duck-shaped pain

2000-09-03
Where I Am Rural In Theory Only

People here in Montrose, where my mom lives and where I am spending the weekend, always ask me what life is like in "the big city." I am always momentarily disoriented by this comment, because it takes me a bit of thinking to realize that what they mean by "the big city" is the town where I live, which is in no way big and is really only a city because the town logo proclaims it to be one.

In my mind, I live out in the sticks. There are horses across the street from me, and a corn farm just one house over on the east. But, I'm also minutes away from conveniences galore: a ginormous new Safeway, three liquor stores, and an interstate highway that will lead (eventually) to anywhere I might want to go. My town, if you go by population alone, isn't terribly small -- 45,000 people -- but it feels tiny to me.

I think that everyone thinks of the place that they grew up in as being small and restrictive. Friends of mine who grew up in Denver tell me how crappy it was to grow up there, and how they couldn't wait to get out of there to search for greener fields. To someone who had lived their entire lives on the other side of the state, however, Denver was the Biggest Place Ever. Sure, there were much bigger places out there, or so you'd read once, but they were much further away and stranger and just getting to Denver was a large accomplishment, one which most of the people around you never even do.

But to hear that the place you grew up in -- the place you think of, deep down, whether you admit it openly or not, as a complete hicksville -- is considered the "big city" -- it just blows the mind.


I drove my mom and her puppy to Montrose this afternoon, making sure to take my new favorite scenic route, the one which goes through Pea Green/Peagreen. Being a holiday weekend and all, the traffic on the highway was more that I really wanted to deal with, so a leisurely saunter through the corn sounded about right.

We listened to two CDs on the way, ones which I've written about here before: More A Legend Than A Band by the Flatlanders, and Have Moicy! -- which, along with my CD of live Bill Monroe recordings, form my driving-fast-through-the-rural-areas musical triumvirate.

I never pay much attention to lyrics. The only ones which I really notice are those which fall on the extremes of the clever-banal spectrum. This has its advantages -- it allows me to like bands which are really compelling musically but which fail to live up to even minimal standards in the lyrics department [1] -- but has a dark side, too. When people ask me what I like about certain songs, I can't just quote some sassy lyrics I'm stuck trying to coherently describe to them why I like that key change I'm awfully fond of. [2]

But, when I listen to music while any sort of relative is around, I suddenly become hyperaware of the lyrics in whatever we're listening to, especially when it comes to Forbidden Behaviors. I could be listening to something which I've heard hundreds of times before, but it's while I'm listening to it with my cousins or my aunt that I'll realize, "Oh my God! This song is about drugs!" Then I become all nervous, wondering if said relative is listening to the music as intently as I am, taking mental notes and finding evidence to support their favorite theory about my eventual decline.

So, even though I knew this already, abstractly, here is what Have Moicy! is about, at least in the my-mom-is-listening-to-this-with-me sense [3]: Eatin'. Humpin'. Smoking pot in the woods. General nekkidness.

My mom seemed to take it all in stride, though. The dog just slept.


Monday is everyone's favorite day of Enforced Fun, so I guess I'll be taking it off, too. I have no idea if there'll be any entries until Tuesday, but you never know.


[1] Such as, say, my favorite band.

[2] And I do love key changes. I don't know why this is -- I suspect that it's linked somehow to the seven years I spend singing in school choirs, where the appearance of a key change in a song was treated as an enormous big deal, something which only the most skilled among us would survive with any sort of aplomb. I relished the challenge, even though I was a really crappy singer.

[3] Which cancels out all other enjoyment of what you're listening to at the time. You cannot find pleasure in songs when you're in the my-mom-is-listening-to-this-with-me mode.

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