it s new year s day in new orleans and i m walking to the rib room with the girl of my dreams and when we re walking i have thoughts i m not sure others have like how the most underrated actor in the world is steve railsback who played manson in helter skelter and who played ed gein he s been in a few rob zombie films too i m pretty sure i think yesterday we were at honey island swamp and i was thinking about the new year and what i m gonna do and i thought about the movie southern comfort with keith carradine fred ward peter coyote and powers boothe and the slide guitar soundtrack of ry cooder and how powers boothe could ve played vincent bugliosi in the movie helter skelter manson s famous prosecutor i could ve pursued acting or maybe been one of those soundtrack guys but i m a songwriter and writing songs is my calling til the day i die gonna write songs that make people laugh cry happy angry songs that make grown man shit their pants like little fucking babies songs about lazy little cats sleeping on 9th ward porches songs bout pitbulls howling in cages at police stations while the cops process their pimp dog owners the first chapter of a book about maurice ravel he was born a few years after my home was built and that s put me in a spell thinking about marx freud and einstein and the late 19th century and then we started to doze off in the afternoon because we were feeling pretty sleepy from all of that good rich southern food that we ate turtle soup grits salmon with creme fraiche remoulade shrimp and fried catfish plates last night we watched fireworks along the mississippi and i got a call from my friend in tennessee and it was her grandmother s 97th birthday she s the closest thing to a grandmother that i ve ever had she makes oyster stuffing every thanksgiving but the last time that i had it i was sleeping in her basement in 1990 reading riders on the storm i was obsessed with the doors but didn t care for the perspective of john densmore this past christmas day my dad s friend dan engelberg died in a hospital bed at the old age of 99 weeks away from turning 100 and the saturday before he talked to my dad and said he was ready to go and that he loved my dad and that he was one of the best friends he s ever had and i called my dad christmas night and he was quiet and said it hadn t quite hit him yet and i talked to my friend last night and she was at home with the shingles all alone on new years eve someone else was watching her children cause she s not well enough to handle them by herself these days she was tuning out watching true detective on dvd and right now me and my girl are gonna go find a place to eat try to dodge the drunken fans of the ohio and alabama college football teams playing at the superdome right now as i write it s hard getting out of this big soft bed tonight just back from saint charles tavern where they were blasting the game she had bread pudding and i had chocolate chip pancakes she keeps talking about adopting a dog or a cat and i keep talking about which guitarist i m gonna bring to japan when i finally go to sleep i hope to have a nice dream about my old kitty cat sniffing at the christmas tree not a nightmare where i m lost in a malaysian sea snakehead fishes tearing me apart with their nasty teeth you never know if it ll be a good or a bad dream but nothing beats falling asleep to the sound of the streetcar in new orleans and i dreamed that it was 1978 and i lived in central city and it was a warm autumn day and me and my friends went to see ali spinks 2 at the dome and we walked back to someones house so excited about how we d seen the fight of the decade in new orleans and we laughed all night on a muggy front porch til the sun came up and then the dream cut to the back bedroom of a shotgun style house and i was looking around the room and the walls were purple and gold the radio was on then i woke up it was january 2nd i picked up a guitar that i bought at a pawn shop