There's some political campaign yard sign company that has come up with a brilliant gimmick for keeping up business in the off season. It'd be like a a heart-shaped candy maker replacing "Be Mine" with "Get Saved" in an effort to keep the factory running all year. 

During the mid-90s in Mississippi, there was a fad of PVC signs with mini-marquee letter slots. People would put them in their yards with excerpts from scripture. It was the early predecessor to Tim Tebow's eye black (which never made use of the darker side of the Bible. For Tennessee weekend or an away game into Death Valley, you gotta break out the Revelations). But at least that made sense as a statement of faith. You had to actually crack a Bible and pick out a verse and a passage. "This is something that means something to me, go check it out." The JESUS signs are just lazy tokens that come dangerously close to using the Lord's name in vain. It's just blunt, meaningless space-filler put into the world for lack of anything else to say; the yard decoration equivalent of hitting your thumb with a hammer and muttering "Christ" under your breath as you grab your hand. 


Green and White Houses. At the opposite end of the green and white yard sign blasphemies are the green and white houses. And they are also all along this stretch of road. Green roof, white trim, double chimney houses. The white brick or wood or stucco show age, but not in a cheap way. It's a classic deterioration, like silver hair behind the ears. It's more establishment than neglect. It's that aging that sets apart the true estates from the cheap vinyl siding imitations, which just end up looking like unbrushed teeth after 2 years. 


Green and White Vegetation. If there hasn't been a country song to use the phrase "like a dogwood in the pines," it's for sale for a low, low royalty. In rows and rows of green roadside pine trees, the sparse blooming white dogwoods are brilliantly conspicuous. 


"I saw her there at the 7th grade dance like a dogwood among the pines." It's got Tim McGraw megahit written all over it. Perhaps "Evergreen Love" could be the title. It's the next "Don't Take The Girl." This  isn't meant derisively. I have a sad, soft spot for bad country. I just want to contribute to the genre.

Or, if you could even go Southern gothic edgy, "The line of blow laid upon the piles of cash like a dogwood in the pines and his ears filled with the roar of an I-20 log truck."


In Twitter literature, there's no need to put in the work of doing complete novels. Just catchlines, similes and metaphors sold separately to fill out whatever existing framework you already have in place. 99 cents per phrase. 


Holly Springs Swamp Land. Speaking of bad country lyrics, I've got some good swamp land for sale in Holly Springs. There it was, a "For Sale" sign on the roadside from ReMax claiming an investment opportunity. It wasn't just mildly moist land or some seasonal flooding. This was swamp. Probably at least hip deep, cypress knee dotted swamp. I assume you'd buy it to hunt ducks or farm crawfish or dispose of bodies, but I couldn't think of anything but Monty Python's Holy Grail, because I'm a British teenager from 1975.

Betty Davis, Whore of the Free Market. Bette Davis had eyes that were song worthy and is a symbol of early Hollywood beauty. Betty Davis is a shack right on the Marshall County line, marking the course to Oxford like the edge of the Holy Land. It's a monument to the fact that people will drive for cold beer and warmed-over ribs. In Oxford, where cold beer is illegal and no beer is legal on Sunday, Betty Davis, slut that she is, has made a comfortable living picking up the needs that can't be filled in proper incorporated society. 

The debate stretches across generations, disciplines and social strata of Ole Miss attendees and still remains unsolved. Hotly and passionately debated among scholars and slackers, everyone with a strong, unrelenting dogmatic belief one way or the other-- If one group of foresight-lacking college kids buys a case of warm beer in Oxford and puts it in ice and another group of kids drives out to Betty Davis to purchase a cold case, which one will get to the baseball outfield with the coldest beverages before first pitch? Like the enigma of the Tootsie Pop, we may never know.


Take Me Back, To Oxford Mississippi. I see her. I know she's there. She probably doesn't really remember me. Probably doesn't care or wouldn't notice, if I just zipped by without a second glance. She's moved on. I, sadly, haven't. 


And so, I have no choice but to swerve a little out of the way to stop in and gawk for a while at the sundress in the breeze that is the Oxford Square. I meet up with an old friend who still is lucky enough to maintain an honest and productive existence in Oxford and we head to lunch. There are some who don't believe in the legend of the fat vegetarian. It's understandable. I mean, not everybody's been to Ajax Diner. 


The meatloaf is good. The catfish, better than average. All manner of sandwiches and chicken fried steak and burgers and they're all solid, classic comfort food selections. But the star is the veggies. Fried eggplant, fried okra, cheese fries (veggie? sure), squash casserole, hash brown casserole, cornbread dressing, butter beans, turnip greens, mac and cheese, fresh tomatoes with homemade mayonaise (sadly, not in season at the time of this visit)...oh man. It's food coma-inducing vegetation and starch and clearly outshines the proteins. Fewer animals would need to die if more places did vegetables like Ajax. We have sweet tea and catfish with extra tartar sauce and talk about times just far away enough to sound like lies. And then, it's time to load back up into the Uhaul. 


New Orleans is the end of the road. There's still a little way to go, but the rest is familiar and could be done on autopilot. Treebeard had it right. I like going South. Somehow, it feels like going downhill.

Pray to God I See Headlights... Traveloge Part 1

The late night commercials were wrong.

Despite a love for the freedom of the open road. Despite a desire to be my own boss, set my own hours and earn a good wage. After two days and 1300 miles in the cab of a truck, I now know that those commercials and my woozy, pre-dawn delusions of diesel-fueled grandeur were wrong.

My future is not in the exciting industry of long haul trucking.

I thought I was well prepared. After all, I had at one time owned a C.W. McCall cassette tape. I brought sleeveless shirts, loose-fitting canvass pants. An iPod loaded with new music, as well as podcasts. A sturdy soul, BP powder, three bags of pop rocks and a box of Girl Scout cookies (It's just you and me, Shortbread. One of us isn't going to make it across the Mississippi). It wasn't enough.

What I lacked was a spring-loaded spine and an ass like a bean bag chair. Short of that, the only salvation would've been a bottle of muscle relaxers waiting at my destination like the quaaludes-packed carrot on the end of the proverbial stick (as used in the filming of "The Lost Boys"). 

Historical Markers. Despite all the pain and persistent audible creaking every time I rotate my neck, I would like to do this drive again. With a loser schedule and a more comfortable conveyance, I've discovered something I kind of already knew-- they got stuff in this plucky stretch of America. Stuff that tickles the little ironic snark-happy hipster traveler who nonchalantly squats on the couch of everybody's brain. But also stuff of actual historical significance that reaffirms a connection with our country's past. And there are more than a few sites that artfully straddle the fence between the two.

The Davy Crockett Tavern, Davy Crockett Birthplace. The Davy Crockett Travel Center-- where there are six different flavors of Cappuccino, including Rabid Coon (extra foam), the Bear Grinner (with a dusting of ground Yellow Jacket), Alamojo (chicory and horny goat weed) and Wintergreen. 

Casey Jones Museum, National Bird Dog Museum, Rusty's Historic TV and Movie Car Museum, The Natural Bridge (Damn you, Natural Bridge, haunting my travels. I can't tell you how many times I've passed by this place and, despite my curiosity, never been able to stop), Luray Caverns, the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library, the Stonewall Jackson House and the George C. Marshall Museum (which share a highway exit...possibly more?).

These are things that need to be seen and can only be truly appreciated by someone without anywhere else in particular to be. 

Gasoline. I contributed heavily to the Jugheadistan country coffers. There were initially plans to drive at a constant, conservative speed throughout the trip in an effort to maximize fuel efficiency. That went out the window about 10 miles into open interstate when I encountered my first '89 Lincoln Continental doing 72 mph where I wanted to do 73. Three gallons of rapid acceleration later, and I'm scanning the truck stop signs pricing unleaded.

The variation is staggering. In one 30-mile stretch of highway I passed 10 different gas stations with prices ranging anywhere from $3.16 to $3.69 a gallon. And there was no rhyme or reason to any of it, turning the entire experience into a rolling version of Deal or No Deal. Do you want to take the $3.29 a gallon at the Exxon at exit 18B or would you like to play on? I've got the banker on the line right now...and he's offering an additional hot rollers-cooked meat product and a free bottle of water with a 10 gallon purchase.

Surely the app already exists where your GPS/iPhone scans the road ahead and displays the gas prices for your shopping convenience. And once that becomes standard equipment, things seem like they'd have to even out. Until then, it's just Howie Mandel in my head tempting with cheeseburger rollers and the fear of things unseen.

iPod Kills The Radio Star. This shit is going to happen. Instead of blindly scanning the Eastern Tennessee airwaves, I chose my own destiny of podcasts. No Taylor Swift. No local drive-time political rabble. No "Today's Hits" or "Yesterday's Favorites." No commercials. I ran through hours of podcasts and caught up on everything from the air gun assaults of English Premier League soccer players to a brief history of the fall of the French Bourbons. I listened to my favorite wrestler (The Heartbreak Kid) talk about his religious rebirth and how that meshed with his work in a generally crude profession. And Real World Star "The Miz"proclaim that he had ended the city of Cleveland's title drought by winning the WWE Championship Belt. He then more or less challenged LeBron James to a fight. Finally, I took in Oscar recaps from a variety of sources, including the screenwriter of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" proclaiming Will Smith to be the only true movie star of the current film industry.

And then...at 9:38 pm 21 miles outside of Nashville, the iPod battery died. I was tossed back, scared and screaming, into the unmerciful abyss of the airwaves. Like Adam and Eve tossed out of Eden and into Bob's Country Bunker. I found a local ESPN affiliate that sustained me with Brian McKinney inanely taking calls from a national audience on the value of drafting defensive or offensive players. Because I care what some lonely trucker in Peoria thinks about NFL draft strategy.  But, by boiling it down to a meaningless 50-50 coin flip of offense vs. defense, you enable the lowest dominator to engage. I whist-fully daydreamed about the halcyon minutes prior when I was able to listen to an Oscar-winning screenwriter discuss a subject on which he had interesting ideas and thoughts and tried once again for any last scrap of juice in my iPod. Unless you're claiming responsibility for an act of arbotoreal terrorism on a rival school, I really could not be less interested in what's coming off the radio phone lines.  At least it wasn't pre-teen romance from a persistently slack-jawed 20 year old relationship masochist who clearly made a deal with some unholy entity for tunes that stick on your brain like Alzheimer's plaque.

Satellite Tether. It's honestly not hard. You hit the interstate and go until you see a sign telling you to go somewhere else. When in doubt, just head south and west. But still, there's this doubt. Did I miss a sign? Where EXACTLY am I and how does that relate to where I need to go?

I haven't had a car, much less a GPS, in four years. But the cars I've ridden in, and occasionally driven, in that time almost all had either a GPS unit or smart phone constantly updating, reaffirming your place on the planet.

Being without it creates a constant, nagging anxiety. There aren't a lot of landmarks and what landmarks there are don't mean much without some kind of further reference. It's a loss of instinctual swagger that's a little troubling. I'm going this way because I know it's the way I need to go. I've seen the maps. I've been watching the road signs. I don't need this constant affirmation that every step along the way is correct, some metallic matronly voice behind an LED screen constantly providing positive reinforcement. And this is from someone who's only used these devices in the periphery. I can only imagine what it would feel like to an every day owner-operator.

TBC...

Convenient Myth of Pre-Destination, Egg Bowls and Thanksgiving

I wasn't born into this. As much as I play up my Ole Miss fandom as being some inevitable hereditary curse like Sickle Cell Anemia or clubbed feet, it's not the truth. Yes, both my parents and a considerable portion of various other wings of my family went to Ole Miss, but there are plenty more that attended college elsewhere (or not at all).

Joe Lee Dunn, Pregnant since 1994.

And yes, I lived with Ole Miss sports for 18 years of my life when I came to the point where it was time to make a decision about whether to re-buy in. Maybe my earliest Ole Miss memory was huddled around a Liberty Bowl bathroom heater with the rest of the frostbitten masses on New Years Eve 1992 listening to Billy Brewer, then-defensive genius Joe Lee Dunn (barely into his first trimester of a still-continuing male pregnancy) and Cassius Ware stumble through a 13-0 victory over Air Force. I made a "Cassius B-Ware" sign to hold that was discarded because it meant removing the shivering hands from my jacket.

In the previous year, Ole Miss had jumped to its first New Years Day bowl since 1970...and gotten absolutely destroyed by Michigan. The recruiting spree that brought in much of the talent responsible for that modest-by-national-standards success (including Cassius Ware) would, just two years later, land Ole Miss the harshest NCAA penalties since SMU got the chair. Chucky Mullins died and Brewer was fired. The next generation of the Manning legacy was derailed when Cooper's career ended with a spinal chord condition and Peyton decided national success on Rocky Top was more appealing than toiling away in non-televised obscurity.

I knew all this when it came time to decide whether to continue riding this roller coaster with Ole Miss as a choice for college, or take the one last legitimate road toward true fandom by throwing in with another alma mater with a higher ceiling and a lower trough. Or even choosing not to care at all. But, in the end, I doubled down on my home state and previous experience with four years in Oxford.

It's been a long season. There's only so many different ways to say losing sucks, so let's get all semi-seasonal and talk about the good things; the moments and people that, when remembered, reaffirm my commitment to the Rebels and move along from sport-to-sport, season-to-season.

Deuce McAllister running. People who only know him from his time as a Saint, sadly only think of Deuce as a bruising, hunched workhorse. But before he got beefed up and worn down in the NFL, Deuce was much less workhorse and more work-of-art. He returned kicks, lined up as a WR and ran with an extra gear that was astonishing. When he broke free, he strode...defiantly upright. A sailboat with a strong wind in a bay full of chugging tramp steamers. When Deuce got loose, it was beautiful. The only thing more beautiful was when Ole Miss got within 4 yards of the goal line. Everybody knew what the call was. There was no need for a secret hand signal or play name. Just scream from the sideline, "Deuce over the top." The only thing more beautiful than when Deuce ran was when he flew.

Against Auburn in 2000 in my first season as a full-fledged SEC student-fan, Ole Miss was struggling. The offense had sputtered and everyone was waiting for some kind of spark. The Rebels got a stop and Deuce stood at the 10 yard line awaiting the punt. He pointed at the student section, then pointed to the end zone. There are those who were there who say this didn't happen. Who say I, a perhaps over-served Freshman, simply imagined this. I say it happened. And after Deuce found a seam and sliced through the coverage, it rained whiskey and coke for a solid three minutes. We still lost the game (Rudi Johnson was a bad man and our defensive line averaged about 210 lbs.), but Deuce called his shot. It happened, and when I finally passed on my car six years later, the "Deuce For Heisman" bumper sticker was still proudly affixed.

The Tad Pad, 1997-2001. There was no basketball tradition. There was that thing with Sean Tuhoy in 1981, but that was a fluke. I vaguely remember seeing Gerald Glass play, but that was in the Jackson Coliseum. I love college basketball, and in need of a team to grab onto, I fell in with the Nolan Richardson 40-Minutes of Hell Razorbacks. Shortly after the 94 championship, I took the scariest flight of my life into Fayetteville in the middle of an ice storm to watch top notch college basketball in, what was then, a brand new, state-of-the-art arena filled to the rafters with 20,000 frenzied fans fresh off the red meat of back-to-back national championship appearances. It was comfortable and shiny and huge.

Then, something happened. Because while Arkansas and Nolan Richardson were playing on a national stage and recruiting players from across the country, Arkansas talent got overlooked and slipped downstream into the waiting arms of a relentless coach named Rob Evans. Keith Carter, Anthony Boone, Jason Flanigan, Jason Smith, Jason Harrison (later) joined North Carolinian Ansu Sesay and Michael White and pounded life into Ole Miss basketball. Through the back-to-back Western Division titles, NCAA appearances and into the beginning of the Rod Barnes era, the Rebels entered for the first time into true basketball fandom.

Where Bud Walton was leather, padding and video boards, Tad Smith was concrete, metal and a faded analogue Dr. Pepper scoreboard. The shoddy ventilation system was no match for the Mississippi humidity late in the season, and the court would sweat in the heat-- turning any attempt at a basketball game into a demolition derby. It had a chimney. And water fountains on the corners of the court.  It felt amateur, but also hands-on. A game at Bud Walton was like watching a professional fireworks display. Tad Smith was lighting a bottle rocket, holding it in your hand until the last second and then tossing it into the dark. It felt personal. A rowdy Tad Smith felt dangerous.

Yes, a chimney. You know, for the Christmas stockings.

That was the brilliance of it. It's the firecracker in a closed fist. You don't need nearly as much force if you can confine it into a tight space. The student section was right on top of the court. The "seats" were just numbers on a metal bench clearly not meant to accommodate the backsides of grown adults (much less the vast ass expanses of the deep South). It was only 8,000 people, but it was 8,000 people piled on top of each other and piled on top of you. It was a high school house party while the parents were out of town were 10 were invited, but 200 showed up.

After beating Ole Miss in the first round of the 1997 NCAA tournament, Temple made the trip to Oxford. From the moment they stepped onto the floor, they looked like a girl scout troop who'd taken a wrong turn on a dark road. The same team that had taken apart the Rebels just a few months previous got routed. Temple guard Pepe Sanchez still curls into the fetal position and pisses down his leg every time he passes a hub cap on the street. By the end, they just wanted to get the Hell out of that concrete asylum and back to Philly. And that's how it was, game after game, for the next 5 years. Nobody wanted to come play in the Tad Pad.

The thing about the high school house parties is that they're made to get broken up. Similarly, the atmosphere at the Tad Pad had to either adjust or die. It was born in 1996. It came to maturity in 1997. Started its decline with the embarrassing performance against UCLA in the 2002 NCAAs and then died at the hands of Mario Fucking Austin and Derrick Zimmerman in 2003 when a bullshit traveling call on Trey Pearson in the final seconds gave Mississippi State the win. Bottles where thrown and the only thing that stopped the student section from rushing the court and tearing a strutting Zimmerman apart like a zombie hoard was the recently-graduated Rahim Lockhart standing in front, holding them back with his 74" python arms. What's left is an empty shell, apathetic fans and a student section with all the danger and menace of a used party popper. But for one brief golden age, Ole Miss basketball at the Tad Pad was all that is right with college sports.

The Tuberville Reconstruction. It was a miracle. Anybody who says otherwise didn't see it. Before the infamous "pine box." Before he made his name on the national scene at Auburn, Tommy Tuberville took his first college head coaching job and pulled an Anne Sullivan-style miracle on an absolutely broken, betrayed football program. Ole Miss got popped with a four-year probation of 24 lost scholarships, a two-year bowl ban and a one-year television ban (Which was a service to everyone, really. The Joe Lee Dunn head coaching era is something that should never have been put to video tape-- like the video in The Ring, only with Lawrence Adams quarterbacking. I'm pretty sure Joe Lee was barefoot in a maternity gown on the sidelines. That's not a joke).

Just three years later, Tommy scraped together a program of misfits and rejects: walk-ons, over-looked small school stars, community college transfers, players generally seen as defective in some way by every other division one school. They were some of my favorite players. John Avery is still the gold standard for Ole Miss speed to the point where his name has become a unit of measurement.

"What does he run?"

"Oh, it's about a third-quarter Avery."

"That's not bad."

Meego sees you.

Linebacker Meego Spearman is an Oxford folk legend just short of Faulkner and Willie Morris. Nate Wayne was Patrick Willis if P-Willy shrunk in the dryer. A young Dulymus McAllister was starting to get some attention. Ken Lucas, a converted WR, became a shut-down CB. The Heard brothers. Rufus French was the unrealized prodigy. Matt Luke with the Jake Taylor knees at center. Tutan (pronounced "Two Ton") Reyes. Comone (pronounced Come On) Fisher. Boyd T. Kitchens at tackle. Walker Jones would have been considered the whitest player on the 1959 squad.

And of course, the legendary connection of 5'0 QB Stewart Patridge and Cory Peterson when Tuberville the Riverboat Gambler rolled the dice and went for 2 to beat Mississippi State in 1997. Taking home the golden egg and taking Ole Miss, still in their last year of probation, to a bowl game. It was pure joy and there was the feeling that this was only the beginning of something truly epic.

Tuberville and the foundation he laid was so strong it propped up even David Cutcliffe's droopy-eyed incompetence for four years. If Tuberville stays, Ole Miss wins its first modern SEC championship. He didn't. And so we wait. But still, he oversaw the rebirth of the program and everything good that has happened since has at least partial root in the Tuberville reconstruction.

There's more to this list, and maybe I'll come back and supplement if the darkness continues. But it's good to look back. It reminds you why you keep believing and why you bought in the first place. It's not that I don't have any where else to go. There's just no where else that feels quite so much like home.

Rust Belt Angst: Two Cow Garage and "Sweet Saint Me"

It was a Monday night. It's a hard sell. Relegated to the small back bar of a larger venue, about 30 people put down the $10 cover to see Two Cow Garage.

Finding bands at their beginnings is one of the joys of live music. Seeing them in their raw state and then watching them file, shave and shape down into something that makes sense. The workshop is always more interesting than the museum. The first time somebody experiences a finished work, it begins to die. And it dies a little more with every new viewer.

Two Cow Garage at a show in NC from brand new kind of photography

But Two Cow Garage is not a block of stone in search of a pile of dust. They've been at this for the better part of a decade and just released their fifth album. It's time for someone to let them out of the workshop. Because if you don't, the shavings start to overtake the product and the block is whittled down to a nub. It's great for the select few who got to see the process, but it doesn't work out too well for the block.

Their new album, "Sweet Saint Me," is very good. In a fair and God-fearing world, "Lydia" would be pouring out of radios. It's a song made to be an A-side single. The second best song, "Lucy and the Butcher Knife" is a quirky story song that was made to be a cultishly beloved B-side. The album alternates from orgran-juiced, double lead vocal jump rock to stripped-down, single voice in a room with an unelectric instrument. But from the first time I heard a Two Cow Garage album, I knew this was a band that needed to be seen live. Something wasn't translating from the studio. Like the other albums, "Sweet Saint Me" is very good. The live Two Cow Garage experience, however, is amazing.

"We really appreciate yall coming out tonight. We were in Alabama last night and, well, we're just really happy to be here. Thanks again for coming."

I'm not sure what happened the night before in Jacksonville, Alabama. But for what could not have been much more than the cost of the gas to get to the next show, a grateful rock band took the stage and put on a big Saturday night show in a shitty back room on a Monday. They ran through most of the new album with a vengence, drilling the unfamiliar songs into your head so deep you wonder if they hadn't been there all along. They obliged shouted requests for songs from the crowd and made songs from the back catalogue of my iPod stand up like they had a life of their own. A Replacements cover closed things out on the perfect night of music for a frustrated Fall.

Walking out of the show, the first temptation is to describe them as raw, and that's mostly due to Micah Schnabel's voice. It's all gaps and crackles and strained threads popping out of a V-neck collar and working a clenched jaw. The stage antics are erratic and the instruments swing and shake sometimes with the beat and sometimes exactly offbeat. If there's a "look" of the band, it's like a animated ball of laundry that was wadded under the back seat of a conversion van.

But raw is lazy. The obvious surface parts are raw. The full sound, the full experience is not. This is a mature rock band that puts out a sound that is exactly what it is meant to be. Shane Sweeney slaps the bass like a Stax session player and sings like a truck driver on the 35th hour of a 36-hour haul, too tired for anything but hard, weary truth. When Sweeney's bass and voice meet Micah's, it's tar finding the gaps in gravel and everything else just rolls on top of it. It's those moments when the two come together that Two Cow Garage really finds its sound. It's something that shows up more in the shows than the albums.

I'm not somebody who dislikes genres on their face. It can be helpful to have a mental context for something, and thoughtful genre assignments can provide that. But let's not try to drill too deep or over-think things just to avoid the obvious. Two Cow Garage is not Alt Country, and I don't think they fit into the newly fashionable "Cowpunk" label either. There's not much twang to this music outside of the livestock in their name, the sideburns on Shane's face and their occasional use of a cowbell. It's rust belt angst with the literacy to be able to express it. It's just straight forward rock and roll, and beautifully so.

There are a handful of bands that I will openly proselytize for, bands you may not know, but you should. Bands that, in a fair and just world of meritocracy, would be packing out five-figure venues and filling the airwaves. Glossary, The Felice Brothers, The Dexateens, Blue Mountain...and now Two Cow Garage is proudly on that list. If they come by, pardon the sawdust and the inconvienent show time, and go be saved.

Life In Central Time, And Other Moments Of Joy In a Lost Season

Central Time is God's time. Just spending time in the comfortable daylight where early isn't so bad and dark loses just a touch of its edge makes me feel like a more balanced soul. It's proof that the Lord resides somewhere in the strip of America between Chicago and New Orleans, riding his circuit in an '86 Fleetwood Fiesta with blue Astroturf flooring and a peeling "Eat a Peach" decal from the previous owner. Doin' deeds and eating gas station breakfast biscuits.

It gets a little white knuckle in the Fiesta on the Pig Trail, but I have no doubt he wheels it into Fayetteville on occasion. Once you peel back the ever-growing layers of four-laned strip mall build-up, you've got a core that is one of America's under-rated college towns. Aside from Ole Miss bringing along our Golden Flake early morning kick-off curse, this is the kind of weekend you should use to experience a gameday road environment for the first time. There's not an awful lot on the line, so nobody's chewing glass in anticipation. But, it's still an SEC West game, which  brings with it a certain level of intrigue and an enjoyable level of excitement. Energy without spilling over into meltdown.

Ole Miss/Arkansas games have a weird rhythm to them. It's a series that has a hard time finding its beat. Before the Houston Nutt shotgun rivalry was born, it was more like being set-up on a date with a girl who's lived across the street from you your entire life. We've got sort of parallel history, and it seems like there should be some kind of spark between us. It just never seems to catch. Even the Houston Nutt fire has started to dampen, and we've fallen back into our routine of nodding politely on the walk out to grab the morning paper.

Arkansas is a team with deflated aspirations of making the jump (they got double-bounced by Auburn, it appears) and is coming to terms with non-BCS success. Ole Miss is a team trying to find a foundation for whatever's coming next in moral victories and pride. What happens when they get together? A five hour teenage grope fest with Crimson and Clover playing in the background. The threat of electricity hanging in the air without a lighting strike ever actually finding the ground.

Other programs have rings of honor where they remember the greats from their championship teams. Ole Miss is quickly developing quite a ring of martyrdom. Great players who played their asses off stuck on bad teams. Upon induction, they will receive a pastel Vineyard Vines hairshirt and have their names engraved on the train tracks outside of campus. Jerrell Powe is earning his place in this illustrious grouping with his play this year, trying to pull whatever he can out of an underachieving defensive unit that was supposed to carry the team. However, being in the backfield on every down only means so much when there's no containment on any other part of the field. I don't know that Jeremiah Masioli will qualify with only one season. But as Rick Cleveland points out,  running for his life behind an offensive line of walk-ons while watching his former team compete for a championship is the steepest punishment for petty theft this side of Saudi Arabia.

But like I said, this was a day for small victories, including good timing to avoid the rain and the generosity of friends with shelter, whiskey and televisions. And a good Saturday night college town band with no cover charge at Grub's playing Gillian Welch's "Miss Ohio" featuring a male singer and a 3/4 time pace. And $2.50 beers and greasy late night food. And feeling amused superiority at the young novice drinkers puking doubled over trashcans with exposed undergarments...only to end up in the same position yourself later in the night.



And one guy in a studded black leather jacket, a portable amp and a worn guitar on the street banging out Ronnie James Dio solos, non-ironic mullet flowing in the wind, while drunken frat boys cheer and toss dollars in his case.

It doesn't matter if nobody's listening. Or if the people who are listening don't get it. It's all about keeping the faith. And that's easier to do in a good, Christian time zone.