Back from Thanksgiving with my friends, after Thanksgiving with the folks, and I’m lucky and I know it to have two groups of people happy to have me for Thanksgiving. Dad played Alice’s Resteraunt by Arlo Guthrie, he knows how to sooth me. I wanted to play this one for him, didn’t get around to it. Then of course ended up talking about heavy metal with my friends.
I’m just an old cowboy these days, in Oklahoma that’s an okay kind of thing to be. Toby Keith joined the choir invisible, so did a lot of the old boys, Cash, Orbison, I could go on. Served my time, and everyone respects that.
I wonder about other ways I might have gone, if I might have been a country singer, what that might’ve been like. I’d probably drunk myself to death by now. I understand it anyway, the way I understand a lot of ways I might have gone.
But I rode that wall of death, as many times as they’d let me. It’s so different hearing and singing this one now. I heard Richard talk about it too, I think it was bigger than he knew. It’s an admission of temporary-ness. An admission of the distructive nature of the things that make us feel engaged.
Now it’s bucked me, I don’t know, do I get back on? Of course you say yes. You’ve never rode.
Are you sure Hank done it this way? Maybe that season is finally over? Maybe it’s time for this old cowboy to hang up his spurs and find something new.