Episode 228: Free Solo V - Drinking 6 Beers in 15 Minutes

July 4, 2026. Art, truth and commerce. ALSO: Clara Bow's wikipedia. PLUS: The latest Advice King column and a song of the week by Robert Earl Keen.

Robert Earl Keen - "4th of July": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf_VxBiXzIo&list=RDtf_VxBiXzIo&start_radio=1

Cold Brew Patreon: Patreon.com/ChrisCrofton

Channel Nonfiction: ChannelNonfiction.com

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:14):
Hello, it's Chris. This is a hopeless Mike is not
too loud. I am doing a solo show. Sorry, it's
been a while. I was out of town. It's July fourth.
It's July fourth, and someone's hammering outside a hopeful sound.

(00:37):
Maybe maybe they're building something to fix. Maybe they're fixing,
uh democracy, Maybe they're hammering a democracy back together. Anyway,
it's July fourth, So thinking about a lot of things,
thinking about people's history of the United States, thinking about

(01:00):
it's oh, people cutting the box using box cutters to
cut the liner for the reflecting pool, people getting thirty
years in jail for uh, trying to give people magazines
that help them, Um, you know, thinking about Trump making

(01:25):
a billion dollars in crypto, uh, Trump scamming his actual voter. Like,
are people like making money off the off the population?
Like actually, I mean, I know politicians are always making
money off the population through stealing their taxes, but they
don't usually just run a crypto scam. That's a that's
that's a new whole new level of shit, you know.

(01:47):
And uh, then proud boys marching around Washington, d C.
Today on the fourth crazy writer's picture of a black
woman sitting in the midst of a bunch of masked
men who are leaving the they took the fucking subway.
A lone black woman with no mask on, sitting there

(02:07):
looking sick to her stomach, surrounded by a bunch of
of white men wearing khakis and masks, khaki masks even
like a bunch of deranged Kinko's employees who have lost
their minds, you know, who have no idea what the
fuck is going on, and they think somehow marching around

(02:28):
this hellscape yelling white powers has something to do with anything,
you know, when their enemy has been and always will
be corporations and monopolies, and and how sad and misguided

(02:48):
that they have ended up. And also you know, much
sadder for the people. People will have to deal with them, obviously,
but it's just pathetic also to see these people so
confused that they think marching around with me asks on
has some has some impact on on on reality or
or you know, uh, just completely confused about how to

(03:11):
assert themselves and choosing the just the worst path possible.
And this July fourth is for for for the people
have to try to keep their heads on straight in
the midst of all this starting with that very strong

(03:35):
woman sitting on the subway in Washington, d C. Today
and keeping her composure surrounded by frightening, misguided uh lost
idiots wearing masks and uh and trying to frighten people
even further, as if people aren't frightened enough. But uh, anyway,

(04:05):
so this July fourth is a pretty fucked up July fourth.
I mean that's an understatement. And I don't know, you know,
once again, once again, once again, I'm in a shitty mood,
or in a mood that is complicated to podcast in.
So I had some ideas how to get around it

(04:25):
and make it more fun. But Greg's Greg's on vacation.
I'm gonna have some coffee even though it's almost eight
o'clock at night. So I'm screwed as far as sleep.
M I'm gonna celebrate the July fourth, twenty twenty sixth
by not getting any sleep. Anyway, miss you guys. Two things,

(04:53):
A few things happened. Took a friend of mine to
rehab when I got back from California, went to check
Attanooga and did a show with a band called dash
Rip Rock. Opening for dash Rip Rock with I played
and my friend Justin, my friend Justin Justin and the
Cosmics played. I think I made one of their songs

(05:14):
songs of the Week, the song Working, which I wrote
the lyrics for. CO wrote with them that the lyrics
they added were great. That was a fun trip. That
was last Saturday, so a week ago. I went down
to Chattanooga and played, and that was such a great show.

(05:36):
I played by myself electric and I really enjoyed it.
The trip to California was a complicated one, just because
it was Father's Day, which I didn't remember because I'm
not a father and my father is deceased. And also
when my father was alive, I didn't really uh wasn't
really that inclined to give him a party because I

(06:00):
considered his fathering not to be so great. I think
any objective court of other fathers who were maybe slightly
less insane would convict my dad of being a very
certainly outside the box dad in a way that was
mostly for him. He enjoyed being a rebel at the

(06:23):
expense of his children because he didn't really have any friends,
so he rebelled mostly by just saying crazy shit to
his kids. He had alienated all the adults around him,
because because no one, no one wanted to hear about
the Holocaust as much as my dad wanted to talk
about it. As a non Jew, he talked about the

(06:43):
Holocaust endlessly, and that if you say do that enough,
you know you're not gonna have any adult friends. The
only people you can talk to about it will be
your children because they can't leave. So you have a
captive audience that can listen to your miserable, nihilistic musings.
Because his point was he grew up in this catastrophic household,

(07:07):
which he did, and I and I now at this
point understand that. And that's why when he passed last October,
I was able to say I love you right to
his face as he was passing, and it was beautiful.
It was beautiful for me because I realized that he
was he really was doing his best. He was trying
to he was trying to say I'm in pain. We
talked about this before. He was trying to say I'm

(07:27):
in pain by talking about tragedy all the time, you know,
and and his wheelhouse was tragedy. He'd grown up seeing
so much like barbarity in his house that he was
like just wanted to talk about barbarity. That was what
he knew best. He didn't know stability, he didn't know.
He didn't know how to be happy, so he knew
how to be sad, and that was it. He wanted

(07:49):
everybody to be in that place with him all the
time because that was his area of expertise as far
as he was concerned. So whenever anybody started to have fun,
he wanted to put an end to it because it
felt like he didn't and he didn't know how to
exist in that space. He did not know how to
have fun, so he, you know, he had to be
and he also felt like a horrible fear of abandonment.

(08:10):
So he felt like if people were leaving, if people
were having fun, they were leaving him in a way
because they were leaving him behind in his morose space.
So he felt like he was actually being abandoned when
people started to have fun, And then he would say
what about the Holocaust? Literally like don't forget about the Holocaust?
You know, when we were running through the sprinkler, And
that was the idea, was just to get people back

(08:31):
in his So he felt like people wouldn't leave him
if he kept them sad enough anyway, complicated stuff. People
are very complicated, you know, people are complicated, and white
supremacists are actually just people who are rejecting that complication,

(08:53):
rejecting that complication or don't have the tools to deal
with it and are trying to say I'm in pain
by marching around in some sort of sad community. All
they want is community. All my dad wanted was community.
And if you have a community, if you can't, if
you can't mitigate your rage like one of these white supremacists,
because they've all had some sort of primal hurt. I'm

(09:15):
sure you know. I don't believe a lot of people
are born racist. I think it's largely learned and doesn't
make it once again, doesn't make it any easier to
deal with. I'm not trying to be sympathetic to the
to these people who are marching around with masks on,
but what they're really looking for is love. You know.

(09:37):
That's what's so sad about it is they just want
to be in a group. Uh. And the United States
sold the idea that we all wanted to be on
mansion in mansions all by ourselves and on huge amounts
of acreage like the Marlborough man smoking a cigarette all
by ourselves, you know, and that's that's a recipe for uh.

(09:58):
I know it's seems obvious, but it's it's loneliness, and
loneliness leads to anger a lot of the time, like
what who did this to me? Kind of thing. But
uh so I went to California. I went to California. Oh,

(10:25):
it was Father's Day. That's why. That why that little
digression digression, I guess so, so yeah, Father's Day. Anyway,
So Father's Day came and went. It was not such
a big deal to me. I know, it seems like
it would be maybe since my dad just died, but

(10:47):
it wasn't. Gosh, you know, if there was some way
I could connect to my father, I think I would
have been able to do it. I tried. I wanted to,
you know, connecting to him and death is it's probably
not gonna be possible, you know. I just there wasn't
enough there for me to connect to he was. I mean,

(11:07):
I connected as much as I could. I knew he
was not a bad guy. He didn't mean to be.
He just wanted to express his pain constantly, and it
just made it very hard for anybody else who was
trying to like at least get through, you know, get
through without thinking about pain every single second. That being said,
I will say as a performer, stand up, author, artist,

(11:34):
any kind of artist, you know, and it doesn't Art
can be you know, planning a garden, it can be
helping at a community center, it can be Art. To me,
is trying to tell the truth, trying to live in
the truth, as opposed to business, which is trying to

(11:56):
bend the truth to fit fit some kind of a
profit motive. Art is like the truth, like, you know,
just unfettered truth, and it's, uh, it's quite hard to do. Now.

(12:19):
That's what I've been thinking about. I was reading about
Clara Bow. I was thinking i'd be reading I think
I was thinking today, just as a departure from so
I don't just babble because I am by myself today,
I was maybe gonna read Clara Bow's Wikipedia just because
I was. I was reading about Clara Bow and thinking

(12:39):
about how her story was relatable. You know, I'm not
sure in what ways we can go through it. We
can go through it together. Probably a lot of you
just turned off the podcasts because you're like, I don't
want to hear the Wikipedia Clara Bow. Are you out

(13:01):
of your fucking mind? I mean, maybe I am. It's
a good chance I am. Yeah. So I turn on
this podcast and not only is there not a co host,
but this fucking guy reads the Wikipedia of Clara Bow
and says there's some somebody he learned from it, and
he leaves it up to us, and then he played
an ac DC song and that was the end of

(13:22):
the episode. That reminds me of the Daily Seitgeist commenter
who said, uh, like he didn't understand my appearances on
the Daily Zeitgeist because I don't promote anything. He was like,
I don't like his his, his his, I don't understand
what his point is. And you know, I can, I can.

(13:45):
I can understand that because you're always always looking for
art now to have some sort of sales point. But
I just like to just to go off and and
let people know that that we're all, uh, we all
just really want to go off. We don't want to
try and sell stuff. We want to sell stuff as

(14:06):
little as we possibly can so we can get onto
the good part of like bullshitting and eating ice cream
and talking about how to solve how to fight fascism
and all these kinds of things. But uh, but I
also understand that now I can sound pretty disordered, like
my appearances on things can sound like probably stress it.

(14:31):
They can do stress. I mean, that was what this
listener was saying in the comments. It was like a
Reddit comment, just saying like, because a lot of people
were saying they like my appearances on the daily like
gust I probably already already told this story, but this
guy was like, basically like his appearance has stressed me
out because they don't have any point. They're not he's
not promoting anything, you know, And that's a pretty pretty

(14:55):
uh that's a pretty deep comment really, because you know,
promoting stuff is it's kind of a failure. I mean,
we're really doing something that doesn't there's nothing. There's no
end goal here on earth except to live and die
and have the most fun you can and be as

(15:16):
loving as you can. There's no Promotion is something you
do is a It's not supposed to be something you
have to do all the time. Promotion gets in the
way of living. I mean, you're forced now to go
on Instagram and promote every minute. But even that is
a lie because now your Instagram post reached nobody. So

(15:39):
now you've spent all your time performing and making content
to serve this algorithm that just can turn itself off
at any moment or do whatever it wants to you,
and you build your whole business on it. And Instagram
is right now in the process of just like ruining
everybody's attempt at lacating this mission. You know, the machine

(16:01):
is finally like, well, I don't like any of your posting.
I just like I just like videos of people getting
eaten by sharks. I don't want to see any even
your comedy that you put the words on like, we
don't want to I mean, that doesn't reach anybody. Yet
that reached people. It's like, oh no, we just need
to do this. Oh well, stand up comedy straight to
the camera doesn't work. You gotta put words on it.
And now you put words on it. No, that doesn't

(16:22):
work either, because promotion is not is not it's it's
if you're doing it nothing but promoting, then you're not
doing any art because the art is the truth part.
So telling the truth right now is very difficult because

(16:47):
because it's unpleasant and it's so bad that no one
wants to hear it really, so stand ups and and
stand ups are reduced to just arguing with audience members,
you know, because people want to feel some power. So
there's this movement toward empowering the audience members, like that'll
make them feel happy if they get to anticipate in
the show. But they're not happy because they still don't

(17:09):
want they still don't don't want to hear certain there's
certain parts no one wants to be. Everybody's living in
this sort of compartmentalized way where they don't want to
hear certain things and they get very angry if they
hear them. That's not a good uh environment for art,

(17:32):
which I'm arguing is like telling the truth whatever way
you're doing that, something outside of capitalism, something outside of
a narrative where you're trying to end up in something
use get from point A to point B. Financially, that's
not art, that's that's you know, that's commerce. You know,

(17:58):
which I which I already said, So say I say things.
Let's say I say the same things a few times
h most of the time more coffee.

Speaker 2 (18:08):
Hmm.

Speaker 1 (18:14):
But yeah, stand up music if you're not talking about anything. Actually,
if there's a time where everybody's like, if there's no
fascism and you're just talking about nothing, then that's kind
of like a version of that would be a version
of what you You could want to do that kind
of art, But right now, if you're doing that kind
of art, unfortunately, you're you're kind of you're just doing

(18:37):
decoration for the fascism, like art that's decorative at this point,
which while in a stable time period or a time
period where people aren't just being fucking constantly kidnapped, you know,
off the street, then you would say that, you know,
doing doing some sort of like decorative art would not
seem so political. But now doing decorative art is like

(19:00):
being a political It's not it's a failure in my opinion.
Now I'm not doing overtly political art but at all.
I mean, I'm writing love songs, you know, most of
the time. But I'm trying to change that a little bit.
I'm trying to write more. I'd like to write a

(19:22):
song that encapsulated the sadness of the moment and talked
more explicitly about the moment. I mean, I haven't written
songs in a while. I haven't really written songs since
the since all this got way worse. You know. At
the last time I put out an album was I'm

(19:43):
Your Man, which came out in twenty twenty five, but
it was recorded before the pandemic and just didn't come
out because of the pandemic. So that was recorded in
twenty twenty. So most of the songs I wrote were
from twenty twenty, and twenty twenty was a very different,
very different time. I mean that was Biden had just
been elected. There was hope again, you know, at least

(20:11):
you know, in the in the in the world of
like hoping that a democratic president would do something to
save us. But but new songs. I want to write
new songs, and I do think that it would be
nice to write something that was mentioned what's what's going on?
I mean, I don't want to be like putting up
wallpaper for for fascists, and I feel like a lot

(20:33):
of people are doing that. But I don't know what
you're supposed to do, because it is, you know, the
truth's a lot more fun, are a lot easier to handle.
When like no one wants to hear about people want

(20:54):
to say like, oh, we would never let the Nazis
happen again. Of course, we would never let the Nazis
happen again. And it's fun to talk about that when
that's something that's in the past and you can just say, oh,
I would never let that happen. And then so you
can talk about dark things when you feel like you're
not having to take a stand, and in art you can.
You can you can endlessly talk about horrific stuff if

(21:16):
it's if it feels like something that you can't do
anything about, or it's in the past, but now the
stuff's happening like right down the street, so no one
wants to hear it right now, like five years from now.
If ice goes away, then then people will want to
talk about ice and say, I have a lot of
You could talk about ice all day and your stand
up you talk about them. Now people say, shut the

(21:37):
fuck up because it hurts their feelings and they don't
want to hear about it. Just like you could talk
about civil rights and say people would say thank goodness
for civil rights and like, oh, if I were there
during the civil rights movement, I would have helped out.
And then the Voting Rights Act gets like basically removed,
which was one of the main victories of that entire movement,

(21:58):
and and there's white supremacists on a bus surrounding one
lone black woman, and everyone wants to hear Americana songs
about cactuses in the in stage coaches, Like I don't
mind hearing about cactuses and stage coaches, you know, I don't.
But but but those those sorts of songs really stand

(22:20):
out as as like like they really look like unfortunately,
like just kind of things you can point to and say, well,
nothing too bad should be is going on, like you know,
you know, we've we've got we've got all these people
out here wearing cowboy outfits, so it couldn't be too bad,

(22:42):
like what would what? You know, they're you know, there's
there's just a problem with acting normal during desperate times.
That's not art, that's that's set dressing. That's my fear.
And I include myself in this. I'm not I'm not

(23:03):
I'm surrounded by cowboy outfits in Nashville. It's not my fault.
I like cowboy music. I used to listen to fucking
all that. I mean, I love like I love the
Promise of America. I mean some of that cowboy cowboy
music is like you know, from the South, you know,

(23:26):
which is historically more integrated than the North, you know.
So I'm not putting down cowboy music as some just
like part of a sadness avoidance operation at all. I mean,
a lot of it can be complicated. So I'm just
trying to make I would encourage everybody to make complicated

(23:47):
art right now, and pretty overtly anti fascist art right now.
The way I'm trying to think Auto Dix did Germany
after the painter Auto Dicks painted, uh, anti fascist paintings

(24:11):
in Germany between the wars, lots of horrific images of
injured World War One soldiers, you know, taking you know,
people didn't want to see a painting of that. They
wanted to see a painting of a vase with some
flowers in it. But no one's talking about the people

(24:32):
who are painting vases with flowers in it during the
rise of fascism. Years later, they're talking about Auto Dicks
because Auto Dicks was was taking that shit on and
so his work was it was art, it wasn't decoration.

(24:54):
Uh And uh, I get scared when I say anti fascist.
How's that for America on its two hundred and fiftieth birthday.

(25:17):
But I know that there's the side of this where
the more overt this gets like Trump just running cryptos,
running crypto scams. You know, it's so helpful for him
to be this obviously corrupt, because it's starting to become like,

(25:39):
I mean, you know, I don't know that his followers
ever will truly admit that they made a big mistake,
but some are, some are faltering. They're still weekly blaming
Joe Biden for this and that. You know, they're like, oh,

(26:00):
I don't like Trump, but I mean part partly as
people have been the new thing is all, well, Trump
is bad, but but he also is He's not he'd
be doing better though if it wasn't for people trying
to sabotage him, Like if people were just more supportive
of Trump, then maybe he wouldn't be. But when you
when it comes to like running a crypto scam where
you may have actually bought some of his meme coin

(26:21):
and then you lost all your money and he made
a ton of money, and you know presidents aren't supposed
to be selling meme coin anyway, you start to falter
and you start to say, fuck, this guy is a criminal.
But now he's transferred enough money to himself and his

(26:42):
kids that we're gonna be This is my fear, is
that that once everybody wakes up, it's gonna be too late.
You know, he's gonna have he has enough money to
hire his own private army, and so does this, so
does his son, and so does you know, and and
and and uh. I mean, we're going to be dealing
with these fuckers for a long time until we like

(27:03):
just get rid of this currency system and start over
and say that the amount of chit canery that's gone
on with the currency is it's not even real anymore.
I mean, it's been bailed out so many times and
uh and uh, you know it's been it's been. Wages

(27:24):
have been kept so low that that you could argue
that keeping wages that low is fraud. So the money
that they made is fraudulent and therefore invalid. And the
money at bill that billionaires have is ultimately part of
is a result of fraud because the keeping wages as
low as they are now when a lot of these
companies are owned by the same companies that set the

(27:44):
gas prices, so keeping the wages just in line with
where people can barely pay the rent. It's not just
a coincidence. At this point, they're controlling the whole thing.
And and uh at some at some moment, at some
moment in the his in in in the future. Rather uh,
this will have to be this money will have to

(28:05):
be considered uh uh useless. I mean one way or another,
it will be useless because they'll have all this money
and they'll have no one to that has you know,
there's nobody to sell anything to if no one has
any money. But there will be there will be some

(28:25):
correction where we have to we have to say, like, okay,
Elon Musk has made money so so idiotic, like the
fact that he has a trillion dollars, it's all fraudulent,
So that we have it's he basically has a trillion widgets,
and we have to take away his money because he's
done nothing except launch satellites and and run a pyramid scheme.

(28:48):
So this this, since he has the all the world's resources,
then we have to cancel this version of the world's
resources because they're not real. He has not these are
not We've we've devalued this. There's no map. Labor hours
have no correlation to the dollar, anymore. So like what
people are earning is what he's earning versus what other

(29:10):
people are earning, what other people are earning. They're so
out of whack that we just have to start over
with a different again. I'm saying the same thing over
and over again, but I'm not sure exactly what I'm
talking about. But I know there's supposed to be some
correlation between money and how much labor is going into

(29:31):
Like it's supposed to be somehow supply and demand and
labor factors into it. It's not just supposed to be
one guy runs a bunch of pyramid schemes and takes
everybody's money, and one other guy runs a crypto scheme.
It's just you can't if it's not real money, if
you can just scheme all of it out of the
out of the whole system, all of it, you know,
like you're not. If you can scam this much money

(29:53):
out of a system, then the system is broken to
the point where you need a new money system. I
think I arrived somewhere there. I thought a fun thing
would be to tell you just a story I was.
I was, I was at work the other day. Could
call this the loading dock report. I had to do

(30:16):
another pickup at Blama Zoom uh Bama Zomb and and
the guy in there said, well, listen right now, this
really happened while I was in uh Bama zomb. This
guy was like, uh, well, you know, robots right now

(30:39):
are doing about the same human workers are keeping up,
and that makes me feel good. In that statement was
just so horrific that even he after he said it
to me, he was kind of like looked shaken. And
I said it to I mean, I said, I looked.
I mean I looked, I looked. I also looked at
him like he said, like it was good news. And

(31:01):
then he sort of heard it back in the in
real time when he said it. He kind of listened
to it, and then he looked upset, and I looked
upset too, and I was like, oh, yeah, that's great.
Oh well humans are keeping up, and he said, yeah,
that that makes me feel good. You know, if they
start to do if the machines start doing better, then
I'll get nervous. Ha ha. Definitely different than small talk

(31:24):
of the factory and say nineteen sixty three, when you
were just like talking about how hungover you were or
you know what your dart scores were the night before.
Definite downgrade in the conversation to be talking about things
are looking good right now because humans are keeping up
with the robots. Fuck, that was real. I'm not not

(31:46):
making that shit up. That really happened. And he was
like a manager there too, so he was like the
voice of reason, Like other employees probably must have come
to him, and he probably says that same thing to them,
like they're like, God, a boss, I'm kind of wororried,
Like the robots are doing pretty well. You know, they're
starting to make me feel like we could be replaced.
And he's like, nah, not right now, We're tied with

(32:10):
the robots, So get back to work and chin up smitty,
like objectively, so much worse than the twentieth century for
all the tech. The tech has done absolutely nothing except
destroy everyone's nerves and ruin small talk. And also all

(32:34):
small talk, even about sports, has just been reduced to
talking about money, like, oh boy, the football game, I
wish I could go to that if I had six
hundred dollars or who knew billionaires were going to have
the same, like they weren't gonna be content just to
like play polo. They were gonna try, and they were

(32:54):
gonna take away all the blue collar workers fun too,
Like we're gonna start watching football like billionaires. Now I
ever watched football. I think John Paul Getty was at
the football game in the nineteen seventies. No, he was
in an art museum, Like it was better when the when,
the when, the when? The elites quote unquote, you know,

(33:16):
the thieves like John Paul Getty, the gas people, like
basically the gas people, like you could substitute the oil people,
the oil and gas people. They they didn't want everybody's everything.
They had their lane. You know, I hate that expression
lane because it's always used to tell artists not to
say anything except for staying there lane. But but once

(33:41):
billionaires wanted to, like they want to have everything. They
don't just want polo, They want polo, golf, darts, fucking
I bet I bet seats to go watch the World
Series of Poker six hundred dollars. There's a seat, Like
there's no I guess. Also, people just didn't have A

(34:03):
millionaire can only choose a couple of things to be
involved in, and a billionaire can do whatever they like.
They can do everything so they can get a ticket
to the boat race, the Dark Contest, the they just
can take a private jet to every event on the
on the Earth that didn't used to be a possibility.
Like millionaires, they could like be involved in local boat races,

(34:27):
sex trafficking, local sex trafficking, local cocaine trafficking, but it
was all sort of local. Billionaires can go to any
event on the Earth and jack up ticket prices. Billionaires
have to go. It's really just I mean, it's it's
it's it's a silly refrain, but it's gonna be a refrain.
It's not a silly refrain, it's a tiresome refrain, but

(34:47):
it will be the refrain until they go, because you
can't have a life with them running around and you
can't even go to a goddamn football game after, you know,
after you have a hard day of trying to keep
up with the robots. Thank you keeping up with the robots.

(35:09):
That's a good name for this episode. Hope you guys
are enjoying it. I bet you're like, thank god he
hasn't started reading Clara Bo's Wikipedia. Oh, but it's coming. First,
I'm going to read the advice king from a couple
of weeks ago that you guys haven't heard. It's about

(35:31):
our Mayor Freddie here in Nashville. I'll let me play
this the sound effect for the loading doc report, because
that was a pretty robust and yes, I said robust
on purpose. That was a pretty robust loading dock report

(35:52):
because I did go back to Bama zoom. No no, no, no, no, no,
oh god, I wish i'd someone send me instructions on
how to get an ad blocker. That's the loading doc

(36:12):
report for this week, and now there's gonna be I
had another idea that the supermarket report I forgot. Before
I do the advice king, I'll tell you a story
from when I used to work at a supermarket because
I've been spending a lot of time on them on
a truck. As you know, I've been spending a lot

(36:34):
of time in the back of the truck though in
the heat now, and that's a whole different fucking ballgame.
So if you guys have any recommendations for good clothing
for like pants and shirts that aren't I've been wearing
like my street clothes to do this truck job, like
basically t shirt and jeans, and I was drenched in

(36:55):
a half an hour the other morning. So I need
some light or wait, but cool looking clothing. And I
can't look like a young idiot like I can't be
too crazy looking. I want to look like sort of
dignified at age. Well you know old I am, you
know this age? And uh, you know, so maybe some

(37:16):
like gore text pants or something. I don't even know,
you know, it's core text still a thing. Excuse me. Oh,
I got to check up at a at a doctor's
office too, at a nonprofit h there's a doctor's like

(37:37):
a doctor's office that for people who don't have insurance,
which I don't have right now until I can't get
it until November when the exchange opens up again. Conveniently,
it's only open for a few months a year, which
is nice. Anyway, I had a really good doctor's appointment

(37:57):
at this place called Carras. It's it's spelled it's US.
You say it keris, but it's it's spelled c H
A R I S. And it's in Mount Juliet, Tennessee.
And they provide services to people who don't have insurance.
And I got such a great doctor appointment and and

(38:18):
an EKG and blood work for eighty dollars. So if
you're in the Nashville area and you don't have insurance,
it's the only qualification. You just can't have any insurance.
And you go there and you you call them up
and you just have to be from the state of Tennessee.
And it's a fucking miracle because Tennessee has so little

(38:38):
in that vein and u uh Mount Juli. It's only
a half hour outside and it's outside of Tennessee, outside Nashville.
I mean anyway, I was thinking about them because I
talked to the doctor about my endless throat clearing and
he said, yes, if you have bronchitis, you're you're you

(39:00):
can have inflammation for forever afterward if you're an adult.
So I've had inflammation ever since December, and was it
was good to hear that that it was He just
gave me a simple I mean, I don't have to
think about it anymore. So all this sniffing and throat
clearing and everything is all connected to that. So just

(39:21):
try and avoid getting bronchitis unless you're a child, I guess,
but especially I have like at asthma, when I get
dust allergies, I get asthma. So like he's like, Oh,
if you're prone to swelling or whatever you call it,
what inflammation and your bronchial passages, and you get fucking bronchitis,

(39:44):
then yeah, I can linger forever. So that it was
nice to hear. But that explains why I've been just
constantly fucking clearing my throat and snorting and drooling all
very sexy stuff. I haven't even gotten to the California
trip yet, I've gotten so So anyway, unloading the truck.

(40:08):
It's hot in the truck, okay, So give me suggestions
on loose or like clothing that's sort of cool looking
that is not so hot and not shorts, don't say
like short shorts or anything. You can send me the
suggestions the best of bread at Gmail, and maybe I'll
do it. Maybe I'll do an advice king question about
that I work on a truck. Oh look, fireworks, can

(40:30):
you hear it? It's July fourth. Anybody's shooting off fireworks today?
As an ice agent, as far as I'm concerned, what
exactly are you celebrating, buddy? Uh um? Okay, So the
supermarket report I was gonna do just so when I

(40:52):
was sixteen, I worked at the supermarket, and I that
was the last time I was in the bed of
a truck really, because we used to get shipments of
groceries in nineteen eighty five and we'd go in the
truck and get him and I just my first job
I ever had, so it was like, seemed like pretty cool,
Like it just seemed like such a big man thing
to do, to be pulling pallettes off of this truck.
But it was hot, and I remember how hot it

(41:14):
was in the back of the truck. But that was,
of course when it was hot, like nineteen eighty five hot.
I think it's like forty degrees hotter now, so just
boiling in the back of the truck. But anyway, reminded
me of the supermarket. And then I thought, oh, that'd
be a fun thing to tell a story about instead
of just talking about the end of the world. So
I'm gonna play you a little sound effects for that

(41:36):
to announce the to announce that no, no, no, no,
oh no, it's James Talerico. I support James Talerico, even
though I don't trust him, but he's goddamn anybody besides
Ken Paxton. I mean, he looks he seems fine. But

(41:56):
I don't trust any politicians anymore. Listen to me, Listen
to Grandpa. I don't trust any politicians anymore. That supermarket
sound effects get the hell out of here. I just
yelled so loud to the microphone. This is a modern
I wanted something like a cash register, not this new

(42:18):
fangled scanning. Well, that's what we're gonna get. That's the
supermarket report sound effects. So this is the story. It's
not a very long one. But when I was a
young alcoholic in the making, I working at a supermarket

(42:45):
in ninety eighty five was a great job for well,
I wasn't really an alcoholic yet. I mean, it's hard
to say. I mean, I'm I'm not going to get
into when you become an alcoholic. I mean, I guess
I was born an alcoholic waiting to just drink. But
when I was sixteen, first job, Grand Union Supermarket and
New Canaan, Connecticut. I'm ready to confess. Statue of Statute

(43:08):
of Limitations is up. But there were no cameras in
the store, and and you, just like I would just
go back, walk down the aisle, I take an empty box,
walk down the beer aisle, look both ways, stick a
six pack of Budweiser in the box, put it on

(43:29):
my shoulder smart you know, on my shoulders. They can't
look in it. And then I'd walk with it back
on my to the through the back doors to the
loading dock, jump off the loading dock, and put it
underneath this board that was leaning up against the concrete
retaining wall or whatever the hell it was retaining while wall.
Listen to me, just wall. It's a pretty fancy podcast.

(43:53):
He says, retaining wall about a lot, even though I'm
not sure. It sounds like maybe it's just a regular wall.
And then at the end of the shift, I would
drive my nineteen seventy three Duster, which was my dad's
car that he had bought new. Such a basically pretty

(44:13):
ugly car. I just like imagining him by buying it.
I think he probably bought it because it was cheap,
but it was a gold Duster, very big car. Anyway,
I drove that fucking big sedan around the back of
the building, and then I would get out of the car,
go go up to that board, grab the six pack,
get in the car and go to whatever party or
soccer field or a reservoir. We were gonna drink that

(44:34):
six pack, and usually you could split a six pack
between three people back then because you'd get a buzz
off two beers pretty good one. So I was like
a hero. But yeah, working at a supermarket was a
good job for someone who needed beer who was underage.
Back then. It was kind of like really really a godsend.
And thank you God for that board, that retaining wall,

(44:58):
that duster, that loading dock, that box, the fact that
there were no cameras. Thank you for all that. God,
thank you not as much for everything that's going on now.
So what was I gonna say? Oh? Yeah, So, like

(45:20):
another thing I did with beer when I worked at
the supermarket was, and this is the story, we would
get fifteen minute breaks because sometimes you could be a
four hour shift. I think maybe you got a half
hour break if you worked eight hours. I can't remember what.
I just remember fifteen minute breaks. I mean it's the
first time I had a job, so I'd never known
about breaks, but I was like fifteen minutes, man, oh man,

(45:41):
that's a short time to eat meatballs from the deli
down in the fucking breakroom, which was just like four
pieces of plywood next to the furnace that they formed
into a room that had like some stuff on the
walls about how to help people if they're choking, and
I took one of those. I did the same routine
with a six pack, except this time I went down

(46:02):
to the bathroom in the basement of the fucking supermarket
in nineteen eighty five, which probably was the same as
the basement. It probably had been unchanged since the sixties
when that place was still open, and so it was
just a bunch of like conveyor belts and stuff and boxes,
and it's just dark down there and very dismal. And

(46:23):
I got in this dismal bathroom right next to the breakroom,
and I got in the stall, and I brought this
six pack with me, and I drank an entire six
pack of Budweiser twelve ounce cans in fifteen minutes. Now,
I hope most of you just like swerved off the

(46:43):
road and drove into a pond when you heard that,
or it fell out of your chair or your treehouse
or wherever you listen to this thing, or fell off
the elliptical, because that is fucking crazy, And it's not
crazy because six beers is so much beer, even though
it's a lot of beer in fifteen minutes. It's that
without a funnel or knowing about that trick where you

(47:04):
can poke another hole in the top of the beer
or or shotgunning it to drink, the amount of air
that gets forced into your body drinking six beers in
a regular fashion in fifteen minutes is insane. So I
returned to work, meaning walking back upstairs, and I was

(47:25):
a checkout guy, and this is back when you had
to press the buttons on the wasn't scanning yet. But
it didn't matter, like that wasn't the problem. It wasn't
that I was drunk, even though I was kind of drunk,
which I thought would make work better, which might be
true if your bartending, but any kind of labor job,
or you're bagging groceries or something, you don't want to

(47:46):
be drunk, and you certainly don't want to be bloated
in the way that six beers and fifteen minutes makes you.
But I did that. That's a real thing. I'm not
wrong about that, because I remember I didn't know what
to do with the beer. If it was full, I
had to have it drunk, and then stuffed the cans
in the in the in the in the garbage can
in the bathroom, which is like a metal can with

(48:07):
one of those sort of chrome flaps on it, so
you could like, once those cans were in there, I
figured nobody was gonna be looking in there and they
would never know where they came from. And it just
wasn't a sort of there was not There was like
the idea of like people were not paranoid about their
safety the way they are now back then at all.
I mean, there were no cameras. There's nobody downstairs checking

(48:28):
to see who was drinking beer in the in the
fucking bathroom. There was no nothing. There was just like
just everybody was sort of like resigned to the fact
that they might die any day, at any moment, at
the hands of a mugger or a falling piano or whatever,
and they were okay with it. There hadn't There was
no gang of billionaires who decided they wanted to live forever,

(48:50):
and it infected the whole world into thinking that they
were going to live forever. We were all just thinking
we could die at any moment by being sucked into
a conveyor belt or having an aneurysm from trying to
drink six beers in a bathroom stall, and there was
a certain exhilaration to that that feeling, although I didn't
realize it was exhilarating until it was taken away. So

(49:13):
what I'm getting at is I want to say, I
want to tell you that drinking six beers in the
bathroom stall is art. That's not what I was gonna say,
but drinking six beers in the bathroom stall is something
they should put in a movie or make someone do
in real life, or something for people to understand how
hard it is. And I did that, and then I

(49:34):
found out that even though the idea that from watching
commercials I was sixteen, you know, I was like, drinking
equals fun. So drinking plus bagging groceries equals still not
that much fun because you're bagging groceries, So half of
the equation is not fun. But you're taking drinking, which
is fun, and you're adding it to bagging groceries, which
is not fun, and you figure it equals a little

(49:57):
bit less, a little bit more more fun than just
the bagging groceries. But it turns out it's actually worse,
and you'd rather not be having being drunk. Bagging groceries
is actually worse than bagging groceries just regular. So that's it. Now,
I'm gonna play the rest of it and I'll tell
you some more stories about that if you enjoy that
segment that was supermarket stories or something. I don't even

(50:19):
know what it was. What was the loading dock report
and supermarket stories? Next time I'll talk to you about
how I if you didn't know the price back then
you just made it up because there's no way you're
walking up and down the aisles trying to find out
the actual price. So if something didn't have a tag
on it, because you had to tag stuff with the

(50:41):
with the goddamn pricing gun, and if it didn't have
a tag on it, then you had to walk all
over the store trying to find out the price. So
you just like didn't you looked at it and pretended
there was a tag on it, and then you just
punched in something you thought was probably around the price.
Let's see, I'm trying to find they really don't have
good rely, ble they just have scanners. Now they don't

(51:02):
have all right, I'm gonna do cash register of sound effect,
aren't you glad I did this now instead of once
the show started or before, I mean, rather than before
the show. Uh cash register sound effects. I was actually
just have slurping slurping. That was it. Well, there you go.

(51:34):
That's Supermarket Stories from nineteen eighty five. Now I'm gonna
read you. You guys are like, man, I think we're gonna
get through this whole episode without hearing the Clara Bow Wikipedia.
You might be right. I have a little more coffee
happy four of July, though, I hope everybody's hanging in there.

(51:55):
Had a great time in La. It just was like
I forgot that everybody on my show show on Sunday
at the Healing Force of the Universe Records, me and
Johnny Fritz did a show and like everybody involved. For god,
it was Father's Day, so not a huge crowd and
uh anyway, everybody was sort of like, oh fuck, it's

(52:16):
Father's Day. But it was great and the show before
the night before we showed the movie and I met
a couple of you guys from who listened to the
podcast and some Zeitgang people that was at the lyric
I period and what a great night that was, and
the stand up I did that night, which was really
supposed to be a Q and A. It was just
supposed to be a Q and A after the movie. Was

(52:38):
just some of the best stand up I've ever done
because I was just so in such a great mood
after seeing seeing the film. And also I'd gone hiking
that day, which was really good for my spirits. And
I think part of my problem is I just don't
exercise enough. So I got to go hiking out there
and made a couple of barrapists videos if you guys

(53:01):
are familiar with that old gag from the from the Pandemic. Friday,
I played an art walk in Sierra Madre, California, which
is up near where I used to live in Monrovia.
Stayed in Monrovia with my old landlord Phil and his

(53:21):
wife Diana and their kids, and so great to see
them and really miss California. I know, California is not
quite as much fun when you're living there and paying
the paying the rent and everything, so vacation is a
little bit different. But I just missed the the beauty
out there, and and I miss Astro Diner, and I

(53:42):
missed the New Beverly So I can't remember what I
was about to do, except I was gonna read you
the advice King, So that's what I'll do, and then
the second hour, the second hour will be just the
the Claire Bow Wikipedia. So here's this column I wrote

(54:10):
criticizing our mayor Freddie O'Connell, the mayor of Nashville, which
I who I supported and have become disillusioned with. Although
he seems to be making some moves to try and
correct his image because he's trying to run again, and

(54:31):
if he takes criticism, that's great. I would like I
would like to because I'm not the only one criticizing him.
Hopefully he's reading the room and realizing that everybody is.
He's not going to get re elected unless he starts
acting like standing up to fascism. So here it is,
dear advice King. I'm an average fifty four year old man.

(54:54):
I was in Nashville, your neck of the woods, about
a month ago. Lovely town. It's not where I'm from,
and maybe I don't know the lingo. A guy said
to me it's better for old guys to look spooky
than to smile. Can you explain this phrase to me?
Signed bugsy M, So I said, thanks for the email, Bugsy,
Here's AI's suggested response parentheses. Real. This is a real

(55:18):
This was really suggested to me as a response to
this guy's email. Hey, Bugsy, that's a classic Nashville thing.
It basically means it's better to look a little intense
or mysterious than to look too eager or overly friendly
when you're trying to fit in or seem cool. Case closed.
That's a classic Nashville thing, Bugsy. I say it every

(55:41):
day to everybody. I said, it's my reflection in the
mirror this morning. Thank God for AI. Am I right?
Or Okay? So let me explain this to you. This
might be a little bit complicated, and maybe you already
understood it. But so this guy sent me an email.
Obviously his name is probably not bugsy M. But that
was a real email I got. And then before I

(56:04):
could respond to the email, I wasn't actually gonna respond
to the email. I was actually going to use the
question for the advice column. But this new feature on
Google gives you a full email to send back, like
a suggested response. So he asks, oh, like, what is
this lingo? And I'm prompted to send back. That's a

(56:27):
classic Nashville thing. This is AI saying that's a classic
Nashville thing. It basically means it's better to look a
little intense, total bullshit, right, So then I say, case close,
that's a classic Nashville thing. Anyway, just saying that I'm
making this so complicated. So I said, thank God for AI.

(56:48):
You know, I don't have to respond to your email.
I can use their response, you know. But then I said,
maybe not, maybe, maybe Nashville is not a lovely town
there because in the question he said lovely town or
maybe it is. But if it is, why would a

(57:08):
lovely town need to be policed by drones? And why
would the allegedly progressive mayor of that lovely town allow it.
I'll give you my opinions since this is an advice
slash opinion column. My opinion is that the mayor of Nashville,
Freddie O'Connell, is under some kind of pressure. How have
I arrived at that conclusion? Well, because he was definitely

(57:29):
against surveillance as a Metro Council member. It's one of
the main reasons I voted for him. Also, his campaign
slogan was I want you to stay, as in, don't move.
Away from Nashville. Allow me to amend it. I want
you to stay and be followed around by drones. What happened, Freddie?
Tell us? Please? Is it because the crime rate went

(57:52):
way up? Nope, it's down. How do I know? You
bragged about it? So the crime rate isn't the What
is it's It's certainly not coming from his non wealthy constituents.
Every working class person I know who supported Freddy's campaign
is outraged. So what is it? What's the pressure? I'll

(58:12):
offer my opinion and then some advice. The majority of
serious crimes being committed in this country are being committed
by the wealthy. And before you can say, what about shoplifting,
I'm talking about big crimes, the kind of crimes that
make one man a trillionaire and force everyone else to shoplift.
Medicare fraud, which a certain rich white Republican US Senator

(58:34):
very profitably committed and paid a fine to get out
of trouble for was successfully used as a pretense to
demonize all Somalis and the entire state of Minnesota. The
low wage workers who safely trim hedges in bell Meade
get abducted by ice on Nolansville Road. The poor are
the targets of MAGA, Yet the Metro the Metro National

(58:58):
Police Department drones are being deployed in Madison, Tennessee under
a progressive administration. The area of Madison being targeted is
low income. So what are we doing? It is impossible
to separate surveillance from class If crime is down, why
do we need ever more advanced crime fighting? Because it's
about creating a culture of fear. The wealthy know that

(59:20):
they have accumulated too much money to be safe. They
are afraid of the poor. Rather than pay higher wages
and higher taxes, they are counting on licensed plate readers, fuses, ice,
data centers, and drones to calm their increasing paranoia. That
is a vision of the future that we must fight,
and the time to fight is now, not later. That's
why we elected you, Freddie, to fight this pressure. I

(59:44):
think I know what it is. The pressure is from
big money, and it has turned you into someone I
hardly recognize. Please let me know how I can help.
My advice Bugsy. Maybe Ai is right and everyone in
Nashville is mean mugging to get ahead. Well, if they are,
it's not safe anymore. There are cameras everywhere. You better
plaster a benevolent look on your face, cowboy, reassure the

(01:00:07):
wealthy that you aren't a threat. Smile extra big as
the drones pass over. Remember, none of this is about
safety or immigration. It's about intimidation and control. Which side
are we on, Nashville. There is no middle by the way.
You're either against all of these things or you are
for all of them. You can't pick and choose. So

(01:00:29):
that's the advice King for last two weeks ago. And
I got to say some things in there that I
wanted to say. You know that none of this is
about immigration, and none of this is about crime. This
is about control and fear. We need to all say

(01:00:49):
this over and over again so people understand it. People
are too fucking stupid. They've been too fucking inured into
this idea that crime and surveill or somehow surveillance can
solve crime, even though every goddamn crime that's ever committed
is caught on tape and nobody can see who the
fuck did it. Because it's not about that. It's not

(01:01:12):
about that. It's about fucking everybody being scared out of
their minds. Crime fighting is is is? Uh is the
is the excuse for everything? Anyway? Hmm okay, now I'm

(01:01:39):
gonna read a little bit of this Claire bau thing
just for fun. I just didn't really know her her
her life. She was sort of chewed up and spit
out by uh, the same stuff that's chewing us. She
was chewing us up and spitting us out. Really, the

(01:02:01):
only reason I wanted to bring it up was she
said she had a quote that I really liked because
she was a flapper. I don't know if younger people
know what that is, but in the twenties they were
like party girls, party people called flappers, you know, who

(01:02:22):
basically were just party people. People stayed up late, you know,
people went out and and uh seemed to be having
a lot of fun. And uh, she said this, This

(01:02:48):
is a quote that really made me interested. She said,
all the time the flapper is laughing and dancing, there's
a feeling of tragedy underneath. She's happy, and she's unhappy
and disillusioned. And that's what people's sense. I'll read that again.
All the time the flapper is laughing and dancing, there's
a feeling of tragedy underneath. She's happy and disillusioned. And

(01:03:11):
that's what people sense. Clara bow So, happiness what we
all want. Uh And and flapper if you if you
remember a flapper. A flapper is like this, manically dancing, smiling,

(01:03:32):
drugged up, drugged up or alcohol drug and alcohol, you know,
like just in a in a in a happy in
what looks like happiness, a frantic, grinning state. And that's
what the cocaine addicted leaders of our country are operating on.

(01:03:55):
This idea that if you do enough war, if you
keep things moving fast enough, you're never gonna you do
enough drugs, you drink enough, you start enough wars, you're
never gonna be bored. You're never gonna be lonely, you're
never gonna be sad. You're just gonna always be in
the That's why these lonely men who who are racist,

(01:04:15):
fantasized about war situations, because they want the brotherhood, they
want the the constant you know, warp creates an excuse
for all this depravity that you think will make you happy,
like horrible sex and horrible you know, violence that you

(01:04:38):
think will somehow make you happy, because your stimulation and
happiness are are sort of intermingled in our culture. That's
why cocaine is the ultimate drug of the wealthy, because
they just happiness is looked at as stimulation. That's if
you're constantly stimulated, you can't be sad. Totally incorrect. And

(01:05:07):
Clara Bow was part of that. She became a huge
star and then she had a breakdown because what goes
up must come down kind of thing. And that's what
these people like. And this is not to compare her
to this, but but these are the people like Stephen
Miller and Pete Hegseeth. These guys are headed toward horrible deaths.
Whether it's from suicide, I don't know, but they're not.

(01:05:30):
You can't operate like this and then somehow or another
you end up either dead in a bunker like Hitler,
or you end up dead at your own hand or
he was no, Hitler killed himself. You know, there's just
a there's a problem with this idea of trying to
transcend life through ketamine and launching satellites like like Elon

(01:05:54):
Musk or or or or launching wars, and and and
doing cocaine like Pete hegg Seth or doing cocaine and
and uh and and uh, and strutting around prisons full
of people that you just imprisoned, like Stephen Miller. Watching
poor people get beaten by men who are under your orders,

(01:06:16):
like Steven Miller, like that's somehow for them feels like, Oh,
I'm never gonna be sad because I'm never gonna stop
having adrenaline ties into like same stuff as watching Instagram
videos all day, sex and death. But Clara bo you know,
she went to the top of this like alcohol and

(01:06:40):
and and and fame system and then she ended up
cast out of it the way people end up cast
out of it, like Telsea Gabbard, whoever the fuck it
is that, you know, like, uh, who get eventually cast
off these systems because they're not useful anymore. But anyway,
I would just recommend Actually, I'm not going to read

(01:07:01):
much of this at all. It's too complicated. Clara Beau
is just an interesting story of a person who grew
up really poor and and had a very fast paced
life and and then uh fell apart and died quite young.

(01:07:29):
But she sure sounds like she, you know, she was
a loving person. It sounds like or a person who
was trying to do the trying to be a real person,
and she wanted to have an exciting life, and she
wanted to transcend her violent and and and poor upbringing.
And uh, you know, uh, capitalism loves people like that,

(01:07:53):
Moselle wear you out. Those corporations love a person who's
got a as on a mission to themselves. Her mother
held a butcher knife to her neck. I guess that
was some kind of a big deal. Like it fucked
her up real bad. Anyway, I don't know why I

(01:08:16):
thought this was a good idea. Okay, well, anyway, read
about I don't know, just also read about Claire Bau.
I mean, she was on top of the world, like
fucking Taylor Swift. No one even knows who the fuck
she is now. She was just as big, if not bigger,
because there were even less stars back then. But like
she was Taylor Swift of nineteen twenty two, you know,
and she died alone at age sixty and no one

(01:08:40):
knows who the fuck she is. And you know, meanwhile,
Taylor Swift's everywhere all the time. She's a billionaire. She
had her wedding today or yesterday, and I got in
Madison Square Garden. You know, a sad affair that's supposed
to be fun and totally a sign of mental illness

(01:09:02):
to have your wedding and a goddamn arena full of
a bunch of celebrities as your guests. I mean, it's
just some of the saddest shit you've ever seen. Total mess.
I mean, I would describe Taylor Swift as a total mess.
That's what kind of person has their wedding at Madison's
Square garden and who builds? You know, she has a
billion dollars too, you know, you know she's completely headed

(01:09:23):
for a fall. I mean, how do you how do
you deal with aging when you're when you're doing this,
you don't you plummet? You know, she has a future
of plastic surgery, and so does her husband. I mean,
all these people, all these people have these heightened, absurd,
youth based existences. And that's the kind of stuff I

(01:09:43):
want you to think about this fourth of July. So
that's the fourth of July episode. Some weird references to
Clara bow me over explaining my advice king to the
point where it probably was unintelligible. But my point is

(01:10:04):
tell the truth. Always tell the truth. Try to tell
the truth, you know, and and the truth is art.
The truth is art, and the more fascist shit gets,
the more of the truth is art. It's daring, it's uh,
you know, you don't have to stand in our in
art gallery and get shot with a gun to uh
tell the truth. When things are going better and people

(01:10:27):
are less aware, then you have to like go to
extreme measures to tell the truth. But right now telling
the truth is daring enough, just just speaking the plain
old truth, and that is we're fighting fascism, and that's
as far. That's as far you just need to say that.
And it doesn't feel comfortable because they're putting people in
jail for this shit. So but we have to do

(01:10:48):
it anyway. So I hope everybody has a great weekend.
And uh, and and we'll go back to maybe doing
some we'll we'll go back to doing some shows with
Greg Act soon. He's just away. And thanks to everybody
who came out in Los Angeles to see the shows.
And and today's song is gonna be a song called

(01:11:09):
Fourth of July by by a cowboy. There's somebody who
makes sort of cowboy music. But I but you know,
I'm not against cowboy music. It's just got to be
the right kind of cowboy music. I suppose this song
is called fourth of July. By what the hell is
his name? I can't remember his name. Hold on a second,

(01:11:29):
we have this last tip of cole Brew. There it
is Robert Earl Keene. Robert Earl Keene, the song is
fourth of July. It's a pretty song. I'm pretty sure
he wrote it, but I'm not positive. I actually should
look it up real quickly because I don't want to
say he wrote it if he didn't write it, because
a lot of people have done this song. I just
I just like his version of it. Robert rol Keina

(01:11:52):
some really nice songs, Robert rol Keene, Fourth of July.
Let's see no Dave Alvin wrote it of the Blasters,

(01:12:14):
great great song. I just happened to love this version
by Robert o' keane. But I'm glad I looked so
it's a song by Dave Alvin. And uh, this is
Robert Robert Earl Keane's version. Great lyrics have a great week.

(01:12:35):
She won't answer by that college.

Speaker 2 (01:12:38):
Man understands, ask well, go cigarette along, Mexican, get us
by the love. It's about the July sad, it's above

(01:13:08):
the July.

Speaker 1 (01:13:10):
It's called the two Lies. She gives me the cheese,
but now one of the live