Left Behind

Do you sense a correlation between small-minded, dogmatic religiosity and just about every truly evil event you've witnessed or read about?

It's my measured, but unvarnished perception that dogmatic fundamentalists are fundamentally fucking shit up all over this hairball.

My buddy Garry Smith gave me a bottle of George Dickel Tennessee whiskey the other day.

Me: What's this for?
Garry: For turning me on to Greg Keeler.

That is, rocky mountain raconteur, poet, essayist, biographer, painter, professor, and fisherman Greg Keeler (cf. Trash Fish: A Life). Here's a video of Greg singing one of my favorite tunes, an original composition called Left Behind.

At the end of the tune, Greg ceremoniously kills the shot of Dickel sitting on the table. Greg's escapades with cult-novelist Richard Brautigan (Trout Fishing in America) were often kick-started by George Dickel as recounted in Greg's closely personal memoir, Waltzing with the Captain.

Greg Keeler was my creative writing teacher in 1980. He was an endearingly awkward, untenured professor in those days who indulged a few of us upstarts by reading poetry side-by-side with us at the now defunct Union Hall Coffee House on Main Street in Bozeman, Montana.

Greg's poems were ridiculously superior to the self-absorbed, half-baked drivel the rest of us dished up (e.g., River Men), nonetheless Greg treated us like comrades-in-words.

River Men
Bozeman, 1980

From manly notions careening down
Ejaculatory duct in kayaks, from
Mount Everest to Katmandu waving

Nature awaits our wiggling semen
Seductively clad in lugged soles
And housed in ultra light tents

Idiot minoes swimming to
Beat the river to the rock