On Rory:

It was the humming that got her.  The spontaneous eruptions at the grocery store when Rory was in line with her lethal favorites, a bottle of Jack Beam and a can of creamed corn.  The floating slips of atonality that dragged her by the ear at the gas station putting another round of diesel in the bus with the last of Mick’s state disability checks.  The gurgling snatches from a cracked car window cruising by at the end of the day; the driver finally having settled on a station that wasn’t playing commercials.  Just one motherfucking station, just one.  It was that miserable squealing like a stuck pig summer when it seemed the whole globe was blasting Jude’s new song in unison.  A twelve-bar Monstrosity that she claimed she’d dredged up from the bottom of the Delta, nicotine fingernails dirty and squirming with the muck of the ancestors one generation removed from the Middle Passage, she drawled in exclusive interviews with the European trade mags.

As crotch sticky and miserable as the tread of June to August was there was no worse torture than the hijacking of the airwaves and every inch of the audible world by the Monstrosity.  She swore off all media, Jack Beam, creamed corn, Solitaire, any whiff of diversion that would take her away from practicing, going up and down the fret board in her head, on the back of her seat, trying to tame the petty little niggling little argument between her mind, which swooped away, wandering and worrying mid-chord change, and her disobedient fingers.