Oral History Project, continuation, 3/5/2018, Sunday into Monday

Interviewing one's own internal private personal Keith Richards, around 5 AM:

Well, it is like a war.  Tending bar like that, people wanting to talk to you, you wanting to talk to people, brother comes in with family, wife's birthday, you might be pissed at him for his mean streak, but it's all cool when they get there.  Felt rather like shit.  Walked through the woods, and the tree pollen, busting out all over me, but it's some sunlight, and it's fresh air, and in the woods the wind is not dragging at you, that mean wind of city avenues, and big egos, channeling Mother Nature's beautiful flows into something sinister, noisy, and the cars are running along, and the sirens, and thank god you've turned off the sidewalk after the bridge and into the woods.

But every damn shift is like a war.  It takes all your physical energy, it really does.  You fight in pain, your bloody hands are cold and can't move, so that when you get to work and try to take your trusty old wine opener to cut the foil off the top of a wine, so that you can get at the cork easily--and you have to make that cut nicely, like a surgeon, no ragged edges to cut your dry fingers open--it's rough as hell, and it almost hurts, and you think, shit, I think I'm too old for this job if just opening a bottle of wine hurts like that.

Well, after this parade of needy people, entertained, entertaining, you somehow think it will lead somewhere, all this work, that of being a rock n roll legend, well, then you got to get home.  Bicycle you left, the lightest one, you try riding that home and goddamn it's cold, the wind's hitting you in the face, your ass, your crotch, the whole pelvis and the back are hurting, and you say, just get me closer to home, you come up past the Turks, you can barely take it and just walk the rest of the way with the bike, and then goddamn by the time you get in the door, groaning, cold, you don't even want turn on the tv in the cold, you just go to bed.

Later you wake up.  Wars, for reasons physical, emotional and spiritual, can not be fought without a healthy dose of pain killer.  Wine, and a good amount of it.  

I mean, you know, the old Bible stories are exactly right, the right thing to listen to.  That's where blues comes from, all songs, all music, really.  The constant war, the constant battle, the constant back and forth between the prophets and the warrior kings, on and on, and on.  Exile, the desert, dealing with shitty people...  Murdering...  There's a great resonance in them.  And so I watch a little bit of some series called The Bible, a History Channel production, where all the actors are told to scream at the top of their lungs, half of the sounds of swords being pulled out of their sheaths, and that new bloody sound that's popular now, of cutting through the viscera, the fascia, human flesh and organs, throats, and the sound men have added a moist quality to it, like to make the sound of blood being spilled, and then roars of battle and on the next guy for our little king of the tribe, metal against body.  

It's no wonder, you know, look through history, Lincoln loved reading the Bible, all the prophets, and kings, the battles and such, shit laid to waste and all that...


I guess that's what I liked about my job, in a way.  It was physical.  It hurt.  It made you stiff with aches, neck, back, made you feel weak as a kitten.  Made you just feel sick, in need of a warm blanket and a dark place.  It was as close as you could practically get, being a nonviolent type, the restaurant business, to war, marshaling all your lines of soldiers, ammo, back up...  No one ever saw that, that ice berg depth work of getting ready to go, as it to answer any question, any shift in the battle.


That's why we grant the old Stones guitar player with that laugh of many cigarettes a kind of prophet status.  These are the old prophets come again.  

People, you know, you wait on them, they can turn on you, they can turn into pricks quite quickly, or they can sit around and spend a long time lingering, and you wonder, what the hell are they doing...

But it's a war, constant battle, the quest for kingly leadership, lonely, wanting a prophet...

And the people of DC, goddamn what a draining bunch of jerks they are, not so much who they are or how they act and talk, but for all their ambitions...  Some way they can find a safe job that doesn't hurt, that won't kill you, that doesn't make you broke and homeless and your children dead, that doesn't make your people enslaved.. Good luck to them and their degrees and their higher careers...

I feel like I know where I stand... Not a profiteer...

No fucking wonder, when they got back to their tents after a day's work, after a nice nap, you got your guitar and your bottle of wine, and who gives a ....  what hour it is....

Keith Richards was once a nice little boy.  Great family.  Soulful people.   And still, a nice guy.

But war, you know, you fight when you have to fight.  Then you sleep when you can.  You eat when you can, whatever you have.  You have a rough idea of when you have to fight again.   Are you ready, will you be, in so many hours, who know.  But the battle goes on and on.

You just got to get used to it, and not care, not get upset by it...  



Anyway, after chopping a lot of ego heads off, and dealing with marauding infidels, rival powers, the boy needs some guitar and some wine, if he can't have some wifely company at 6 AM before going back to bed to face another day...


But it all is perfect.  The perfect interplay of the people in your life, the circumstances.  You just have to be enough of a saint to realize all that.