A Lament on the Dearth of Hootenannies and Moonshine

by Peter Sanders

Oh Daddy Why?

Why are there no fun Hootenannies and where’s the Moonshine in my local nightlife? Why do all the places I go to have people with asymmetrical haircuts wearing tight T-Shirts with ironic slogans on the front? What’s a hipster, Daddy? Why is everyone so sour? Why do they bang their heads up and down to loud music where the guitars shriek and whine and you can’t hear the singer’s whine, while all the irony ironed T-shirters drink wine?

Why aren’t there ever ads on the radio, or cool Web sites or pasted posters and flyers on telephone poles in ironic neighborhoods about all-night Hootenannies in the hills and in the brush? Why do they not just have people in overalls who look like Uncle Jesse (you know which Uncle Jesse Daddy!) playing the fiddle and bouncing their knees up and down and up and down?

Everyone can wear their own overalls and plaid shirts and sing un-ironic songs about loss, love, redemption, pets, shotgun weddings and shotgun deaths. Why does everything have to have an amplifier and a groupie?

There wouldn’t be a $10 cover charge to my Hootenanny Daddy! It would be free, but you couldn’t bring silly Ketel One, or Grey Goose or Belvedere! No Guinness. No Amstel Light or Grolsch! Not even any Pabst Blue Ribbon or Keystone.

We would sit on hay bales we brought to the Hootenanny or on the tailgates of old, beat-up pick up trucks (not ironic pickups, but ones that have already been beat to shit by real poor people) and drink Moonshine that we made ourselves in bathtubs and crackpots.

Why do people make Meth when they could make Moonshine? It’s much more fun! And it tastes so good and it’s like one big secret that we could keep from the cops trying to bust us even though the Moonshine is so strong our intestines burn and our eyes cross!

I worry though. What if too many people start going to our Hootenannies and drink our homemade Moonshine? Then we might see our fun times on an ironic T-Shirt they sell for too much money at some froofy store! People might bring electric lights and thumping amplifiers and boom boxes to our midnight Hootenannies!

They might never play the fiddle, but instead suck on candy pacifiers like stupid babies and they would accidentally light the hay on fire when they put their cigarettes down carelessly or burn a hole in my plaid shirt while I dance up and down and up and down. Then there would be a line to get into our own Hootenannies!

Then our Hootenannies would become ironic and our Moonshine would be packaged in frosted glass bottles with twist off caps instead of in the mayonnaise jars we love to use (after we lick all the mayonnaise off with our fingers). Then some big company would buy our Moonshine recipe and put it in 7-Eleven display cases next to the Zima after they took all the alcohol out of it and only left in the sugar and the moon.

Then there would be stupid party ads for our former Moonshine on TV at bars where only hot women go and only drink Moonshine-Ice and dance with obviously gay guys at a bar that we all know doesn’t even exist anyway. We know it doesn’t really exist because there’s no irony at that bar on TV.

Oh Daddy Why?

© 2004 Peter Sanders, All Rights Reserved.