Friday Homestead Dispatch

Robots Are Real

Ah, old age. The twilight years—that delicate phrase. Twilight my foot—roaring dawn of a new life, more like, the one you didn’t know about. We all avert our eyes, and then—wham! you’re in there, too, wondering how the hell this can have happened, and maybe it is an early circle of hell and here comes the gleeful devils with their pitchforks, stabbing and prodding.
—How It All Began, Penelope Lively

1.
I grew up in a small Kansas town and like many boys in the 60s I was a member of the Boy Scouts. We had our meetings in the basement of the Presbyterian Church which was exotic for me as my family attended the Methodist Church just up the street. Yes, in a town of 500 in the middle of Kansas, a church basement was exotic.

For several years our troop attended a week long summer camp in the woods near Abilene, Kansas, the boyhood home of President Dwight Eisenhower. Brown Memorial Camp, or Camp Brown as was commonly called.

Part of scouting entailed earning merit badges for such things as personal fitness, hiking, fishing—and at Camp Brown we had the opportunity to work on many including rowing, swimming, and marksmanship.

In my last year as a scout I was asked to be on the staff for a week. At one point it was so hot and humid (the Smoky Hill River runs through the camp) that I got dehydrated. I thought the solution was to drink as many Dr. Peppers as possible, since I was still working on my personal health merit badge. It didn’t help matters that they were lukewarm as the vending machine was on the blink half the time.

So I ended up lying down in my tent for a bit when the flies started flocking around me. I had bug spray with me—surely some nasty 60s shit—and I kept spraying it all over myself but it didn’t seem to help, and in fact they were joined by their disease-infested cousins from down by the river. It took several spraying sessions before I realized I had picked up my Right Guard™ deodorant that the flies seemed to just LOVE.

I think I finally got some rest although bloated and still dehydrated from the Dr. Pepper and pockmarked from fly bites. That evening there was some redemption as the entire camp gathered in the main amphitheater—it was July 20, 1969—and we all watched Neil Armstrong make One Giant Leap For Mankind.

Irony?

2.
Many of you who have seen the Carnivaleros, or the newer incarnation Dropped By Birds, have heard several of my songs that I’ve played live for some time; Hesitation Bridge, The Die Was Cast, Mamie Eisenhower, Rudy Got Caught Again, Dreams Are Strange, Life I’ve Led, Party Girl. There are as many more that may never make it to the stage—The Flying Saucer Song is one. Here is the poetic novella in its final version:

The Flying Saucer Song

Bo works in a clothing store
Ever waiting for something to happen
He'd lost most his hair showed little fanfare
But his spirits haven't seemed to dampen
He spends his free time staring up at the sky
As he knows they'll surely come back
The poking and the prodding and the missing ten days
The occasional panic attack

Flying saucers, come from a far-away star
Flying saucers, shaped like a Cuban cigar
Flying saucers, no one knows who they are
Flying saucers

Bo swears it's true it could happen to you
Snatch you up when you least expect it
The next thing you know you're floating to the sky
Then you'll know the true meaning of dissected
Hoffa's body has never been found
Did DB Cooper ever hit the ground
Amelia had her plane see what good that did
Did a dingo really eat the young Chamberlain kid
Flying saucers

So Bo keeps his watch for all of mankind
With the hope of being next in line
'Cause nothing ever happens in the clothing store
Those aliens are genuine

Flying saucers, come from a far-away star
Flying saucers, shaped like a Cuban cigar
Flying saucers, no one knows who they are
Flying saucers

And pictured below are the original bedside scratchings before the editing process. Notice it was originally ‘your’ cigar in the chorus, then ‘Clinton’s’ cigar (har), and finally settled on ‘Cuban’ cigar.

Then the trick was to put it to music. You can listen to the final version on Bandcamp or on Pandora Radio.

I enlisted my pals Karl Hoffmann on bass, harmony vocals, various noises, Connor “Catfish” Gallaher on pedal steel, mellotron, and sitar, and Kelley Hunt added the amazing and hilarious harmony vocals. I pounded out the lead and some harmony vocals, drums, accordion, and piano.

Which leads to…

3.
Robot Monster (1953)

It rates a 3.0 on IMDB…heh. It starred actors who never quite ‘made it’ in Hollywood lore; George Nader and Claudia Barrett. If only George had changed his name to something more lively, say Marion Robert Morrison.

Also, according to IMDB, this was one of the most lucrative movies of its day, with a box office of more than $1 million on a budget of $20,000. And it was shot entirely outdoors, without sets, in four days.

4.
Speaking of Robot Monsters, I’ve been mostly giving politics a rest, a snooze, a gedouddahere. This month grab your popcorn for the chaos in the House-O-Republicans. In 2025 the reality is that all guardrails are gone. At least for the next two years.

And as we slide toward the mid-term elections, I agree with James Carville that the message from Democrats needs to be less about pointing fingers and name calling and more about people’s needs—it’s the money, honey. Carville writes), I’ve been going over this in my head for the past two months, all the variables, all the what-ifs, all the questions about Joe Biden’s re-election decisions and what kind of Democrat or message might have worked against Donald Trump. I keep coming back to the same thing. We lost for one very simple reason: It was, it is and it always will be the economy, stupid. We have to begin 2025 with that truth as our political north star and not get distracted by anything else. It’s about finding ways to talk to Americans about the economy that are persuasive. Repetitive. Memorable. And entirely focused on the issues that affect Americans’ everyday lives.

JUST VOTE BLUE still stands, and it needs to be done both locally, statewide, and nationally. As Lee Papa wrote this morning, Start local. I joke around about there not being any future elections, but I don't think that's true, if only because states run them. Making elections secure from the ways Trump and the GOP can fuck with them is one of the most important things we can do, and that means organizing to toss out the assholes in your state legislatures who are making voting harder for some groups. Join organizations that are advocating for more state constitutional amendments on abortion rights. Get decent school board members elected. And find and support progressive media outlets because CNN and the rest of corporate media can get fucked. If things go full fascist at the federal level, any bulwark will at least slow shit down.

And now…