Not dead, just restin'....

My friend Rosey is 6'8" and tonight he was talking to Al, a semi-regular at the bar. Al has a semi-mullet, wears his Vikings hat everywhere and is missing his 4 front teeth, but he's the salt of the Earth and one of the funniest people you'll ever meet. On this particular occasion, it struck him how tall Rosey is and he asked him if he ever played basketball, and if so, why he quit. Rosey replied, "It was a combination of disinterest, lack of talent, and two shakey knees." Not missing a beat, Al quipped, "that's why we're not astronauts."

The Other Side of Country, the blog, has been woefully absent because summers in Minnesota are meant to drain the precious bodily fluids out of the corpse of life. Be prepared to re-visit this space often in the coming days for massively disjointed screeds on new music, old music, and shit played on mainstream radio stations by jagoffs who wouldn't know music if it hit them in their chicken eye. Plus, there will be the random treatise on love, poison, and violence, but not necessarily exclusive of each other, and not necessarily in that order.

Right now I'm listening to Merle Haggard, Live At Billy Bob's Texas, revelling in the deliciousness of Dara's prose, and wondering if my old pal Demko would stay on a suited 8-9, heads up, in a no-limit house game for $350. Fall and Winter in Minnesota were made for good food, doubling your salary in all night poker contests to cover your summer impulse spending, and frying the wires from your Sony stack to your Cerwin-Vega two-way rig with hidden sub-woofer.

Even now, as the Yankees and their horrible coach survived a 10-7 scare to the cursed Red Sox, I say God Bless Willie Nelson, Patterson Hood, George Brett, Chris McAlpine for what he did to that Lake State guy, the 69-70 Chiefs, Phil Ford for sticking around, Tricky Dick Gleichman and the fullback give up the middle right, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, any local independent music club not associated with Clear Channel Entertainment and their storm troopers with armbands and jack boots, and Bill Fagelson for that second shot on the first hole that WILL happen one day. Stay tuned...