Trumpet Guy Quotes

Back when I was a regular mortal kid, I didn't know much about combat. I had some murky ideas that armies would line up, blow trumpets, and then march forward to kill one another in an orderly fashion. If I thought about Viking combat at all, I would envision some dude yelling, SHIELD WALL! and a bunch of hairy blond guys calmly forming ranks and merging their shields into some cool geometric pattern like a polyhedron or a Power Ranger Megazord.

Back when I was a regular mortal kid, I didn’t know much about combat. I had some murky ideas that armies would line up, blow trumpets, and then march forward to kill one another in an orderly fashion. If I thought about Viking combat at all, I would envision some dude yelling SHIELD WALL! and a bunch of hairy blond guys calmly forming ranks and merging their shields into some cool geometric pattern like a polyhedron or a Power Ranger Megazord. Actual battle was nothing like that. At least, not any version I’d ever been in. It was more like a cross between interpretive dance, lucha libre wrestling, and a daytime talk show fight.

tooled cowboy boots, engraved hip flask and, in recognition of his new passion for geology, a nineteenth-century explorer’s specimen hammer in a leather case. To bless his second adolescence on turning fifty, a trumpet that had once belonged to Guy Barker. These offerings represented only a fraction of the happiness she urged on him, and sex was only one part of that fraction, and only latterly a failure, elevated by him into a mighty injustice.

There are more guys than girls in jazz. Next-to-no lady trumpeters (oh, there are a few) but it doesn't matter because, for me, jazz trumpet is all about one guy Miles Davis. He made this famous album in 1959 called Kind of Blue which is kind of, always, how I feel. That album gets into your bones goes and goes starts, hesitates, reaches out, feels for the music, the sound, the thing you want to change. Always grasping for the unattainable makes you kind of excited, kind of sorry.

Always remember, the arch-conservative view of the law trumpeted by the Federalist Society is a minority opinion. It’s a minority opinion in law school, in academia, and within the legal profession writ large. Anything that can be done to drown out conservative voices on the Court should be done, and the quickest and easiest way to do that is simply to add more voices.

No one in his family could remember talking about it. Must have been dreadful, they agreed. And, being Walkers, and Bushes, they didn't bring it up. It was only years later, when he got into politics and had to learn to retail bits of his life, that he ever tried to put words around the war. His first attempts, in the sixties, were mostly about the cahm-rah-deree and the spirit of the American Fighting Man. The Vietnam War was an issue then, and Bush was for it. (Most people in Texas were.) He said he learned "a lot about life" from his years in the Navy—but he never said what the lessons were. Later, when peace was in vogue, Bush said the war had "sobered" him with a grave understanding of the cost of conflict—he'd seen his buddies die. The voters could count on him not to send their sons to war, because he knew what it was. Still later, when he turned Presidential prospect, and every bit of his life had to be melted down to the coin of the realm–character–Bush had to essay more thoughts about the war, what it meant to him, how it shaped his soul. But he made an awful hash of it, trying to be jaunty. He told the story of being shot down. Then he added: "Lemme tell ya, that'll make you start to think about the separation of church and state . Finally, in a much-edited transcript of an interview with a minister whom he hired as liaison to the born-again crowd, Bush worked out a statement on faith and the war: something sound, to cover the bases. It wasn't foxhole Christianity, and he couldn't say he saw Jesus on the water—no, it was quieter than that.... But there, on the Finback, he spent his time standing watch on deck in the wee hours, silent, reflective, under the bright stars... "It was wonderful and energizing, a time to talk to God. "One of the things I realized out there all alone was how much family meant to me. Having faced death and been given another chance to live, I could see just how important those values and principles were that my parents had instilled in me, and of course how much I loved Barbara, the girl I knew I would marry…” That was not quite how he was recalled by the men of the Finback. Oh, they liked him: a real funny guy. And they gave him another nickname, Ellie. That was short for Elephant. What they recollected was Bush in the wardroom, tossing his head and emitting on command the roaring trumpeted squeal of the enraged pachyderm; it was the most uncanny imitation of an elephant. Nor were "sobered" or "reflective" words that leapt to Bar's mind when she remembered George at that time. The image she recalled was from their honeymoon, when she and George strolled the promenades, amid the elderly retirees who wintered at that Sea Island resort. All at once, George would scream "AIR RAID! AIR RAID!" and dive into the shrubs, while Bar stood alone and blushing on the path, prey to the pitying glances of the geezers who clucked about "that poor shell-shocked young man." But there was, once, a time when he talked about the war, at night, at home, to one friend, between campaigns, when he didn't have to cover any bases at all. "You know," he said, "it was the first time in my life I was ever scared. "And then, when they came and pulled me out ..." (Him, Dottie Bush's son, out of a million miles of empty ocean!) "Well." Bush trailed off, pleasantly, just shaking his head.

Jimmy Vanderbean, if you remember, is the guy who called me “Brass Gas” in band. (For the record, I farted ONCE while playing my trumpet.)