Double Order of Government Cheese, Please

Holy cow – I am super mega ultra pleased to report that Nashville-via-Bowling Green legends Government Cheese finally have an official home on the WWW again, now on MySpace.  Now I don’t have to link to all those YouTubes in lieu of a website anymore, rock!  Linkage revisions coming soon.

More Cheese, Please

Lookie what I found… new old Government Cheese videos. I guess I should monitor YouTube a little more closely sometimes since some of these have actually been posted for a few months now. All kinds of chewy extremely Eighties goodness here to be had.

I remember when less than ten bucks (sometimes a lot less) could buy you a pretty good night out in Nashville or Murfreesboro with a Cheese show and a guaranteed hangover the next morning. And if you were lucky, still have enough left over to buy a much-needed 2 liter bottle of Sun-Drop for the hangover cure, too.

“Oh Yeah” (live):

“Mammaw Drives the Bus”:

“Face to Face”:

Awesome Search Terms, 01/18/2007 Edition

I have probably been getting a little too much entertainment lately out of reviewing the search terms that land people here on The Lynnster Zone, but some of them have been pretty darned funny and many have been just plain odd. I’ll probably start sharing these weekly or something, they have really been cracking me up. Here we go…

“orange hair from sleeping too much”

I sleep a rather ridiculous amount of hours when I do sleep, but no, can’t say that one’s ever happened to me.

“what happens if you sleep too much”

Well, according to this next searcher, you could become…

“insane from sleeping too much”

Oh, so THAT’S what’s wrong with me. Okay! Moving right along…

Next, we have this next group of search terms that has popped up on several occasions:

“how to deal with a freeloader boyfriend”
“boyfriend freeloader”
“freeloader boyfriend”
“boyfriend freeloader”

My advice, as before… kick his ass to the curb!!!

“constantly dreaming about ex-boyfriends”

A phenomenon I’m certainly somewhat familiar with, though I wouldn’t say even close to constantly, thank goodness. If I got rid of you once, I certainly don’t wanna keep seeing you, be it in my subconscious or not.

“the munsters vs. the addams family”

Ah yeah! Verification that my friends and I aren’t the only freaks who sit around discussing stuff like this as if it’s something so important like finding the answer to world peace. KC would be so proud!

Given the fact that I write a lot about music-related stuff here, it’s no surprise a good deal of the searching that brings people here is music-related… first we have the Motley Crue contingent:

“don’t go away mad just go away lyrics”
“motley crew dont go away mad”

One time several years ago I referred to my group of longtime friends as a “motley crew” and ever since I’ve been getting the Motley Crue hits. Then I made it even worse by titling a post with a Crue lyric (sort of on purpose, sort of not). But it’s also not my fault people don’t get the Crue vs. crew right in the first place.

“when you gonna give me some time”

Sharona!

“Bangles married Hoodoo Gurus”

Nope, sorry to burst a bubble for somebody somewhere, but while Michael Steele and Brad Shepherd did date for a while in the ’80s, none of the Hoodoo Gurus have ever been married to any of the Bangles. (And no, contrary to Jeffraham Prestonian insistence, I am NOT Debbi Peterson of the Bangles… heh.)

“tabitha soren ugly pig”

Shame on you… that’s not a very nice thing to say.

“john mayer fan rants”

Uh sorry… wrong blog! (Though I do think his blog is funny and link to it here.)

“meg white’s feet”

Oooh… an alt-rocker foot fetish in the making? I can’t tell you anything about chick drummer Meg White’s feet, but I am unfortunately all too personally familiar with chick drummer Jo Walker’s feet, which is why that search landed here anyway. And Josie hates Meg White. So maybe that kinda counts.

Then we have the local and semi-local music searchers, like the Government Cheese fans:

“fishstick day government cheese mp3″
“camping on acid”
“come on back to bowling green and marry”
“government cheese band”

And more Nashville and Knoxville music searchers:

“jet black factory” when the city sleeps”
“smokin dave & the premo dopes”

Then a note to all blonde, long-haired guys at MTSU… somebody is looking for you! See:

“blonde, long hair guys at MTSU”

Next, of the stalker variety…

“the lynnster zone”
“memphis lynnster”
“lynnster”

Hello Stalker! Or old friend trying to find me, whichever the case may be…

“john cosper memphis”

Man, I have no idea what has become of my old friend Cochise Cosper, but if you do find him, tell him to e-mail me. His disappearance has become stuff of legend among the Memphis Gripe crew.

“Annette Fine”

I haven’t talked with Annette in probably a decade, but I’m sure she’s still around the ‘Net somewhere and no doubt is still one of the biggest Replacements fans on the planet…

“dobie dog”

Dobie has his own stalker! Awesome!

“bunny bread”

That’s what I said.

From the Um, Okay…? department we have:

“decorations with melted lp albums”
“kids in the hall feeding a tapeworm”

Next…

“cat in a basket song”

I don’t know about such a song, but here’s one cat in a basket for you.

“comical laundry pictures”

Laundry is funny? Who knew?!!

“creomulsion nasty”

I beg to differ.

Just plain odd, vaguely weird, and slightly fetishy maybe:

“blob teeth in puppies”
“zombie housewife photos”
“youtube emma peel choke”

Then kinda seriously disturbing:

“swallowed whole cat”

All I can say to that is… ouch.

And last but not least…

“what need to start sewing bez“

Apparently someone thinks one of my fellow NiT bloggers could use a new hobby.

It Came From Nashville

In Googling while looking to verify some information for someone else – information that probably used to be in some brain cells killed long ago in my head – I once again ran across this August 2006 article from the Nashville Scene about Nashville’s music underground of the ’80s, an article that references tons of people I knew and practically every band I ever saw from 1982 to 1987. That article, and another similar recent article about that period that’s been floating around the ‘Net, always makes me glad I was there to witness much of the miracle that was happening at that time in non-country Nashville music. As I told Shadow 15‘s Scott Feinstein in the course of a brief e-mail exchange a few weeks ago, that was just a really special time to be around then, hanging out in that scene.

Government Cheese is playing? Yeah, I’m there, man. The Questionnaires, The Movement, Jet Black Factory, Webb Wilder, Bill Lloyd, Raging Fire, Jason and The Scorchers, Walk the West, and so very, very many more. Something to do every single night, somewhere to go, and someone to see.

The Knoxville contingent had it going on too at the time, but I think all of us in Middle Tennessee thought we had it better, snotty youngsters as we were. I saw a bunch of great Knoxville bands within Davidson and Rutherford County lines, though, first and foremost being Smokin’ Dave and the Premo Dopes. Happy to report that Todd Steed‘s still doin’ what he does best over yonder eastward.

As previously referenced on my old Replacements page, the word “alternative” had not yet been coined in those days as the end-all, be-all term for the indie music scene. “Indie” was already sometimes used, Rolling Stone was still calling it “college rock” in their charts. The word “underground” was tossed around a lot, and I guess that’s what we were all calling it most of the time then around Nashville. I don’t think there was any big definitive term at the time. It was just different than most everything else that was all over the dial on the radio at that time.

I know everyone was all excited because there seemed to be something HUGE happening. There had already been these big local scene explosions around the country, like Minneapolis and Los Angeles (like L.A. really needed it), and then closer to home in Athens, Georgia. A bunch of those bands from Athens that were almost like the home team to us because they played Nashville so much, suddenly they were getting ALL this national attention. And we were just SURE Nashville was gonna be next.

Well, there was some attention, a little. I’ve got Rolling Stone‘s 1985 yearbook back in the back room somewhere that has a little section on Nashville in their local bands section, that features bands that had mostly broken up by the time it was published, or would soon after. Jason and The Scorchers, yeah, they did well enough. We thought a whole lot more would follow in their wake, lots of very deserving, very talented folks. 1986 was this huge, huge year, absolutely electric in all the excitement.

And then – well, it just didn’t really happen. It was good to be there when it was happening, though. It was a great time to witness, something to see. And something I’ll likely never see (or hear) again. Not like that.

When I moved to Memphis in the beginning of 1988, it was a huge disappointment to find a music scene that was practically dead, and a fight to find decent radio. Rhodes College’s indie station was around at the time but changed format soon after I moved here, there were a few alternative shows on the public radio station but not full-time, then one of the AM stations tried a late-night show for a while that didn’t last long. As far as radio, we were mostly without until Nirvana broke and suddenly we had a 24-hour, big power station. The live scene mostly sucked. There were a few bands to get excited about, but most up them gave up soon enough in frustration because there was so little support of the Memphis music scene in general.

Memphis was nothing like what I had experienced in Nashville, though I was aware that at that same time things were winding down up there as well. Sometime around 1990 or so, friends in Nashville were telling me this band or that one had broken up, people had left town, this place or that place had closed, things just weren’t the same.

It was good while it lasted, in any case. It was great being there in the middle of this scene that just seemed like it was on fire, about to just freaking explode. All this electricity in the air, great bands and awesome music to listen to everywhere you turned, it seemed like for a while.

I have some more thoughts about those days bouncing around in my head today, but they’re of a more personal nature. I guess I knew this was going to happen, writing about those old days. Not sure if the rest is to be shared or not… guess we’ll see, or not…

So Far Today

I found stuff yesterday that made me very very happy and made me feel like I was 19 years old again for about an hour, heh. I am so thrilled more Nashville bands from the awesome days are surfacing:

Shadow 15 on MySpace

Raging Fire on MySpace

Jet Black Factory on MySpace

Really just can’t get enough of this stuff, it’s hard for me to believe it’s been 20 years since I’ve seen some of these bands play. I luv me lots of all three of those bands, and Shadow 15′s “So Far Today” remains one of my top fave tunes of the era – I have been carrying around a beat up cassette of stuff taped off of WRVU with that on it that has somehow managed to survive all these years. Which brings me to the next bit of news (great news for me!) -

To make this latest find even cooler, I heard from Scott Feinstein, who says they are currently in the process of getting together some of the old Shadow 15 stuff with plans for a CD, probably in a few months. So that along with the recent news of Tommy Womack planning to remaster and rerelease the old Government Cheese catalog eventually – I couldn’t be more thrilled.

So in honor of all these fine folks that keep resurfacing out of the old Nashville underground after lo, so many years – on this fine gorgeous November morning in Tennessee, once again, I bring you the almighty Cheese!

PS – Here’s direct links to that one and the rest of the live show Government Cheese videos currently on YouTube:

The Shrubbery’s Dead Where Danny Used to Fall

Camping on Acid

Skyline Rant and Somewhere in Between

There’s a couple of non-live videos over at YouTube too – enjoy!

Thank You

Oh, yeah – thanks SO much to the “SHRUBBERY FISHSTICK PEACHES” person, whoever you are, for making sure my Friday was so much more fun than it otherwise woulda been today. Big thumbs up on that! Heh.

C’mon Back to Bowling Green (Redux)

Following up today’s earlier post…

I can’t help it, after finding this Government Cheese treasure trove of video today, I kept grabbing seconds here and there when I could this afternoon to go watch whatever. So much fun. I must have seen these guys every chance there was in Nashville and the ‘Boro – and once in Bowling Green – until I left Middle Tennessee in 1988. These live shows were from a little bit later era, so it was a kick to see a performance I missed in later years.

As I updated the earlier post later in the day, thanks to another Cheese fan – with obviously a sharper eye and better attention span than yours truly – after I posted the original post today, I learned that Tommy now has all the Cheese masters and a lot of video shot by their label, with plans for remastering and making it all available as time allows. That’s awesome and I am SO looking forward to that now. (Thanks for sharing the love, Tim!)

Tommy’s book Cheese Chronicles: The True Story of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Band You’ve Never Heard Of came out in the latter half of the Nineties and since that time I’ve probably purchased 50+ copies and forced it upon every musically-inclined friend, relative, future husband (just one), and others of dubious whatnot, just because it’s such a glorious read (and they all dug it). Heck, I still have two extra copies in my closet, I think.

So now I can finally not only make ‘em read about, not only make ‘em listen – but actually SHOW live Cheese to all those dozens of folks now… woohoo.

Anyway, yeah, these are great. There’s some videos there in the stable too (including a cover of “Search & Destroy”), but the real pieces de resistance are these three vids from a 1992 live performance at ye olde Exit/In in Nashville:

The Shrubbery’s Dead Where Danny Used to Fall

Skyline Rant and Somewhere Between

Camping on Acid

Skot’s 1992 hair cracks me UP. Tommy just plain cracks me up, period.

The fact that these videos EXIST for me to be able to sneak peeks at on a Friday afternoon make my world a happier place today. It seems like Government Cheese just keeps poppin’ back up in some shape, form, or fashion every few years, and as I said several years ago already – they’re just like the band that just won’t die, and I’m glad of it. Long live the freakin’ Cheese, man!

*****

Along similar Nashville lines, found another gem on YouTube today… Practical Stylists performing “Shake Some Action” at Cantrell’s in the fall of 1983. Cantrell’s!!! I’m dying here of terminal nostalgia!! You can’t see much but the sound is pretty good.

About two years after this video was shot, drummer Jim Hodgkins and I were both attendants in a wedding that was being held in the mighty huge (not) metropolis of Valier, Illinois – a town where there is absolutely nothing to do, so the bride-to-be, maid of honor, and I (the bridesmaid) ending up attending the bachelor party, the only such one I’ve ever attended (because there was really nothing to do but sit around the hotel rooms, watch MTV, and get drunk). Which none of this has anything to do with anything, except to say Jim Hodgkins was not only a great drummer but was a fab bartender too.

(Odd that so many of my posts lately are about being (having been) drunk. I don’t even drink anymore, really haven’t in years. OK, well, whatever. As you were…)

F-I-S-H-S-T-I-C-K (Redux)

I promise I might talk about something besides music again this week. I know everybody’s not obsessed like I am.

I was perusing site statistics last night tho, and among other things (like wondering who the heck the stalker might be who is apparently searching for an old friend of mine), this one entry’s search terms jumped right off the screen at me (it did!) and sent me into paroxysms of giggles:

“SHRUBBERY FISHSTICK PEACHES”

Ah yeah – the sign of someone special. I knew IMMEDIATELY what they’d been looking for. It does my heart good just to know there are still other old Government Cheese fans out there lookin’ for stuff.

We had lots and lots of great bands bangin’ around Nashville and the ‘Boro in the ’80s, but the Cheese was by far my fave of the bunch. And given the opportunity to take 10 discs with me to last me forever on the proverbial deserted island, there’s a specially-made-for-me Cheese compilation from old vinyl that would be one of the ten… no contest.

No idea where/how*** anyone can get copies of any Cheese stuff anymore except Tommy Womack might be able to hit you back still, or at least point you in some direction of some sort. But if you find any old tapes or vinyl around somewhere in used shops or rare record specialty shops, I highly recommend you grab ‘em. Priceless. And even if they don’t suit you personally, I swear you’ll be able to sell it on eBay for a pretty penny to some desperate Cheese fan, so grab ‘em anyway.

So anyhow, I clicked to do the same “SHRUBBERY FISHSTICK PEACHES” search and got to smiling and giggling even more when I hit the number one link at Blogcritics.org ‘cos man… besides Government Cheese, I own nearly every other album they talk about on that page, or something by almost every band and artist… AND one of my ex-boyfriends is indirectly referenced in the article. Hehe. When I get some time, I need to go hunting down that earlier article they’re talking about, too. But read this article, it’s pretty neat and right on the money as far as that old scene goes.

There’s many a day that I wish I’d never left Nashville. And much like dude in the article said, I too cannot walk down the canned fruit aisle at the grocery store without thinking/humming/singing/whistling, “You’re gonna learn to like ‘em, yellow cling peaches…” Tee hee. :)

*** UPDATE – Thanks to another Cheese fan with obviously a sharper eye and better attention span than yours truly, I just learned that Tommy now has all the Cheese masters and a lot of video shot by their label, with plans for remastering and making it all available as time allows. AWESOME news! Thanks for sharing the love, Tim!

What’s Up?

So I found out in the course of my extended absence from here that (A) somebody besides the whiny KC/Greg/Duncan/Jo/etc contingent and Stef actually reads this thing, and (B) people I don’t even know, or at least don’t think I have ever met, actually read this thing, and regularly… so upon finding all this interesting info out I am once again motivated to rant and rave at will, at least until and unless I get pissed off again, so, in that case… hi!!

Really tho I’ve just been staying so busy constantly with eBay junk, i.e., my second just about dang near full time job, as well as some private buying, just haven’t had time to be here… vintage Barbie has been berry berry good to yours truly this summer, anyhow. But, I have waded thru and sifted out all the junk mail, expired stuff and other such clutter in my mailbox, answered a few, and am getting around to the rest, I think I still have mail from 1997 in there but I am slowly but surely getting around to everything, including maybe even updating the website some, in fact, I have to now because someone finally solved the Monarchs Riddle, yay!

I’ve also been pretty tied up trying to get my latest cat family addition, who’s now undergone $300 worth of surgery and basically had himself a facelift, to stop hating all his new brothers and sisters and, since he’s not playing nice, spending quality time with him in what’s become his room and he is most assuredly getting way too spoiled rotten.

What else have I done or has gone on… well, let’s see, our Stef in Boston got married in the interim so congrats all around there… I learned that I have, unknowingly, not had any health insurance coverage this entire year and have instructed my family that if something happens to me they are to sue my employer’s you-know-whats off… I got the new STP CD and man, is it awesome… been to funerals, missed funerals, found out about funerals three weeks too late… Chuckie & Jan have a beautiful new baby girl named Maggie…

Went to see The Watcher, now that was a cool movie, and James Spader and Keanu Reeves in one sitting is about more than a gal should be expected to have to withstand, but I must say here, it was REALLY weird seeing Keanu play a bad guy for a change, and every once in a while I felt like I was watching Bill & Ted’s Excellent Serial Killing Adventure… I continue to harbor reasonable grudges against 22% of my ex-boyfriends…

The Hoodoo Gurus played a one-off reunion gig in Sydney during the Olympics and I wasn’t there, but bless Robbo, Sven, and the always pleasant Andy Kelly for making me feel like I almost was…

Cole & Donna came down with the kids one day and yet another reason why I don’t have kids occurred to me after spending maybe an hour walking around the mall at Wolfchase looking for Halloween costumes (John Stephen is to be Bugs Bunny this year) and came home as exhausted as if I’d been walking around there for twenty hours instead of one…

KC experienced a fit of genuine and selfless generosity and I waited for the sky to fall in for a couple of days, but amazingly it never happened… for the first time ever in nearly eleven years I am thinking about changing jobs… it got cold… there was an unbelievably huge wreck right out in front of my house one night, the aftermath of which turned into kinda a neighborhood block party…

Our man in Sydney, Jimm, was here in the States for weeks and I didn’t get to see him this time around, but thanks to the power of USPS Priority Mail I made sure he went home with stacks of Goo Goo Clusters and chocolate Moon Pies… I also recently saw the movie Hillary and Jackie and it was truly incredible, I had no idea… the annual girls’ slumber party time is coming up again, and can you believe we’ve been doing this for ten years now…

Gorman Bechard’s (out of print but you can usually find it on Half.com) book The Second Greatest Story Ever Told is about the second most hilarious novel I’ve read in my entire life (the first being the oft-mentioned Tommy Womack book) and has many Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson references for any Replacements fan to die for… and I don’t know, that’s probably about it.

Spending Christmas in Chattanooga this year, so expect an ice storm to befall the entire Southeast again just before, just like it did last time I was driving to Chattanooga for Christmas and nearly stranded me by myself in Memphis for the holiday… just thought I’d warn y’all in advance.

So I like just about fell over in shock when I opened up my Commercial Appeal one morning a few weeks ago to find ’80s Nashville power pop party boys the White Animals as the front page story and photo in the Appeal section… my god, talk about one’s gloriously misspent youth staring one in the face! After getting over the shock, I was absolutely thrilled to learn that not only are they doing some shows here and there (including New Year’s Eve in Birmingham) but have put out a new compilation CD, which means I can finally have all, or almost all, of the Ecstasy album back again!! That poor pitiful cassette tape I had from 1986 literally died from overuse ages and ages ago, and definitely has been leaving a great big hole in my Nashville Underground music collection ever since. I need to update and revise the entire Links section again, but if you want a copy of the new compilation CD for yourself you can go to the Links section and go check it out, look at old and new photos, all kinds of stuff. Now if someone would just re-release that 1986 or ’87 Jet Black Factory album, The Movement’s self-titled one, the entire Government Cheese catalog and the City Without a Subway compilation on CD…

Anyway, I must go for now but will probably think of things I forgot later… goodnight Evan D. wherever you are, and talk to the rest of y’all later…

I Guess Maybe I Was Having a Bad Day

Ah, finally I am beginning to feel like a normal human being again. So, what exactly happened to me last week, you ask? Well, I’ll tell ya… mainly because I don’t want to repeat this story over and over again a hundred times in e-mail, phone, etc.

OK, starting from the beginning… my mother was on a business trip in Miami and the night she arrived, as she and her colleagues were coming back from dinner, she tripped over one of those concrete parking lot barriers and broke her wrist, bigtime, spent all night in the ER, you can do the math on that part. Well, she ended up staying in Miami for the next three days and completing her duties there… they couldn’t have done what they needed to down there anyway as far as surgery (well, technically they could have, but she certainly couldn’t be staying down there for weeks). Luckily this was her left arm, as she and I are both right-handed and boy wouldn’t that have sucked.

Anyhow, via friends of the family we had arranged for her to see a doctor back home and have what we thought would be fairly minor, no big deal, surgery, on Thursday last week, the morning after she was to arrive back in Nashville. There was some discussion between her and me over the course of the early part of the week about whether she could drive her car home from the airport or not – most unfortunately, this just happened to be one of the few times she flew out of Nashville instead of Memphis (oh thank you to my faaavorite airline, Northwest, for jacking up prices so high in Memphis and being such buttholes about letting other airlines have terminal space that it most of the time makes more sense financially to fly out of Nashville or Little Rock. Jerks. I recently caught the head of the Memphis airport saying in the paper that Northwest does what’s good for Memphis or something like that… bullsh*t.)

Anyway, it was finally decided that whether or not she could drive I was going to drive to Nashville Wednesday night anyway to either drive her home or follow her home, no problem. Since I hadn’t been truly prepared for this (my usual procrastinatory fault) I wound up sleeping about two hours on Tuesday night, with expectations that I could still get from Memphis to Nashville and backtrack halfway to eastern Northwest Tennessee and still be able to get a decent night’s sleep on Wednesday night… little did I know.

So, OK, it’s Wednesday by now and the first thing that happens is I walk out of the office on my way to my car late in the afternoon and the tornado sirens are going off, but the sky in Crosstown is clear as all get out. I even stop to get gas at the hated Tiger Market on Union, standing there pumping my gas while the sirens are going off and thinking, well, it must be the siren in Whitehaven I’m hearing ‘cos there is nothing going on up here in Crosstown and Midtown, which turned out to be true for the moment. I have the good sense to listen to talk radio on the way home to make sure I’m in no imminent danger, get home and my weather-predicting dogs go bounding outside, which is a pretty exact indication that nothing weatherwise is about to happen for the time being, so, great. Just about the time we get back inside I hear thunder – NBD (no big deal).

Then the sky turns black, then comes the monsoon. At this point it appears to be just lots of rain and thunder and lightning, but I turn on the TV just in case, to keep an eye on things. As I’m trying to get some stuff ready (in vain, ‘cos it will be another three hours before I can even go outside to put stuff in my car), I keep noticing interesting things on the weather report on TV, and my plans (“OK, I’ll leave about 7…”) kept getting later and later (“OK, I’ll leave about 8… OK, I’ll leave about 8:30…”). Then Channel X scares me to death by pinpointing what they think may be a tornado in southwestern Shelby County, tracking its upcoming path northeast up over the south loop of I-240, then up to Airways and Lamar, then toward… you guessed it, straight for me.

Dobie and I are sitting on the couch watching this phenomena and I have already gauged my direct route to the hall closet and how long it will take me to get there once I hear what everyone says tornadoes sound like, like a freight train or something… I can get there in seconds, yank everything out of the closet and have me and Dobie in there. (Baby, of course, being scared to death of not only thunderstorms but just plain rain, always has the safest place in the house anyway, under her usual table.) Well, I never heard the siren go off if it did – it’s right behind my house at the fairgrounds – nor did I hear any freight-trainlike noise – so I just stayed put and lo and behold, no tornado. (Of course, the other problem with the weather reports, which stayed on for about four or five hours straight that evening, was that it was raining so much and so hard the Doppler radar was barely able to pick up anything thru all the rain anyhow.)

Finally all the blasted rain and thunder and lightning dissipates and I’m getting things ready to go again, and I’ve already called the Nashville airport to get them to give my mom a page when she arrives, allegedly at the time on a 10:15 pm flight, to tell her I’m running late because of the storms here. I finally split town about 9 pm, about two hours after I’d initially planned and an hour after I’d planned during the course of the nastiness down here. Also, during the course of all the weather chaos there was a three-alarm fire at the FedEx superhub, so I hope there weren’t many of you expecting something from FedEx last week…

Anyway. Finally, I am on the road, slightly tired but having a great time as I’m in love with my CD player anyway and have some good music completely blasting. The weather’s calmed down by now tho I’m trying to keep an eye on the sky, prepared to pull over and hit the ditch at any moment if necessary, but for the first hour and a half, everything’s cool. I start hitting a little rain just north of Jackson, but that’s okay, rain’s no big deal other than the fact that every time an eighteen-wheeler passes me or I pass them I’m temporarily blinded by waterfalls over my car. Just about the time I get across the Tennessee River and the land where my beloved hometown lies, it starts getting worse. Nasty, nasty, nasty, but still quite driveable. Nooooo problem.

About the time I see my second humongous tree lying on the interstate, I decide maybe I better turn on the radio and see what’s up. KDF in Nashville, which I listened to and supported for years and years when I lived up there, let me down and, unable to find anything substantial on any other station, I was forced to listen to the big FM country station up there the rest of the drive (you know it had to be bad if I was listening to the country station). About the time I’m getting up around Kingston Springs (home of Christabella Wilson, grin), a caller calls in from Fairview (a very tiny town where my car once died about fifteen years ago on a drive home from college, I was stranded for hours and after a while beginning to feel like I was stuck in the movie Deliverance). While listening to the caller’s tale, it occurs to me that, had I left Memphis when I intended to, I would have hit the Fairview/Franklin exit on I-40 just about the time the tornado touched down in Fairview, which is only a hop, skip and jump from the interstate exit. I don’t know which of my guardian angels (all of them, I reckon) was looking out for me that night to make me wait out the weather in Memphis and then piddle around a little longer than I meant to getting ready to split town, but, man. (shudder)

So, I’m listening to the radio the rest of the way to Nashville and listening to how there’ve been touchdowns in ten counties, including Davidson County (Nashville), and by the time I hit the city limits I already know that most of East Nashville and a good deal of the rest are without power and there’s power lines down all over. Most of West Nashville looks okay so I’m sort of starting to take the death grip off the steering wheel, while still keeping an eye out for fallen trees and power lines, as I tool around the 440 loop. Well, it’s still raining, and I’m having a little trouble seeing, and then I realize why I’m having so much trouble seeing, because by now I’m in East Nashville and it’s pitch black. After finally maneuvering my way to the Nashville airport, I’m trying to do the right thing by parking where I think I’m supposed to park in short term parking, but I can’t see a darn thing, pitch, pitch black. I get parked (thanks to the little construction guy who was walking around with a flashlight, who was nice enough to inform me that the airport had been hit by a tornado), and walk thru the completely dark parking garage and up to the main door, where a security guy asks if he can help me. After telling him my mother was supposed to have arrived on a 10:15 pm Delta flight, I’m informed that the airport shut down around 9 or 9:30 due to the tornado. Great.

So, I leave the airport, thinking my mom is still in Atlanta at this point, and nearly have about fifty wrecks driving up Murfreesboro Road trying to get somewhere where there is electricity. I park at the Waffle House (ahh!) and then proceed to call everyone save for the people I really don’t want to be waking up at 1 in the morning trying to figure out where my mother is. (If you’re doing the math, Nashville is about a 2 hour, 45 minute drive or so from Memphis, and I left Memphis at 9 pm.) One of the first calls I made was to Delta, misguidedly thinking my mother was still in the Atlanta airport, and then I am informed that my mother got on a standby flight that landed in Nashville at 5:30 pm.

Okay, so, now I don’t know whether my mom is at the Nashville airport (in which case I was going to make her get a cab to the Waffle House as I wasn’t relishing any more possibility of a wreck on the way back to the airport), or if she got her car and tried to drive on home, in which case she might have gotten caught by the tornado. In any case, there’s no answer at my mother’s house; nothing on the answering machine at my house; and the Nashville airport folks, who I also called, were no help (“This lady is having surgery at 9 in the morning two hours away and you won’t go look for her?” – “Sorry, ma’am, we can’t.” Bah.)

Having exhausted all possible phone attempts and being on the verge of just getting the heck out of Nashville and driving back westward, I realized I had no other real choice than to retrace the murderous, war-zonelike path back to the Nashville airport. So I do, without incident (I should interject here that one of my thoughts as I was leaving Memphis that evening was, “OK, God, if this is gonna be my night to die then so be it, but if it’s not gonna be my night to die, then please don’t let me wreck my car!!”). This time I go up the arrivals ramp of the airport and park where they would have probably arrested or ticketed me if there hadn’t been a tornado and ensuing blackout, and go in search of my now-handicapped mother. The emergency lights are on in the airport so you can pretty much see, but I walked around for about a half hour in the utter chaos the airport had turned into with stranded passengers with no luck. I was just about to leave, having decided that I didn’t know where she was but she wasn’t there, when I decided to make one more trip around. As I got ready to start up some stairs, a fellow standing at the bottom stops me and goes, “Are you looking for your mother?” I say, “Yes, a blonde with one arm in a sling?” Bingo. After having been in Nashville for almost two and a half hours, finally.

The rest of the tale is a little shorter… we arrive at my mom’s house around 4:30 in the morning, get up a couple of hours later (at this point I’ve had four hours’ sleep in two days) and head to the doctor’s office, where we think she’s going to be having fairly minor, not a huge deal, surgery. Wrong. At 1 that afternoon she’s headed into what we now think is Same Day Surgery, which turns out in the course of the surgery to wind up being fairly major surgery. Actually this probably turned out for the better, since the other would have put her in a full arm cast (in which case she wouldn’t have been able to do much of anything and would have probably had to come to Memphis to stay with me indefinitely), and instead she’s got the whole rods-and-pins thing, which is gnarly and has been quite painful but she’s able to move fingers and elbows and such, so that in the end is much cooler. You do not even come close to realizing how much you need your fingers and shoulders and elbows until you break something like this…

Anyway, other than the fact that it was a pretty painful situation it was kinda neat since we were there at the hospital back home and the majority of nursing personnel around were either Mom’s students or former students and also included my best friend from the 7th grade, as well as many of my mother’s colleagues, and we pretty much got the VIP treatment, which was cool. My mother was insisting on going home but finally gave up insisting, someone sent me home for a while on the premise that I could get some sleep but, knowing that if my head hit a pillow I wouldn’t wake up ’til the next morning, I just did some stuff and went back and spent the night on a very uncomfortable hospital couch. And in the morning we got to go home earlier than we would have probably had we not been getting slightly VIP treatment, so that was cool too.

There was much to be done at the house too, tho, before I could leave and go back to Memphis, suffice it to say I didn’t get all that much sleep the rest of the week either but that was okay! There was also the problem of how to get my mother’s car back to where it should be from Nashville, and let me tell you I was not looking forward to having to drive back up there, but that turned out spiffily as my grandmother and her husband (who live in Nashville) just happened to be coming from there that weekend and were kind enough to drive the thing back to us, yay. So, with Mom situated and I having gone out to the store and bought enough stuff to keep her from having to go to the store for probably three or four weeks, I moseyed on back to Memphis and arrived home in the middle of the night early Monday morning to deal with the certain chaos there would be at my own house, and here I am. Still tired this early Friday morning, but better.

In any case, last week was not a good week.

So, what else… well, I saw Tommy Womack and his lovely wife, Nashville’s Channel 5′s Beth Tucker, on TV briefly while I was home, that was kinda cool. Tommy informs me that at the moment he is not on the schedule for the downtown Nashville thing with NRBQ in June so that’s a bummer, I hope that changes.

I am tickled that my eBay rating is edging closer to 200 now, although it would have been nice if everyone I’ve sold stuff to would have bothered to leave feedback since it’d be closer to 300 than 200 if they had, sigh.

And I’m in the middle of some rather extreme life-changing decisions, but more on that some other time, maybe, as things are pretty tentative right at the moment… let’s just say some things were just meant to be, it just took me about five and a half years to realize it? We’ll see, in any case KC won’t speak to me for years, which is usually kinda a blessing. (snicker) Gotta go as I’m still pretty exhausted, talk to some of you more over the weekend, and happy late birthday to Jules – ’til later…