Slim Cessna's Auto Club @ 31st St. Pub Tonight!

Somewhere within the vast expanse of the American West... perhaps close to the Sierra Nevadas... there is a town beyond time. Its inhabitants live with the fears and dreams of the depression-era homesteaders. They toil to carve a bulwark against the ever-encroaching wild of their surroundings. The people make contact with the spirits of the previous inhabitants of the land- an indigenous tribal group that expended its own collective sweat, a salty moisture that wet the dry gnarled roots of ancient arboreal survivors. And the hymns of the ramshackle clapboard church send reverberations beyond all hearing or understanding. The vibrations from fifty hardscrabble voices seek out the ghosts across the land. The resulting prayer is a collective plea that asks for nothing the earth can give. It's a plaint for a lost covenant, and it mollifies no one.

In this town-out-of-time, a young boy tosses feverishly on a horsehair-stuffed mattress, and though exhausted from working through the daylight of another autumn day... chases anguish through a dark space not yet sleep. His head filled with the austerity of old-time religion, he seeks a peace that is no man's to give. Like his Appalachian forebears, the boy is borne into struggle. His hands are weathered and calloused, like those of a forty-year old man. But his spirit suffers the deepest abrasions of his surroundings. He struggles with the unclean taint of the growing surges within him, and cannot escape the visions of the gaze of the girl down the road. He has been warned by the preacher to run aside of the temptations... to cast his sight instead upon the rock of the Word. But though he stretch himself out of joint to reach the sanctuary of his Lord, he feels the pull ever downward by the warm hands of the cast out angels. Yet damnation is somehow more familiar to him than eternal oblivion, and it is these thoughts of an empty non-existence that at last chill his longings. He'll rise tomorrow, and draw a cold-water canvas rag across his brow, and fortify himself for his nightly round of doubt.


Brothers and Sisters, I have spoken of this before... A Gathering of the Good People awaits your presence tonight in the Strip District. Let not another day's dawn catch you looking backwards, turn around and accept the hand that is offered you, for it is the hand of one who truly cares.