.. they say teamwork makes it dreamwork – Post Malone
Damn straight, Post Toasty. To start with, you lifted the opening riff from T.P.’s “Learning to Fly.” If you’re gonna steal, steal well, I always say. We all need a little help, particularly with those white boy hip-hop to country transitions. Everybody seems so angry these days, like their very lives depend upon it. Charalamagne tha God dished the hate for Malone early on, calling him a “fake future.” Wish I could be relevant enough to be anyone’s fake future. Have to give Char credit for something other than his novel spelling of “the.” Post is a difficult celebrity to hate from what I’ve gathered. Perhaps it’s time to check in with ‘tha God’ again, now that White Iverson has leaned plugs-first into country. But so it is as we hurtle toward November.
Country always fit my sensibilities. Not because I’m some truck-driving tough guy, but more because my mom turned me on to Johnny Cash and “A Boy Named Sue” when I was a kid. (Shoutout to Shel Silverstein.) In fact, I am driving a truck these days and that works, too. Better than the pricey German sedan I leased a few years back and could do 120 in an eye blink. Impressive acceleration notwithstanding, I found myself getting called “bitch” a lot by other guys on the freeway. I’ve reached the age where you feel the sand slipping through your fingers and realize that 120 in “Sport Mode” is no sand-stopper. Cash, like my mother, had Scottish roots. And country music has some serious black roots, with much lifted from the field songs of enslaved southerners. As George Carlin once noted about addiction “Mother’s milk leads to everything ..” Ricky tha Philosopher .. yeah, that’s the ticket.
The one solid ticket I punch faithfully of late is a morning walk. I find myself looking forward to it more than seeing it as duty or obligation. This can’t be said about much these days. I read where completing a certain number of daily steps is correlated with not dying of a heart attack during said 24 hours. But you read a lot of crap like that and sometimes it’s just better to take a walk. I do plug in the earbuds pre constitutional which is somewhat isolating but makes employing another of my mother’s habits easier: She always seemed to have a smile on her face. I perhaps rejected this in my own persona as an angry young man (read: wiseass.) She was an attractive woman and her sunniness may have gotten her more attention than she was shooting for. I do recall being bothered by the near-predatory stares from passing men as she held my hand in Petrini’s supermarket. Couldn’t they see she was with her child? But that was their problem and her smile paid dividends. I don’t have as much to back it up as she did but, generally speaking, it seems to work while stretching my legs. It helps that said grin is “in motion” so the idea that I might want something if they smile back is less threatening. I did hear a groan from a feminist jogger the other day when I had the earbuds out, but I figured that was her problem and perhaps a bit of indirect karma from the supermarket creeps. What can you do, besides keep smiling?
I worry that Post Malone’s affability may also be his liability, but he’s under 30 and the internet puts his net worth around 60 million. Still, you can’t buy sunniness; it has to radiate from within. It’s a real kick in the pants to think that, the more you’re worth the more you have to guard that radiator. I think he goes kind of hard, too. That’s always a wicked combination — someone who goes hard but always has a ready smile and a warm word. Life is a balance and it’s no cake walk. And all the while it’s slipping through your fingers.