A Preacher Named Jack Daniels

Today is not the first day I barely glanced at the headlines.  More earthquakes, more BS in DC and more Goodhair in Texas.  I don't mean to minimize the significance of current world events - it's just that something else has captured my attention: a preacher named Jack Daniels.

His father was a dedicated drinker and thought it would be helpful to his son to be named Jack Daniels for pretty much the same reasons as that dad Johnny Cash sang about in A Boy Named Sue.  This preacher has a last name, but until I think of a suitable pseudonym, he'll have to remain JD.  And he's going to have to have a pseudonym on account of he's coming in from the mountains for the specific purpose of meeting me.

When a preacher comes down the mountain all the way to Menopausal Stoners World Headquarters, you can bet I'll turn the event into a miniseries the same way my internet dating experience turned into The Summer Boyfriend Reality Show.  I canceled that one last year. I got an attitude and wound up deleting 976 profiles in two weeks (Stonerdate 01.27.09). There were still plenty of potential candidates remaining, but I decided to take a boyfriend break.  I had had a boyfriend nearly every day of my life since I was sixteen years old except for when I was married to Buzz Kill which was worse in some ways.  No disrespect to the institution of marriage, but I have observed that the only people who are foaming at the mouth to get married have never been married - and that includes the GLBT community.

Maybe my time on Match dot com would have been more productive if I'd have come out and said I like to smoke weed and wrote a little blog called Menopausal Stoners - but I didn't think that was a good idea.  First of all, it's still sadly illegal to smoke weed, and you never know who is looking at Match.  More importantly, though, I didn't want to mention the blog since I have been known to find a Cautionary Tale in my personal experiences.  I could see how one of those Cautionary Tales could lead to serious trouble if the character in question had my phone number. The other trouble with dating when you're over 50 in New York City is the lack of single, straight, half-sober, half-employed men without young children who are not whiny bitches.  There are so few of them that even the whiny bitches have frenzied harpies trying to lasso them with designer panties. After a couple of months on Match, I concluded that there was not a man for me in New York City and gave up on the idea of dating until I move back home to Texas. 

JD is well aware of the weed, and we've been following each other's blogs for a while.  Not long ago in the comments, Jack Daniels graciously volunteered to be Chaplain and Shooting Instructor for the Menopausal Stoners Militia.  It's too soon to say if he is boyfriend material or not, but we've talked so well on the phone together that he bought a plane ticket with the extra cash he recently made by preaching at a funeral.  I didn't know preachers got tipped well enough for funerals to get plane tickets - but from what he said about the lady who died, I imagine she'd be glad to hear she facilitated his trip to New York City even if she had trepidations about Menopausal Stoners World Headquarters.  I'm thinking that if there is a spirit world, though, folks who were uptight about all manner of shit in real life lighten up once they are dead.

Interestingly, my mother is in full support of this development which is enough in and of itself to make me suspicious.  My mother is rarely in full support of anything.   Nevertheless, she liked this idea the minute she confirmed that JD will be safely back in the mountains before Velvet gets home from college.  As a woman who had four step-fathers in addition to her BioDad, Mother frowns on random men traipsing around the living room.

I'm not worried about having Jack Daniels in the living room - or the kitchen for that matter - because Jack Daniels and I both got our ideas about how people should behave from The Code of The West.  We see the most obvious examples of The Code of the West in John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies and shows like Gun Smoke - but Star Trek was all about The Code of The West, and so is Terminator come to think of it.

When it comes to romance, I like the model shown by John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara - not only in The Quiet Man but also in Big Jake

The relationship between Maureen O'Hara and John Wayne shows that a strong, smart, creative, motivated, fiery, authentic woman can manage almost any damn thing perfectly well on her own.  She doesn't need to listen to a man at all unless there is a very bad guy involved such as the kidnapper in Big Jake. Everyone needs backup sometimes, and Big Jake is the boy's father, after all. Occasionally a man will turn a fiery, authentic woman's head, like in The Quiet Man.  When a man enters the scene in these circumstances, he has such strength of character, innate good sense and moral authority that the woman will hush up and listen.  That's how successful relationships work under The Code of The West.

As it happens, JD is from Texas and may very well have that sort of Authority.  He lives in the Rocky Mountains now, but he grew up in San Antonio and was in Austin at the University of Texas at the same time I was.  We listened to the same bands except we never met because he went to Club Foot and I went to Raul's back in the Austin, Texas of Myth and Legend.  So now, there are two men from San Antone.  Notably, the Man from San Antone himself - who has only communicated with me via text message since he sent money back in November - finally picked up the phone when I left a voice mail mentioning that a Preacher from San Antonio was bird dogging around HQ.  The Man acted like he never heard that message and simply asked when I was going to be in Texas later this month on my annual bluebonnet pilgrimage.

It'll be early May before I meet Jack Daniels in Real Life.  In the meantime, Velvet will be home for Spring Break - hopefully celebrating his midterm grades and securing summer employment.   Then I've got a couple of weeks off for my own spring break.  I hear there should be a bumper crop of bluebonnets this year.