Saints Day. George to be exact. All hail the good old dragon killer, St.George. For without him, there would undoubtedly be some crazy, fire breathing thunder lizard reeking all sorts of havoc and seriously stressing out the inhabitants of Libya. What with imprisoning virgins and eating the shit out of their sheep while munching on their little kids for desert and all. Lucky for us good St.George was up to the task and killed the great beast for the peace of all mankind.

Bless his dear old soul, AHmen.

I’m not gonna lie. I had no idea it was St.Georgies special day. I was just sitting at Merlin’s with Tim Kallevig, enjoying a neat James and watching the sun do that setting thing when all of a sudden a bunch of merry men come out in semi-blackface and begin to dance a jig, set to accordion playing busty beauties, and whacking each other with sticks while pseudo-fertility-dancing in perfect time with bells on.

5 surreal minutes later we’re shooting the fecal matter with some dude named Dean who is ever so kindly giving us the upload on what the freak just happened. Celebrating some thousand year tradition. Fertility for the townspeople. Good fortune for the farmers. Remembrance of the dude who killed the ever-loving dragon. That’s the short of it. Word up I say, so long says he. Pound back the last of the Guinness. Hit the road. Come home and write a song about hotel room honey. and fast forward to the now:

I’m eating beans in the shower- straight from the can. Cold. Tasteless. My tinfoil hat is resting percariously  a-top my massive mane of unmanageable madness. A list of unreasonably long words are written in invisible ink line the shower walls. I am practicing for the 41st annual inter-galactic spelling bee. The homies from Mars gave me an unforgivable whooping last year but it’s good all good now. I got my invisible ink and my tin-foil hat on. I’m ain’t afraid of no ghost. I’m fittin’ ta thwart them at any cost and prove once and for all that Mankind, while the most destructive of the primates, is certainly the most crafty and verbose.

For real though.

Woke up today and tried as hard as I could to make it outside to enjoy the sunshine. It took me a couple of tries before I finally got it. After a couple hours I ended up walking around Midtown all afternoon with my guitar. It was nice to sing songs and smile at everyone. A few hoody dudes joined me for a freestyle. While our subject matter was quite different, shootin’ niggaz and smoking’ crack and whatnot, the root of our final song was very Marleyesque. One guy goes, “I don’t know how I’m gonna eat and that’s alright with me. Everything is gonna be alright. alright. alright.”

That’s my guy right there. Lil’ tatted homie named Chevy.

After an hour or two of walking I took a nap outside of the art museum. Woke up to a call from said Kallevvig. Yes I’m up. Yes I slept well. Yes I would love to shoot some hoops.  Oh…and what? Really? ooooooo

Tim got his car towed.

From right outside his house.

Sure there was a sign saying don’t park. Sure they “had” to sweep the streets. Sure this happens all the time. But damn, guys. They straight up took his car and made him pay to get it back. You apply that behavior to the playground and it’s straight bullying. Like, “I’m gonna take your toy because I say you can’t put it there, and if you want it back, you gotta give me some skittles, a couple lollipops, and a big ol’ bag of reeses.”

It’s insane people.

Total small stuff, but at the same time, it just really goes to show how funny and out of hand things are in this crazy society of ours. How many silly people with silly ideas and  delusions of stature can tell some poor schmuck who is just trying to do his job what trees to chop down, what cars to tow, what kids to mace, what graffiti to paint over, and so on and so forth. Yesterday this would have been a real stick in my emotional mud. Today I got some sunlight in me, I soaked up my dose of vitamin D, so now it all just seems like one big joke to me.

Kallevig on the other hand was feeling a little different. I rolled up to the court (with the one and only Mr.Waterman AKA the soon to be internationally famous soul rock-n-roll singer of my favorite indie-dude band PORTAGE) and Tim was looking a little melancholy. The last time I saw Tim looking like this was a few days prior when we were driving to Sioux Falls after a particularly shameful stop at a gas station where we spent 20 minutes trying to decide what sucralose saturated sac of monoglycerides we were going to select to satiate the candida-albicans crying out to our central nervous systems for unholy sustenance. We had driven about 2 miles down the road. Some beautiful song, Goshen in particular, was playing. The prairie was alive with sunshine. The air was fresh. All things considered the moment was perfect, save for the fact I was stuffing my face with FLAVOR BLASTED BBQ FRITOS and Tim was inhaling a ham and cheese  “sandwich.” I looked over at him. The look on his face was reminiscent of Keanu Reeves on a park bench, seeming to scream, dear God why such sacrilege?! I bust out laughing, rolled down the window and proceeded to shake the living daylights out of that Fritos  bag until it was empty, all the while shouting, I’M FREE, I’M FREE, OH LORD, I’M FREE OF THIS SHAME.

It was a funny moment. I proceeded to dub Tim’s sandwich a “shamewich” after I found myself liberated from my packaged poison prison. But anyway, back to the basketball court. Back to towed cars and sad Tim Kallevigs.

The lesson we learned, after shooting basket after basket, was that there is a time for everything. I believe the world is at an imbalance right now, but that there is also an emerging shift in consciousness attempting to make things right, or at the very least to prepare a new stage of spiritual evolved beings to inherit the world and pick up the pieces of the coming trials of this new dangerous and altogether wonderful age. That being said, since the dawn of time (AKA the day you were born) there has always been a give and a take. There have been times when people have taken things from us without asking, have tricked us, have stolen or devieced us to get something they desired (I know I’m guilty of all of the above) but there are also times when we find ourselves with the lucky ticket. We end up with more money at the end of the month than we though we would have. A friend takes you out to dinner. You score a good deal on whatever it is you’re buying. you finally win the little stuffed animal out of that crazy nazi claw machine. The point is, in dealing with matters of finance and possession, these things are perpetually in transit. Money constantly goes from one hand to the other. Possessions are made, bought, sold, and so on and so forth until ultimately everything ends up in a junkyard or landfill or the side of the road and we all die rich or poor with a bunch of stuff we can’t take with us that in the end didn’t do us very much good anyway.

So sitting at Merlins watching some grown men dance a jig to for ancestors long past, we decided this:

Things come, things go. You just got to learn to accept when things leave and know that for every time we lose, we receive. There is more to life than money, that much is obvious, but during those inevitable times we find ourselves shafted or snubbed, we also find ourselves with a bittersweet oppurtunity to reflect how we too have taken, and how ultimately we are here to be givers, not takers.

Anyway. Fleetwood Mac is GROOVIN me out right now.

I

Must

Dance

Love you guys.

PS. Minneapolis shows comin’ atcha real soon.

MAY 2nd at HONEY MPLS

MAY 3rd at the CABOOZE

ohm shakti