Cowboy Confessional

Let’s just hope they have learned all the positions for prayer, if you know what I mean.

On either end of an Ohio cornfield there is an evangelical church and a strip club, separated by some very nervous Amish folk.  The strip club is nothing to write home to mama about.  It is a shabby building that oddly resembles a resurrected church, though as a strip joint perhaps Beelzebub performed the resurrection rites.  The dancers have requisite Midwest belly pouch, some are decorated with tattoos, and let’s not tally the c-section scars.  The Foxhole is a place one web critic called “the shadiest, dirty skank a** hole in the wall I’ve ever been.”

But why trust the word of a Senator.

Left to their own undulations, the Foxhole might never have achieved notoriety beyond being the bottom rung in the “gentleman’s” club ladder.  Indeed, such a putrid pole parlor would never have received press unless religious zealots had not made it an issue.

Oddly, Muslims have nothing to do with this story.

Nine miles down the road from the Foxhole sits New Beginnings Ministries, which on the surface sounds like an oxymoron given how long ministries have been a business classification (just ask Saint Peter who started the industry before Christ’s corpse got cold).  New Beginnings’ pastor was unhappy about competing for spiritual real estate with an accumulation of discount and not very exotic dancers.  As the pulsating pastor pontificated “We cannot share territory with the devil.”

He hasn’t seen the falling real estate prices in Ohio.  There is plenty of cheap land for everybody.

The flock at New Beginnings began to badger the “babes” at the Foxhole.  For months the congregation has photographed the license plate numbers of Foxhole patrons and generally annoyed the workers with scripture.  They stood outside of the club, making a highly visible and entirely contrary environment to the one inside.  They shouted at the burlesque princesses, using their stage names and applying a carrot-and-stick trick, offering to pay their living expenses while reciting bible verse.  In other words, they have taken all the fun out of either being nearly naked on stage or providing one dollar incentives (there is no fun to be found in buying five dollar Budweisers).

So the bump-and-grinders counter protested at the church.

Come Sunday morning, some Foxhole peelers pop-out of their clothing and into bikinis or less, and stand outside of New Beginnings, no doubt proving a new beginning to teenage boys attending adoration services (and perhaps to some of the teenage girls).  They hold signs quoting scripture to give the pastor and parishioners some Christian enlightenment.  “Light and darkness cannot exist together, so The Fox Hole has got to go,” is the pastor’s retort.

Light and dark coexist – they just have to time share.  Like the master Ray Hubbard says, there are two kind of people – the day people and the night people, and it is the night people’s job to take the day people’s money.

The fact is that extremes have always co-existed as long as nobody thought they were perpetually right and used force to enforce their perceptions (i.e. Osama bin Laden and other porcine syphilitics).  Yin and his ugly brother yang.  For example, there is currently a strip club in Jerusalem, though historical records do not tell if there were table dancers at the Last Supper.  Extremes even blend.  I have few doubts that more than one member of New Beginnings has ventured into a bimbo bar before.  The dancers are the night people, and it is their job to take the congregation’s money.

If nothing else, this bilateral cluster clucking is an example of American freedom in action.  Woman have a right to make money given whatever ‘talent’ or assets they have.  People have the right to either peruse the performers or be dedicated to their dogma.  Everybody has the right to speak their minds regardless of how empty they may be.  Yes, everybody has the right to free commerce, free communion and free speech.

But not in the VIP room.  That always costs extra.

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It is gray and cold in San Francisco today, which means it must be summer time.

I have long accused Gawd of playing one specific cruel trick on every human he assembles.  In my case he made me a Southern gentleman who respects and honors the softer sex, yet also made me overtly amorous, resulting in the innate instinct to bed most of the world’s women and yet ethically restrained from doing so – a lifetime of teal tinged testes.  The Old Man Above made Bill Clinton a billy goat too, but instead of sexual ethics gave him a lust for chubby woman, which might be the worse of our fates.

It occurs to me that perhaps Yahweh might get yucks from inflicting similar ironies on urban settings.  Chicago received a huge industrial economic base and a political infestation to remove all the wealth industry created.  New York was granted a cosmopolitan vibe with a rich arts culture and a population of hard people whose main mission is to suck the art out of life.  Hollywood has gobs of image and no soul.  Washington got power san a conscious.

San Francisco was awarded a beautiful landscape and enough fog to conceal it.  Scenic San Francisco vistas are vacated by summer temperatures that make Alaskan’s shiver (yet people run around naked here is alarmingly large numbers).

While researching my next book (whose subtitle is an insider outs San Francisco) I discovered that San Francisco’s central essence is irony.  It is a town torn between anarchy and fascism, spiritualism and salacity, free love and expensive parking.  In San Francisco for every action there is an equal and opposite overreaction.  Familiarity may breed contempt (and children) but San Francisco breeds contradiction.

Contradictions are, in no small part, responsible for San Francisco being both prototypically American and not American at all.  San Francisco revels and rebels in freedom providing you don’t smoke (tobacco) in public, recycle and compost, and never vote Republican.  This pull between a yen for the freedom to be yourself and civic censure of anyone one free enough to be politically incorrect makes San Francisco America’s bastard step-sister.  As the master Mencken mentioned about San Francisco “What fetched me instantly … was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States.”

In San Francisco your banker wears tie dye t-shirts and streetwalkers wear diamonds.  The best bars are dives and the best music comes from buskers.  The best scenery is on the costal cliffs, which the prevailing fog prevents you from seeing except on October 12^th.  This town is irony in action, a perpetual self contraction.  Perhaps Allah’s ambush on Frisco was to give it a split personality where each bipolar part is itself insane.  Yes, if you can deal with The City’s imbecilities it is an entertaining place.  Just keep your hands in the ride at all times.

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Everyone has the right to be stupid.  Unfortunately some people abuse the privilege.

Take the two cases of Jennifer Keeton and Julea Ward, who independently have (il)logical or religious problems with homosexuals.  Both are or were students in public universities (Augusta State and Eastern Michigan respectively) in graduate programs for counseling.  Both women – who are attractive enough to convert Castro District regulars – had the poor judgment to publicly discuss what they thought.

Keeton believes homosexuality is a personal choice and lifestyle but not a “state of being.”  The two are not mutually exclusive.  Some homo sapiens are clearly hardwired from birth to prefer people with similar plumbing.  Others have no particular preference, and choose through trial and Eros.  Keeton sees only one of the two alternatives, which means she suffers from intellectual myopia.

Ward is worse in believing that homosexuality is morally wrong.  One dictionary defines morality as “conformity to the rules of right conduct.”  In an allegedly free society like America, “right conduct” is theoretical.  The People have clearly said that as long as one’s behavior does not purposefully or negligently harm someone else, there is no “wrong” conduct (granted our laws often violate this principle, but that is why The People prefer physically violating their elected officials).  Ward’s assessment is based on her own perception of “right conduct”, which she is free to inscribe on the inside of whatever woman’s thigh she wishes to lick.

Or not.  It is allegedly a free country.

What makes their cases problematic is that they are being tossed out of college onto their perky little heterosexual keisters.  In statements sounding Soviet, the administrators of Augusta State have asked that Keeton be indoctrinated.  A District Judge upheld Ward’s prior dismissal for declining to guide gays and deliberate with dykes.  Keeton was told she had to attend a “remediation program”, which is academic literary effluvium for “reeducation camp” and an attempt to force a fellow human to think what she doesn’t.  With Ward, she was ousted for refusing to counsel people pertaining to matters that she personally opposed based on her religious beliefs.

Who is a girl going to abide by – her God or her government.  Well, God does have seniority.

Several collisions between individual rights are at play here.  People have the right to believe what they like, and no government has the right to force them to believe otherwise.  Consumers have the right to spend their money as they see fit, including taxpayers forced to lob lucre into state colleges.  People have the right of association, which includes the right from association, and thus cannot be compelled to counsel anyone they dislike for whatever inane reasons they may have for disliking them.  Being taxpayers themselves, Keeton and Ward have equal access rights to public universities, and morality codices – be they the student’s or the public’s as reflected through government schools – cannot keep them from access.  Equal access to taxpayer funded counseling services are also extended to taxpaying lumber dykes and butt pirates.

Solomon couldn’t solve this dispute.

Unsurprisingly the correct solution is the most difficult, untenable and unpolitical of them all.  Eliminating government universities solves the whole mess rather nicely.  Keeton and Ward could wonder off to whatever educational institutes of parochial paranoia they prefer, obtain degrees with their own capital, and in their subsequent careers commit whatever malpractice they prefer.  Taxpayers would then be unburdened and could invest directly into the university, curriculum and state of (un)consciousness they conceive.  Everyone can be made happy by cutting government out of the equation.

Which is why it won’t happen in my lifetime.  Government, the original virus, tends to grow, mutate and infect until the host dies or some powerful antibody (a.k.a. revolution) occurs.  Americans have failed to contain the pathogen called government, and thus we must suffer the disease until death or a butt full of armed antiseptics is administered.

A Mexican stand-off (ooops, sorry, an undocumented stand-off) remains.  Freedom of thought must be preserved and thus all attempts by government to force conformity must be eradicated.  Keeton and Ward cannot be dismissed from their equal access/opportunity educational path because they think wrong (and there are only three crimes in the word – the crime of being stupid, the crime of thinking wrong, and the crime of driving with your head up your rump).  Government cannot keep these women from university programs on “thinking wrong” grounds, nor can Mao-like reeducation camps become a substitute for reasoned or unreasonable disagreement.  Government caused this problem by getting into the higher education business, and more government is the worst possible solution.

Ostracization however is always effective.

Nobody can be compelled to associate.  You cannot be forced to like someone else or say a civil word to them.  Shame is an underused tool in modern society, and one that would be very applicable here.  Living in San Francisco I have numerous friends and acquaintances who are members in good standing of the Church of the Carpet Chewer or the Sausage Factory Synagogue.  Can’t say I find a dimes worth of difference between a diesel dyke and a truck drivin’ man, except that the dyke might have more chin stubble.  Homos are people with preferences (and I even share some preferences with lesbians).  It is impossible for anyone who has spent significant time around the other clans to see them as immoral, living a “lifestyle” instead of possessing pre-existing preferences, or unworthy of counseling.  Doing so would be stupid.

Stupid people we mock.  Shame them for willful ignorance.  Deride their lack of insight, empathy and intelligence.  So let Keeton and Ward keep their educational opportunity while we individually marginalize their very existence.  Let’s assure that their social isolation is so profound they will need counseling themselves.

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Mixing ca be maddening, but some times it is mandatory.

Among bipeds with biases, Stolen Horses is one of my more popular tunes.  Yet the mix has never quite been right.  After laying down a new vocals track (that better reflected the aghast of the narrator) certain weaknesses of the mix because painfully obvious.

In this latest version, some minor tweaks have been made which made all the difference in the world.

First, I’ve quit being shy about panning instruments mid song.  When the vocals need an unobstructed center, shifting guitars to the side makes perfect sense, and bringing them back to middle ground in solos works.

The accent electric sounded too mellow, so running it through a distortion stack gave the sounds more urgent and angry overtones, which match the theme of the song.

Finally, pumping up the volume on the drums gave it a bit more drive.

In MP3 format, there is too much mud, but that will be dealt with another night.  In the mean time, these horse will run their course.

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This is becoming common – another video based on data taken directly from my Gun Facts book.  Keep up the good work troops!

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