Well Bottom Blues

A sad baritone blowing big round. Jello-tremulous Os of the blues.

That’s what started this ramble into a pleasant melancholia, a fizzy afternoon beer buzz of sadness not quite cheerless, simply there like a color in the air, a sky so blue and clear you can hear it, a faint hum beneath your feet, a Fall afternoon so perfectly empty you just want to lay down in the arms of some big oak and root, thinking: well, if the world is going to caterwaul in a crashing train wreck, I guess I’m not busy today. Go ahead. I voted early.

And then you remember the Indians, stuffed into the lobby of the museum. So you go and the colors aren’t quite right, all that expanse of white marble flattening the chromatic costumes into something cartoonish, stealing the scene’s perspective like some docent-run VCR on endless loop in a neutral cream room of neatly labeled artifacts under glass…instead of the slow approach up a street lined with low, sameish houses, long rows of shotguns and maybe a catercorner store.

First just a spyboy peering around the colored chalkboard brightly proclaiming Hot Breakfast and Cold Beer, then a hollering of tambourines in the distance and then you spot them, turning a corner, bright-beaded bird creatures from a dream, singing in a language they have made themselves.

That’s when you decide: No, thank you I want to slap the snooze button on that doom clock your time doesn’t apply to us down here we’re on Central River Time and things—things are just a bit slower and we’re not quite ready for all your rapturous end times of votes and riots and war. We’re all in pawn up to the brim of our sharp fur felt hats so here’s a dime: call in all your breathless bad news dispatches stories to someone else.

If you’re going to destroy your world try to keep it down to a manageable rumble in the distance, please, perhaps a smudge of smoke on the horizon like a marsh fire and leave us to ourselves, to the scat-o-logical chantings of Fi-Yi-Yi to mad tambourine time, only at war over the prettiest, the bright side of the poverty and sadness you turn into your 24-hour horrorshow and we turn into a sad baritone sax blowing big round Jello-tremulous Os, measuring the girth of the blues just about city sized and right for us, thanks.