Watch out, Eugene, you don't make things worse

The world has never had a good answer for pure, raw speed. When something can be accomplished with coordination, controlled fluidity, perhaps even poetry, while at the same time being blindlingly fast, we applaud it; we nurture it; we pay it exorbitant sums of money to go faster if possible.

Demko knows this. It's why thoroughbred horses make him twitch. There are those of us in the Taco Martin Equine Society down at Canterbury Park who joined for the gambling. We're the worst kinds of degenerates, dropping foolish amounts on vastly misinformed bets in the vain hope of buying luxury goods, or even a nice dinner with the spoils. We're not there for the verse of hoof on earth, man and beast flashing around the turn, a great whip of sinew and silk, hurtling mercilessly at an invisible finish line, and maybe an extra pale of oats. THIS my friends, is what makes Demko full in the pants.

Me, my head is full of dreams...picking the first four horses of the Kentucky Derby in order, based on some tortured calculus of approximately 4 months of meaningless races across shorter distances and disjointedly contrasted tracks. The truth is in there for me. I want to see it, like Moses on the side of the Mountain.

Brother Derek is faster than the other horses in this race. It's a fact. Even if he doesn't win the race, he's faster than all of them. You space them 5 feet apart and run them for a half mile on a straight line, and it will look like a cheap race scene from a John Ford movie, Derek saddled with the handsome male lead.

But the Derby is a mile and a quarter (1 1/4) of treachery. Speed is beautiful, speed is innate, speed is a Greek tragedy, the black-eyed chorus wagging its finger at Hermes, tired from a night of extreme travel up Mount Olympus, too exhausted to deliver the message.

A few minutes into the second song ("Gravity's Gone") of the Drive By Truckers' latest record, A Blessing and A Curse, we get this:

Between the champagne, hand jobs and the kissing ass by everyone involved
Cocaine rich comes quick and that's why the small dicks have it all.

"Cocaine rich comes quick..." Members of the Teimon school in the 16th Century used to furtively self-flaggelate hoping for 5 syllables like that.

No, Daniel-san, if the paint-the-fence lesson is sinking in, you know fat money on Brother Derek is "cocaine rich comes quick" anticipation, a wager so sure, you'd swear Dick Cheney would watch the whole thing from the betting window, with his back to the track, waiting for the first possible second to slide his ticket across to the fresh freckle-faced girl putting herself through college on a stool at the pari-mutuel counter.

Sure things breed fear in mortal men. The independent music circuit in the Twin Cities used to unfold before me like a childhood copy of "Where the Wild Things Are." Up one street and down another, all along the train, an iffy hot dog stage-left in the Mainroom at First Avenue, you could predict the results. We all knew the Drive By Truckers would one day record A Blessing and A Curse:

The welfare lady said enough is enough
The kids ain't been to school in weeks

Crystal Meth in the bathtub
Blood splattered in my sink
Laying around in the aftermath
It's all worse than you think

That's why we went. We just knew they were going to do it louder, faster, more inbred, and exponentially more coordinated than the fucking posers in the mainstream music industry. If you're standing around working your pud inside your Carhartt's at a Van Zandt concert, trying to pretend it's Lynyrd Skynyrd, not only have you been had, you fucking deserve it.