picking up the loosies from the grass below

good morning ~

(click the YouTube link to listen)

in lieu of a new track this week please accept this really nice video of the collabo jam that guitarist Dustin Wong and I did at our show in Los Angeles a couple of months ago - Solarc just posted it

this is the last MBB email I’ll send before going on tour next week (ahh!!!!!!) - really hope to meet some more of you lovely readers out there, say hello:

"Andre palmed my skull"

"I'm sorry, what was that?"

"Andre palmed my skull once"

I waited for the airborne firework to explode and tried again.

"You're going to have to give it to me one more time, I'm sorry"

"Andre palmed my skull one time. He grabbed it easy as you'd grab a melon, fingers came down over my eyes. I couldn't see! They did a great match down here, this is back when I was in high school. Big man."

Among the many terrifying and surprising things happening during the Lebanon Valley Speedway's annual Eve of Destruction, this conversation caught me particularly off guard. The man sitting in front of us had started in on what seemed like one of the defining anecdotes of his entire life and was quickly rattling off the highlights of the story in-between announcements from the racetrack's commentator and the roar of dangerously cranked engines. I knew he was a sweetheart because he kept sending photos of his extremely stoked grandkid to presumably the kid's parents. And I couldn't help but notice this because his phone's type was magnified to an extreme degree and his brightness was cranked all the way up. But he had some kind of slogan on his american flag t-shirt that seemed to be saying something about the armed forces or POWs that I didn't quite understand and I wasn't sure if he approved of the amount of powerclashing my two friends and I were doing with our outfits one intimate bleacher row behind them. He must have overheard me talking about going to the Lucha Libre match we saw last week. Here's my moment, he thought, this young freaks are gonna love. His story continued.

"Yeah we were out there waiting for him after it was over, stood by the exit door in the parking lot. He came right over to me and popped his hand right on top of me. We met Hulk Hogan, too, he asked us for a whole case of beer. He was a big man, too, not as big as Andre of course. Met up with a few of them at a bar afterwards, got to meet many of those folks. I even..."

And here the grandfather - bald with a mustache with a t-shirt tucked into jeans - expertly pantomimed rolling up a fat fucking doink, twisting his fingers in his lap in that unmistakable posture, laying his index finger across the contents of the joint to keep it nicely packed, even giving his object work a little sealing lick before savoring an imaginary toke of it. This dude must have been an Olympic-level weed smoker back in his day. All of this was done just out of sight of his grandkid who was enthralled watching the beater vehicles limp at maximum speed around the racetrack.

"...with the Samoans. One of the greatest nights of my life."

I figured he was cool with me saying "hell yeah" in front of his grandkid, I let it rip, I could see the pride ripple in the man's eyes.

People jumping shirtless from a forklift onto a barbed wire trampoline, a sedan from the 90s careening all the way through a camper trailer, running through it like it was paper, school busses taking the 8 laps of the speedway at remarkable velocity, a car at full speed running straight into a ladder while a guy in a cowboy hat backflipped off the very top step, a man set on fire, standing with a steady thumbs up as the blasts of the fire extinguisher calmed away the flames. One stunt was particularly crude: they hit a dude with a mini cooper. Normally there's more setup than that, more prestige to the trick. This time they just straight up hit a guy with a mini cooper and unsurprisingly this is the action that required an ambulance. But then they sent out the rodeo clown doing wheelies in the micro car and then the band that played flaming instruments on a truck that also shot flames tooted around their version of "low rider" and everything continued.

Would it even be the Eve of Destruction without a little menacing edge? Take, for example, the man in a cowboy hat and oversized sunglasses sat just across the aisle from us, as blackout as I've seen anyone get maybe ever by 7:30pm. How was it even possible that he was already this fucked up? Surely it was not on the $4 miller lites - ah, I see a water bottle and him grimacing, it is filled with hard alcohol. Kid Rock's "Cowboy" came on the loudspeakers as the Prophets of Regret set up on one their stunts. He pointed directly at me, almost touching me with his index finger, almost like the Sistine Chapel.

"it's NOT a helmet"

He adjusted the brim of his cowboy hat, I was once again confused by something someone said to me unprompted.

"it's NOT a helmet...........it's not a helmet"

Was he under the impression that I was accusing him of wearing a helmet? Was he making some kind of more metaphorical commentary? Why was I the person with whom he so urgently needed to communicate?

I watched him stumble down the steps of the bleachers and make a showy little Chaplain-esque dance of avoiding the people coming and going, the way that truly drunk people are always doing a going through a charade.

Later my two friends said that they think the state police picked him up, he was being walked out of the parking lot while they were coming back from their smoke break. What would become of him, churned as he now would be in the carceral system of 2025 America? Hard to say, but from through the cracks where we sat I saw something I'll never forget - he dropped his pack of Newports on the way down the bleachers and now there was another figure in shadow, just barely visible, picking up the loosies from the grass below.

But what about you? Did you ever meet a famous wrestler? When was the last time you were blackout drunk in public? If you were standing on top of a ladder and a car was coming straight at you, would you be able to backflip off the top in time?