---Michael Acklin   
NEW DIGS
    Poverty Ridge is too small to be a town, too close to a town to anyway be allowed to develop very much without having to pay for it. One lane wide, Buford Trail the only road in the community, wandered off the tip end of Bobcat Lane at what at least seemed like a right angle. A hundred yards or so later it made another right angle up the face of the ridge. The soil hereabouts stacked mostly red clay with random shapes and sizes of limestone and granite. Every foot of road sharpened its oil-pan punches and tire-wall shredders. I drove the MINI at less than a walk, climbing each pile of car-grinders in turn, all the way to the corner to the mailbox marked 2008, the number in the one-line add pulled from the Ozark Shopper. The driveway split off from the main trail and described a sort of quarter-moon parking spot beneath an old, tired black walnut tree. Beneath the tree, gathered haphazardly about parked the remains of half a dozen riding lawn mowers, a couple of overflowing tool boxes, half full of black water and wiggling mosquito larvae. Just uphill of the parking spot, a jumble of weather-greyed pine steps wandered up the steep hillside to a long, unpainted deck, hung like a hot-dog tray from the length of a blue and white single-wide house trailer. On the deck, behind a round aluminum table, the Mayor of Poverty Ridge. Albert MosRite Franklin filled the lawn chair without spilling out of it. His thin, speckled hair clung to the sides of his head in fear of being the last strand to go. His head and neck were spotted with a lifetime collection of freckles, most of them the size of a corn flake. All this gathered about a lively face, given to expressions commonly used for the amusement of children. At heart a 1930s hobo, Mose had settled in Poverty Ridge after having a double-hip replacement, marrying, and having a pack of beautiful daughters. Surrounding him on the deck day lay a large tan hound of undetermined lineage, seven or eight cats, and his youngest daughter, Millie.
    "Have you ever" he paused and assumed a dusty squint "have you ever known anybody who had all 381 songs of Lefty Frizzell?
    "Why yes," I said, "In fact I’m the one who gave them to you"
We are low level grousing in the manner of Joe Friday and Frank Smith, but so far Joe and Frank have the good lines.
    They’re still in there, in that infernal external Hard Disk just where they lay as something ugly and nasty shut them off altogether. from the big old world (ME). $600 is what it costs to get the files back I have to send off my disk with a trusting heart and not a little scepticism . We’ll see how it goes.
    This disaster didn’t happen because I was careless.I had both the main drive and the backup connected and running a file backup along with a scheduled backup of all my programs. Both got fried, one came back to me after a bit of unix coaxing. The big old backup is the dead one, but it was serving double duty as a program disk
Ah, well, there was a time when I didn’t have a computer to my name, nor a printable song book, nor recording software, CD burner, DVD creator… heck, I didn’t have an amp or a guitar for quite awhile.
    It’s possible to get so bound up in the stuff that you lose sight what made you a musician to start with.
Of all the Mudcat locations, my favorite so far is thr Muddy Bayou Summer Palace, but work has dragged me off to points Northwest. Now my special place of daily rest is Poverty Ridge. You can send them emails to acklin@hughes.net, and if you just have to call, well, I’ll tell you my phone number someday when I can remember it
    For now, it’s me and Mose, the dog and the mayor. I’m happy with all the goodies I’ve accumulated but mostly hanging out with a guitar and a little Vox amp. It’ s possible to get so wrapped up in gimmicks and stuff and gorget that you started out working alone with guitar, a harmonica holder, and a little Peavey PA
    The PA is different, the guitar is prettier, and the harmonica holder is somehow not on the bill right now, but I’ve got a couple of single-act bookings and I’m gonna se where it goes from there.
 
 
 
 
"Reality is merely an illusion,
 
albeit a very persistent one."
 
                                 Albert Einstein