I was cleaning carp out behind the house one afternoon when the rawboned neighbor guy walked over. He had been fiddling on a junk car. “Nice ones,” he said, looking down at the fish. And they were, a bodacious passel of Ictiobus bubalus, as my carp-shooting buddy Mills and I like to call them when we’re all dressed up in camo on our secret log, sweating in the sun and smelling of fish slime and Off!. A little Latin to offset the caveman behavior and stink. Mills got me into bow fishing, and now it’s a problem. I sneak off to shoot carp the way some guys sneak off to shoot pool. Mills smokes them up with apple and hickory in his old concrete smoker, but first I have to clean them. The neighbor stood there silent while I sawed off heads and peeled out guts. Every now and then he took a drag on his Marlboro and a pull on his Pabst. Finally, he spoke.

“So. Yer a writer.”

“Well, yeah, I mean…”

“You do poetry?”

“Well, I’m not much of a…”

“I do some poetry.”

“I, uh…”

“Good shit.”

He walked back to his car. We never spoke again.

Searching for something, I came across this entry about Jamboree Days (in my hometown of New Auburn, Wisconsin) from July, 2003:

Jamboree Days always has the feel of a family reunion to me, but when it comes to capturing the ineffable essence of the thing, a member of one of the large local families may have put it best.  Referring to the subtitle of Population 485 – Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time, he raised a glass to the hubbub, and declared, “Here I am, meeting my neighbors one beer at a time.”

I still remember the excitement of watching the “Majik-Man” play, blonde mullet and all.  In the midst of some grim doldrum years for the Pack, Majkowski gave us hope, and he beat the Bears in an especially delicious way.

Then he got hurt.  Then he came back.  Then, on September 20, 1992, he injured his ankle during a game against the Bengals and was replaced by a new kid named Brett Favre.*

So.  If you see Don Majkowski, please tell him I don’t mind him signing my books as long as he doesn’t mind me signing his footballs.

*Sadly, after serving as the Packers starting quarterback for 16 consecutive seasons and setting nearly every record extant, in 2008 Favre abruptly and mysteriously disappeared, never to be heard from again.

- The opening verse of “Edge of Town” is set on the highway overpasses described on pages 99-104 of Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time (HarperPerennial).

- The album’s title song, “Tiny Pilot,” was written in memory of Perry’s nephew Jake, as described in Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting (released in paperback as Coop: A Family, A Farm, and the Pursuit of One Good Egg).

- “If They Give You Wings” is a song drawn directly from scenes in “Branding God,” the essay found on page 256 of Perry’s book, Off Main Street (HarperPerennial).  The song lyrics also include a Dylan Thomas sample.

- “Harry Was Right” (bonus song available on physical CD version of album only as track #14) is a song set in a real-life bar called The Joynt.  Perry’s readers will recognize the bar and its denizens from Chapter 13 of Truck: A Love Story (HarperPerennial) and may especially enjoy singing along with the bridge, which is a direct quote from the book: No…light…beer!

- Perry wrote the first verse of “Indiana” while driving from Michigan to Illinois on his Coop hardcover tour.  The song makes specific reference to “Seven A.M.,” the Edward Hopper painting that anchors Chapter 8 (beginning on p. 138) of Truck: A Love Story (HarperPerennial).

- The lyrics of “Cissy Moan” invoke Oxford, Mississippi (home of Square Books) and the writers Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, and William Faulkner.  The main character of the song is caught stealing books at “Lemuria” in reference to the actual bookstore in Jackson, Mississippi.

Printable .pdf here.

My good friend, neighbor, and butcher, Bob the One-Eyed Beagle was in fine form last night.  He informed me that yesterday someone came by the meat market with a bunch of books and asked him to sign each one of’em.  He got a big kick out of that.  Then he told the story of how he hauled an old defunct TV to the recycling center the other day.  He says he stopped at the cafe and one of the regulars asked him why he had a TV in the back of his pickup.  “I told him I was trying to get the Outdoor Channel!” said Beagle.

Here’s a portion of how I described the book in Population 485:

I have never seen any photographs of Cartwright, but the title page of Western Wild Animals is faced by an engraving tagged with the caption, “David’s Return to Camp.”  He wears a white beard and a flat cap, and he is striding down a wooded trail, a rifle in his right hand and a dead deer balanced over his left shoulder.  In short, he looks like a forbidding version of the Quaker Oats man.  A selection from the preface seems a continuation of the furrow in his brow:

He is…not a professional book maker, and he knows that it is only by practice that there comes any great degree of perfection in any art or trade.  What he gives you, he puts upon the basis of an experience of forty years, and gives it with that assurance that he believes should come of practical knowledge, as opposed to any hypothetical and visionary trash.

No dancing ‘round the campfire with patchouli and rain sticks, then.  All well and good.  But here’s where my ears really pricked:

Since the author of this book claims for himself an incompetency to the task of putting it into shape, and the more exact wording of its pages, and has placed that part of the work into the hands of another, it is due to him to say that…

Just a cotton-pickin’ minute.  Back to the title page.  Western Wild Animals, etc, and etc.  By David W. Cartwright.  In much smaller print: Written by Mary F. Bailey.  Turns out David W. had a ghostwriter.

Thanks to nanaze for the note.

This is Thistle:

This is Boggs:

Thanks to their owners for sending these photos.

Will be shooting the breeze with paramedics, EMTs, first responders and firefighters tonight.  Home, sweet home, no matter where yer at.  Tip of the cap to my NAAFD crew, and to the Emergicare bunch.  Home soon, pager back on.