i want to declare war! on fort collins, colorado!
euforquestra, my favorite afro-cuban-samba-soca-funk-jazz-reggae-rock band here in town (and if you think they’re the ONLY afro-cuban-samba-soca-funk-jazz-reggae-rock band in this town, you obviously weren’t in the audience this morning when, after a summer of rehearsing, the Loser Family Funktasmic Apocalypso Beat Project successfully made it through all eight bars of “twinkle twinkle little star” on banjo, recorder, guitar, steel drum and accordion!), just gave their farewell-to-iowa performance last weekend as they moved to fort collins, colorado.
now, i was fine with this, until i took the kids to see Mike and Amy Finders at the hospital rooftop cafe today, and they bid us a tearful farewell (literally! and trust me, if a little boy in a spiderman mask asked if you were a cowboy, and then said, “i love you, cowboy!” well, you’d tear up too)… because they had just moved to fort collins, colorado, and this was their final perfomance as iowa residents.
one is a coincidence… two is some old bullshit. and two in one week is a vast right-wing conspiracy. motherfuckers, just because you slap a RAGBRAI commemorative beer label on your delicious fat tire amber ale doesn’t give you the authority to go all pied-piper and prance off with our musicians. if any more of my pickin buddies disappear from my jam sessions, there will be blood.
now that that’s out of the way, let me tell you why the title of this post is funny as hell.
PRM had a friend in undergrad who was taking a trip to cuba. as an american citizen in the 1990s, the easiest way to get to cuba was to fly there from canada. so, having ingested the usual quantities of his favorite substances, this dude was in the backseat of a car full of people headed to canada to make their flight to cuba. all was going well until they got to the border, and the canadian border guards, having looked over driver’s licenses and passports, asked if anyone had anything to declare. the answers they received went something like this:
“no.”
“no.”
“no.”
“no.”
“YEAH! i have something to declare! i want to declare WAR! on canada!”
and in case you ever have a burning desire to be deported and permanently banned from canada… that’s apparently a pretty expedient way to get it done.
anyway, should you happen to live in or near fort collins, i highly recommend both groups. you should request that mike and amy sing the song mike wrote for her on their 10-year anniversary, “Ball and Chain Blues.” because watching a couple that’s obviously still deeply in love, after 10 years and two kids, play the crap out of a mandolin and guitar, while singing improvised insulting lyrics about each other, will not only be the best fusion of country blues and freestyle rap-dis you’ll ever see, it will also be as close as you’ll ever get to being in bed with me and PRM (unless you happen to be a geriatric biracial tranny stripper with a six-pack of new belgium beer in each hand, which will get you quite a bit closer!)
