Finding My Heart at the Bottom of a Glass at the Bar Down the Road

Yesterday we returned to our old home, to sell off the remaining livestock and pick up what remained of Mr. Angry, the murderous ram, all neatly wrapped in plastic and white butcher's paper. It was the first time my wife had seen the house empty and lifeless. She wept and likened it to viewing the body of a deceased loved one.

It was a good night for my dear sister to watch the kids, while we walked down to the neighborhood bar and talked over my bourbon and her girly drink - though she told me she is beginning to take a liking to the bourbon, as she stole sips from my glass. They serve their drinks cheap and stiff, which I appreciated greatly.

We discussed the whole ordeal of the last couple years of our lives, and how she felt that our little place and the dream of the farm were the last of what remained from before the leukemia. We held on long and hard, but we sacrificed too much. Both of us feel happiness in our new place, spending more time with the kids and each other, and looking forward to enjoying the things we love and had sacrificed for the farm. But our soft hearts still feel the sting.

Val cut me off after two cigs, but allowed me another bourbon. We laughed at overhearing a kid trying too hard and obviously to get laid. Val told me my previous "Home" blog post was a lie; I will always be too much a redneck to claim to be urban. We agreed to make a better effort at keeping up on the redneck activities we had allowed to fall by the wayside, such as demolition derby at the speedway - Brenden has loved demolition derby ever since he watched my longtime friend compete at the county fair. We even have a Youtube playlist for him that is mostly made up of train and car crashes.

I have been struggling with the direction to take this blog, which I felt needed a shift, along with my major life shift, or perhaps ending it altogether. I have been unhappy with most of these attempts, which may have, at some level, been born of me wishing to no longer want what I once wanted. I think I may quit torturing you readers with music I listened to during dark days in college, but very rarely listen to anymore, and then only out of a misguided sense of nostalgia.

As I wrote before, this blog is a place where I work through my thoughts, and often these lines of thought will be abortive. When I turn on Pandora, I do not have a rap, electronic, downtempo or IDM station, but instead have a list chock full of folk, alt country, old country, outlaw country, alt rock and so on. Yes, I have been lying to you for the past few months. I post up LCD Sound System and then go listen to John Prine from an old boom box in the garage window, while finding a good spot of prominence to put up my grandpa's rusty old PBR trashcan, plan out my garden and stealth chicken run, and surf Craigslist for a project car. I may hate pop-country, but I'll be damned if I don't like Mark Knopfler. So, while I now live in a place where I could easily live without a car, let alone a truck, and while my beat up truck may have been towed away and I now mow my lawn weekly, I will try to return to posting from my country heart, for in the country is where my heart still resides.

We stumbled home, laughing and talking as we haven't in a while. I will be happy wherever I end up, so long as Val is there. We may have failed up in the world, but our hearts still lay outside city limits, whatever that may come to mean.