Wear the fear
Burn the candle
Can you handle
Cherry candy?
It’s from the song “My Wing,” from Hiss Golden Messenger’s 2019 album, Terms of Surrender. For some odd reason I thought it was a song about living boldly, living bravely in a world that’s trying to kill you — a song about the state of the country, and the world, and the planet, in these well and truly fucked times (they were then, and still are, even more so). Then I read an interview with M.C. Taylor where he said about that particular song: “I was staying in a cottage on a big, beautiful, empty hill in Arrington, Virginia, and I was on mushrooms.”
Oh, mushrooms, sure. I got that way one time on Little Kings Cream Ale.
Anyway, I don’t know what all this means, except to say that the rolled-up fencing in the picture above looked to me like a folk-art bee swarm when I would drive by it, westbound on Walnut Grove near Farm Road, in Memphis. One day I decided to stop and take a closer look. I walked over and took a picture of the thing.
I won’t say it was some kind of otherworldly experience, like M.C. Taylor, aka Hiss Golden Messenger, with his mushrooms, or me with my Little Kings, but at least I didn’t get stung by those folk-art bees, who are notorious for it.