If we're to just go ahead and believe everything that JD McPherson, the songwriter and soul/swing singer from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, tells us about women and their effects, we would come up with a list that could go something like the following:
They are all on fire. Some are controlled fires and others are evacuate-the-area fires that will leave nothing but acres of charred destruction.
They are something else. They are better than drugs.
Some of them might have eyes that are made out of alcohol.
They should be fought over. They should be won.
They constitute something like a religion, something unshakable when they're right, when they're good.
They are sidewinders, sneakier than ferrets. They lie sometimes and hell if it's not usually seen as something to do with their charm.
It all sounds like it comes from the stories our grandfathers, tell other grandfathers, if they still talk about women the same way now as they used to think about them. It's an aged appreciation and it's a beautifully ragged interpretation of what these lovely, deceitful, powerful, gorgeous and shifty things have always done us - the lightweights of the species.
*Essay originally published August, 2012