Taylor Swift Marked For Mirth, Part 1

You'll agree, I hope, that there sure has been a lot of bangers and mash about our subject lately.  It's almost not fair:  she's an easier target than the authors of all our social ills put together with a turkey with a belly full of hot-buttered popcorn and whiskey thrown in, because she's so winsome and projects the down-home goodness of a biscuit smeared with freshly churned butter.  Well go-o-lly, she's purer than driven Southern snow.

Winsome without question, and pure like a tub of Country Crock.  This erstwhile pig-farmer's jeremiads about good lovin' gone bad real quick have proven too popular with the stunted pajama party set, and me and you and the Good Lord too wanna know why.  

Does she sing of the vicissitudes of love and the verities of being burned by it?  In the main, I guess so.  It's the oldest subject in popular music in all its iterations.  What the heck - sure, God heal her broken heart.  If I'm going to be honest with you, my dear friends, I have to tell you that I don't pay much attention to her music.  I have paid enough attention, though, to know that it fits nicely in business and medical office settings and, yes, the nuthouse, too (in due time, in due time.)  It's perfectly negligible, yet it's all around us, like some airborne rash immune to previously reliable forms of treatment.  

I suspect that the girl reads her own press - she seems to revel in creating it, after all.  Therein laughs something laughable:  surely she knew better than to give John Mayer anything more than a fleeting thought.  Hell, they're competing for face space on the cover of every checkout rag and, what's more, they're in negotiations to grace some of our most beloved candy bars, too.  

It seems to me that dating John Mayer excited a change in her.  Hers wasn't about to become another Tina and Ike story.  From the point after John Boy kicked out her of his room before the sun came up and breakfast was served one too many times, she picked up the mantle of liberation from scumbags with greasy hair and greasier motives.  In her mind, she's become liberation's foremost theologian.  

That makes me laugh too because, unless I'm a dummy for believing everything I read, she's a scumbag, too, tossing men out to the curb like Ophelia tossing poppies, but still unable to tell a hat from a stick.  This new take no shit ethos she's adopted, one that will only earn applause from me, begs a different analogue.  Now she's Rosie the Riveter, showing off her muscles and punching paramours where they live upon their respective inabilities to make her every wish come true.  It's the best I can summon right now.  The chef's been cookin' all day and he needs a break.

We've all been burned in love and burned someone else in its name, too.  In the best cases, we mature and either move on or humbly make amends, whatever the case requires.  That, or we act like pigs.  Despite the image she attempts to cultivate as a woman of the world, she's an overgrown kid, capricious, petulant, prone to fits and pretense and proud of it.  In short, her behavior is rotten, which marks her as a brat.  Maybe she'll become a woman soon.  Until then, she's churning up nothing but shit storm after shit storm.  

The Main Ingredient

A Shout It Out Loud: Penultimo, I Hear You Loud and Clear, Good Buddy!

My ally, the sour-dispositioned Mr. Yum, is this installment's featured image.  His is the type of face that belongs on the covers of a thousand magazines.  Sometimes there's just no justice.