Patsy (Patreon)

I'm not going to Google it, because I find there to be something a little lovely about the idea that, in the not-too-distant past, we used to be able to go into a restaurant, sit down, somebody would bring up some fact, people would argue about it, and there was no oracle in your pocket where you could clarify whatever conversation happened to arise. In a previous life, my friends and I would leave our phones in the car, so we could postulate, confident in our own opinions, without one of us being able to check on the facts. It was a great way to anticipate a hangover, especially when it happens at a Waffle House.

In that spirit, here's how I recollect it, purely from my own mind: Patsy Cline was born in the '30s. She basically built an entire subsection of Country Western musical culture, and toured around the country back in the days before giant arenas. She played in gin joints and what we would, today, consider to be "a medium-size music venue." 

She was a pretty girl, but you wouldn't look at her and get the same ravishing ingénue vibe that you would with, say, Taylor Swift. There was something about that day and age of American music, where yeah: you have to be pretty, but your sheer talent meant more. In the days of radio, the music was more broadcast-able. I wonder how stressful it is for Taylor Swift, as talented as she is, to also have to consider her physical appearance at every moment, every day. To be honest, it surprises me that she doesn't spend the vast majority of her life curled into a fetal position.

So Patsy Cline, when she was about 30, was doing with a lot of rockstar stuff at that time, and was traveling around the country primarily through the means of little propeller planes. Her manager, as I recall without Google, was a guy named Hoss, and he said that she should travel by car; the guy at the airport told him that there was going to be a lot of fog and rain, and that it might be safer that way. The thing is, Patsy had been scheduled to do two back to back shows at some little town in Indiana, that turned into three, and she was tired, and was heading down to Tennessee, and the drive would've taken about eight or 10 hours. So, she was willing to roll the dice and fly.

"Hoss," she said, "if this is when I'm going to go, this is when I'm going to go."

A couple of hours later, her plane crashed, and she died. That's super sad, because plane crashes are horrible things, and we as a society, despite all of our faults, are still wise enough to see when somebody so great was taken away from us while he or she was still so young. James Dean, Billie Holiday, The Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens, Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Carl Sagan, Alan Rickman, Anthony Bourdain… Some of these people are members of the 27 club, but by our current standards, it's still kind of a bummer when somebody who is younger than 65 kicks the bucket. That perception is a triumph, in some ways, because 65 was pretty old until fairly recently, but still... it sucks.

I don't know why, but I feel like a little bit of a hipster when I say that I identify with Patsy Cline. I got to visit her grave site in Winchester, Virginia once. It wasn't grandiose, but it had a Country Queen vibe to it. This woman was a big deal, and people decided to honor her passing in a way that they thought was befitting. Would she have hated it? I didn't know her personally, so I dunno. But she just kinda seemed like the sort of woman who wouldn't give a fuck, so it was a little curious that there was an actual bell tower there, regardless of how humble it is. Most of us don't get bell towers. 

We all have our firsts. The first food we ever remember really enjoying, the first job that we think that we're going to have when we grow up one day, the first favorite animal, the first time we masturbate, and in the back of our minds, wonder if that's what they were talking about in school, and am I going to die? Or even worse, am I going to go to hell? I was raised pretty conservative, so that was absolutely a thought in my head at the time… Thank goodness we all grow up.

And then there's that first song that's ever stuck in your head. At least, the first song you can remember. Patsy Cline, San Antonio Rose. 1957. (I literally have no idea what year this song came out, but in the spirit of not Googling it, I will just do what people used to do, and tell you that's the year, and I'll trust you not to Google it.)

There are many nights when I keep Patsy Cline on loop on my ancient iPod. This little gadget, which I've affectionately nicknamed "Ernesto," rolled off the factory line in 2007. Back when Barack Obama was a junior senator from Illinois who nobody had ever heard of. I've used it pretty consistently over the last 13 years, when it came at a discount because I was buying some other Apple product? I can't even remember. But the battery still holds a good life span, it still works, and I love durable goods.

This photograph has not been staged. This is just the way a 4 ft.² portion of my accommodations happens to look at this moment. Take from that what you will. To me, it feels, again, like one of those Where's Waldo pictures. Search through it, and you can find pieces of the whole. There's a lemon, too.

In the meanwhile, if you happen to have access to Spotify, or YouTube, or even a collection of CDs, or whatever you usually resort to, take a moment to give Patsy a pat on the back. She was a classy fucking broad. And, she was catchy.

Memes… The term was coined back in the '70s, by an English dude named Richard Dawkins. He postulated this idea that, like a virus, our ideas can spread from person to person, and they can grow, and they can mutate. And these ideas, which can come in the forms of pictures, experiences, cultural phenomena, music, social impulses, shared observations… they provide a venue through which we can share common experience. Like interpersonal conversation, times 1,000,000. 

We live on in that way, through our ideas. Sometimes, I wonder if we've evolved out of the idea of progeny (and we just don't know it yet), when in a more modern sense, we're more able to "live-on" through the memes we've put out there in the world. We never know quite how a brain-fart, shared extensively enough, will change more people than something like an offspring ever will... Is it possible (I'm being, as my old college professor used to call me in J-School, "high-falutin'"), that something you've read on this humble Patreon page will affect you or someone you know, in a way where it gets passed on, Cloud Atlas-style? Maybe some notion that gestates in a brain somewhere, and turns into an idea that somebody didn't have before, in quite that way? Or maybe, this, like all things, will fade, eventually, and that's OK?

Shit, I don't know! Sometimes, there are just things you just can't Google.