Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

How many “troubled,” “unstable” and/or “unbalanced” loners are sitting in their moldy little studio apartments right this minute, having their blood boiled by the hatred and bile spewed by Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin and the whole Fox News cadre, while compulsively cleaning and fondling their oily semi-automatic weapons, waiting for their moment to get their names on CNN, BBC, and the New York Times front page, above the fold? Hundreds? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands?

Who knows? But all they need is a push, and there are plenty of high-profile media blowhards who are willing to supply it.

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Before Barb and I married back in the previous century, I only knew how to cook three things: Meatloaf, spaghetti, and leftover meatloaf. Having children and working from home has forced me to broaden my epicurean horizons over the years, and I’ve expanded that range to eight or ten things. I’d been doing quite a bit of the cooking lately, and my limited repertoire was becoming more difficult to disguise. “Hey, Dad,” one of the kids would say as I served up another meal. “Didn’t we just have chicken nuggets last night?”

I’d spoon a helping onto her plate and say, “This is different, although I should point out that the nugget is the most desirable part of the chicken. This is an Italian dish called Chicken Parmigiana Cacciatore, uh, Pesci DeNiro.”

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Mired here in the Dead Zone between Christmas and New Year’s, I find myself looking back on a year that was packed like muffin-top jeans with music, death, work, travel, drama, laughs and tears. Kind of like an early Coen Brothers movie, only with less John Goodman.

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

The 235-year-old experiment called “democracy” is definitely nearing the end of a long and crazy run. Hey, this thing wasn’t going to last forever, any more than the Colts were going to keep winning 12 games every year. Democracy is done.

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Whenever I hear Christmas music I gnash my teeth and ball my fists. It’s worse than someone scraping the tips of a fork across a dinner plate. My love for holiday songs was completely ruined by a harrowing winter road trip experience, and I’ve never gotten over it. Now, 25 years later, the tale can finally be told.

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Musicians are notoriously easy to shop for, because they usually need everything. Rent, bail, legal fees, drugs, booze, health insurance, it just depends on how much you want to spend, and how much of an enabler you’d like to be.

As far as something you can wrap up and slide under the tree, there are lots of specific ideas for gifts that will momentarily capture the wandering attention span of the musician in your life, and hopefully add some quality to his or her existence. Just don’t loan them money.

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

I’m not a big Vegas guy. The soul-sucking bombast of the Strip leaves me cold, and the only gambling I do these days is when I sit on the toilet to drop a deuce before I check to see if there’s paper. But on a recent trip to visit family in Sin City, I discovered an attraction that got me as excited as a martial arts fan who opens the front door to find Jean-Claude Van Damme delivering his pizza. It’s the Pinball Hall of Fame, the world’s biggest collection of classic, fully functional pinball machines.

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

I’ve been a caffeine junkie since my dad first introduced me to the acidy splendor of canned Folger’s brewed up in a chrome electric percolator when I was 16. There were no Starbucks in those days. No City Brew, no espresso huts with goofy names like Bean Me Up or Grounds For Divorce. There was Folger’s, the diner and the truck stop. And I loved it. I spent more days in college sitting in the student union lounge drinking cup after cup of their gutless institutional brew than I did going to class. But, oh, the world problems we solved, the glorious plans we made. And it was all fueled by coffee.

A hot cup is the first thought that forms in my head each morning (sadly, sometimes even my last thought at night) and over the years, coworkers and family have been made acutely aware of my strict NWBC policy: No Work Before Coffee. Or decisions or questions or hostile attacks like, “Good morning, daddy,” or anything else that requires cogent thought or a reasonably intelligent response.

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

After a glorious few weeks Indigenous Summer, the weather in the Northern Rockies has pretty much waved off its autumn pit stop is heading straight for the checkered flag of winter. And winter, for me, is the time to celebrate the great indoors.

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Politics has ruined government, but that’s not exactly a news flash. What boils my caucus is the seeming desperation of career politicians to keep a permanent seat on that gravy train of public office. Once they’ve tasted that gravy, once they’ve grilled up a few cases of free Montana steaks or flown to a single-malt fundraiser on a pharmaceutical company’s G6, there’s no way they’ll ever want to go back to having to get by on just a salary or straight wages, the way most of us non-politicians have to do. Like a 34-year-old grad student, these career politicos will shed every scrap of dignity and self-respect before they give up their cloistered existence and join us out here in the grubby Real World.