Add a foot of snow and replace the romantic old Americana buildings in the video with chain stores and food depots and aluminum siding clad houses and you’ve got a lot of my town tonight. Found this on youtube last night while shunting around looking for tunes to make my brother learn on guitar by Christmas. Got thoroughly depressed listening to Maura O’Connell singing Blue train of all things on you tube and became rather fixated on the skinny gent who makes mournful sounds in a suit I rather admired at the chorus. Nancy Griffith or Griffin sits on a sofa in the background with her hands cupped to mark time like a spinster grade school music teacher looking beatific and just wailing away. It was Saint Patrick’s day with my father’s side of the family and Christmas with my mother’s here tonight I tell you. I’m quite wrung out. But it’s not going to be entirely a Steve Earle Christmas this year, thank you very much. it sounds like we’ll have both an analyst and a veterinarian to dinner so we’re all covered. I know the emergency room nurse here up north and my brother works at the hospital in the city, so it’ll be good, wherever we hang our stockings. I want an the ipod touch with the itazer.

I’m just blathering off the top of my head here for a bit. I’ve been writing a blog post about the obama victory, a thing called, “This Decisive Moment”. Sort of the story of a dime as it knocked around from weaselly little boyfriend to cafe to quite alarmingly dear friend to solitary walk across town in the big smoke on the American election day and then again the day after, with feeling. A study in pattern and decision. I kind of went into town taking notes, and of course nothing is more indecipherable than day to day life, let alone notable, and things became more complex upon observance rather than whatever. Riting is hard. A blog piece tends to come to me like parts of a jigsaw puzzle one by one in the mail. So I figured a lovely little folk song and just chill.

Decisive moments indeed. You wonder whether the decisions will have any effect as wall street reports ribbon across the bottom of the tv screen but then they did a little happy dance today there. I haven’t turned the tv on actually but for that once today since the election. I felt we all needed a rest. I’m no Anderson Cooper. I took a lot of lofty notes in town, but then when I got to the part when i was describing myself writing a bitter love poem and it came to the point where I was going to have to insert the purely insipid and insincere lines of har poetry themselves I balked. I’m that self absorbed here in the country, despite quite complicated involvements in family and community life, let alone painting. Which actually I am let alone to do. Because I am a monster otherwise. Quite simply. As Susan quite rightly pointed out that lovely autumn afternoon on the patio at the Only when I interrupted her lunch with Toby to see if she could have like party platters for fifty for me in two hours for an opening. Which she and Toby fucking delivered. Lovely platters too. I think Susan and I came to the city at the same time, she opened a little shop and I was renovating the top floor studio. She says you have to be.

I gypsy about, live like a teenager. Sixteen in the pants, at least in theory. I’ve been getting ready for a little Christmas show, day of the Santa Clause parade up north. A pleasure show, just to be there. A new gallery, a gallery 62, a friend from high school opened up. There’s a good dj in the hotel after the parade, which will be in the evening. Little town of three hundred souls. With snow now. Place I’d move to for good in a minute if there was any way to make a living there.

Snow fell deep tonight. I’ll have to get up and shovel in the morning so this is short. Little folk song, and chill.