Whig Hill

The Art Museum had a booth

Boy, I pick the strangest places to meet girls.

The bears love me, and everyone loves Lizzie.

Bad day yesterday

When I stayed longer than expected in Virginia, I ran out of brain pills. The anxiety returned and yesterday was the worse I've had it in almost a year and a half. It helps me understand why the shrinks classify me as "compulsive" because you just can't help it. Really, your brain says your nervousness, twitchiness, queezyness, aprehension, sense of doom and grief are all irrational...but it then goes ahead and believes them anyway. Meanwhile the rational corner of your brain looks on in disbelief and panic as it's little corner of real world gets smaller and smaller.

The dog was not helping. I took Lizzo for a walk and we ambled down the side of a road with a sedge-filled ditch on the side. She was real loopy from being locked up all last week and was running in and out of the ditch being happy-stupid. The last thing I saw was her doing some kind of flying-judo-wrestling-leap into the bushes, then a pause, the an alarmed bark. Then another. Not the "heyhappytoseeyou" bark, but the scared, fighting bark.

I ran over. She was tussling with something and I grabbed her out of the ditch. I went over and saw a cornered groundhog. I checked close for mouth-foaming but all I saw were spectacularly crooked teeth.

Now, this corner of the county has rabies so I immediately took her to the vet and in the lobby I checked for bite marks. Couldn't find any so the technicians said if she's updated on her rabies vaccination (she is), it'll be fine, but I could bring her in on Monday to start an antibiotic and rabies booster. Of course, they mentioned, groundhogs aren't known for rabies and they're always out in the day anyhow.

She's fine, of course, but Good God, this fed my brain's gnawing, uncontrollable need to eat hope and happiness and regurgitate despair.

Whatever. I'm back on the brain pills. I feel fine. I did a decent show this morning. Now I'm going to go watch Scott Riggs the Redskins get his their first win.

(Jeff Burton won and I,like everyone else, cried.)

Heresy, I know

I submit that the best, most important, and most influential bluegrass bands are these, in this order:

1. Flatt & Scruggs

2. The Country Gentlemen

Discuss.

(And if you don't know why this is a heretical proposition, then don't worry about it.)

This is funny......now

My wife wanted me to dress like this. Flared pants... flip-flops,etc. Really. And we fought about it a lot. (The quarrels were rooted in declines in trust, tolerance, love, etc., but it came out over these stupid clothes.)

Needless to say, we're divorced now.

And I hope the New Mister likes being judged on the jackassedness of his pants.

The Talented Mr. Read

So I watched Elizabeth's old man, Noah, single-handedly restore an old Salisbury house on the History Channel's Save Our History program. Clearly Noah is a modest rock star because he let the rest of his crew get all the credit for the work.

Salisbury is tucked tightly into the Western Piedmont's German-settled region and it was neat watching all the people with Anglicized German names interviewed. For instance, they got a Sides on film. (A living one, that is.)

And the restored house carries the names McCubbins-McCanless. I'll bet  a dime for a dollar the McCubbins is a direct descendent of Salisbury merchant James McCubbins who became the county salt comissioner during the Civil War. You can read further about his role in this riveting article.

On air Sunday

Reminder. I'll be on the air tomorrow morning, 10am -12, WXDU. Unless you are one of the cows in Orange County who pick up a perfect station signal, you can listen online here. (Beware, they've been having trouble with the online broadcast all week.)

And, as expected, I'll be playing the usual bluegrass and twang numbers.

Obviously, I'm not trying hard enough

In all seriousness, this is me. I am stunned at how well it describes me and I know he's right because I understand and experience all the (apparent, but not real) internal contradictions he mentions.

In related non-news about me, when I am not doing my best to be a willfully grumpy misanthrope, I'm trying hard not to just bust out in juvenile laughter. So when I arrived home today and checked my bloglines, I was dutifully alarmed by the news that historians, apparently, are humorless.

Professor Maass hypothesizes the reason being too many long hours in archives. But that can't be true because I've just finished six days and sixty four hours straight reading microfilm at the National Archives and I feel elated and gregarious right now. (Too bad all my friends have left town just as I got home. Stoopid friends.) I even have photographic evidence. (With an endorsement from the silliest girl in state government.)

Hell, the only time I've had a serious link from Dr. Luker was for my amazing photoshop skillz. And the Stonewall Hefner was just the tip of the iceburg of PSs I've done (most of which are NC-17 at best, and would get me driven from North Carolina at worst.)

Then again, maybe I've just presented solid evidence that my sense of humor is not funny at all.

But I try.

some things heard and not heard

I had lunch with my brother Brian in DC yesterday and he said the folks up there refer to doing tourist-type stuff as "seeing some marble." That's pretty funny. Funnier because I plan to spend time after work on Monday taking pictures of said marble.

My sister Sylvia just said that when she was a kid she and her girlfiend(s) would have sleepovers and pretend they were married women whose husbands were away in Vietnam. That's funny. And kind of sad, too, since she was growing up in and around military and naval bases in Hawaii during Vietnam.

My laptop is out of comission and combined with general computer ignorance on my part, I have no access to my music. So I've been without the soulful twang for about three weeks now. It's getting bad. But on a podcast I listen to (still get those) I just heard a song off Riley Baugus' latest album and it was so beautiful I fell to my knees and cried. Actually, I didn't. But I could have if I'd wanted to. Just one of those things that make you happy to be alive.

Inhale. Exhale.

Freedoms

The National Archives is home to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and other items they are billing as the Charters of Freedom. But let me tell you, the National Archives has expanded the meening of Freedom in ways you can't imagine. On Thursday and Friday nights, the microfilm reading room is open until 9:00 pm. 9:00 pm, PEOPLE!!! I don't believe any archive in the world stays open after 5:30 pm.  The vampires that keep me from my precious documents must turn in.. The NA opens at 8:45am so that's twelve uniteterruped hours of head-in-microfilm-reader-time. Oh my lord, lord, lord, lord. Oh my lord. (MMMMmmmmmm)

Now, any experienced historian would be wise enough to ask me--So, you spent thirty hours total reading microfilm--but did you actually find anything? And I'd have to answer. Why, yes. Yes I have. I've turned up some absolutely wonderful things regarding the NC and CS quartermaster departments. North Carolina history will probably have to be re-written based on what I found today.

oh, yeah.

Doc Watson played Rockabilly before he played Hillbilly

Attended a good lecture today. Jocelyn Neal spoke about the making and marketing of country music in North Carolina. Well, not exactly country, but, chronologically, string band through brothers bands through bluegrass to folk revival. You get the picture. And that picture is probably wrong.

What I liked about her talk is that she said probably exactly the same things I would have said on the same topic. Namely, that musicians consciously adopted the hillbilly persona as a stage technique; that what sounds old-timey and traditional to us was pop, progressive, and forward-thinking to them, and that the folk-revivalists willingly (uh, my word and interpretation) fell for the romantic and traditional construction that was far from the truth.