yabba dabba doo the King is gone

The World’s most celebrated drink driver is gone. The link between motor-dependence and freedom just got weaker.

“The bars are all closed,
it’s four in the morning.
Must have shut ’em all down
by the shape that I’m in.
I lay my head on the wheel
And the horn begins honking
The whole neighborhood knows
That I’m home drunk again”

George Jones (If drinkin’ don’t kill me her memory will)

The World’s most celebrated drunk driver has passed.

According to the legend George Jones used to go out carousing, leaving his then wife – Tammy Wynette – lonely and alone. Worried about George’s honky-tonkin’ ways ‘the First Lady of Country’ finally lost patience with standing by her man and decided it was time for talk.

To make Jones spend an evening in the lovely suburban home that had become her prison, she hid the keys to all his cars. It was way too far for George to travel on foot to his favourite downtown haunts. In the Twentieth Century people born poor who attained riches didn’t go big on bicycles. So the self-reliant ‘King of Country Music’ set off to drive into Nashville……on his lawn-mower.

Years later, wallowing in hell-raising mythology, George recorded this jaunty version of the notorious attempt to enter his capital on a latter day Donkey…

The reality probably looked more like this sad and ugly scene out on Interstate 65

 

Why not break the seal on a bottle of the hard stuff, put on some Jones and consider that the – always  tenuous – connection between motor-dependence and personal freedom just got one link weaker?

Down in Mississippi the highway patrol
Will read it in the paper and say,
“God rest his soul”
No more will he wobble down life’s highway
‘Cause George stopped drinkin today”