The Taylor Swift Seminar

A female voice cooed through vintage JBL speakers in the last record store left on the Oregon Coast. I heard:

He said that if the sex was half as good as the conversation was
soon they’d be pushing strollers but soon it was over

The lyrics arrested me. I stopped browsing used country CDs hunting for Shania Twain’s greatest hits. I walked up to the clerk sitting behind the counter.

She wore ripped jeans and a rocker t-shirt. She looked like a lead singer for a Coos Bay rock band. Toyz? Dammit Jim? Phat Cheetah? Blue Tide? Timber Wolf?

It was a Taylor Swift song she told me. I’d never heard a Taylor Swift song. I told the clerk that and her face exploded with bliss.

She launched into a Taylor Swift seminar. She quoted the damn discography!

When passion presents itself from five feet away in the last record store left on the Oregon Coast, you best engage.

The same goes when meeting a homeless man on a Coos Bay beach at 6:15 in the morning and he offers you a leg of red rock crab he caught at midnight with a milk crate during a bout of insomnia, cooked an hour ago, and just cracked open leg with needle nose pliers in front of you from five feet away. Delicious!

The clerk and I introduced ourselves—her name an interesting derivation of a body of water that rhymed with a mediocre glam metal band from the 80s.

We discussed music. She told me she was a groupie for a national country act and traveled all over the country. She didn’t think groupie was a bad word. I agreed.

I recommended Liz Phair’s debut album. She wrote it down. I knew she’d investigate because I promised clever wordplay:

They make rude remarks about me
They wonder just how wild I would be
As they egg me on and keep me mad
They play me like a pit bull in a basement