Published !!!

Write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for. - Mark Twain

Mississippi Land And Lodges, an upscale hunting and fishing magazine, recently published this tale that I wrote about a year ago.  Hit the link if you have 10 minutes to kill. 
It's in the August/September/October issue, the one with the antler chandelier on the cover.
Check it out if you get a chance.  If you're a Mississippi hunter, you need this magazine on your coffee table, opened to page 20. 
They pay well, and I have a daughter at Texas A and M.  Let the editor know that you like my stuff.  That's all I'm saying.....

A moment of nostalgia, inspired by the deaths of 4000 blackbirds in Bebe Arkansas

From MSNBC:

BEEBE, Ark. — Preliminary autopsies on 17 of the up to 5,000 blackbirds that fell on this town indicate they died of blunt trauma to their organs, the state's top veterinarian told NBC News on Monday.

Their stomachs were empty, which rules out poison, Dr. George Badley said, and they died in midair, not on impact with the ground.
That evidence, and the fact that the red-winged blackbirds fly in close flocks, suggests they suffered some massive midair collision, he added. That lends weight to theories that they were startled by something.
Earlier Monday, the estimated number of dead birds was raised to between 4,000 and 5,000, up sharply from the initial estimate of 1,000.
Keith Stephens, a spokesman for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, provided the new numbers.

I once put that many blackbirds on the ground, but it took about 3 or 4 months.  Read no further if you are easily disturbed. 
I grew up on a rice farm in Mississippi.  Our house was in the middle of a pecan orchard.  There were 50 or 60 pecan trees in the fields around the house. 

(As residents of Fort Worth know, blackbirds and grackles travel in massive flocks.  They'll color the sky black.  When they select a place to roost in their daily migration, they leave behind a massive pile of blackbird droppings.  Downtown Fort Worth's efforts to get rid of them were comical.  They used scary rubber owls, air canons, plastic snakes in the trees, and I forget what else.  One thing they didn't do?  They didn't hire me to shoot them.  But I digress....)

One year when I was about 12 years old, the largest flock of blackbirds I've ever seen decided to roost in our pecan orchard.  They would fly in at about 2:00 in the afternoon and leave around 7:00.  Sometimes you couldn't see the branches on the pecan trees. 
My father estimated that they ate about 20 acres of rice.  (At the time, a good rice yield was 90 bushels per acre, and we got around $8.00 per bushel.  Do the math.) 
I had a 20-gauge single-shot, a beloved shotgun that I purchased with my own money in the 4th grade.
My father gave me an allotment of one box of shotguns shells per day....

....and turned me loose in the pecan orchard.  That was the best job I've ever had. 

As long as he didn't need me on a tractor, every day was a blackbird hunt. 
I could aim in the general direction of a tree, and put blackbirds on the ground.  My record number was 23 with one shot. 
Jack and Jim, our two sorta Border Collies, started following me into the orchard to gorge themselves on blackbirds.  They were competitive types who survived on leftovers and scraps, and they didn't bother with chewing.  They just ate and ate and ate.  Watching them swallow blackbirds was like watching Chris Christie swallow an aspirin. 
Eventually the cats (whose name was Legion, for they were many) started following me into the orchard.  I'd give almost anything for a picture of me, the dogs, and the cats making our trek into the killing fields.  We were a team.   
The birds eventually figured out the range of my Western Auto .20 gauge, and it became a bit more difficult to kill quite so many birds per shot.  Still, it was a rare shotgun shell that didn't send 8 or 10 of them to blackbird hell. 
25 shotgun shells per day times 12 dead blackbirds per shell times 3 or 4 months. 
You do the math. 

The grossest part, even by my jaded North Mississippi standards, was when Jack and Jim made it back to the house. 
They would recline in the driveway, and you could see wounded and unchewed blackbirds moving around inside their ribcages. 

I don't know or care what killed 4,000 blackbirds in Bebe Arkansas, but I'm sure the blackbird population will survive. 
They've made it through worse things. 

The Caramel Pie Story

This is the definitive version of The Caramel Pie Story, a tale that has been spreading throughout north Mississippi (and beyond) for at least 35 years. It is time to get it online before the variant versions take hold and are accepted as truth.

People have told this story so many times that some Mississippians now claim to have been there when they weren’t. Combine those folks with the number of people who claim that they saw the aftermath and, well, there’s not room for that many people on an ocean liner.

The story involves a caramel pie, my family, the LaMastus family (neighbors), a remodeled kitchen, and some ducks.

Don’t forget about the ducks.

It was wintertime on our farm in North Mississippi, sometime in the early 1970’s.  I was probably 14 or so. Amy and Jill, my sisters, would have been 11 and 9. My little brother Steven was 7.

On the morning of The Caramel Pie Incident, my father went duck hunting with Ed LaMastus. The plan was for the hunters to be back by early afternoon (with ducks) so they would have time to clean the ducks, clean themselves, and get over to the LaMastus’ house in time for Arlas LaMastus to cook the ducks for supper that night.

In the meantime, Mama was in her (newly remodeled) kitchen, cooking a caramel pie.

Here’s the recipe:

Peel off the labels off of three cans of Eagle Brand Condensed Milk.

Submerge the three cans in a large pot of boiling water for 3 hours. Add additional water every 30 minutes to ensure that the cans remain completely covered.
After 3 hours, carefully remove the cans from the pot and place in the refrigerator until they are cool to the touch. Don’t open the cans until you are 100% sure that the caramel is at least down to room temperature.
Open the cans and spoon the contents into a pie crust.

The condensed milk will have turned into a delicious, gloppy caramel substance. Cover the caramel with whipped cream, and you’re finished.  Go here for a variant version that involves a crock pot, but takes 8 hours. 

If you want to make a healthy version, put some banana slices on top of it.

That’s all there is to it, and those things are great.

That takes care of the preliminaries. So….

1) Mama was boiling some cans for a caramel pie.
2) Daddy was duck hunting with Ed LaMastus.
3) Don’t forget about the ducks, which have not yet arrived on the scene.

By most accounts, we were all good kids. But sometimes we would leave a mess in the (newly remodeled) kitchen. Sometimes we would leave new clothing or toys outside. Occasionally we would bring our dogs or cats into the house and they would get into the groceries. On one occasion we let a female cat in the house, a cat who had kittens all over Mama’s wedding dress, the dress that was being carefully saved for Amy’s and Jill’s weddings. Mama looked at the spectacular amount of kittens and afterbirth, shrugged it off, and wondered if one wedding dress was enough to make that many kittens legitimate.

In the time leading up to The Caramel Pie Event, Mama had been on a Responsibility Rampage.
Her battle cry was “Y’ALL HAVE GOT TO ACCEPT SOME RESPONSIBILITY!”  If we didn’t clean up our rooms, we heard “Y’ALL HAVE GOT TO ACCEPT SOME RESPONSIBILITY!”  If we left the refrigerator door open (in the newly remodeled kitchen) – “Y’ALL HAVE GOT TO ACCEPT SOME RESPONSIBILITY!” We started doing our best, but I think our parents were ready for a break from their irresponsible kids.

Duck hunters are usually back home early, perhaps because Mississippi ducks have done most of their flying by noon. But on the day of this duck hunt, 6:00 p.m. came and went without the hunters returning home. This was long before everyone had cell phones, and no one could get in touch with the two patriarchs. Someone had drowned, someone had been shot, or the duck hunters weren’t having much luck and were staying on the pond out of sheer pride and hard-headedness. Sometime around 4:00, Mama and Arlas LaMastus switched over to plan “B” and agreed to cook some of the many diverse animals that were already in the LaMastus freezer.

Finally, around 6:30, Daddy’s pickup pulled into the driveway. He had gotten five or six ducks, and he looked like he’d spent the day stranded on Mount Everest.

(My father, Donald Gene Patterson, was one of the greatest men I’ve ever known, and it was an honor to grow up in his house. He has left behind some big shoes that I’ll never be able to fill. But the man could not go duck hunting without getting water in his waders. I’m a horrible role model, but at least I can stay dry on a duck hunt. Daddy could’ve worn waders into The Gobi Desert and come back soaked to his armpits.)

For the benefit of the Brits reading this epic, these are waders, compliments of The Mossy Oak Company, or West Point, Mississippi:

Since we had a yard full of ravenous dogs and stray cats, Daddy dropped the ducks off inside the house, where they waited at the far end of the (newly remodeled) kitchen hallway, like biological weapons of mass destruction. (The Caramel Pie story requires more foreshadowing than the complete works of Charles Dickens.  I apologize.)

Mama was already irritated beyond rational speech, since the plan was for Daddy and Ed to be back in time to clean the ducks, cook the ducks, etc., etc., etc. I halfway expected her to say “YOU AND ED HAVE GOT TO ACCEPT SOME RESPONSIBILITY!”

Daddy got out of his waders and coveralls, inspected himself for new frostbite, and then stomped into the back of the house to clean up. You know how badly it hurts to get into hot water when you’ve been extremely cold? I can still remember the sound of Daddy screaming in the shower.

They finally left for the LaMastus house, (going through the kitchen and stepping over the ducks as they departed through the side door) and leaving three children and an invalid grandmother in my care. We spent the next couple of hours in the back of the house watching TV with my grandmother.

A couple of hours later my sister Amy was walking toward the front of the house and heard the first explosion in the kitchen.

Fortunately for Amy, she assumed that Steven and I were fighting and she didn’t bother investigating immediately. Otherwise, she would’ve had an Augustus Gloop moment.

But then she heard two more explosions. She opened the kitchen door to investigate.

You know that scene in “The Wizard of Oz” where everything goes from black and white into color? Or the first time Harry Potter walks through the column at gate 9 ¾ to Hogwarts? Or those C.S. Lewis kids who are messing around inside the wardrobe and come out the other side into Narnia?

That’s the experience Amy had when she opened the door to the kitchen. She walked into another world.

Mama had forgotten about the cans of caramel. All of the water had boiled away hours earlier. The cans had started swelling and swelling, turning red hot. At one point you coulda penetrated their lids with a hat pin.

Finally, all of the cans had given up and exploded underneath the cooktop.

But they didn’t remain under the cooktop. When each can finally ripped open at the vertical seam, it went spinning around the kitchen at about 5,000 RPM’s because of all the pressurized caramel glop releasing itself into the stratosphere. (Or it would’ve gone into the stratosphere, but our kitchen ceiling was in the way.)

Each can probably made 30 or 40 laps whirling around the kitchen floor, spraying tiny rivulets of hot, sweet, sticky, caramelized goodness all over the wallpaper, the ceiling, the appliances and everything else.

Imagine if vandals attacked your house with a thousand cans of Nestle® Silly String.

Imagine if "action-painter" Jackson Pollock had gone through a “brown” period.

Imagine yourself as a child, seeing the greatest thing EVER.

Amy took a look at the thousands of strands of caramel, each one slowly being overcome by gravity, and marveled for a few seconds, much like the first European to see Niagara Falls, or the first astronaut to see the curve of the earth. Even as a child, she knew. She knew. This was something people would talk about for centuries.

And. It. Was. Not. Our. Fault ! ! !

If you read a lot of crime novels, you know that there’s enough blood in a human body to paint a small apartment. Mystery novelists are fond of that statistic, for some reason. On a smaller scale, in case you’re wondering, there’s enough caramel in 3 cans of Eagle Brand to paint a large kitchen.

Amy sprinted to the back of the house. “Y’ALL COME LOOK IN THE KITCHEN. Y’ALL AREN’T GONNA BELIEVE THIS ! ! !”

We pulled ourselves away from The Brady Bunch and ran into the kitchen. Once we figured out what had happened, we were absolutely delighted. We ran our fingers through the caramel on the refrigerator and ate delicious fingerloads of the stuff. We wrote our names in the wallpaper. I think we took Steven’s shirt off of him and rolled him around the floor.

Some of the new kitchen cabinet doors were open, and the stuff had gotten into the plates and cups. The cabinet doors that were closed had caramel rivulets running down their glass fronts. The vent-a-hood over the cooktop was dripping enough chocolaty stalactites to send Willie Wonka into insulin shock. I don’t know why I remember this little detail, but we had a Skillet Clock like this one….

….mounted over the stove and a tiny little drop fell off the minute hand and fell into Steven’s hair.

We briefly debated letting the dogs and cats in, partly so they could help us lick the walls, and partly because we knew we’d be telling this story for decades and Border Collies and cats would add some flavor to the tale. But we couldn’t do that because they would’ve also eaten….

The ducks.

Don’t forget about the ducks.

After about 15 or 20 minutes of licking caramel off of the walls, the floors, and each other, we decided that it would be a good idea to call our parents.

Amy got to the phone first and called the LaMastus house. “You remember those cans that were boil….”

“TURN ‘EM OFF, TURN ‘EM OFF, TURN ‘EM OFF I FORGOT TO DO THAT BEFORE WE LEFT ! ! TURN ‘EM OFF !!! ! !”

“It’s too late,” Amy said, without betraying the extent of the fury that the Eagle Brand Company of Orville, Ohio had unleashed in our kitchen. “The kitchen is a mess.” Amy and Mama went on to calmly exchange some girl talk about how it could be cleaned up the next morning, a Monday, when we would be in school and not in the way.  But, in later tellings of this story, Mama admits that she halfway thought we were playing a trick on her because of the "responsibility" rants we'd been enduring.  She thought we had noticed the red-hot bulging cans of Eagle Brand on the cooktop, turned off the heat, and played a joke on her with the phone call.

(Amy went on to get a Masters and then a Doctorate in Rhetoric and Composition, a field that requires one to cite information in a straightforward manner with no appeals to emotion or verbal trickery. She displayed this ability even as a child.  I, on the other hand, grew up to pound political rants into a computer at odd hours of the night, with the stated goal of attracting as much attention as possible.  That explains the next phone call nicely, I think.)

I waited about 15 minutes and called the LaMastus house again. “YA’LL AIN’T GONNA BELIEVE THIS. THE KITCHEN LOOKS LIKE IT JUST GOT SPRAYED DOWN WITH A SEPTIC PUMP !! WE CAN’T EVEN FIND ONE OF THE CANS !!”

That did it. The parents decided to come home.

We started calling our friends and describing the carnage, not realizing that we would be calling them again in 20 minutes to describe the final outrage that would be inflicted on our defenseless kitchen….

And that would be….the ducks.  They were dead.  My father had shot them.  But they would have their revenge. 

I haven’t been duck hunting in 25 years. Not because I don’t like going, and not because I don’t like to eat ducks. It’s because I hate cleaning them. Ducks have intestines that are the diameter of a pencil and 3 miles long, filled with everything that the bird has eaten for the last six years.

They also have millions of tiny little pin feathers that have to be pulled out by hand. After you’ve cleaned your first duck, your hands are a mess, and the feathers start sticking to everything. I’d rather field dress a Woolly Mammoth than clean another duck.

Some duck hunters claim that it’s easier to remove the pinfeathers if you freeze the duck first, and then let it thaw. For some reason, the feathers are easier to remove afterwards. (I used to think that was just an excuse to postpone cleaning ducks. Throw the critters in the freezer, forget about them, and then bury them in the backyard sometime in the Spring.) Whether you believe that’s a time-saver or not, the ducks had frozen solid in the back of Daddy’s pickup while he was driving home that afternoon.

When he put them inside our back door, they had thawed.

And when my parents opened the side door, thousands and thousands of tiny little pinfeathers had already released themselves from the ducks that grew them…

And the four Patterson children, with caramel all over their faces, hands, and hair, had posed themselves in a photographic tableaux in the kitchen hallway, looking like Victorian Sewer-sweeps, if there ever was such a thing, waiting to surprise our parents….

And when my father opened the door, a huge gust of Mississippi winter wind blew across the ducks, picking up those thousands and thousands of feathers….

And we saw a feathery cloud coming toward us, and there was absolutely nothing we could do about it….
Except watch the feathers stick to the caramel, the kitchen, and us...

And our joy was made complete.  (1 John, Chapter 1, Verse 4) 

The kitchen looked like it had been tarred and feathered. We all laughed until we cried.

The #1 priority for the cleanup plan the next day was to get us to school so we wouldn’t be stomping through the caramel and tracking it through the rest of the house. Everyone went to bed thinking it would happen.

We woke up the next morning with a foot of snow on the ground. School was cancelled.

Daddy got some paint scrapers, some 5-gallon buckets for us to sit on, and Amy and I started scraping the walls. We didn’t make much progress.

Then Daddy went to the farm shop and picked up “Son”, one of his employees.  Son Rogers was an older African-American guy, salt of the earth, taught me how to drive a tractor, first man to tell me about B.B. King, etc, etc, etc.   Daddy told Son that we had some cleanup to do at the house, and asked him to bring a scraper and a 5-gallon bucket to sit on. This was north Mississippi in the early 1970’s, and Son was of a generation that didn't question white people about their business or their personal lives. He just showed up with his scraper and bucket.

In the greatest display of willpower and suppressed curiosity I’ve ever seen, Son briefly looked at the caramel, the feathers, the two nasty looking white kids scraping the walls, and never said a word or asked what had happened.

He just sat down beside us and started scraping.

I'm copying my sisters, brother, and various LaMastus people on my Facebook link to this so they can vouch for the accuracy of this story.  I hope someone in Drew or Merigold Mississippi will forward this to the current owners of the house so they can put up a plaque or something. 

Death Panels force Canadian to the U.S. for treatment

Here's someone named Mark Bonokoski, writing in The Toronto Sun, on Canada's healthcare system:

Kent Pankow lives in Edmonton, in a province and a country that is trying to either kill him or bankrupt him.

No sense mincing words.
Suffering from brain cancer, Kent Pankow was literally forced to go to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. for lifesaving surgery — at a cost to family and friends of $106,000 — after the health-care system in Alberta left him hanging in bureaucratic limbo for 16 crucial days, his tumour meanwhile migrating to an unreachable part of the brain, while it dithered over his case file, ultimately deciding he was not surgery worthy.
Now, with the Mayo Clinic having done what the Alberta Cancer Board wouldn’t authorize or even explain, but with the tumour unable to be totally removed, the province will now not fund the expensive drug, Avastin, that the Mayo prescribed to keep him alive and keep the remaining tumour from increasing in size — despite the costs of the drug being totally funded by the province for other forms of cancer.
Kent Pankow, as it turns out, has the right disease but he has it in the wrong place.
Had he lung cancer, breast cancer, or colon cancer, then the cost of the drug — $4,555 per treatment, two times a month — would be totally covered by Alberta’s version of OHIP.

But he doesn’t.

And so he is not only a victim of brain cancer, he is also a victim of arbitrary discrimination.
Full disclosure. Kent Pankow, a 40-year-old Red Seal sous chef, is a son of the man who married the spouse of my late brother. And it was while vacationing with them at their winter home in Los Cabos, Mexico, recently that this story began to unfold back in their home province of Alberta.
But do not think, even for a moment, that this could never happen in Toronto or other parts of Ontario.

Our supposedly universal federal health care system, the pride of most Canadians and the political struggle of America, is only as good as the length of the waiting line and whether you have the right disease at the right time.

Here's some info on the Kent Pankow Trust Fund.  (Note to other Bow Hunters - watch this clip !)



There you have it. 
"Socialized medicine: solving no problems, but giving government more of the money." 

A Target-Rich Environment

Have you ever gone dove hunting on a baited field? It's not much fun. There are so many birds, that you don't get a feeling of accomplishment when you bring one down.

Ever shot a deer from a herd that was enclosed in a small barbed-wire fence? Me neither. Hope I never do.

Have you ever gotten a fishing license, gotten your poles, lures, bait and boat together, and then gone to dip a few fish out of the live well at a Red Lobster restaurant? Well, I haven't either. I can't imagine why anyone would want to do that.

But that's what it is going to be like every time I visit this site.

The cool picture of the guy with too many targets to shoot at came from here.

Claude Marshall LaMastus - R.I.P.

One of my best friends ever was the late, great Stan Norwood of Drew, Mississippi. We met in kindergarten. Stan lived next door to a guy named Claude Marshall LaMastus, who was about 12 years older than we were.

This is the story of how, back in the early 1980's, Stan got Claude to the hospital after a uhmmm....hunting trip. But first, some background.

When we were about 14 or 15, Claude Marshall had a terrible car accident. He was coming home from Clarksdale, ran off the road, flipped his car, and was thrown through the sun roof. Claude was paralyzed from the waist down.

Claude hadn’t had much to do with Stan and me until the accident. But once Claude was confined to his wheelchair or crutches, we became his chauffeurs, running buddies, duck and dove retrievers and all-around gophers. I helped him with his physical therapy in the swimming pool a few times. In exchange, Claude let us hang out with him, let us make mix tapes from his record collection, etc etc etc. This was at the beginning of the “Outlaw Country” era, and Claude Marshall and Mike Ellis taught me to love that music. Stan and I were marching band and choir geeks; Claude was a semi-rich guy with some money. Remember, he was 12 years older. It seemed like a good deal at the time.

That’s all you need to know to appreciate this story. I’m going to tell it the way that Stan told it to me. I’m sure that I’m going to get some of the details wrong. If anyone in Drew Mississippi wants to correct or improve on this, please use the comment field.

One day in the middle of winter, Stan and Claude were going down the Sunflower River in a fishing boat, ambushing ducks. It was freezing cold. Claude was in the front of the boat with a shotgun and Stan was running the outboard motor. I don’t know the reason why, but Claude decided it was his turn to drive.

Imagine a paraplegic in full wintertime camouflage trying to get from the front of a metal fishing boat to the back. It was a doomed idea to begin with, and it was complicated by all the guns. Ever since the accident, Claude had become a little bit paranoid. Maybe he felt helpless without the full use of his legs. Most of the time he was armed with an amazing array of guns, ammo, and knives, and that was just for riding around town. I remember thinking that he looked like a cross between Franklin Roosevelt and Pancho Villa.

When Claude had scooted about halfway down the length of the fishing boat, one of his guns went off. The bullet entered one of his legs, and left a heck of an exit wound. The exit wound was nowhere near as bad as the entry wound the bullet made in the hull of the boat. Yes, Claude Marshall had shot himself AND the boat. Because of his paralysis and various pain medications, the gunshot wound didn’t bother Claude very much. Stan started freaking out because the boat was taking on water.

Once Claude got shot, they abandoned the plan to change drivers, turned the boat around, and headed toward the pickup and boat trailer which were about two miles away.

They were bailing as fast as they could but the boat was taking on more and more water. They started throwing out ballast. They threw out the ice chest. They got rid of the seat cushions. They got rid of some fishing poles and paddles and tackle boxes, and they threw out the extra gas tank. They were still taking on water.

When they were about halfway to the truck, Stan looked down at his remaining fuel tank, the one hooked to the motor. The needle was banging on empty, which was enough for Stan to imagine that the engine was starting to sputter. Various obscenities were shouted at the heavens. The motherhood of all gas tanks was questioned. Stan turned the boat around and went back to try to find the gas tank they’d just thrown overboard.

Fortunately, the tank had a half inch of air in the top and was bobbing in the current when they got back to it. Stan fished it out, swapped the tanks, and then made another effort to get back to the truck. In the meantime, they were both wet up to their thighs and were freezing.

Stan finally got them back to the truck. He backed the trailer into the water and started winching the boat (with Claude in it) onto the trailer. Once that was done, Stan had to figure out a way to get Claude into the pickup.

“Hell, don’t worry about me,” Claude said. “I can ride back here. Just get me to the hospital.”
Stan didn’t feel right about it, but he got in the truck, turned up the heat, and pulled the boat and Claude Marshall LaMastus up the riverbank. Once they got onto paved roads, Stan pulled over and suggested they stop at someone’s house, someone who might help get Claude into the cab.

Claude refused. So Stan got back in the truck and pulled Claude and the boat (in sub-freezing weather) all the way to the Ruleville hospital. Stan claimed there was ice in Claude’s beard by the time they got there. I can imagine the looks they got going down Highway 49, looking like a “Field & Stream” Christmas Parade Float.

When they got to the Emergency Room entrance, which had a loading dock, Stan removed the outboard motor from the boat, and backed the boat straight to the dock so they could unload Claude.

Stan said he hung around the Emergency Room for a little while, figuring they’d want to ask him some questions. Nobody ever did.

It was the Mississippi Delta. They’d seen it all before.

A few years after this happened, Stan Norwood was killed in an automobile accident between Drew and Memphis.
This afternoon I got word that Claude Marshall LaMastus was killed in a one car accident on the Drew/Merigold road.
Our world is now a much less interesting, much less colorful place. But if there’s a heaven, Stan and Claude are now shooting at low-flying angels from The Pearly Gates. They know they can't hurt anybody; they just want to keep things interesting.
My thoughts are with the LaMastus family tonight.
This is a song I first heard in Claude’s record archives. Here’s Waylon: