Shit on Toast, Country-Style Lemonade

I know I sang 'Are You Ready for the Country?' but can I have a few minutes man? Because I'm not at all ready. Thanks.

It's really weird to think about old country singers all strung out. Old jazz guys too. It seems impossible to do heroin and hooch and cocaine in the kind of clothes they wore back then. Can you really hit bottom and do an adequate job of it in sleeve garters and spats?

The t-shirts and cruddy jeans of Nirvana and the like are much more readily accepted by my imagination.

Holy Hot Topic

Our class did a unit on "THE FUTURE" when I was in fourth grade. I don't remember much, just some more-difficult-than-usual spelling words and coloring.

One of the assignments was to come up with an invention of the future. Most kids did something lame like homework machine or pizza replicator but I chose future fashions, in keeping with my obsession with bullshit fashion rags like YM, Elle, and Seventeen. Fourth grade girls do not need to be thinking about fashion. They should be taking karate and building circuit boards. My mom's an awesome woman but she indulged me on that shit too much. She should have confiscated it like it was pornography.

Clothes. Fashions. Future fashions. Anyway, so I made this little poster with all these sketches and one of the things I drew was arm warmers. I even called them that - "arm warmers". I also had something called the "arm bow" which is basically an early mock-up of the scrunchie.