ArcaMax

AI ain't ever gonna use an outhouse, but Dolly Parton used one. That was back in the days when living "off the grid" wasn't a moral decision, but just meant that the grid didn't give a damn about where you were, and you couldn't afford it if it found you.

That was when country singers didn't come from the suburbs of Cleveland, and they didn't think of a homemade quilt as art.

In those days, when Dolly was singing with a skinny, sequin-suited man named Porter Wagoner, there was a fiddle in the band, and the steel player got a long solo because there were plenty of people in the audience who wanted a steel guitar solo.

A friend of mine used to say that the steel player was aways the most redneck-looking guy in any country band because he was fully committed to hillbilly music. A fiddle player could get a job with a string quartet, or in a pop band, or play in an orchestra if he had to, but the steel player had to either play honky-tonk music or get a job with a Hawaiian band.

AI won't give you a Dolly Parton, not even if you program it with the feeling of bare feet on the talcum powder of a dirt road in summer, or the "trickle-shush" of a fast-moving creek no one ever named because it's too small.

I was mowing the hot grass on the eastern side of my house, the rotary blade on my underpowered electric mower cutting down the yellow wildflowers along with the grass. Out west in one (or maybe two) of the square states, fires whose political cause can't be agreed on chewed through the trees and roasted the furry groundhogs in their holes.

Like me, my next-door neighbor is semiretired, so he also mows his grass during the week, and he cut off his mower when his wife waved from the porch, her phone in her hand.

"Dolly Parton died," she hollered to him.

"That's too bad," he said.

Like most Americans, I live in a suburb, not a "holler." There is no coal mine down the road, and I don't own a mule, and AI is reaching for me to make sure I never get a half-step off the grid.

I listen to country music, or old blues, or rap, or Cajun or folk, anything that has poverty in it and death, and a joyous shout that makes the boss think maybe you're not working hard enough.

Because love, and fire, and death and music is really all we have, and flowers cut down, and the steel guitar crying, and the fiddle telling you to find a partner and dance.

I've been writing for wages for more than 40 years. I'm not as good at what I do as Dolly was at what she did, but I know what she did. The words come slow, or they come fast, you pull them out, or they come dancing at you for a kiss.

She couldn't take the songs. or the money, or the sequins with her, but I like to think she's feeling the talcum powder dust of a dirt road and hearing the "trickle-shush" of a fast-moving stream no one ever named because it's too small.

To find out more about Marc Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle and iBooks.