Spruced Up And Saved From Oblivion: Your Man For Fun In Rapidan's Fifty Greatest Country And Western Songs Of All Time!

1) The Critters, Mr. Dieingly Sad

On the surface a simple little song with a borrowed melody (from Paul Williams, no less), The Critters' masterpiece takes a turn down a very dark road about mid-song, and the next minute-and-a-half is a pure, harrowing cage match with Satan. No surprise: Satan wins, and before he's done with Mr. Dieingly Sad there's broken glass, a shotgun blast, and blood all over the walls.

2) Three Dog Night, One

Hank Williams' entire catalog boiled down to three minutes of existential longing. When the pedal steel starts raining tears after the last chorus you'll feel like you've never been in love, never felt the sun on your teeth, and never had a haircut you didn't regret.

3) Jim Stafford, Swamp Witch

Stafford's got something of a bum reputation as a novelty act, but 'Swamp Witch' ought to convince anyone who cares that the man has a hole in his dark soul that you could drive a Mack truck through. When I heard Jim sing this song at his theater in Branson I had shivers running up and down my spine, and some of the old buffet vultures around me were actually crying out in terror.

4) Charlie Rich, There Won't Be Anymore

This, in a nutshell, is what country music is really all about: a man makes a short, hopeless, declarative statement, and then sings it like he believes it.

5) Cat Stevens, Banapple Gas

Not what it sounds like or seems, neither of which I --or you-- could define. That said, it's something mighty special all the same. But, you ask, is it really country? You're damn right it is.

6) Red Sovine, Teddy Bear

Sure, it's kind of corny: a little Teddy Bear gets abandoned in the woods, gets lost, is harassed by predators, gets hit by a pick-up, and finally finds happiness in the arms of a little girl. Yet in that little girl's willingness to overlook the bear's mangled limbs and missing eye there's a tidy and useful lesson for all of us. If this song doesn't get the tears flowing, you need to see a therapist to help you understand all the damage your parents did to you.

7) Terry Bradshaw, I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry

Make no mistake: Bradshaw was a great quarterback, and he's entertaining enough playing an unhinged whack-job on TV. But as this peerless interpretation shows, he's an even better country singer, and in Hank Williams' classic Bradshaw found an outlet for all the repressed feelings a professional athlete in America isn't allowed to express in public.

8) Sheena Easton, Morning Train

A classic song of abandonment made even more unforgettable by the reliable presence of the Jordanaires and the sizzling fiddle break provided by Vassar Clements. Also features an uncredited Leon Russell on piano.

9) Steve Miller Band, Abracadabra

'Abracadabra' shows that Miller obviously spent some time studying what Gram Parsons was up to, and there's a languid quality to the arrangement that would make this song right at home tacked onto the end of 'Sweetheart of the Rodeo.' Country --and rock and roll, for that matter-- is full of singers pining for some sort of magical remedy for lost love and broken hearts, but few of them get their hopes squashed so completely as Miller does here.

10) Oak Ridge Boys, Wasn't That A Party

It sure as Sam Hell was. 'Nuff said!

11) John Anderson, Swingin'

No roadhouse jukebox would be complete without a copy of this alternate lifestyle classic, a rare country song with lyrics as racy and erudite as anything in John Updike's randiest novels. You want to get a bar full of drunk fat folks dancin' and hollerin' along to the record player? Just punch up Anderson's deathless key-party stomp --mission accomplished!

12) John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band, Tender Years

A beautiful version of 'Tender Years' that actually, miraculously, manages to wring more emotion out of the song than George Jones ever could. Before Hollywood stole his soul, Cafferty was a great, hugely underrated singer, and this may be his masterpiece.

13) The Tijuana Brass, The Lonely Bull

Country songs are full of people who have gotten drunk, cried in their beer, and slept in their clothes, yet in a genre steeped in all manner of lonely funk, fog, and fractured hearts, nobody ever got it so right as the Tijuana Brass. I hope like hell the boys in Calexico get down on their hands and knees every night and thank their version of God for Herb Alpert.

14) Dean Martin, Houston

There are scads of great versions of this song, but Martin's is the only one you need to own --unless, of course, you need confirmation of how great it really is.

15) Gilbert O'Sullivan, Alone Again (Naturally)

Sadder than a sack full of nothin', and if you've been drinking I'd strongly recommend you lock the gun cabinet before you drop the needle on the turntable.

16) Eric Carmen, All By Myself

Ibid.

17) Gary Wright, Dream Weaver

Just how completely fucking great is 'Dream Weaver'? You know the answer to that question as well as I do, so let's just move right along.

18) Randy Vanwarmer, Just When I Needed You Most

I'll admit this one has a bit of personal history behind it, but it still has the power to tear out my spleen and tattoo 'Oh, Fuck' on my buttocks every time I listen to it.

19) Victor Lundberg, An Open Letter To My Teenage Son

Raw, honest, unflinching, and powerful as a shot of monkey serum. If you're a parent --and I'm not-- I suspect it'll make a mess of you in a hurry and then make you a better man (or woman). Sort of like 'Blind Man in the Bleachers,' only different. No blind man, no bleachers, but the same desperate attempt to communicate something vaguely important.

20) Blues Image, Ride Captain Ride

This one might have ranked higher if the pale Marty McGraw cover version hadn't poisoned my memories of the original just a bit. Still, no road trip would be complete without it.

21) Ray Stevens, The Streak

Ok, so maybe this one falls under the 'Guilty Pleasure' category, but sometimes when I'm listening to music I just want to laugh, clap my hands, and sing along.

22) ZZ Top, Tush

An elegy, a prayer, a shout of praise, a cry in the darkness, a yelp of unabashed lust --how can one song be so many things? I don't know, but 'Tush' proves it can.

23) Sammy Hagar, Winner Takes All

Obscure gem from the soundtrack to an equally obscure Canadian Western starring Merlin Olsen, Susan Dey, and Herve Villechaize. Hagar takes an old chestnut and makes it all his own (with help from Mark Knopfler).

24) Will to Power, Baby, I Love Your Way/Freebird medley

It's the craziest idea in the world, and it shouldn't work, and it shouldn't be country, but I'll be damned if it doesn't and it isn't.

25) The Sweet, Fox On The Run

Timeless song of a Nashville dream gone bust, complete with some of the most vivid bus station imagery in all of country music. You feel for this young girl as she falls into the clutches of a 'talent scout' and ends up snorting coke and starring in $500 porn movies. And you cheer for her (sort of) as she finds God.

26) Billy Idol, Hot In The City

The song that launched a million line dances still holds up pretty damn well, all things considered. All I know is that when I tossed it on the stereo at a party recently my guests erupted in a boot-scooting frenzy right there in my living room.

27) The Nashville Teens, Tobacco Road

Who says there's not a place for doo-wop in country music? Not me, not when it's steeped in the dust of gravel roads that go nowhere and the longing of small town teenagers everywhere. This one might be hard to find, but it's worth the journey.

28) Hank Locklin, Please Help Me, I'm Falling

Sex addiction, alcoholism, eating disorders, and codependency --it's all right here, years before Betty Ford ever crash landed at Hazelden. It's all right here, and it's all good in the way that only country music can make bad things good.

29) Styx, Miss America

There's so much going on in this song that I don't know where to begin. Taken on its own --and with the unstated I tacked onto the beginning-- it could be a lazy declaration of disillusionment. Add a question mark and you have a political statement lurking in a tossed-off query. But however you care to interpret Styx's dense, metaphorical rip through the American Dream, it all adds up to a pure, timeless classic of country music --and for once that's country in the broadest sense. Meaning: the place where all of us live.

30) Johnny Horton, The Battle of New Orleans

An epic of American heroism, and the sort of song that gets stuck in your head and drives you absolutely batshit fucking crazy. What 'Battle of New Orleans' demonstrates is that some things are worth fighting for, and some things that are worth fighting for are worth singing about. Also, implicit in this song, as in so much of the great country music I love: Don't fuck with America. Bonus points for rhyming 'beans' with 'New Orleans.'

31) Tom Jones, Green, Green Grass of Home

No list of the greatest country songs of all time would be complete without a contribution from the virile Welshman, who proved that a hirsute wanker could belt out an American classic with all the style and emotional nuance of a Nashville pro.

32) Pat Benatar, Hell is for Children

In one of country music's finest examples of method acting --or maybe, God help her, she wasn't acting-- Benatar wrings every ounce of pain out of this succinct and wrenching portrait of rural poverty and child abuse. 'Hell is for Children' is a rare example of a country song that dares to tackle social issues without resorting to trailer trash cliches and self pity.

33) Spandau Ballet, True

Tremendous song that touches on country's timeless themes of fidelity, infidelity, and the broken hearts that result when tortured souls venture down to the dark end of the street.

34) Curtis Mayfield, If There's A Hell Below We're All Going To Go

Mayfield's forays into country deserve to be placed next to Ray Charles's 'Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music' on your shelf, but chances are you --and millions of other people-- never even heard them. Here he tosses salvation out the window and wages a wrestling match with sin in which we're all losers. This is a record the Louvin Brothers might have recorded, and if they ever update the splendid 'Goodbye Babylon' set Mayfield deserves a place on the roster.

35) Tommy James and the Shondells, I Think We're Alone Now

One man, one woman, a bottle of Jack Daniels, and a long night of lovin', Tommy James style. Dim the lights, and cue up a little Ed Ames or Ray Price.

36) Neil Sedaka, The Diary

This one seems so obvious at first listen, but listen again: Sedaka's predicament (he finds his faithless lover's diary) is a familiar one, but what he does with this discovery is satisfying and surprising beyond belief. You'll find yourself thinking: I wish I'd thought of that.

37) Jay Ferguson, Thunder Island

What a wonderful metaphor. I think it was John Donne who said 'No man is an island,' and Jay Ferguson might be inclined to agree. A man and a woman, however, now that's a different story, and Ferguson's artful exploration of the pure, tempestuous oblivion of sex is country music's Song of Solomon.

38) REO Speedwagon, Keep the Fire Burning

When it feels like love is slipping away, Speedwagon's 'Keep the Fire Burning' is the perfect lover's plea that'll remind you both of what's at stake and why it's worth fighting for. A nice antidote to D-I-V-O-R-C-E, and one of Owen Bradley's most sumptuous productions.

39) Fats Domino, Jambalaya

It should be apparent by now that I'm bending over backwards here to avoid the obvious choices, but I'd emphasize that this isn't purely a perverse attempt to be contrary. I love Hank Williams as much as the next guy, but his music is now so familiar that it's become like the wallpaper in this room, and more often than not when I get a hankering for Hank I turn to one of his countless interpreters for a fresh spin on the master's music. Domino's take on 'Jambalaya' is about as fresh as it gets.

40) Carol Douglas, Doctor's Orders

It's not often a doctor dispenses practical advice of the sort Ann Landers routinely dishes out, but Carol Douglas had a damn good doctor, and the advice he gave her would have proved useful (and would still prove useful) to country's legion of unhappy women: get rid of that man. Of course such advice sounds a bit like common sense when the man in question has infected you with syphilis.

41) Terry Jacks, Put the Bone In.

The flipside to the smash 'Seasons in the Sun' is a classic of country cooking (Jacks is ostensibly talking about a pork and beans recipe), with a filthy insinuation that takes it over the top.

42) The Alan Parson Project, Eye in the Sky

The anthem for all those paranoid peckerwoods holed up in the mountains out west, as well as the anti-government tax-dodging zealots all over the country. Despite the fact that 'Eye in the Sky' was allegedly found in the car that Timothy McVeigh was driving when he was arrested, it's still a powerful song that taps into some of the anger and distrust that is lurking out there in country's heartland, and as such is a nice counterpoint to the jingoism of Lee Greenwood et al.

43) Cream, White Room

A clear-eyed account of the aftermath of a debauched night on the town that ends in a detox cell. In the sorrow of the hungover protagonist, a man who has let everything slip away, you can hear the echoes of everyone from Hank Williams to George Jones.

44) Foreigner, Dirty White Boy

White trash exploitation songs don't come any more unsavory than this one, the sad tale of a backwoods Don Juan who makes his reputation deflowering virgins and cuckolding husbands. Despite the obvious relish with which Foreigner serves up the nasty details, there's a morality play at work here, and justice is ultimately served. Marty Robbins for people who don't know who the hell Marty Robbins is.

45) Thompson Twins, King For A Day

Another tale of a roadhouse Lothario who comes into a boodle of cash (an inheritance of some sort, I think, although the song is vague on this point) and lives high on the hog for a day. This is essentially the old story of money burning a hole in a man's pocket, and though you know exactly what's coming --the guy squanders every last dime on liquor, women, and riverboat casino slots-- it's a hugely entertaining yarn all the same. Almost sounds like something Hank Jr. might have coughed up in his prime.

46) Jody Reynolds, Endless Sleep

Easily the best of the tributes to Hank Williams that flooded the country market after his death. Its timelessness is a product of its ability to tap into the anguished fuck-up's ancient longing for peace and serenity. It almost makes you wish you were dead, and that's as high a tribute to a great country song as anything I can think of.

47) Rick Astley, Cry For Help

Astley's one great, defining song, and one of the finest things to come out of Nashville in the last 20 years. It's exactly what it says, and more. As pitiless and pitiful a performance as anything in the dense catalog of blues, soul, and country. Unfortunately no one heard Astley's cry, or realized how raw and real it really was, and he'll be remembered --if he's remembered at all-- as one more great talent who died too young.

48) Melanie, Brand New Key

Great off-kilter take on the theme of a woman who's had enough of a philandering lover. Beyond the central metaphor (a revelation that will open up a whole new world for the protagonist), there's an entertaining tale in which the woman changes the locks on the house while her soon-to-be ex is out drinking and carousing with his pals. The locksmith, of course, is more than willing to participate in the woman's liberation, and what ensues --Melanie is clever enough to make you use your imagination a bit-- is straight out of Penthouse Forum.

49) Foghat, Stone Blue

A fat slab of the bluest country you'll ever hear, delivered with typical butt-kicking whump by the titans from Fenniman, Mississippi. The record industry, and its attempts to remake them in the mold of Alabama, ultimately wrecked Foghat, but before the weasels got their hands on them they were one of the most volatile live acts in all of country.

50) Consumer Rapport, Ease On Down The Road

Country music has always been full of songs about people leaving things behind--lovers, families, dead-end jobs, jerkwater towns. Sometimes these characters are leaving to pursue a dream elsewhere; often they're just getting the hell out of town. It's a liberation theme that has resonated with countless people trapped in lives of quiet desperation, and it's certainly not unique to country. It's interesting to note, however, that 'Ease On Down The Road' beat 'Born to Run' to the charts by five months, and it's a more stoic, laidback version of Springsteen's anxious, revved-up classic. The guys in Consumer Rapport don't know where they're going, and they don't much care, just as long as it's somewhere else. 

Nothing At All Like A Bruce Springsteen Song

Do you remember that time you threw your heart from the window of a speeding car?

Was it burning?

No, not that time. It was just heavy, a sodden wad of plumbed meat. It felt like a water balloon coated with grease. It couldn't have weighed more than a softball, and it bounced once on the shoulder of the highway and skipped off into the ditch. Some kid who was out fucking around found it the next day, put it in a plastic grocery sack, and took it to school for show-and-tell. An alarmed teacher confiscated your heart and hauled it to the principal's office.

The principal was a wattled walrus of a man, and he called the county sheriff, who came down, took one peek in that plastic sack, and had a pretty damn good idea what he was looking at, even as he wasn't quite sure what to do with it.

Within 24 hours posters started appearing on telephone poles around town, which is how you eventually got your heart back, although at the time you weren't so sure you even wanted it back.

Remember that dinky town? What a strange place. What a strange time in our lives that was. The town was so small that it didn't have a newspaper or radio station, and the closest city that had either was almost forty miles away and had been pretending for half a century that the little town didn't exist.

The town had a serious inferiority complex going back almost a hundred years, and things had gotten so bad that there was a vocal cult of locals that was convinced they were living in the hallucination of a senile god. Somebody had made a trip to a big city in the north some years earlier and had returned with a state road map on which the town was nowhere to be found, further convincing many people that they, their families, pets, cars, homes, neighborhoods, and entire community did not, in fact, exist.

A dwindling group of optimists formed the Existence Party and ran a full slate of candidates for local offices. Every one of them was soundly defeated. Yet still the town carried on as best it could; the residents dutifully paid their property taxes, sent their children to school, maintained their homes and lawns, and --for the most part, anyway-- obeyed local laws.

High school graduation became known as Vanishing. Almost without exception graduates fled town immediately with whatever memories they had left, never to return. You couldn't for the life of you figure out how they escaped. Newcomers, even relative newcomers --anybody, really, who had not lived there all their lives-- tended to suffer from gradually worsening memory problems, particularly regarding how they'd come to live in the town in the first place.

You were definitely in this camp. When I first met you you no longer had the foggiest idea what you were doing in that place or why you had moved there. You insisted it was the most boring place you'd ever been, and you had the odd feeling that you were being held hostage. More and more often you felt like you were lost the instant you left your house. Often enough, in fact, you were lost even when you were in your house.

The streets of the town had become a sort of labyrinth to you, and you often found yourself unwittingly driving in circles, sometimes for hours at a time. The streets all seemed to either dead end or circle back on themselves.

Sometimes at night you would park at one of these dead ends and shine your car lights out into the seemingly endless scrub brush beyond the city limits. You said you would see dark shapes moving around out there, and the occasional flash of yellow or red eyes captured in your headlights. Coyotes, you thought, or perhaps even wolves.

It was the sense of captivity, the boredom, and the torment of your eroding memory that led you to throw your heart from the window of the speeding car. A woman had been driving, but you couldn't remember her name or what she looked like. You retained a vague memory of being tormented by the woman's incessant chatter.

The day you retrieved your heart from the sheriff's office, as you drove home with the plastic bag rattling on the passenger seat, you realized that your eyesight was rapidly fading. By the time you got home you were almost completely blind and had a difficult time finding your way into the house.

You remembered that much, at least for a few days. Your house, you said, was dark, and you could barely make out the various familiar shapes in your kitchen. You could hear the hum of the refrigerator. You felt with your hands and located the counter next to the sink, and there you deposited your heart in its grocery sack.

You were so tired, uncommonly tired was the phrase you used, and you suspected that you might be dying. How long, you wondered, could a man live without a heart?  And how long had it been since you flung it from the window of the speeding car? You really had no idea. There was, however, very little doubt about this much: you were now almost completely blind. You were disconsolate. Words were beginning to break apart in your head; they had been slowing way down for quite some time, but now they were truly starting to disintegrate. There was a moment in which you said you were seized with a powerful longing to hear Louis Armstrong. A few snippets of a tune jerked momentarily between your ears and then just as quickly evaporated.

At some point you fell into a deep sleep, perhaps even a coma. When you regained consciousness you were still sitting at your kitchen table, and you said you could hear your heart stirring in the plastic sack. Rattling, initially, and then jerking around.

When I found you you had your heart in your hands, cradled like a rabbit.

Do you remember the rest? Do you remember how we escaped together, and how, even slumped against the passenger window and blind and barely conscious, you mumbled that our getaway in the dead of night was "just like a Bruce Springsteen song"?

Do you remember how I cut up your heart with a steak knife and fed it back to you one bite at a time?

Can you remember that, baby?

I hope one day soon you'll remember everything, and never again forget what happened next. 

No Flowers, Please

Gogi? I remember saying. Is that your real name?

She said something to me, something impertinent I'm sure, that was lost in the whirring of the blender.

Grasshopper? She said a moment later, offering me a thick green drink in a jelly jar.

I swear, I said, I could drink these all night.

I do, she said.

Later, she put a record on her turntable and said, my mother used to sleep with this guy who's playing tenor. She used to follow Shelly Manne around, and I'm sure she slept with pretty much everybody in his band. She spent half of her life chasing after musicians, until she got too old and worn out. Then she started tending bar in this law-and-order dive, and all she ever dated were old cops. The last twenty years of her life she dated one cop after another. The same guys who used to make life so miserable for her old musician friends. They treated her like shit, the fat bastards. Funny, isn't it?

She went back to the kitchen and fired up the blender again, and when she returned she settled back in on the couch and said, my mother had this big, fat scrapbook full of signed photos and I.O.U.s from jazz musicians, most of them written on cocktail napkins or scraps of placemats. It was like a who's who of jazz musicians, seriously. Those sponges fucked her and drank up all her money and then dumped what was left of her for the old cops to pick over. I wish I still had that scrapbook. I wonder what happened to it? I'll bet something like that would be worth a lot of money.

She got up and put another record on the stereo. I'm sure my mother screwed this guy too, she said. I remember him coming around and crashing on our couch in his underwear. He was an A-number-one creep. Creep central. Bad complexion, bad teeth, nothing really to recommend him other than a decent wardrobe and the fact that he could play music. I guess that was enough for my mother. Me, I've always hated musicians. Every one I've ever met was a bum who never even pretended to be a decent human being unless he was on a stage somewhere, and that was just so they could get some woman like my mother to sleep with them and buy them drinks. Don't get the wrong idea, I love music; I just hate musicians, and don't even try to tell me that's not possible or I'll claw your eyes out.

I'm sure it's possible, I said. I don't have a doubt in the world it's possible.

Oh, Jesus, she said. Don't kiss my ass like that. It's so unbecoming.

I had some fine times with Gogi. We laughed a lot. She really did drink grasshoppers every night, and she had one hell of a record collection. She also had a lot of nice clothes. She hated crowds, I also remember that. I lost track of her when I moved in the early eighties, which wasn't unexpected; I should warn you, she'd told me when I stopped by her place to say goodbye, I don't keep in touch, so this really is adieu.

I found her obituary online a few weeks back, in a Phoenix newspaper. She died in 2002, at the age of 52, which meant that she was older than I thought, but still not nearly old enough. The obituary didn't say how she died, or, rather, of what. She wasn't survived by a husband or any children, which didn't surprise me, of course. Just a brother in Boston, I think. No flowers, please, the obit said, and suggested memorials to the Humane Society. I keep telling myself that one of these days I'll get around to sending a check.

Late Summer Rerun: Lord Knows, Child

One day Ella's grandmother took her to the county fair, something which Ella looked forward to all year long.

Her grandmother wouldn't go on any of the rides, not even the Ferris Wheel, but Ella didn't mind going by herself. If her grandmother had allowed her to, Ella would have gone on every ride --the big, swirling, spinning rides, the fast and high and upside-down rides-- over and over again. She liked to be high above the world, like an astronaut when he could still see the lights and the rooftops and the trees and the tiny people going about their lives, before he moved into the dark part of space.

Ella wanted to be James Bond, only a girl, but if she couldn't be James Bond her second choice was to become an astronaut or a race car driver. She would always like to wear beautiful clothes, though, whatever she did, and she would have to be able to put flower stickers and spangly things on her astronaut suit. When her mother moved away she had left behind boxes of fashion magazines in her old bedroom, along with a collection of James Bond novels that had belonged to Ella's father before he was buried in the cemetery of soldiers. These magazines and books were the main things Ella liked to look at and read.

At any rate, the one day Ella knew she would always remember at the county fair was different from every other day she had spent at the county fair, all of which had been wonderful in their own way. But on that particular day Ella had seen a man --a man wearing a suit very similar to those worn by astronauts or race car drivers-- fired from a cannon and carried high above the bright lights of the Ferris Wheel, beyond which was a waiting net.

Ella asked her grandmother why a man would be fired from a cannon, and her grandmother had said, "Lord knows, child, I suppose he just likes the way it feels."

Later, after they had seen the Human Cannonball, Ella and her grandmother had walked through the county historical museum and the Indian museum and the fish building. The last building Ella's grandmother always liked to look around in was the arts and crafts building, and that afternoon there was an old man sitting at a table and making tiny ships inside of glass bottles.

Ella had never seen anything like it, and she studied the finished projects that were on display with a combination of wonder and confusion. They were beautiful little ships, remarkably intricate, and Ella couldn't understand why they were in the bottles or how they had gotten there. At the moment Ella and her grandmother happened by, the old man was just beginning to build another ship in a bottle, and it was too early to tell exactly how he intended to do it.

Still, it was the question of why that troubled Ella, and she stared at the old man for a moment --he was peering through a large, mounted magnifying glass-- and then she just came out and said what was on her mind. "Why would you put a ship inside a bottle?" she asked.

The man raised his head and seemed to give the matter serious thought. And then he smiled at Ella --it was, she thought, an unmistakably happy smile that she would never forget-- and said, "And what do you think you are, young lady, right this moment, but a ship inside a bottle?"

"But how does the ship get out of the bottle?" Ella asked.

"I do believe," the man said, "that in no time at all you're going to figure that out."

Contemplating My Possible Worthlessness And Immortality

I am worth no money, but I must be worth something. What is not worth money?

I will start with a process of elimination.

If time is indeed money, then I can reasonably conclude that I am not worth time. I can also conclude that I am not worth the price of admission, since "the price of admission" implies a "price," and a "price" implies a cost, and the very idea of "the price of admission" implies some exchange of money.

Just as assuredly can I conclude that I am not worth my weight in gold, as gold is a universal standard of monetary value.

Is there, then, anything at all that I could be worth, given that the concept of worth is now inextricably tied to value, and value to some price tag? A price tag is, of course, the amount one is expected to pay for an item, and the amount one is expected to pay for something is generally agreed to be a monetary consideration.

Given such logic, I must reluctantly conclude that I am worth nothing, and if in fact I am worth nothing then I must turn my considerations, or ruminations, to the subject of nothing and its properties.

And there I find an inadvertent affirmation, or at least some small cause for hope: If, as I have heard said, "Nothing matters," then I might reasonably conclude that I matter.

What, though, does it mean to matter? Could I not reduce the question of my nothingness to something along the lines of "What is the matter?" Meaning here the matter, or mattering, of my personal nothing.

I am thinking here, and feel like I must now go backwards a bit, as something else has occurred to me as I typed the previous paragraphs regarding my possible status as a mattering being.

Another curious thing I have sometimes heard said is, "The best things in life are free." Free obviously meaning here "of no cost" or "requiring no exchange of money." Another possible bit of encouragement, this; since I am worth no money, I must then be some sort of "best thing" as well as free, and "free" is a word, surely, with many positive connotations, including unfettered or in a state of liberation. Yet I now think of the phrase, "There ain't no free," which, if there is truth in it, would once again consign me to a state of non-existence.

This consignment would seem to receive additional support from the following consideration: If I am not worth time, and time is --as people are fond of saying-- of the essence, then I cannot possibly be of the essence, and must therefore conclude that I am non-essential, which clearly contradicts the idea that I matter.

Perhaps you will at this point understand my confusion on this and many other pressing questions.

Again, though, I must look for a silver lining, for surely a man cannot long live without some hope of a silver lining, even if he has absolutely no fucking idea what "a silver lining" might mean in this or any other context. Be that as it may: If time is, as is frequently alleged, fleeting, and time is money, and I am not worth money, then I cannot possibly be fleeting, and so might possibly be immortal.

Perhaps, though, that is not a true silver lining, for surely immortality is an expensive proposition --one can only imagine how much it might cost to live forever-- and thus immortality would therefore be yet another luxury that I cannot afford, as well as, come to think of it, a rather dreary aspiration.

From The Vanishing Dump: Unbroken Promise

Disappointed in love and broken
at forty she married a small town
in Ohio
it made no brash promises whispered nothing
sweeter in her ear than good morning
good afternoon good evening good night
my dear
good night my darling
good night my dear
in the morning
I'll still be here.

Wordsworth's "The World Is Too Much With Us": The Facebook Update (Redux)

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Friending and attending, we lay waste our powers:
Few of these friends are actually ours;
We have commodified friendship, a sordid boon!
The Cybernaut that turns her back on the moon;
The silence that is howling at all hours,
Our virtual marches on indifferent powers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
We seldom move --Great God! I'd rather be
A Luddite suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, sitting on this distressed settee,
Have glimpses that were less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
If only on my giant flat screen TV.

'Invictus: After The Boys Of Summer Are Gone,' By William and Donald Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

Nobody's on the road.
Nobody's on the beach.
The sun goes down alone.
The summer's out of reach.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Out on the road today
I saw a deadhead sticker on a Cadillac.
A voice inside my head said don't look back,
You can never look back.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

I thought I knew what love was.
What did I know? Those
Days are gone forever.
I should just let them go.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

And I can tell you, my
Love for you will still be strong,
after the boys of
Summer have gone.

Remarks Prepared For The Inaugural Launch Of The Mississippi Megalops: Cadmus, The Great Blooming Void, And The Last Performance Of A Celebrated Castrato

In 1929, fringe historian Rolston Geary wrote in his obscure masterpiece, Utsaht Ushipi ("River of Rats"): "The Mississippi of the latter half of the 19th century was an agent of profound and dubious change, a sort of liquid conveyor belt that ceaselessly carried all manner of vice, decadence, debased culture, and quackery north from places where such commodities had been hatched in a hothouse of guile and gullibility."

As the history I wish to recount today commences, our nation was just beginning its long recovery from the Civil War; it had been barely two months since General Robert E. Lee had presented the Confederacy's surrender at Appomattox. With the tenuous peace, the Mississippi River was a throbbing superhighway running up and down the heart of the country, and all manner of humanity was making its way north and west in search of a new start or simply returning home.

St. Louis was a bustling staging ground for refugees and pilgrims fleeing the ravages of the war. At the same time the northern reaches of the river had been a relatively placid refuge during the war years, and its populace had been for the most part distant spectators throughout the conflict, even as tens of thousands of Union soldiers had trained at Fort Snelling and fought at Gettysburg and other pivotal battles of the war.

In early May of 1865, the McKinley Morganfield, a steamboat making its maiden voyage, embarked from St. Louis bound for St. Paul. Among the passengers on the boat was a consumptive castrato from Italy, Marcello Salvatorri. Salvatorri was at the time one of a handful of surviving castrati in Europe --along with the legendary Alessandro Moreschi, Domenico Mustafa, and Girolamo Velvutti-- and was well past his prime. Once, though, he had been known as "The Angel of Perugia" and had been a minor celebrity in Europe, where in 18th century Italy one could still routinely find signs outside the offices of doctors bearing the words, Qui Si Castrano Ragazzi --"Here boys are castrated."

For at least a decade, however, Salvatorri's increasingly rare performances had been primarily spectacles of mere curiosity and even pity. A review of one of his last European performances had referred to his voice as "a ruin, the feeble skreeing of a doomed animal."

Salvatorri's trip to America --billed as the "The Grand Tour of a Celebrated Castrato"-- was sponsored by a utopian community on the outskirts of a disreputable hamlet then called Cadmus, which had been thrown up downstream from St. Paul in the early years of the Civil War.

Cadmus was home to an adjunct military garrison to nearby Fort Snelling, as well as a trading post, a collection of motley merchants, the hovels of river men, a handful of unruly saloons, a busy boat landing, and --on its eastern fringe-- the Reverend Hosiah Hungwell's visionary encampment, The Great Blooming Void. The Great Blooming Void was characterized by the relative youth of its members, and espoused a mish mash of spiritual, philosophical, and psychological notions that incorporated the most attenuated tenets of both romanticism and the Enlightenment. Hungwell's acolytes were an eccentric and eclectic group; some were attracted by the promise of naturism and free love, others by the group's avowed pacifism and the Reverend's queer brand of futurism; still others by the opportunities for artistic expression and philosophical and scientific inquiry.

Hungwell had invented a "Dream Cradle," and his adherents utilized several different variants of this invention to stimulate dreams and visions. Hungwell was said to spend upwards of 16 hours a day in his own, specially customized Cradle, and he emerged from one such session with a vision of creating a new renaissance of castrati in America, which he called "a species of pure artists and laborers, keepers of mankind's purest dreams." This vision became the Reverend's latest pet obsession, and he began to make plans to bring a castrato from Europe to perform at the Great Blooming Void's annual "Summer of Love" festival, with the goal of raising public awareness and support for his campaign.

Through eastern connections Hungwell managed to find his man, and to arrange his passage from Europe.

That spring, though, the village of Cadmus was dealing with an unprecedented infestation of rats. In late March the river had washed tens of thousands of rats downstream, and scores of these sodden vermin had managed to scramble ashore at the Cadmus boat landing and lay siege to the already squalid community.

One local diarist of the period wrote that "one cannot walk the streets unmolested by the creatures. It is not uncommon to encounter them in packs of several hundred, and they are aggressive and will swarm anything that sits still for too long."

There was not, alas, yet a printed organ for news in Cadmus, but one can find several brief dispatches from the St. Paul Sentinel's archives that make mention of the rat problem in Cadmus and fret about growing concerns that the capital city might itself be overrun as well.

In the first week of May, the Cadmus garrison commander, Erling Pike, in consultation with Governor Alexander Ramsey, took the unusual step of offering a bounty on rats; the bursar at the garrison was authorized to pay two cents for every dead rat. A giant pyre was built on the banks of the river, and for at least two weeks, according to the garrison's logbooks, there was a steady procession along the road to the fort, as residents hauled dead rats by the bag and barrow full. Once the bounty was paid, the rats were added to the pyre.

Rat catching mania had taken hold of Cadmus, and drunken, cudgel-wielding vermin vigilantes roamed the streets at all hours of the day and night, clubbing and stomping rats. Local urchins were, as might be imagined, also zealous participants in the slaughter of the rats.

A man named Gustave Moeller, a trapper and fisherman, lived in a heavily secured camp on the western edge of Cadmus, on a little hill overlooking the village. He did not consider himself foolhardy enough to join in the local rat frenzy. He did, though, regard himself as nothing if not an opportunist, and he captured a number of rats in live traps and constructed several large, hooded enclosures in which he systematically began to breed the creatures.

Also aboard the McKinley Morganfield as it began its maiden voyage out of St. Louis was Dr. Gabriel Kaplan, a graduate of the Harvard School of Dentistry, who was making his way west in search of adventure and dental emergencies. Kaplan was an inebriate and a hothead. He had lasted just six months in a Washington dental practice before fleeing that city after shooting a man over an ill-advised horse trade.

By most accounts, Kaplan was a thoroughly incompetent dentist, but in those days even a competent dentist needed to be prepared to defend himself. The tools and techniques of the trade were unsophisticated at best, and unhappy patients, who were often the victims of incredible and horrific incidents of malpractice, frequently resorted to violent acts of retribution.

Doc Holliday, the famed dentist, gambler, and gunslinger, was not an anomalous representative of his trade. On the frontier, it has been alleged, dentists routinely killed more men than federal marshals.

Meanwhile, the broke-down European gelding, Salvatorri, had been further debilitated by the long and arduous journey from Europe to St. Louis, and his condition aboard the Morganfield worsened.

A physician in St. Louis had pronounced the castrato in very poor health, and opined that further travels were likely ill-advised. Nonetheless, the promoter who was accompanying him, a man from Boston by the name of Erich Blount, was determined to get his charge to Cadmus, and so Salvatorri was hauled aboard the steamship by crew members.

Less than a day into the journey Salvatorri developed a terrible toothache. The dentist, Gabriel Kaplan, who had spent his time aboard the boat playing cards and drinking to excess, was summoned. He refused to see the castrato until he was paid up front for his services. A disagreement ensued between the incompetent dentist and the unscrupulous promoter. Despite the promoter's claims (surely exaggerated) of the suffering patient's wide celebrity, Kaplan had no interest in providing pro bono services for Salvatorri. In fact, Kaplan argued, Blount’s claims were all the more reason he should be paid an inflated fee for services rendered.

Kaplan purportedly brandished his gun, placed the barrel squarely in the greasy middle of the promoter's forehead, and demanded payment. By this means, payment was secured, after which Kaplan proceeded to ply the diminished castrato with large quantities of whiskey and then remove the offending tooth and two others for good measure.

As the McKinley Morganfield steamed north toward Cadmus, Gustave Moeller's rat-breeding operation was exploding, and he began to make as many as five trips a day to the garrison, leading a horse-drawn wagon heaped with rats, many of them no more than a week or two old.

These visits immediately aroused suspicion; no one had seen Moeller in Cadmus proper recently, or could recall witnessing his participation in the public revels surrounding the wholesale slaughter of rats. There had also been, by the time Moeller began making his regular trips to the garrison, a marked and widely noted decrease in the local rat population. The rats, in fact, had become quite scarce, and the flow of bounty hunters to the garrison had slowed to a trickle.

Moeller was making a very good living off of his operation; indeed, after only three weeks he had already received more money from the allotted bounty funds than all of the other rat catchers combined.

A meeting was convened at the garrison, and someone eventually broached the previously unthinkable: was it possible this odd fellow was actually running some sort of rat production out of his fortified camp?  A delegation of soldiers was to be dispatched on a mission of discovery the following morning.

Moeller, however, had had for several days the sense that the jig was up. He had managed to stockpile a snug boodle of cash, and had long been planning to join the steady exodus of settlers headed west. No one seems to be quite certain what became of Moeller, but the details of the mission of discovery are noted in terse detail in the garrison's surviving logbooks: the next morning the delegation arrived at Moeller's compound to find the man gone. Worse yet, he had performed the dastardly deed of liberating his rats, and the soldiers were confronted by the ghastly spectacle of what appeared to be tens of thousands of rats, moving like a great river of vermin down the hill toward Cadmus.

The height of this new infestation occurred at almost precisely the same moment that the McKinley Morganfield was docking at the Cadmus landing. It was universally agreed that what was forever after known as "The Moeller Scourge" far exceeded the previous rat crisis. It was now decided that the bounty was clearly insufficient for addressing the problem. Furthermore, the ensuing public disorder was taxing a force of already beleaguered soldiers. This garrison served as a sort of invisible adjunct to nearby Fort Snelling. It was staffed mostly with older soldiers and assorted riff-raff that hadn't passed muster or been regarded as battle worthy. These men were responsible for little more than preserving some modicum of peace in Cadmus and the other outlier communities that had sprung up around the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers. They were widely regarded as failures at even this, and their combination of indolence and indifference had cemented the reputation of Cadmus and other similar towns as rogue bastions that were as unruly as anyplace in the American west of the same period.

One of the remaining ranking commanders was an old man of a scientific bent. He recalled seeing the patent for an obscure invention from the factory of Eli Whitney. This contraption was a rat mower, and this officer, Fergus Something or Another, felt certain he could draw up and supervise the construction of something close enough to Whitney's design to be effective.

Working virtually around the clock with the company engineers and blacksmiths, Fergus Something or Another was confident he could produce a testable prototype in less than a week's time.

Cadmus, meanwhile, was awash in rats. The seriously ill castrato, Salvatorri, had been hauled ashore aboard a gurney and ferried through the river of rats to The Great Blooming Void encampment just east of the village. He had arrived in such dire condition --Gabriel Kaplan's butchery had led to an infection, not uncommon even in the most minor dental procedures of the time-- that he was immediately installed in the infirmary.

The gelding's afflictions were by this time so many, and his mental state so deranged, that Reverend Hungwell feared he would lose his prize specimen before he'd even had a chance to hear him sing a note. Salvatorri was feverish, delusional, hacking, and barely able to breathe through his monstrously swollen mouth and nose.

The date of his advertised performance was less than two weeks away.

Among the more curious members of The Great Blooming Void was a great, naked oaf who had come to the community from a respectable family in St. Louis. This young man was Bartlett Hearn, who had been christened Kraj Majales --"The King of May"-- by Rev. Hungwell. Hearn was a simpleton, "touched" in the parlance of the day, and from a very early age he had proved himself incapable of keeping his clothes on. After repeated incidents in school and the community, he had been pronounced a public nuisance and his father had sent him north to Hungwell, with the hope that The Great Blooming Void might at the very least provide his wayward son with some spiritual or moral grounding.

Bartlett Hearn was not yet 20 years old when he reached the utopian outpost near St. Paul. He was already said to be a strapping lad, larger, in fact, than anyone else in Cadmus. His simple, open personality and instinctive naturism immediately endeared him to Hungwell.

The huge and perpetually naked Majales took a keen interest in the debilitated eunuch, and the touched lad from St. Louis proved to be an instinctive, compassionate, and capable nurse.

Under the care of Majales, who was assisted in his ministrations by the infirmary staff and Hungwell himself, the castrato from Perugia rallied valiantly, and in one week's time he was able to stand and, with the support of the naked May King, take brief strolls.

A splendid start to summer in Cadmus --it was now early June-- no doubt proved salubrious to Salvatorri's spirits and health. A handful of the community's residents were Italians, and so were able to converse with the castrato and serve as translators for Majales and Hungwell. Though his health was improving by the day, Hungwell continued to fret about the voice of his visitor. Salvatorri spoke in a halting, raspy chirp that often confounded even his translators. Time and again he was asked if was able to sing, and each time he would shake his head sadly and insist that it was impossible.

"Impossible" was not a word that had any currency in the Reverend's worldview; its use, in fact, was expressly forbidden in the Great Blooming Void's covenant. Hungwell had Salvatorri administered a round-the-clock series of potions, elixirs, teas, lozenges, hot towels, steam treatments, and vigorous throat massages. He was also subjected to regular, intense sessions with the community's widely celebrated mesmerist.

Through it all, the King of May remained Salvatorri's constant companion.

As all this was going on, the rat population, fueled by the rising temperatures and rapidly emerging vegetation, was exploding unabated, and the rats had begun to show up at The Great Blooming Void compound in increasing numbers. The denizens of the commune were morally and constitutionally ill-equipped to deal with an infestation of rats. They were both peaceable folks and cowards, and as such were terrified of the rats and disinclined to kill them. It was almost as if Gustave Moeller's rats sensed they had found a sanctuary from the looming specter of the rat mower.

Reverend Hungwell was, of course, bedeviled and infuriated by the rat invasion, coming as it did less than one week from the announced Summer of Love festival and the performance of his celebrated European castrato. Invitations had been extended to many notables in the capital city, and Hungwell was determined that the festival would go off as planned.

He ordered all those members of The Great Blooming Void who were not engaged in nursing Salvatorri to participate in a rat round-up. The initial plan was to use brooms to drive the vermin into far-flung corners of the compound, where they could be swept into gunny sacks and crates, and relocated to a stretch of wilderness further east. This, of course, was simpleminded folly. The rats were too numerous, brazen, and fleet, and the gentle folk of The Great Blooming Void were too timorous.

Reports, meanwhile, arrived announcing that the rats had found their way into the community's food stores and --even worse news to Hungwell-- had breached the infirmary and were frightening the castrato.

What allegedly transpired next seems, frankly, to be little more than a fanciful bit of revisionist history or a trope from the purview of folklore. One of the more mysterious and eccentric members of The Great Blooming Void community was an androgynous dandy who called himself The Future Man. The Future Man, who would later relocate to New York and make a name for himself in social circles there, was a stoic enigma even to the other Great Blooming Voidians.

This character (who was widely regarded by many to be a member of the fairer sex) is said to have emerged from his tent at the height of the chaos. Wearing his trademark black cape and hat, and striding in leather boots with four-inch heels, he waded right into the frenzy of swarming rats, clapping his hands, stamping his feet rhythmically, and blowing a tin whistle. Here was a Pied Piper of Hamelin scenario, with the exception that in this instance the rats did not follow The Future Man out of the encampment, but rather fled before him, streaming in an almost orderly procession toward the gates.

In this fashion the mysterious rat herder worked methodically for several hours while the other stunned residents of the community looked on with startled amazement. It is said that Kraj Majales even led Marcello Salvatorri from his bed in the infirmary so that the castrato could witness the spectacle.

The fleeing rats headed up the road toward Cadmus, a route that took them directly past the garrison, outside of which Fergus Something or Another and a small group of soldiers and engineers were doing some last minute tinkering on the rat mower. As time constraints and access to materials had made it impossible to equip the rat mower with steam power, Fergus Something or Another had designed the contraption with two facing sideboard seats, each equipped with three sets of pedals. Six men would thus provide the power to turn the threshing blades, while a seventh man would steer the mower from a higher perch in back.

Seeing the river of rats moving down the road toward them, and seeing in this river of rats an opportunity to be seized, a garrison commander gave the order to attack. Eager volunteers sprang aboard the mower and pedaled furiously in the direction of the onslaught. On each pass through the swarming tide, the rat mower was proving to be devastatingly effective. The creatures were being mulched in huge numbers, and those that managed to escape the whirring blades were being stomped and clubbed by the crowd of soldiers and other spectators that had gathered to watch the spectacle. The river of rats became a river of blood.

A large contingent from The Great Blooming Void had assembled outside the compound to witness what was to them a thoroughly horrific tableau. Included in this contingent was the now emaciated castrato, who was perched on the shoulders of the May King.

And there, as he stared at the almost inconceivable barbarism that was unfolding before his eyes, the castrato found his voice. He began to emit a series of almost coloratura squeaks and screams, which the Reverend Hungwell described in his diaries as "glorious, pure, a bit ragged and ruined by time and trial, yet what damage there was in the eunuch's voice was but evidence of the great sacrifices art must make in the pursuit of beauty."

Seized with ecstasy by an occurrence he considered a miracle  that had surely been hatched in his Dream Cradle, Hungwell shooed his flock away from the carnage that was still unfolding, got them safely back inside The Great Blooming Void compound, and shut fast the gates. Addressing his adherents before they dispersed, he said, "We have witnessed a terrible atrocity, and seen evidence of man's boundless capacity for savagery. Yet in the midst of such a wrenching and diabolical spectacle we have been given a sure sign that the way of The Great Blooming Void is the right way, and humanity's best hope."

That night Hungwell and Kraj Majales sat at the bedside of the exhausted castrato into the early hours of the morning. Salvatorri was said to be once again deranged, and sweating profusely, but, while holding the hand of his naked and most faithful attendant, the King of May, he suddenly began to sing a version of "Ave Maria," his voice rising as he found his way into a tune he had performed hundreds of times before. People all over the camp were startled by the unreal sounds coming from the infirmary, and many made their way from their beds to stand outside and listen. Salvatorri's voice was a shell of its former glory, but Hungwell remembered it as "the sound of a long shattered peace being gradually, with each intake of breath, restored. It was almost as if we were hearing a man who was turning away from time itself and striding confidently, if full of sorrow, into the loving embrace of his Lord."

Salvatorri lapsed into unconsciousness shortly after his only American performance, and he was pronounced dead just as the June sun began its first incursion on The Great Blooming Void.

Inspired by the events of that long day and night, Reverend Hungwell and The Great Blooming Void formed The Rio de Ratones Poetry Society, and this group, which was to have a minor influence on American poetry of the post-war period, devoted itself to preserving the memory of the tragic Salvatorri and advocating for what Hungwell had called "great sacrifices in the name of art." The Rio de Ratones Poetry Society is little remembered today, but its motto, "To a new age of gods and monsters!" was appropriated by director James Whale for his 1935 horror classic, "The Bride of Frankenstein."

By 1880, Reverend Hungwell was dead and The Great Blooming Void had been driven from its property by the state of Minnesota, its residents dispersed to far-flung places. Hungwell's diaries, along with a handful of other accounts from the time, including the Cadmus garrison logbooks, survive in the Minnesota Historical Society's archives. The village of Cadmus burned to the ground in 1888.

The modest grave of the tragic Salvatorri –believed to be the only European castrato buried in American soil—can be found in the Pine Bend cemetery along the Minnesota River in Rosemount, just across highway 52 from the infernal sprawl of the notorious Koch refinery.

The photograph above, which shows a Dream Cradle in use at The Great Blooming Void, was taken by Oscar Gustav Rejlander.


(NOTE: I would be remiss in not acknowledging my indebtedness to John S. Beckmann's splendid "On Castration in the Name of Art" for a good deal of information on the life of Marcello Salvatorri, the decline of the castrati in the late 19th century, and a few stolen phrases.)