Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 81

ZZTop and the Regional Lyric Poetry of Texas 73 that one must not go too far in trying to overcome monotony. Each work warns against the deadliness of separating the painful experience of reality from a stigmatized pleasure in the beautiful: "don't give Johnny Walker a ride / cause Jack Black is right by your side" is essentially the same as saying "you believe / in deer and cattle-crossing signs." Jack Black and cattle-crossing signs represent the restraints, the reminders that reality can be harmful if ignored. The enticement to "hit the switch," to drive "while blind" and disregard the signs and social stigmas associated with moving out of bounds is great, but the consequences of doing so can be fatal. Living on the edge, on the frontier where the monotony of social restraint can be challenged, McDonald's and ZZTop's characters must constantly guard against going too far, allowing themselves to become vulnerable. Hardness is a necessary attribute if one is to survive. Both McDonald’s "Night of the Scorpion" and ZZTop's "Master of Sparks" examine the landscape's absurd and arbitrary threat of annihilation for those who are somehow off their guard. In "Night of the Scorpion" the speaker, who is a young boy, and his father wander too far into the wilderness, drawn in to explore the ruin of an old house and its "tumbling stones / of a chimney fallen to rubble years ago . . . ." The landscape here has reclaimed man's shelter, his necessary enclave against the ravages of time and nature, but the innocence of the young boy prevents him from realizing the potential dangers lurking in what was once a haven against the harshness of the landscape. When the poem opens, the speaker has already been stung by a scorpion and his father is absurdly searching through the rubble, trying to avenge his son's inevitable death. In a sense, he is also trying to kill the landscape, trying to prevent what has already happened, but his actions are futile and meaningless. As the poem progresses, we see the effect of the scorpion's poison working on the speaker: In fever I rolled and tossed, saw his shadow high in the willows, cast by the car lights, broad back and head like a stinger lunging from side to side, stones crashing like thunder, like ninepins in the mountains.