Horse Blog

Mr Lunney had a unique way of teaching us. His desk was at the back of the room and after assigning us our work, he put his feet on the desk, took out his guitar and sang old songs for us. It was from him that my love for Irish music began. We learned all the Irish songs he knew, and the two years I was there we put on concerts on St Patrick’s Day on the Mount Mary stage for parents and anyone else who wanted to come. We knew the words to “Danny Boy” and the “Old Colonial Boy” as well as we knew the national anthem. Mr Lunney sang old ballads like “The Wreck of the Old 99” and many songs the cowboys used to sing while on the range.

3.) Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy is a cartoon version of what Elton John would look like through the eyes of Bernie Taupin who imagined himself as a mixture of “English farm boy and American cowboy”. That idea reminds me of moving from Mt. Clemens to Sterling Heights. The people here were so different from what I was used to. My new friends in Sterling Heights were like Elton John as a magical presence in his outfits and I was like Bernie Taupin looking up in awe in my overalls and cowgirl style pig tails.

Man did i ever have fun tho last night. We met up with Banana boy, oh i like him so much! we ended up at Larry’s something or other with these chix that were skantily clad and dancing up on a side table. I felt so far from home! Then we went off to Cowboys which was fuckin crowded! Imagine Coyote Ugly movie but Real! Mechanical bull too! it was so cool!

As for the French, they were the least ambiguous, the most dedicated. The leader of their group of racecourse volunteers was Jacqueline Ripart, a wiry woman in her 50s (I’d say) who has documented and collected DNA samples from horse breeds all over the world. It was she who decided several years ago to revive the traditional At Chabysh celebrations after the long interval during which they were banned by the Soviets. And it is she who’s leading a sustained effort to preserve the Kyrgyz horse breed before its characteristics are completely lost to crossbreeding.

Which brings me to my last point. Somehow I have the feeling that due to Brokeback Mountain, cowboy hats are going to be associated with being gay. Cowboy hats might just become a symbol of gayness, at least in Europe.

1. Test number one: does the evangelist wear a cowboy hat while preaching?

Hit the pause button for a moment so this idea can completely sink in: Cigarette marketers cleverly attached, in the public’s mind, two utterly unrelated things: 1) the American cowboy, with all of the powerful feelings that image evokes in us, of independence, self-confidence, wide-open spaces and authentic Americanism, and 2) cigarettes, a stinky, health-destroying waste of money. This legendary advertising campaign targeting men succeeded in transforming market underdog Marlboro (up until then, sold as a women’s cigarette with the slogan “Mild as May”) into the world’s best-selling cigarette.

I made this photo on Saturday, December 10, 2004 at the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas. The photo is of Clay Tryan, of Billings, right and Patrick Smith of Midland, Texas as they performed their world record time during the team roping event.

We have another gig tonight. I canceled our gig for next weekend because I am headed to Bowling Green, KY next Friday night for a horse show early Saturday morning. I am working with a equine photographer. GREAT money! More than what I make with the band. (BTW… I have realized that I have failed to mention that my bands name is Goodsprings… the name comes from the area where I grew up.)

I guess after taking over the color purple (not the movie), the triangle, rainbows, the steel industry, it has come now that if you wear a cowboy hat, you must be gay, kind of sad considering a couple of months ago, the cowboy hat was a symbol of heterosexuals. Personally I think there shouldn't be a connotation for wearing a hat. However this brings back an e-mail I got in undergraduate from a campus group which stated that if you wore blue jeans on a specific day that you would be supporting gay rights and if you didn't, you were basically a homophobe. The whole for or against attitude seems to be as prevalent as it has been, but I guess it is hard to see shades of grey.

I particularly enjoyed seeing the long horned steer charging up the street and the first batch of them were a little wild, making me think of that famous “running with the bulls” festival in Pamplona Spain for a moment. The circus figures were next on my list of favorites, the man on stilts and the two Shetland Sheepdogs pulling the tiny chuckwagon. Finally, the cowgirls looked awfully beautiful in their sparkling shirts and cowboy hats. All in all, a fun day and great show.

This would be me in a rodeo. You can’t get thrown and trampled by a stick. However, I wouldn’t be safe because you can still trip over a stick and fall down and break your neck.

New Years was fun this year. Mom, Dad, Grandma, Jacque, and I went to Bay Meadows race track to watch a horse race. I had never been before so it was a lot of fun. It was really cool seeing the horses race and watching some close finishes. I decided not to bet on any races, but Jacque did and picked the winner for two races.

In the past, they parked the horse trailers on our street to collect the horses at the end of the parade, but this time they had the trailers at the St. Luke’s parking lot up the street. So I just got one soggy-horse picture.

This is pretty genius, I must say: Larry David says, “Cowboys Are My Weakness”.

No, the real shit I was referring to above has nothing to do with my choice of girlfriend, and everything to do with the few other guys and girls I encountered that year who listened to the same music, and found themselves somewhat ostracized and un-popular because of it. Some of them caved, I saw - they started wearing cowboy boots, or Black Sabbath T-shirts, and gravitating towards either the shitkicker or freak cliques, becoming a sort of sad shadow group of Johhny-come-latelies to these crews. Those of us who either didn’t care about belonging or actively didn’t want to belong kept to our wild music and our wild wardrobes, and knitted even more tightly together as a result of it. Somehow, the wild music people usually ended up with the best herbiage, a sampling of pills stolen from each other’s parents, and every now and then, some blotter. Oh, and beer. Good God, the beer. Someone always had a brother or sister who was of age, and someone was always able to come up with either enough money or enough whining to convince said older sibling to provide the beer. Coors, for the most part - this was Texas, 1981.