What I realized, playing for lunch money, is that strip malls are windows on America's soul -- full of hope and dope and failure. They are built to fail. They always do; they have to; American capitalism depends on it: a steady churn of failure -- worshipped by tech-addled magimetricians as "creative destruction" -- that fuels mass migrations from one form of slavery or a-reasonable-facsimile-thereof to another (those poor symphony musicians). Who was it said money was the root of all evil? Whoever that girl was, she might've known a thing or two.
I also realized that I needed one for me, personally: a stake in a strip mall, in one of those boxes of silver-framed plate glass looking as anonymous as ancestors in a picture album: all those mom-and-popped, family-farmed, self-maidens that picked up and moved away somewhere to a doomtown monoculture that might last long enough to raze a family with scrip and liquor and asbestos siding. Almost heaven, east-by-god Pennsylvania I mean Tennessee I mean Texas I mean Oregon I mean Tennessee. Again. Bullseye on a map is whatever you hit.
Which is me, I'll admit it. What I hit is a mostly-always matter of chance: luck. Even knowing this, though, I always try to parse the more successful instances of luck into form. Bad idea. It doesn't work. I take good luck and turn it into bad form. It is a skill; one that I'm not proud of. It's that kind of skill that starts with Buddhism and winds up with Hello Kitty.
When I busk in the downtowns, there is always someone to laugh at the tootly toy I play. I laugh back and tell them I am the Yo-Yo Ma of the recorder: I have memorized all of the J. S. Bach recorder sweets (that's how I spell what I say it because if you spell it the other way it's some kinda music publishing bullshit), and I will melt them in the air anywhere, at the drop of a hat trick. They say "do some tricks, then, yo-yo man" and drop in a quarter with a pitying, uncomprehending -- because it's not bluegrass or rawk or singersongrotter -- smile. Unless there's a five already in there: nothing kills charity quicker than parity, like that girl said. In which case they tell me to go back to Oregon and play with the whales. My answer is pat: "You mean Denmark" which makes for an even more uncomprehending smile.
There's a method to my rottenness: all these small downtowns in the very particular region where I busk are in the middle of a marketing meltdown. First off, what they don't tell you: They want people to come here and start African slavery all over again. But this time everybody can be an African (all lives matter), just the way Civil War re-enactors can be fat. Also do it with volunteers this time because it's Tennessee (a right-to-work-for-nothing state); in other words some reasonable facsimile called "brand enhancement" (nothing says "slavery" quite like "brand.").
Second, what they do tell you is that the marketers (nothing says "slavery" quite like "market") have decided on a subconsciously Dada-inspired configuration of anything inconceivable that conceivably could be Appalachia in the minds of people who know nothing about the, um, is it really a place? Just please no washing machines on the front porch.
So my actual first thought -- busking on the recorder in one of these downtowns -- was that Appalachia is just the down-country cousin to Scandinavia.
Hear me out: Log cabins come from Sweden and fiddles come from nyckelharpa and banjos come from a strung-out skinhead from Oslo who floated a Hillbiliad dragonship to Africa a long long time ago and picked 5-string symbolist poetry before reverting to Normandy and then marching to Zion to liberate it for "The Girl Who Didn't Like Money" (A Mountain Ballad). Plus: they had recorders down in Brasstown, NC, at the Campbell Folk School because? Duh: Denmark, where the folk school was born, had recorders in their folk schools. And like your girl used to say: Quod Erat Denmarkrandom.
I mean, it's geometry. It's also sausage, which right away linked me with the apple butter of my eye: the strip mall where I'm determined to dip my oar into the Slough of Despond along with all the other pioneers who insisted on Pilgrim's Progress as the only book to read besides the Bible. Inspiration? Please, no. It's entire randomness, meaning luck, and I'm parsing it big-time, because the medium is the method, as I think some girl said.
All of that realizing, on that recorder Büsker Dü-date, came down to: A store. In a strip mall. Just off the interstate, the this-land-is-your-land ribbon of highway teeming with the modern-day equivalent of cash-flush bushwhackers looking for a place to flush their cash but never could because it was all outhouses. But this Appalachia gonna flush, to wit, yo: Buddhism:Hello Kitty :: Appalachia:Greta Thunberg dragonship figureheads.
What were you expecting? Microplastic quilts? Roundup biscuits? Artisanal typhoid from a backyard spring? MAGA limberjacks? Dagnabbit, dragonship figureheads is whittling, for singing-high-and-lonesome out loud! Look, I just raked dry crackling leaves in 94 degree heat in October. You think we don't have something coming? Or maybe you're one of them waiting on the next ice age to kick in. In what? 3,000 years? So, just enough time to walk back civilization, right?
Sombeody's got to do something, and my strip mall outlet selling small-batch Greta Thunberg dragonship figureheads -- carved out of sustainably-harvested, downed timber and cleverly devised so as to conceal a storage compartment for a slim cigaret of high-grade Goosepimple Junction Kush (extra: address the blind tiger) -- will provide nothing less than a 21st c. equivalent of the Isle of Lewis whalebone ivory chesspieces: miniature monuments to an uncertain future full of hope and dope and failure.
Bullseye on a map is whatever you hit.
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