Safe Haven for Asses in the Holy Land

Justerini:  Any marketable substance proffered after midnight within a three block radius I will gladly accept.

Brooks:  Right, and there’s nothing I can’t do with a jukebox. 

Justerini:  I’m out sitting on a stoop, Greenwich Avenue like an idiot, and this Cruzan shortstop accuses me of gypping him.  I think it was because I got tobacco stains on my fingers.

Brooks:  Which fingers?

Justerini:  Just then my phone vibrates.  It’s a text from the Irish twins, not those, and they’re leaving the Italian restaurant . . .

Brooks:  Which one?

Justerini: The one with biplane propellers for ceiling fans; they’re heading downtown and they want to watch me do push-ups and I owe them a few drinks and next thing I know they’re outside beside me re-enacting Lawrence of Arabia. . .

Brooks:  Never seen it.

Justerini:  The way she danced, man, it was real nice if you were on mushrooms.  At one point she looks up and says, “Jesus, I need a keeper.” 

Brooks: That slays me.

Justerini: I’d describe the night as somewhere between a melee and fracas.

Brooks:  You’re fucking coma-toast.

Justerini: I’ve grown this sense recently of the shortness of time.  At first, say in January and the ensuing winter, it was very new and very urgent: I literally thought I was going to die immediately at any moment.

Brooks: Your life was set like a table for breakfast. . .

Justerini: OK; but this summer was dismal all told.

Brooks:  You’re just lucky you didn’t come home from that tiger cage with snakes in your head. 

Justerini: I have never known a woman who was more continuously exacting. This morning she sounded like a Spartan aunt sending a nephew into battle, "Live by your shield, or on it." 

Brooks:  That’s just classic east coast anxiety.  She’s a control freak.

Justerini:  My entire existence, every hour, every minute, for years on end, must be at her disposition, or else there’s an explosion like a thousand prolix earthquakes.

Brooks:  In a dog I think it’s known as heat.

Justerini:  Do I need an espalier for my sapling?

Justerini:  . . . that silly-putty electronic gurgling sound preceding the peculiar gasp that can only be achieved via sudden and massive drug intake, like through a straw.

Brooks:  So what you’re saying is she behaved like a gas made of light particles?

Justerini:  On my way over here I passed six people and four of them must’ve been models.

Brooks:  Think purity.  Innocence.

Justerini:  Yeah, but, I have a 36 percent genetic predisposition to being an asshole.

Brooks:  When you get the message, hang up the phone.

Alleged Lunatics' Friend Society

The cardamom gang and various chums of chance played dead poets’ society at the White Horse Tavern this past Saturday afternoon when the day was fairly adolescent and still yet in thrall of its own potential.

In attendance were the usual suspects, old salts and hands at this Greenwich Village après-ski by now, gamely and namely: the most estimable Lord Jewels, lending both credit and creditability to the proceedings; the poetess Sybl doing her best Holly Golightly (tres fou!) but actually a spot-on analogue for Edie Sedgwick circa Blonde on Blonde; our delicate Daffodil of the wildfire eyes, diamond teeth, maybe the occasional cigarette loitering around her mercury mouth; and last and most certainly least, yours truly and unruly, a sensitive but resilient pillar of debauchery, Sir Richard O’Sugar Jr., B.A..

Also in attendance were honorary members: Mr. Glorioso Hallelujah Esq. and the Princess of Parallelograms, sweet, unassuming Josephine.

The White Horse’s inferior interior was found, daresay, over-stocked with douche-baggage and caucasian cock-blockery, so dare says Sybl, braless and drinkless in the midst of a four hour alcohol fast; her vain attempt to remain abstemious from base and goatish looseness.

This temporary teetotal perhaps accounts for her impotence in “establishing a connection” with Dylan Thomas, not that the most sober of women has ever had very much luck on that score.

On the other hand, two pints of oat soda erected adequate fornication fortification ála Dutch courage via songs for the girls off the jukebox to vainly attempt to tempt Daffodil while escorting a smoking around-the-block wander to duck down a dark den or make a break for that St. Croix of the Virgin Islands.

Hence to Bank Street – where the rooking girls are cooking popcorn, inspiring mayhem and disarray, and finally arm-wrestling like meteoric, though amateur rock stars.

Daffodil serves apple slices on the point of a knife.

About this time Princess Josephine decamps for more academic pursuits, and what with provisions nearly exhausted an exit is prepared the destination to which is promptly forgotten by the time this dream team reconstitutes on 7th Avenue.

Among the confusion someone suggests lonely pizza until His Highness points with conviction to the superiority of his aerie in Chelsea and on winged feet absconds with Sybl to Whole Foods for hors d’oeuvres.

His pad is but dimly lit so soon the booze soon arrives and fully 22.22% of Memory’s daughters assume their positions as odalisque hostesses.

Trivial pursuits are pursued.

After a time and repast of pizza and pasta, all whilst sipping lukewarm Hefe-Weizen in the semi-dark, Glorioso Hallelujah bounces and bounds away on his ambiguous quest after ambiguous young women (amen).

Not this, but the open window of midnight sends a shiver down the spines of the remaining revelers who huddle under eiderdowns, donning sweaters of cashmere and camaraderie; such naked feet as there winkle soon smoothly socked.

And the gods smile, and the Dom Perignon does not detonate in the freezer, and our host with the most toasts concisely précis’s his theories on dispassion and non-dualism with a single sneeze; in reply to what, we haven’t the foggiest notion any longer.

Whether inspired by said sneeze or enthused by the Dom’s ambrosia is hard to say, for soon the sibylline sisters begin conducting their own experiments in non-duality.

Hypothesis: “All dichotomies are illusory.”

Conclusion: TBD.

Sybl provides play-by-play of mine own sub-blanket hand-warming hi-jinx while Daffodil delineates the exact proportions and scope of her favorite erogenous zone.

Hint: With a sat upon cell phone set to vibrate, my missed calls do nothing for her.

Go ahead, reread Steppenwolf.

Lord Jewels sprays our faces with herbal mist.

Sybl models a sari, suddenly an Olympus refugee.

Daft nymph, herself a bed sharing prodigal daughter of Byron’s dictum, “. . . All who joy would win / Must share it; Happiness was born a twin.” (Don Juan, Canto II.172)

To be truly scientific though, isolation and perhaps darkness are demanded and all four of our subjects shortly inhabit rather than inhibit separate rooms at the same time.

Daffodil therefore in the bedroom is a silkworm cocooned, our Lordship’s duvet the envelope of an ovule, seemingly sleeping well though blooming quite awake with an irresistible invitation to lie beside her in the springtime of her under-wire.

A rather outré instance of inspiration: to lay my head at the foot of her bed and wrap my arms around her stems.

You won’t find that move in most recent editions of the Kama Sutra.

Daffodil pours forth from her integument on not making love in 3rd person bedrooms and a bronzed, blonde English teacher she would have more than bloomed for in the supply closet among the chalk and the erasers.

Sybl inspects this less than connubial arrangement and improbably coins the action, “tonseling.”

Upon a certain curtain descending interval, and spurred by the sound of no voices talking, just intelligent dance music from Hong Kong thumping, the bedroom is abandoned, myself momentarily marooned watching a bitching party through the window.

The cozy couch reveals a Buddhist Pietà as Sybl strokes his Lordship’s un-laurelled hair.

LL Cool J felled by bubbly grape juice!

Sybl suggests we take lovers, Daffodil suggests we take tea which entails an excursion for milk and honey passing the dormant doorman and back before the other two could possibly have removed any clothing.

We return to find everyone wide-awake and laughing like softly.

The tea boils away, becoming more concentrated and less; all the more precious.

Finding a marijuana seed between the cushions but no glue on the cigarette papers, your drug-test flunkey becomes convinced that Daffodil seen sideways from a couch-eye-view is the platonic ideal image of a super-hot hip hop Latina from Washington Heights with a crooked hat we once knew someone who once knew.

“That platonic shit is platonic nonsense,” this chick used to say.

And the sun also rises on a Bollywood movie marathon, his Lordship having retired to his chambers as the sirens sandwich their enthusiasm for psychedelic heebie jeebies, now and again catching a glimpse of true beauty exploring the insight gleaned when I call one by the other’s name.

When it is time to leave no one can move.

“Jeez, I can’t find my keys,” someone whispers under their breath.

The day lies before us like an anesthetized patient.

Our begoggled Muses hail a phaeton and make for the ends of the earth, perhaps to a safe-house they know amongst the galaxies.

On queue at Starbucks, Ahab’s own best caffeinated first-mate, Lord J turns to me and says, “I guess those mushrooms on the pizza worked.”

Walking home like a ghost in the mist at 9am without a thought in my empty head the obvious occurs to me.

The Dream of Unhappy Virtue and Wanton Opulence

I’m sitting here unable to complete a thought. When I imagine the universe as a blank canvas or the future as an unread book I don't fill it up with the tedious drama of managing expectations. I want to inhabit the empty future with my true feelings; sending them out into the still-unknown depths and feeling them bounce back like a dolphin echolocating so I can know what it feels like not to be alone in this ocean or at least how deep it is. I hear dolphins accompany ships for hundreds of miles but I imagine they only really get close to other dolphins.

It seemed like it would be a real good idea to wake up early on Sunday morning after a Saturday night playing skydiver in my head seeing how low I could go to shark-level without getting bit, eat a bowl of Grape Nuts, milk and honey (it does not heal heartache), get hopped up on latte with methylphenedate and catch a cab uptown to the Met Museum.

Gorgeous day in October, the weather doing her best to compensate, like an omni-diamond the light shoots out in all directions, and comes back at me in surround-sound in this all-pervading noise glare, the sweet squeaking bellowing of my monophonic Muse. The smell of her hair, her strict rationing of affection; at one point she asks if I recognize the doorman from my old building. He’s a poet, I tell her. “That’s why he’s a doorman,” she says and walks away. I’m still impervious at this point. “Breaking news: life as a poet not lucrative.”

I can remember a gorgeous day in this fading October with you, the weather doing her best to compensate and like an omni-diamond (1) the light shot out in all directions, and came back at me in surround-sound in an all-pervading noise glare which could only be the sweet squeaking bellowing of my monophonic Muse. There was the coconut smell of your hair, your strict rationing of affection; at one point you asked me if I recognized the doorman from my Uncle's old building. He's a poet, I told you. "That's why he's a doorman," you said and walked away. I was still impervious at that point. "Breaking news: life as a poet not lucrative!"

Can you believe how young I am? Let me see if I can help. It's easy. I am young enough to have irresponsible dreams. I am certainly too old for a socratic relationship in a platonic restaurant. Self-discovery is often a lousy topic of conversation, don't you think? It's really no use telling someone to think for themselves, or for that matter, to relax. I am about as good at making the weaker argument defeat the stronger as I am ever going to be. Like my mom said at the wake when cousins asked what I was going to be, "He is what he's going to become."

On the rooftop we squeeze into a wooden chair big enough for one fat American and listen to the guards chew their asses off over ovals and ellipses. Her comfort with my arm around her disarms me. She tells me about some homicide out on the west coast, some guy killed his whole family and then himself. I ask her if she’s talking about abortions and she assents but I don’t pursue that thread of conversation and it does not come up again. I follow her all around the cliffs of the museum. We never make it to the Asian wing. I let her have it in the Greek and Roman wing. I enlist the Graces and the general excellence of the cultural expression, not an ambivalent inch in all that marble, and I think I land a few points. I never learn. Later, on the wooden hill leaved with October blood, I mention running away and she gives it serious consideration but then her face scrunches at the syllogism of her own Tao.

Do you remember on the rooftop how we squeezed into a wooden chair big enough for a single large American and listened to the guards chew the fat over ovals and ellipses? Your comfort with my arm around you disarmed me. You told me about some homicide out on the west coast, some guy who killed his whole family and then himself. I asked if you might be talking about abortion and you assented but I didn't pursue that thread of conversation and it did not come up again. I don't think that's one of the topics we have to avoid. It felt like I was following you all around the cliffs of the museum.(2)

After much thought, my hand on her breast, she says, “I recognize that my belief that my way of life is superior to yours might be based on mere prejudice. I’ve decided it is not.”

After much thought, my hand on your breast, you seemed to say, with total disregard of the solecism of me touching you, "I recognize that my belief that my way of life is superior to yours might be based on mere prejudice. I've decided it is not." Was that was just my imagination? Later, on the wooden hill leaved with October blood,(3) I mentioned running away and you seemed to give it serious consideration but then your face scrunched at the syllogism of your own Tao.

Take me down to the Paradox City where the grass is green and the girls are silly. Did I reach my prime in Central Park? I whispered the truth of my joy to the trees and the stones.

Take me down to the Paradox City where the grass is green and the girls are silly.(4) Surely there was love in our laughter that day. Did I reach my prime in Central Park? I whispered the truth of my joy to the trees and the stones and in your ear. . .

I also remember my birthday and rubbing the pattern of your mother's shirt mapping the most beautiful place in heaven, feeling the quiet opera of you sleeping, my years of hunger-strife returning to attempt to colonize your mouth.(5) Your fine-tooth mind, your hypodermic thought-teeth, your etceterative auscultation of my chest. . . Are you kidding, Muse, beneath that sky in the park, that didn't happen?

I dream you are right behind me, "Don't turn around now," I hear you whisper in my ear. Yours being the last voice before sleep and the very first of the morning. I guess maybe I've always been superficial in this way - - and the worst kind of superficial at that; the kind that pretends to be meaningful.

Yes, I think I told you. I was born shortly before 1pm. The rest of it was an example of sacrificing meaning (or accuracy) for aesthetics, like poetry. I guess I've always been superficial in that way - - the worst kind of superficial, the kind that pretends to be meaningful.

Dead as the Leaves in Union Square

Imagine a long delayed and much expected package arrives via Pakistan Post. A word from the Zen Archer would rather cheer you up this evening, no? So, you receive a rugged envelope the very hue of the bubblegum and cotton candy clouds inhabiting the sky over this metropolis of very private and exotic young invalids at approximately six in the morning. In double bold purple ink “AllKillerNoFiller” is stamped across strange stamps. The story contained therein is mostly unintelligible,

40 47 73 58
Dear Madame,

Do you play solitaire? I'm writing on behalf of Royal Alligator about your search, would like to invite you to learn more about blue raccoons weeping blood, the opportunity that we are offering right now for people like you. First of all you need no prior experience, but we will provide all necessary training when you will join us in bed, sleeping during rainstorms. Now let's take a look at what Royal Alligator offers you: We are looking for nice, dedicated people who are willing to live for our company, locked in a dream beside a friend.

P.S. How often do you do what pleases you?

but the authoress is uncommonly beautiful. Is that not halcyon day happiness in her wildfire eyes when you turn the corner of her block, or push her back on the bed? You try to sit still and concentrate as your mind ignites. The force of gravity seems to dissipate, then to double, like when she comes near and you try to not touch her but flames from your hands leap at her body.

It’s getting dark earlier but it’s still warm. The earth is tilting slowly on its axis and once again there’s the possibility it will tip over completely. Looks like another thanksgiving with Roxy Music with the sun in the water in your eyes. The thought of watching this film from a woman's perspective, as a sort of Jack the Ripper in reverse, alone, isn’t what drives you out on a Saturday night. Admit it.

The leading man was shorter than you expected. Her husband, the director, asks after kids you don’t have, cradling a six pack in his hands, a cut on his forehead. The famous actress is more beautiful, blonder, with an consumptive’s delicateness, her smile swimming in paleness. There’s a feeling you’ll call "accompanying an angel." You feel like you’d volunteer to help fight fires for pay, within a dream recovered on the nightstand, rocking the syntax looking for 365 ways to describe the sky, the daily bread of your eyes. Your fantastic, many-colored, far-grasping, everyway perplexed and extraordinary mode of seeing on the kind of afternoon on which nice people for the most part like to be snug at home.

Panic and paranoia juxtapose like the sun and clouds, difficulties are over-loud dead flowers and you are stupefied, a cartoon peeling your own shadow from behind you. Friends' wives and incoherent children float like motes in the middle distance.

Are you kidding, Nico, beneath the stars in the park, that didn’t happen?

Listening to music, smoking a cigarette, you pick up a scrap of paper on which the word cigarette is written while the singer of the song sings “life is a cigarette.” With your gross expenditure of energy, money, and thought you try to cut a figure in heaven. Come down from the sky and tell your story all backwards, “The True Story of Baby Foot.” Your body they’ll touch, unconsciously brushing up against and strumming like the strings of an instrument making music in your head beneath a faded and fashionably ripped denim sky.

Ok, ok, stop. You’re right, stop, no more.

Soup Kitchen Heroin

JUSTERINI: The only thing I’m interested in going forward is being completely honest and open.
BROOKS: You said that?
JUSTERINI: Yes.
BROOKS: What did she say?
JUSTERINI: Isn’t that what you have been doing all along?
BROOKS: What did you say to that?
JUSTERINI: Yes, but now I mean both ways.

JUSTERINI: The last two years Korea has been my biggest supplier.
BROOKS: Supplier of what?
JUSTERINI: Sexual partners.
BROOKS: You do pretty well in Asia generally.
JUSTERINI: It has been a magical tour through the Asian nations.
BROOKS: To what do you attribute your success?
JUSTERINI: I think it’s the ears. Ever notice I look like Hello Kitty? I think that’s it.

BROOKS: What did you do last night?
JUSTERINI: Jacqueline.
BROOKS: Jacqueline. Jacqueline who?
JUSTERINI: Jacqueline Shit.

BROOKS: All my Brooks Brothers shirts come from the Salvation Army.
JUSTERINI: You’re of the school of atrophy, attrition. . .
BROOKS: It’s gonna rust off before it wears off.
JUSTERINI: You’re the loophole in primogeniture.

BROOKS: Hey.
(Long Pause)
JUSTERINI: Hey buddy. I can’t talk right now. I’m overwhelmed.
BROOKS: Into every life comes a bit of the cross.
JUSTERINI: And Atlas was just a gentleman with a protracted nightmare.

BROOKS: I just had the most enormous sense of déjà vu.
JUSTERINI: Me too.
BROOKS: Something weird just happened.
JUSTERINI: That’s why I stopped talking.
BROOKS: I guess I was just wondering where you were at.
JUSTERINI: Enlightenment is always preceded by curiosity and confusion.
BROOKS: “My god, I’m sorry,” you’ll think back in five years.
JUSTERINI: In the meantime, I’d like to meet a kinesthetic who can tell a good goddamn story.

JUSTERINI: Quite possibly the worst cover art, the worst band concept, the worst name, I have every come across.
BROOKS: You’ve given this a lot of thought.

JUSTERINI: On Saturday I remembered something that occurred in the summer of 1993 which I'd completely forgotten.
BROOKS: Ever think about what makes us remember one thing or another? Even as a culture it's interesting the things we forget.
JUSTERINI: Cop Rock for instance.
BROOKS: Bad Example.

JUSTERINI: She said it was the only aspect of western culture she was willing to accept.
BROOKS: Was she vegan?
JUSTERINI: Of course she was.
BROOKS: What was she drinking?
JUSTERINI: Gin, and lots of it.
BROOKS: I’ve always thought of gin as the most lysergic of the distilled spirits.
JUSTERINI: She cooked me salad for breakfast.
BROOKS: Sounds like a gincident.
JUSTERINI: Every time my phone rings I expect to hear her voice.

Baby, Please Don’t Keep Your Honey in the Fridge

Your gift nearly threw me into an apoplectic fit. Imagine me spacing out in the bathroom (btw – "Do you feel alive in the midst of a crisis?" is #8, which is my lucky number, but who's keeping track?) and I'm already experiencing subtle déjà vu because I've done this in a former life and all the time I've got "I’m Rowed Out" by The Eyes blasting until the blood pulsing in my fingertips becomes so forceful that anything I touch feels like it is moving on its own accord – like vibrating. Words struggle to express how profound an inspiration your body was Saturday and then you send me this stuff and completely blow my mind?! Jeez, thanks for sharing. You were right. Being able to admit when we’re wrong is a sign of good taste.

Girls with limps or lisps have always found a soft spot in me. Only nearly beautiful imperfects are admitted to my sunflower now nightclub heart. Who’s working the door, right? So most of my getting shafted is, perforce, a do-it-yourself thing. When I was 17 I bought a sweet Irish girl all of the Beatles’ albums on CD for Christmas. She fell asleep in my arms on her parents’ couch with “Here, There, and Everywhere” on repeat and the remote control hiding between the cushions like a burrowing bug somewhere out past midnight. She was sweeter than the freshness in water. I listened to those CDs a lot. It was an extravagant gift for the time, but worth it for the memory, its accompanying dispensation from the task of ever having to listen to that song again (Paul McCartney makes me nauseous in any format to this day) and the fact it has ultimately brought me into contact with grown men who say, “kinda like Badfinger without the kicked-dog flinchiness.” Having come to the un-self-governed conclusion at 19 that A Hard Day’s Night is better than Revolver and sex with condoms is a joke, but that if stranded on a desert island with only one to accompany me for the foreseeable future I would pick “The White Album” for sheer depth, “Dear Prudence,” and one word irony.

I have always sort of refused to believe in reality. I think it was a form of primal dissassociation. I have known people who have mistaken this for artistic sensibility and some for religiousness, both of which are painfully unlikely. I can lithograph the summer we discovered The Zombies, a sweet but mephitic scene with little children immured by the fountain in Bryant Park with “Care of Cell 44” playing as soundtrack within the walls of my mind. By the time the relationship ended, breaking up after college and in slow motion to the next fall, we had been through the Who, Kinks, Small Faces, Pretty Things, Rolling Stones, Them, Creation, The Action, The Move, Procol Harum; I listened to only Honeybus that atrabilious summer as if recovering slowly from a bout with mental illness.

I grew such an appreciation standing before the screen door of her universe. Wandering around the Upper East Side with the sky blue like the ceiling of a room in a house you walk by knowing nothing of who lives there except that they have their television on. I smell the cooking. I hear her humming as she goes about her life. I played a non-specialist friend Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders and he said, “Sounds like the Beatles.” And I say, “Yeah, isn’t it great?” I preferred the trippy late psychedelic drug experience songs for a long time. I have assembled pretty deep Todd Rundgren and Italian Prog collections. After five years, I had come to the justifiable if narrow-eyed vision that popular music in the format of Rock and Roll had died with John Lennon in 1980. After five more years of compulsive harvesting a gallimaufry from all quarters and eras but still mostly funneling out of western culture with a median year of 1966 and marinated in sympathy and understanding and a modicum of disposable income I came to the conclusion that there are no conclusions confirming Plato’s pessimism that the radical egalitarian appeal to mass appetites necessarily leads to arts of a lesser and more accessible quality. Some of the best things I’ve heard were never released. I can listen to the obscure as the silkworm’s cocoon rock band’s privately pressed album from 1973 for weeks. Listening to every album John Cale produced, as should everyone; there aren’t many. I miss her colors like unrefracted blue misses green and indigo.

I refined my personal taste to a disgusting and self-indulgent degree. I got excited because I had never fallen in love before. I dig the songs released when the crux was in flux on the cusp of psychedelia most of all. Rock and Roll academic, a perfect spring day in June, girls in breezy dresses prancing around spreading diseases, I dig the idiosynchronicities of nasty garage singles off of compilations of one-offs out of Texas and Southern California most of all. The Lemon Fog, Ty Wagner. I dig Mott the Hoople and the Beach Boys most of all. I have seduced women with some of this music, but I don’t recommend it. Aging slowly like Asians they whisper, “Stay away from my lips, so I don’t think you’re kissing me.” Kissinger said whenever we use force we have to do it slightly hysterically. Being with her is like having an extramarital affair with an extraterrestrial woman on a bed of solid ozone. Any ideas? She keeps saying, “My magic is inexhaustible.” I dig Marc Bolan and everything he did and I dig everything Keith Relf did and I dig everything that Harry Nilsson did most of all. Their music filled a hole in my soul surrounded by water in spite of affordable star naming in the year of Jewesses, “O (name of voyager) the time has come for you to seek new levels of reality. Your ego and the (name) game are about to cease. You are about to be set face to face with the Clear Light.”

The system will determine what actions you can take and the shredder must incorporate a cross-cut with a maximum shred size of 0.2 x 2 in. The nub is the rub. Picture my mouth open to the sky as though tasting a rainbow but actually bellowing to monotone clouds with pure ache.

A Synonym for Cinnamon

"Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. And though admittedly such a thing never happened, it is still conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never." – Franz Kafka

Chock-full of confidence, the alpha gondolier on the Grand Canal in the Venice of my mind, and thinking positively, I walk along this Mississippi of 5th Avenue half-grinning like a criminal prince beneath the Empire State Building (a most convincing dirigible dock on a day like this) half-expecting it to launch. What in Gotham would it take to get you to come back to me?

While I am generally willing to sacrifice the short term glories of martyrdom for long term maneuverability, fifteen years is too long to wait in this age of on-demand satisfaction, and why should I have to?

P.P. Arnold on vocals, Rod Argent tickling the keys – everywhere I go, the chimes of music. Gentle rhythms, plaintive oboes caroling the colors of the street's parade, wheeling strings in the bright cerulean skies. The marrying of vibes and woodwind, celli and electric bass, a single trumpet modestly soliciting money. Foolishly I give away all I possess. The man on the corner bows nobly.

And what gives with all this benevolence of the doubt? I don't deserve it, nor do I care to. Take it away and see where I stand. I am a sinner, a schlemiel, a buccaneer – inattentive, hard of hearing and inappropriate; a loose cannon on the deck, instigating the apocalypse like Tyrone Slothrop inducing V-2 hits.

I don't work well in groups.

The most obstinate volunteer in the soup kitchen of my soul, I'm pointing my heart towards your heart and I'm synchronizing my posture with your posture. I am trying to attract the good fortune of the universe here.

Stop for just a moment.

Count to thirty three times.

Opera singers practice arias walking home.

Has it been 90 seconds?

I have learned to control the self-sabotage without resorting to external interventions, just good old cause and effect. My long neglected intuition has made an unprecedented comeback. I've grown slightly more strategic. (Keep in mind, writing this represents regression.) I have given up drugs, save for chocolate, peyote, coffee and tobacco - switched from Marlboro to Panter to English Oval to Bali Shag which is a bit like taking a series of mistresses to save a marriage and really not as bad an idea as it may seem. At least there's no end in my ability to self-justify.

Writing is slow for me. After every clause I get up and do a little dance and high-five my ghost-writer. We began some of these sentences months ago. If you had a thousand monkeys banging on a thousand typewriters for all eternity they'd eventually turn out the complete works of Shakespeare. That's my guiding premise. I write slowly, I learn slowly, and I work slowly – but I dream at the speed of light.