While walking the other night I turned a corner and saw two small animals in the distance, looking like two chickens waddling but turned out two skunks, one fat and one small and thin, maybe mother and young’n in an exchange I took to be anger and wondered since armed with secret nuclear smells, how does a skunk fight another skunk? Do skunk bombs work against similar opponents? I want to believe it doesn’t. As soon as they noticed me they split. It’s getting colder which I love, soon snow and quiet everywhere. Once I toured with an American couple, we agreed on an exchange. They set up our shows in California, Oregon and Washington, I set us up through BC, AB, SK and Winnipeg. This would be in Feb and one of them had never experienced winter. As our departure drew near she had a melt down over imaginary problem fantasies about the cold and blurted, “why do people live there?” and I realized she probably represents a few million people who think just like that. What’s wrong, with we who live in snowy blizzards? I never thought twice about it but I understood her confusion. My laughter didn’t help.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Memory of those tours aren’t too clear except for a big show in Vancouver. I think years after the place burned down, it might have had the word jazz in its title or maybe it was the jazz slipper? It was large, the crowd too. When we got there and loaded in equipment, a boy was on stage jamming with random drum kit parts along with his mother who played slide guitar with a beer bottle. She was also the caretaker and this was what they did when she was finished. Stage smelled like bleach and noticing us they offered to stop but I sat in and we played an endless blues pattern, it was good. The boy started singing about his stolen blue bike and she harmonized with him. If there wasn’t already an opening act booked I would have tried getting them the job. Miss California became friends with the mother and some years later became a couple and moved to a cold snowy part of Alberta, that was after the caretaker’s son grew up and became a long distance trucker relocating to Ontario. Part of the fun of olderness is how often stories go in directions you couldn’t predict. It upsets some, while others settle for getting new songs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"