Or, to be more precise, corny dogs. For breakfast. At least, I mean, at the very least, I had the foresight and vision to heat the thing up before I ate it. Plus odd numbers and entertainment.
Part the First:
I don’t suppose that a “ball park frank” wrapped in some kind of corn meal, is really bad for breakfast, but I was hungry, and that’s all that was in the ice box’s freezer. So it was either that or cat food, all there is around here. Or some catfish bait in the ice box, got that, too.
Part the Second:
I was plunging ahead, after too much coffee the other evening, with getting the template and cover art together for the December companion release of the 2004 collection of columns. Just an odd fact, with all the weekly columns to-date? 105,000 words. That’s up to and including this week. Even with its typo.
Part the Third:
Kevin Fowler, local boy. Singer, songwriter, rocker, redneck, country music singer these days. My favorite is still “Beer Bait & Ammo” – for real. New release, I guess.
Dinner at Hill’s Café. With two Sagittarius girls. I live an exciting life, especially for a monk. I’d been hankering, ever since Paris, to compare Hill’s steaks to what I had in Paris. I had vague recollections about a sizzling platter of steak, artful prepared. So we wandered into the restaurant, had a seat, and ordered up the small steak for me.
Perhaps I was hungry. Perhaps I’m rather colloquial. Or provincial. Maybe I’m not a good judge of cuisine; although, I’d like to think that there are certain culinary arts that I am prepared to be a good judge of, like seared cow. I’d been working on a theory, based on my last trip overseas, that the French used a better cut of meat, hence a better quality of meal, and therefore, the higher price is easily justified. After all, they did invent French Fries (Pommes Frites).
Theory and application? In the real world? Like at Hill’s? Didn’t work. It was just an excellent selection of beef, crisp on the outside, warm but certainly underdone on the inside.
“I was going to ask for a bite, but it was all gone.”
Perhaps Paris and South Austin are apples and oranges, and perchance it’s just not valid comparison, but the meat was better, the taste was better, and the price was less than a third of what it was in France. Plus I never saw Ranch Dressing in France.
As we got up to leave, a nearby patron offered us his wristbands for the show. Great, the one time I get a decent guest list spot, and some person offers us a free ticket. Didn’t much matter, other than we were able to beat the line.
The show itself? The crowd itself was a show. I copied down some of the T-shirt slogans, just to understand a little bit better: “Nashville Sucks,” “American by birth, rebel by choice,” and my favorite, “The more you drink the better we sound.”
It’s not much more than rowdy roadhouse, brawling & drinking music. One of the latest songs?
“I ain’t drinking any more (and I ain’t drinking any less).” Plus, as a nod to Saint Willie Nelson, “Don’t touch my Willie.” The night wore on, and towards the end, there was a Charlie Daniels Band cover song, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” That’s a fiddler’s song, if it’s done right. Amazing, the crowd sang along with almost all of the song.
That CDB song had me thinking about genre, cross-pollination, and the state of music these days. When I first heard it, it was on “outlaw” radio, Texas Radio & the Big Beat. (That last title is yet another Sagittarius reference.)
I’d forgotten that Kevin Fowler puts on a good show, provided one likes their music a little less polished and little more fun, a little less politically correct, and little more raw.
