I was afraid to hug you . . . I might wrinkle you. – Kit DeLuca to Vivian Ward a.k.a. Julie Roberts a.k.a. Pretty Woman

One of the disadvantages of raising oneself up on a steady diet of books and stories is suffering a tendency to want life to fit the form of a plotted story, with its exposition, rising action, climax, and denouement. Things don’t work that way, obviously, but an appetite for the sentimental stirrings of a well-told story doesn’t respect the way things work. It wants satiation, and doesn’t find it, which then results in the person who it afflicts looking far and wide for symbolism in the sound of the truck idling outside and the way the woman sweeps her hair out of her eyes.
I am that person. Grand narratives are always lying underneath the quotidian everyday goings on around me. I am not charmed so much as delusional, which isn’t so bad when you get used to it, and most of us do. I have learned to guard against overreaching when I thank someone for some small gesture, because effusiveness seems so fitting but bears little aside from awkwardness and perplexity. Someone invites me out for a beer, and I get the sense that great things are potentially afoot – the stirring strings of a crescendo at scene’s end sound in my mind before I walk through the door of the meeting place.
Stories are dangerous, and a good thing, that, or else we’d have a hard time finding anything to care about except maybe people. But we care about people from the way we weave them into our lives, yes/no? How they take on whatever accent we transfer to them? If so, it’s not too far to say that we care about characters in the same way as people. Well, no not same, it must be similar – “same” connotes full-blown pathology. I read an interview somewhere, and I forget who, but the person admitted that he cared more about certain characters than about strangers. I can’t say what that is – honesty maybe.
The prelude being over, I can say that I watched Pretty Woman tonight in my neighbor Pete’s apartment. Pete works nights at the dorm appended to the high school at which I work, and periodically I have talked myself into borrowing his key for televisual intake purposes. I would say this happens once a month tops – tonight I needed to borrow his car keys so I could jump my battery-dead vehicle – and the keys were in the apartment, so I had access to the Idiot Box and had no compunction about making use. And in switching from the Pistons-Sixers game, I ran across Mrs. Roberts’ face and really wanted to understand Lyle Lovett. I am not one who sings Julie’s praises or scoffs at her purported effect; I leave her more than I take her, but overall I am neutral like Switzerland.
Pretty Woman is secretly about the ease money confers, and the limits that easiness encounters when it runs up against emptiness. Love is not all that’s the case, because the character of love undergoes the requisite alteration: at first, it’s to be immediately resisted by both parties – remember, no kissing on the mouth this is strictly business, and then it’s cultivated in a way that honors the resistance all the same. So it’s not that true love will prevail, it’s that true love is underwritten by the exchange of money for sex that – initially at least – falsifies the true love it also makes possible. Not a Wallacian double bind, but a head scratcher to be sure, especially if you are susceptible to the money/power love/sacrifice matrix that constitutes God only knows how many uber-narrative threads.
(At this point, I’m not going to try to defend how I came to devote energy to unpacking the reservoir of significance that is Pretty Woman. Its schmaltz and high cheesedick factor are apparent to one and all, but I can ignore it whereas with other early nineties breakout movies I run to go hug porcelain and heave until it doesn’t hurt anymore.)
Whore or not, Vivian has star power – it just hides in the detritus of the situation in which she finds (and places) herself. Once Richard Gere and his Hidden Hand economy noblesse oblige enter the picture, fulfillment becomes more complex, a concept that suddenly takes on unexpected nuance. Money? Sure, it’s hand in glove with the uptick in dramatic momentum – 3 grand for six days and six nights, and she undersold him – but having the money just makes the question of what one should do that more urgent because it is an uninterrupted question all of a sudden. Now to kiss or not to kiss mouths is an open proposition, which is a problem, considering that up to this point – as she tells him – kissing mouths was the only prohibition she respected. Is wanting to break a self-made promise more acceptable if the premise on which the promise is made may no longer hold? This is, I guess, where the inevitable happy ending renders asking questions a moot activity.
We’re not there yet, though; we’re comfortably situated in medias res. Gere’s dad died a month before, and she has 44 inch legs as a kind of therapy, what kind we’re not sure. He’s too detached and consumed with detachment, the elegant well-off hovering above the unwashed masses kind of detachment, to consider the situation as much more than an aside to the business dealings in which his company is involved. But the plot thickens – the cocktail dress and the way they mutually disarm each other, she with the laugh and fidgeting, he with the please and thank you and “I ordered the menu” the morning after their first night together, plus the overall well-put-together austerity of his existence . . . did I mention I’m back on the Joni Mitchell escapade? It’s unprecedented, this – I feel like I will soon find myself in a field full of nubile girl-women doing the circle hippie dance. You know the one: head back, hands up to the sky, circling aimlessly but always answerable to the hidden rhythm – maybe the Mitchell ploughed up the ground in such a way as to make me more receptive to the Cinderella story.
Where were we? Ah, the risks inherent to fiction and stories in general. I enlist a professional philosopher whose pedantry may suggest resonance with the above but on second look, I think, is merely pedantry for its own sake:

Words come to us from a distance; they were there before we were; we are born
into them. meaning them is accepting that fact of their condition. To discover
what is being said to us, as to discover what we are saying, is to discover the
precise location from which it is said; to understand why it is said from just
there, and at that time. The art of fiction is to teach us distance – that the
sources of what is said, the character of whomever says it, is for us to
discover. This is not an injunction against speaking but a definition of
speakers. Speaking together face to face can seem to deny that distance, to deny
that facing one another requires acknowledging the presence of the other,
revealing our positions, betraying them if need be. But to deny such things is
to deny our separateness. And that make us fictions of one another.

Food for thought, yes, but paltry food (and paltry thought). The new CD is A Grand Don’t Come For Free, by the Streets. I don’t come from the streets, but I have been to Britain, so I can vouch for the supposition that “if she plays with her hair she’s probably keen.”

A radical departure from all that came before

That's a Joshua Tree. I've never really respected U2, though I found myself walking around the other day humming "But I still haven't found what I'm looking for." I laughed. Out loud. I have thirty-five year old women using LOL in emails, which make me puke. Silently.




Radical departures are illusory, though radical breaks may not be. Rousseau was wrong when he postulated the perfectibility of mankind. I am weaning myself off of cigarettes (not true . . . but I will stick to my story) and the fairly large amount of tension and short-temperedness that accompanies cigaretteless me has been experimentally interesting, if not experientally. So there's a strike against perfectibility.

Kids are vicious. They sell each other out. They lie. They complain about how you don't have Kleenex and how cheap that is, and then when you get Kleenex - blue, soft, non-irritating Kleenex - they stuff dirty Kleenex in the crack that has crept in between the two cabinets that hold all those books prior teachers ordered. Another strike against perfectibility.

Grammar is either over- or underrated, I haven't decided.

Is it possible that the first thing people of the future will ask you, after revivifying your cryogenically frozen brain and installing it into a gene-derived clone placeholder body, will be something to the effect of, "How did you all not band together and overthrow that Bush guy?"
Is it really that bad? It feels that bad. Shouldn't great art be coming out? Isn't that kind of the American power struggle, shitty political eras beget incisive, groundbreaking art?

But remember how I cautioned against the very idea of a radical departure. Don't forget that.

Toure's new book of essays - I'm not sure what to say. I set aside a good hour in a Barnes & Noble to peruse, and I might buy.

Do you know of any other good writing on hiphop (and please don't say Bomb the Suburbs)?

Swerve

I’m sitting here listening to Joni Mitchell’s Blue. I never thought I would be saying that. The other common denominator between the two poets I mentioned yesterday is the surplus of interesting acquaintances they respectively have. I also have interesting acquaintances. I wonder what they are doing these days.

The phone just rang and there was no one on the other end. This has been happening about twice a week. Other repetitions: I will be relating an anecdote or expressing an opinion, and midway through, I will realize that there is no graceful way to conclude and I will just sort of cut myself off and look at whoever’s listening as if I had just asked them a question. This habit is a troubling interpersonal tic, which causes difficulty for me and the listener in obvious ways, but there is still something sort of awesome about it. I don’t know if you see what I mean, though I’m sure you’ve told a story that’s fallen flat on its face and felt the awkward surge of empty conversational space brush up against you without any recourse or alternate route available. Normally my anecdotal incompetence occurs while seated around a lunch table with other teachers.

I believe Joni has sung herself silent. I will now replace her with Tom Waits circa Small Change. What a fantastic album cover: the bored looking unattractive dancer with pasties leaning up against the dressing room counter with a mirror behind it. Hairspray, unknown tonics and I guess nail polish lie on the counter. Who is that man in the black and white picture to her right? Waits sits with his right leg up on a chair, looking down and to his left, rubbing his head. A soft pack of Old Golds sits in the foreground, next to a mirror that looks like it has coke residue on it.


Three short second person vignettes, in the spirit of fiction’s being less strange than truth and also being unapologetic about the relative aura of normalcy that surrounds it (fiction).

You are seated in the middle section of a Greyhound bus, eavesdropping on people behind you. They are having a roundtable conversation about how calcified and dissatisfying their current marital situations are. These are your words, not theirs. The conversation has been going on for a few hours; not once have you looked back to connect voices with visages. The stories share a quiet desperation and an early 21st century lassitude about the constraints and responsibilities one ostensibly inherits upon saying “I do” and “till death due us part.” Some are cheaters, others are just unhappy about who they are in relation to who they used to be. Outside the window, mile upon interstate mile streams by, undistinguished and therefore existing only in the abstract American nowhere of bus travel. Save for the occasional river or small suburb that is foreshadowed with an abundance of pictographs indicating food petrol and overnight lodging, you are wherever the voices in the back suggest you should be. They call up flickers of thought, half-images, the mnemonic detritus of your twenty-odd years and the six or seven semi-serious relationships of which you’ve been part. You paw at the book in your hands, searching for the right page, a set of words configured in such a way as to gather up your attention and banish the intrusive flirtations and suggestive comments that occasionally tear through the general malaise in the back. Will they be fucking each other soon? Is that it? Isn’t the sharing of mutual devastation a kind of foreplay? Not having seen who they are, your mind summons up a series of character actors from commercials who are supposed to represent the average everyday maligned citizens you suppose these individuals to be. The book is of no help, and the sun is going down quickly enough to make the window’s image’s content that much more obscure. I cannot begin to describe how distressed this all makes you.

[cigarette break – did I mention that it is quite possible that pneumonia and I are co-habiting on this fine March night?]

You sit in the chair staring back at a large mirror’s image of yourself and the blonde forty-something stylist who has her hands on your shoulders. The hair cape is black. It drapes over the chair and your legs. She teases your hair and asks how you want it. You say short. In the next twenty minutes, you share a little about yourself, as much as seems necessary to keep her attention but not distract her from making you presentable to the world. Your hair cascades onto the cape and floor. You came here on a lark, a walk-in. Halfway through, you realize that it would have been possible to invent an identity for this stranger. She is doing a good job, though, and she tries to provide the right mix of questions and information about herself. The haircut costs $15. You walk out the door into the sun intent on taking a shower.


You receive a letter. It is not a Dear John letter. It is an after the fact breakup letter whose writer has to get something off of her chest. The letter closes with a passage from a letter Kafka wrote to Milena Jesenka – the letter writer knows you well enough to know you know Miss Jesenka perished in a Nazi death camp. This may all be melodramatic, but maybe it’s not. Who’s to say in this day and age what quoting Kafka really is? The excerpted passage at the end of the letter addressed to you goes like this:

Writing letters, however, means having to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create a natural communication, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motor car, the aeroplane. But it’s not longer any good, these are evidently being made at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal service it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the radiograph. The ghosts won’t starve, but we will perish.

You read it twice, catching yourself up each reading on the quaintness of the word “aeroplane.” Then you light a cigarette with a match, light the letter with the same match, and pitch it into the sink. It is the engulfing in flame process that you have decided to just sit back and watch.

Greetings. There is a dead bee on the window sill behind my desk at school. I killed it at least three months ago. Putrescent it is not. I wonder why decay has not set in it. Perhaps the cold draft coming in from the window has sustained it.

“For most people, the name Pavlov rings a bell (pun intended).” Excerpt from reading. I can’t tell if I hate this statement or am subtly seduced by its resolute dorkitude.


August Kleinzahler is a poet who came from New Jersey and now makes San Francisco his home. I just read his book of memoir-ish essays, Cutty, One Rock. Nick Flynn is a poet who lived in Boston for a long time and now owns a house in upstate New York. I just read his memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. We are all hungry for authentic experience, and memoirs are but one feeder stream that feeds into the greater Gulf of AE. This is how I made sense of my recent memoir run.

These are different books. Kleinzahler has a discriminating eye for sources of cognitive dissonance that we do not notice because they are almost ever-present. He takes on cant without onanistic cheerleading about how being un-PC makes him cool; the attention he does pay to himself is deprecating and reveals charisma at the same time. All in all, I would like to be a poet in San Francisco who does what he does. Incidentally, if you deign to listen to NPR on occasion, here is the opening paragraph of (and link to) Kleinzahler’s polemic against Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac:

Readers may remember how the U.S. military blared Van Halen and others at the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, when he took refuge in the Vatican Embassy in Panama City during our invasion of Panama years ago. This method of rousting the wicked proved so successful that it was repeated during the recent Afghan experience, when heavy metal chart-busters were unleashed on caves thought to be sheltering Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. The English Guardian newspaper reported last year that we were breaking the wills of captured terrorists, or suspected terrorists, by assaulting them first with heavy metal followed by "happy-smiley children's songs." The real spirit cruncher turns out to be the "Barney, I Love You" song played for hours on end. Even the most hardened, sadistic killers buckle under "that kind of hell," or so asserted a reliable source. But if that fails to work, I suggest a round-the-clock tape of Garrison Keillor reading poems on his daily Writer's Almanac show.


(By the by, Keillor is himself a gifted polemicist. See e.g. his review of Bernard Henry-Levi’s book, the link to which is here and the equally polemical Hitchens response to Keillor is

Communication From Work

Mark your Calendars!
St. Labre Ranch Branding
April 28th, 2006
For those who are interested in the annual St. Labre Ranch
Branding, it has been scheduled for Friday, April 28th. The event
will take place at the ranch approximately 8 miles north of
Custer, MT.
Take the exit from the interstate at Custer, MT. and head north across the Yellowstone River, continue straight north on gravel road. The ranch is well marked and the St. Labre Ranch sign, which was designed and manufactured by our students, is located at the ranch headquarters entrance.
Activities will start early with gathering and sorting off the calves.
Branding, vaccinating, and etc. will last through out most of the
day.
There will be a hamburger barb-b-queue complete with baked beans and potatoe salad for lunch.
If you are looking to get out and for something to do on a Spring day in April------this could be it!!!
We never turn done extra help!!

All Bets Are Off: Non Sequiturs II

My mother flew to London this weekend. She didn’t fly; she was a passenger on a plane. She went to celebrate my great aunt’s 90th birthday. She said she’d rather attend a birthday party than a funeral. Those are the truest words I’ve encountered in quite some time.

On Friday, I walked out the door of my apartment building and saw a police truck. For some reason – well for topographical reasons – the community to which I belong uses police trucks, not cars. I was two steps out the door when another truck pulled up and asked which apartment Medicine Bull lived in. Mr. Medicine Bull lives across the hall from me. I pointed to his apartment, the officer entered the door, and I spent the walk to school chewing over various possibilities. A pungent chemical smell has lately invaded the hallway of the complex, and I thought perhaps my neighbor has himself a meth lab. I believe now that it was a simple, run-of-the-mill case of domestic abuse, though there is no such thing as a simple, run-of-the-mill case of domestic abuse.

I’ve been reading a bit of Melville of late. Bartleby is a bit Kafka with undue gravitas, methinks. I do like the writing. Am fascinated by it.

I am enmeshed in a situation with a person with whom I wish to speak, to whom I have things to say, and yet silence persists. She is in the intermountain West, as am I, but we are quite a ways apart.

A man with an indistinct European accent called today, identifying himself as a representative of K2 Financial. I was nasty. I asked him if he liked being called by strangers when he was at home minding his own business and feeling a bit grim at how little his business amounted to. I changed course, offered a half-apology – “you’ve caught me right in the middle of something” – and hung up.

DeLillo’s Underworld bears revisiting. I can picture Klara Sax swimming.

Budweiser announces itself pluralistic right there before your eyes on the can: Beer, Bier, Cerveza, Birra, Biere. I am somewhat disappointed that the company couldn’t adhere to a nativist platform.

A selected montage of personal musical experiences: Ode to Joy on the recorder; Louie Louie on the guitar (bastardized); Come As You Are on the guitar (somewhat bastardized and wholly incomplete); everything under the sun on the drums, except complicated jazz and anything that is not relatively simple four-on-the-floor rock (which is to say: some shit on the drums that involves the hi-hat, kicker, and snare).

I would advise you to apprehend some wood and a pit to hold it in and start a fire. Sit by it for awhile, with a companion or three and maybe beer or no beer – no matter. Conversations are informed by fires. Simple as that, they are. Get to a space where this is possible. You are missing out.

This is how the first chapter of section I don’t know what ends (see 399-400) “They dissolved, as the saying goes, in laughter, they practically disappeared into their constituent elements, into atoms and molecules, a couple of girls in a gangster Packard, blown forward in time, and Klara stood on the roof sipping tepid wine and hearing people say, We need theater, and she knew she would tell this story to Miles and she also knew she could never again have a friend like Rochelle and mother like her mother for that matter and she looked across ledges and parapets to the old skyscraper with the massed midsection and the sunburst paneling, ten blocks north, and thought how wonderful it was, what an accidental marvel to come upon a memory floating at the level of a glazed mosaic high on a midtown tower – the old spoked sun that brings you luck.”
Wake up. There's a book going on here.

It's the song that opens with the "Listen-Listen-Listen-Listen-Listen to Me" sample

Opening up a newly purchased CD excites me, always has. First thing you do with a new CD is play it obviously, and I used to have a VW golf – red, five speed manual, good gas mileage great car, never should have parted with it – that had a six disc CD changer in the trunk. I tended to buy multiple CDs at a time in those days and the excitement I felt was tinged with hesitation as I tried to decide which new sounds would best deliver me into a good driving experience. If you don’t drive – probably if you’ve never driven stick either, which demands and encourages a very visceral tactility and enhances your sense of connection between you, the vehicle, and the path you take from one destination from the next – you may not know quite what I’m getting at, but the soundtrack can make or break something as simple as a trip to the grocery store. Anyways, as I was saying, the moments from exiting the store to starting the car were always pregnant with a sense of possibility. I liked new music, needed the fresh discoveries it offered, and unlike say a book which takes time and active attention, I would know in two or three songs how thorough an attachment, how large a space, a given disc might create in my life. I would be wrong half the time, but part of the experience was making snap judgments with very little to go on. If the first disc did not ingratiate itself immediately, I had another new thing clicked into place in my trunk and I could fire it up and start over with a touch of a button.
That was then. For some time now, I’ve been anti-gratuitous expressions of purchasing power. Gratuitous has come increasingly come to mean “not absolutely essential.” There are various ways to pursue this goal according to this meaning, and in my case life circumstances have facilitated the purity of the pursuit. Partially out of necessity and partially out of an inexpressible if not opaque desire to simplify the control my possessions had over me, I got all Spartan and ascetic and proud about being Spartan and ascetic.
There are some problems with this approach, especially when it takes more energy and thought-time to enact than a simple gluttonous living-beyond-your-means orientation otherwise would have. I mean, I still smoke and drink and curse, which may be a way to fend off any lurking premonition that I am succumbing to the soft vapid ethos of the dyed-in-the-wool Hippie, but there’s nothing innately simple or meritorious to early death and incessant vulgarity.
Some associates who share basic demographic traits with me – youngish, slightly at odds with the Orwellian surveillance techniques that flourish in this small insulated community, interested in music film sports etc. – have become mail-order junkies. They resuscitate whatever loneliness deadens in them by turning to simulacra and other people’s disembodied voices. This may not be the most ennobling thing a person could do, but there are worse things to do than spend money and time in a way that helps you cope with the singularly rough edges of your unique life. But are there better things, too, is what I'm asking.
I also still like stuff a lot – exposure to newness gives me a sense of achieving that newness myself – I just don’t get the stuff I like. I’m not so sure there is a lesson there. Plus, I’ve come to realize how strange it is to deny yourself happiness in order to feel better about yourself, especially when the self-denying part of you leaves another part of you bored and undernourished and maybe even a little bit resentful of the porcine selfishness of the general population. Turns out no one is keeping score, but it takes a good deal of something – character or experience or fortitude – to make the acknowledgment of this more than mental window-dressing.
I woke up from a nap about ten minutes ago with the last image of a dream I was having impressed on my mind. I don’t know whose child it was, but the image was of a child, toddler actually, opening up a present as a circle of others who loved the child very much observed. Said child was too young, according to my dream-understanding, to fathom what the actual thing she received was. Her jubilation stemmed from being the center of attention as faces looked at her with joy and voices cooed their approval of how quickly she had dispatched the wrapping paper.
I’m not even going to try to unpack all the other thoughts and associations that came to me as I shook off the thin skein of drowsy post-nap disorientation, but it occurred to me a few minutes later that we were nurtured into this kind of relationship between emotional and psychosocial well-being and purchasing stuff. Going against what was once nurturing is more than difficult, it’s effacing. I don’t mean to come off all insightful about this – I’ve read Marx, you’ve read Marx or at least we’ve both watched Fight Club – and it’s no great discovery to note that the consumerism is empty writing has been on the wall for a numbingly long time. Figuring out a) which way you will choose to butter your bread b) how much time and thought you’ll give over to the decision and subsequent evaluation of said bread, isn’t something you figure out – you just do it and make changes as you go b/c there are no real pit stops anymore.
If you’re getting bored with this, I don’t blame you. Most self-reflexive “how should I live?” musings are masturbatory, and this one is also heavily digressive and about to become more so. I may be in the minority in being seized by this issue. As I said, it’s part choice, part necessity, and as I weigh the pros and cons of re-enlisting for another tour of duty here, the general value of enforced austerity has repeatedly surfaced. Leave it alone, and stick to the doing and changing as you go.
Pardon the confessional tone. I can talk about primacy of experience and living a life rather than attempting to manage it, and of course there’s value to that, but I’m talking about it through my fingers – pushing it out into existence onto this screen right here. To circle the square, the possibility I used to find in opening new things now lies in getting thoughts out in a fairly satisfying fashion, and the major difference is the thoughts really don’t get “out” because the movement from one place to another, and the shifting through the gears and play of the clutch, is propelled by a qualitatively different soundtrack.
Have a good weekend. Eat something greasy.

To begin:
CMG: One sentence describing the last five years of your life: DB: The problems of the mind cannot be solved on the level of the mind.

Not having a roommate simplifies the choices you have when looking for ways to distract yourself. In my better moments, I revert to cleaning and cooking food at intervals that pass muster as far as self-preservation goes. More often, I smoke a cigarette and then read over something without sufficient concentration. (The current over-reading phenomenon has structural similarities to the over-reading phenomenon of the late 02/early 03 period, but the motivational nexuses diverge in significant, but ultimate uninteresting ways.) Where is anything good around here, anyway?
My credit card company has continued to up the ante, raising my maximum balance or whatever it’s called. In response I have dropped the hammer on the outstanding balance and made it go dead. This is, in many ways, the outstanding achievement of late 05/early 06.
Do I sound negative? That is not the intention. I am going for that stream-of-consciousness digression-laden tone that mixes sophisticated resignation with “after school special” flair. While watching the first three episodes of the Sopranos last Saturday, I wondered if there was any Achilles’ heel to the show. It appears, at this point – no. That said, at some point in time (meaning: never) we Americans may grow out of our infatuation with the morally flawed character whose moral flaws don’t include an inability to sound the depths of his conscience. By “grow out of” I mean: “literalize the metaphor of.”

Also:
DB: Precedent doesn't discourage me anymore. I think we live in a time when unprecedented things (for the good and bad) are happening faster than we can comprehend.

Speed is of the essence.
Cultural consumption is at a standstill, due to limited access and you wonderful people not sending me artifacts you enjoy.
Limited comprehension had a good quarter – the price-to-earnings ratio has held steady against a weak dollar and the irrational exuberance of all those investors who still we’re getting out of this alive.
I realize that not talking about anything makes it difficult to sustain a conversation, but this isn’t a conversation now is it?

From a co-worker and friend who lives where I used to live:

"Making the most of the Philipsburg Bar scene - Last night I spent fours hours discussing everything from whether or not the civil war was a civil war to the knights templer to whether or not we live in an oligarchy with guys nicknamed Alley Earl, Lefty Mike and Boots. Life is good, but I got one hell of a hangover."