That Look

Oh, how they love to come up to you, like naked, shitty baby-birds, with their heads turned upwards and that look... that look!... on their faces: an absurd pantomime of pity, and a suggestion that you should just break down and weep right then and there because that is what they expect, that is the custom, I suppose.

And they say all the things: how kind he was, how gentle and how you really must have loved him and miss him so much now, and that if there is anything they can do, they will, even though they never really mean it. And never do they know the true story, the horrifying madness that lay below like a deranged black octopus aways ready to squirm and thrash about it's vile tentacles, and jet out its slimy, foul ink that leaves a stain that stays on your soul for years.

But you play the part, the placating diplomat, and confirm their impressions, even though it turns your stomach in the end. Which is just fine, really, because no one ever actually asks how you feel but instead make endless assumptions. They don't want to know. And, really, you would never want to subject them to the letdown, the fact of what this man really meant to you.

Zack and Craig

(excerpt)

Zack slips expertly off the back of his skateboard and it flies away into the grass. He shoves his chest out and walks right into Craig, bouncing him back in a forceful chest-bump, then grabs him tightly by the arms and pulls him into his face. Opening his mouth like a fish and tilting his head to the side, he lets out a raucous belch, all the air shoved out of his guts right into Craig’s face: French fries, Coke, pizza and that funky unidentifiable odor of a 19 year old.

“You’re so fucking faggoty, Craig!”, he snarls, then pouts his lips out like some emo porn star, his black lanky hair down in his eyes and trailing down the back of his neck in what could only be described as a Goth mullet. 

Craig, in cutoff khakis and sunburst tie-dye T-shirt, smears his hands across his face in feigned disgust. 

“Gross, you asshole!” He shakes his head and his blonde locks bounce around his head like springy antennae. 

“Where the fuck have you been? I’ve been waiting for you forever.” 

Retrieving his skateboard, “Who fucking cares? I was at Jay’s trailer smoking pot.”

Craig throws his hands down by his sides. “Great! Thanks for inviting me. Why didn’t he come with you?”

“Karla was coming over to see him, I don’t know.” 

Zack sits down on his skateboard and hangs his jet bangs down in his face, his red lips forming the words. 

“He said we can come over later, if we want.”

“Cool. I guess.” Craig sits down on the pavement, facing Zack and slides the toes of his sneakers under the skateboard. “Did they say they could get some weed?”

“Yeah, fag, they have it already!”

“Stop calling me a fag, you hypocrite.” Craig shoves Zack off the skateboard backwards into the grass. “You look more like a fag than me!” 

He crawls on top of Zack, his blond locks bouncing down over his face. Zack’s jet black bangs have fallen over the top of his head, and his deep, beautiful dilated brown eyes are both enraged and bewildered by loads of pot.

Craig sticks out his tongue and allows a viscous stream of spit to roll down off of it towards Zack’s face, then rapidly sucks it back into his mouth. There is a brief pause and the empty park seems caught in slow motion, even the birds chirp slower.

“What if I kissed you right now, right here?”

“I’d kick your fucking ass.” Zack’s voice rises, but his eyes are still the same, simultaneously languid and energized. His red lips pout even more, but his passive body suggests opportunity.

Craig leans down and puckers his lips, draws closer and closer to Zack’s face, then right as he’s almost to Zack’s lips, stops. Both of their eyes are closed. Craig can smell and feel Zack’s breath on his face. Even he knows better than to do this here… even in this empty park so late in the day, so he bends closer and presses his nose against Zack’s forehead, and inhales long, sensually, taking in every sweaty pheromone.

“Fuck, I hate this place!”

“Yeah…” Zack, utterly calmed now and strangely tender, delicately nuzzles back, then surprisingly gives Craig a quick peck on the mouth. “We’re gonna get our asses kicked,” he whispers, “but I don’t give a fuck. Let’s go back to Fuller.” And flashes a wicked grin. 

“Okay, fag.” Craig mocks.  

But they don’t make it back to the dorm. By the time they start walking, the summer dusk has settled and the light has started to dramatically fade, and as they pass an overgrown azalea bush, Zack pulls Craig… or Craig pulls Zack… the action is so fluid and undefined...and they are suddenly tucked inside it’s boughs like a little cave a foliage and their lips latch onto each other and they are sloppily making out like real lovers.

Zack drops his skateboard and moves his hands up Craig’s back and digs his fingers deep into Craig’s curls and pulls his face in tighter, their lips almost painfully squishing together. Craig hugs Zack’s thin waist against his, their hard dicks pushed against each other, and his heart is pounding. He slides his hands down the back of Zack’s shorts and feels his soft butt muscles and whimpers.

Suddenly, the make-out stops and they stand together in the bushes, holding each other, panting and heaving, eyes still closed, now even more sweaty in the steamy summer heat, coming back to reality. A few fireflies begin flashing in the depths of the bushes. 

“This is so fucked up,” Craig whispers.

“Yeah,” answers Zack. “REALLY fucked up!”

Airport Layover

The Great Ugly Behemoth, in ready-wear clothes without a hint of style, consumes and plods, enormous and vulgar, through airport terminals. The stereotype is confirmed. No wonder we hate ourselves and each other. Nothing of value, nothing of interest. Progeny, as fat as little pigs, tagging alongside vast swells of baggage. Inane conversations over and over. No one is classy. No one is pretty. No one intrigues.

Dare Mighty Things

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those timid spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.” 

--Theodore Roosevelt

The Gears and Grinds

The mind is a great liberator, but it is also a cage.

In meditation, the skull opens up and beams of intellectual light pour out as if in an ad infinitum planetarium. No geography or architecture is too grand, seemingly.

But in the lower realms of psychology, life-doing and life-planning as it were, the gears and grinds of the whole bloody machine--the clamor and claustrophobia of the cranium--are as crude and temperamental as an antique car.

When one's mind is at synch with outer nature, things open up and are seemingly limitless in scope. If only there were more power, more current, then the knowing of all things could be achieved!

But when one's mind is shoved down by indecision and doubt, into the lower confines of worry and fixation, then one's activity becomes no more profound or able than a beaten tiger limping to and fro inside a barred cage with an insane wax glazing its eyes.

You can feel the pinch, the tight bind: a head-ache that isn't physiological but becomes so by default. Stress winds its way around the mind like a constricting hot metal coil, tightening until surrender emits in the most unseemly and undignified ways. Total impotence and madness rule the moment.

Dead Things

As the bus pulls to the curb, we huddle near the front.

First in line, a freckled giantess woman, whom I've seen for years, pushes a small wired grocery cart. Once strong and capable, she now shakes pitifully and regards her surroundings with an unsteady look in her eyes.

Next is a young boy with strawberry-blonde hair, a cigarette behind his ear and a black plastic garbage bag thrown over his shoulder. I cannot stop looking at the exquisite downy hair on the back of his neck. He has a delicate, almost-feminine prettiness that he seems to be fighting against with an assumed haughty machoism.

Each goes their separate way as we exit the bus and I head on past the park, the dark storm clouds spilling over the west hills and a light spring rain humidifying the air, neither warm nor cold. It is early afternoon, and I have gotten off work earlier than usual.

As I turn onto my street, a sudden wind lifts the delicate white blossoms out of the cherry trees and scatters them across my view like snowflakes.

Everything natural is a surreal green, and the loamy dank funk of botanical birth permeates the air.

A postman works the houses on one side of the street. His solitary presence seems strangely choreographed.

And on my iPod 'The Hours' soundtrack plays. Phillip Glass's phrases churn and repeat, rise and fall, like a stream of smoke caught in an undulating current of air. It fits perfectly the scene, the smell, the nuances around me.

Melancholy yet lush, hopeful yet crushing, the music recalls the tone of the film and implants itself like a soundtrack on the neighborhood scene around me; yet, similarly intimates the cozy envelopments of literature, times of yore when my face was bowed to the open books of romantics and dejected dreamers.

Like polio or scarlet fever, I carry this antiquated chronic condition with me still: taking in the world in terms of acts, themes and scenarios; characters and settings. Everything has a cinematic quality, even my own solitary foibles, and I think this mode of perception must be dead or nearly so.

Who thinks like this anymore? Who sees?

Everything has become so literal and meaningless. Nuance is lost, or exists in vain. Expressions has been stripped down to a neutered simplicity:

A plus B equals C.

And this shift in contemporary thinking has engendered a kind of hopelessness within literature and the arts, and has mostly driven me away.

I think, what hope is there? This mode of nuanced perception is surely lost.

But then I consider the utter ego in this: surely I am not the only one. As a minority, I suppose it is my duty to keep this mindset alive, despite how isolated and freakish it makes me feel.

Decades of Record

What leads you there is a mystery, but suddenly you've found yourself late one evening lifting the lid off a crate of old journals and falling into the seductive rabbit-hole of miasmic nostalgia.

Intrigue mingles with horror as you dare to open each crinkled page and decipher old handwriting styles and bygone syntaxes. It's like reading someone else's journals, especially the older ones. But a certain guilt forms in the pit of your stomach because you cannot deny they are your words, your pathetic clingings, your outlandish aspirations, your perverted admissions, your melodramatic love affairs.

You wish you'd never even started. All these orphaned, half-formed diatribes that reveal more than they should are best kept forever! in this storage crate or better yet buried in some unmarked vault on a deserted island. You think to yourself, one day I'm going to die and someone is going to find these and I will be spinning in my grave as my dirtiest of laundry is brought into the light of day. You shiver with shame as you imagine your own mother or sister finding these and pouring over their sordid contents.

Someone long ago told you to start keeping these diaries. And, in fact, you remember exactly who it was: a high school English teacher, who said sagely that if you recorded your own life you could return to the old missives and take stock of your growth and progress (or lack thereof). You could observe your own life via these recordings much as your own anthropologist, observing significant or errant patterns and evolutions. You considered the wisdom in this and started scribbling the years away.

But it barely works in this way. Much like old photographs, once you've gotten into your 40s and have taken snapshots of every birthday, every gathering, every vacation, every boyfriend or girlfriend, they just become this obscene albatross of nostalgia that you cannot bring yourself to discard, yet really don't want ever to linger upon too intently.

Decades of record takes up space, in photo albums, spiral notebooks, fancy yellowed journals, drawing pads, and are in the end so much dead space taking up your apartment, filling some corner of a room or closet, and represent more than anything a significant heavy layer upon the carapace of your aging being: one more possession that has no use other than representing fragments of your identity, something you keep simply because you cannot throw away.

Save Me A Place

Don't know why I have to work
Don't know why I can't play
Turn me off turn me out
But don't turn me away
Save me a place
I'll come running if you love me today

Invoking Pan in the backyard. 

Don't know why I have to go
Don't know why I can't stay
Guess I want to be alone
And I guess I need to be amazed
Save me a place
I'll come running if you love me today
I'll come running if you love me today.


Written by Lindsey Buckingham 

All One In the Same

The popular icons and works recognized in the recent Grammy and Academy Awards ceremonies are a sad and stark reminder of the esthetic fall of an empire.

I realize that these are pathetic representations of the truest talents to be found within America's borders (or, at least I hope so). But they are, nonetheless, zeitgeist engines that culminate phenomenal amounts of monetary investment in music and in film and generate the vastest of audiences... who not unlike caesars in coliseums of yore determine the fate of whatever they see with a thumbs up or thumbs down based purely on impulse rather than artistic value…

Which is forgivable because so little artistic value is present in the first place!

The fact that the title artist is bestowed on so many musicians and actors who are merely flesh and blood mannequins manipulated shamelessly by some producer and have no talent beyond being able to stand in front of a camera or shriek into a microphone is abominable.

To call Katy Perry an artist during the same event where Carol King is being honored for lifetime achievement is blasphemous, just as Bruno Mars sharing the stage with Sting to recognize a demi-god like Bob Marley. (It is like me saying I laud George Saunders as a fellow writer.)

As the camera sweeps through the audiences of these so-called artists it becomes clear that they are as much fashion models as they are anything.

No one is willing to get real or ugly for art anymore.

Adele is as close as we are going to get to a Patti Smith. Robert Downey, Jr. (who was once relatively gritty) is as close as we are going to get to a Jack Nicholson.

All these pretty boys and pretty girls who are essentially interchangeable become so much wallpaper after a while. And isn't it telling that there is little difference between an actor and musician now? You could practically move them back and forth amongst professions with similar indistinguishable results.

Both of these women are artists?

And it is no wonder. Shows like American Idol de-emphasize originality or raw talent, and instead reward emulating some performers who've already made it to the top.

The result is an elevation of mediocrity, conformity and repetition.

Devoted fans of the show, who watch it season after season, would be hard-pressed (despite their fervent fandom) to name all the insignificant people who've won.

Actors are no different. Promising upstarts like James Franco and Joseph Gordon Levitt have been all but hammered into lack-luster drones and will surely be replaced in a few years. Think of their earlier roles versus the ones they are attaining gargantuan fame for now.

Both of these men are actors?

It hasn't always been this way.

Oscars were once bestowed on the likes of Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor and Henry Fonda.

Grammies were awarded to Bob Dylan, Fleetwood Mac and Bruce Springsteen.

This shift in impetus, in taste and what is to be elevated is recent and endemic to a descent that can be observed throughout this country, top to bottom, from civil participation to education, journalism to politics, en masse behavior to intimate social interaction, even down to the bare root of language... all further indicating a culture in tailspin demise.

It is notable that in the past few years our pop culture icons have increasingly come to resemble our politicians, and vice versa: glamorized figureheads absorbing enormous amounts of wealth while producing mediocre-at-best results.

Talent and conviction have been superseded by fashion and good looks and a willingness to whore oneself to the highest bidder.

Our politicians fare as badly, few representing common will, moral integrity or reasonable intellect, but more concerned with strategic positioning and satisfying the partisan factories that support and eventually replace them with new-and-improved watered down versions of what a leader is supposed to be.

All one in the same.

A No-Win Situation

The clock is broken and it's been 3:20 (PM or AM, take your pick) for the past two months.

Listening to summer music in the wintertime just ruins you, makes you sadder than anything. Yet you still revel in it. 

Each morning you fight the tears and the breakdown; each night the boredom and solitude. Seeking diversion is a real necessity, yet a constant challenge.

It's a no-win situation.

Those who get the things they want always want the most idiotic things. Yet those who sincerely know what they want never get any of it.... or if they come close, they are so foolish they don't grab it when it's in their midst and allow it to slip away.

The beautiful take everything for granted; while the ugly feel freakish no matter what the occasion. Brief moments of attractiveness just make them feel guilty and odd, yet their usual shabby ostrocity make them feel like ending it all in shame.

Those who have the money don't know how to spend it; while the consistently struggling know EXACLY what they'd do with it. 

Yet once it's in their grasp, they panic and fuck it all up.

You ache for a lover, yet really the aching becomes you... because once you get one, you panic and fuck that up, too. You never know quite how to behave.

Suffering becomes your style after awhile. We've all seen those at the party who never drink, are always melancholy, suddenly become giddy and animated, and seem instantly bizarre. While those who are always chipper and up become blue suddenly have  everyone so deeply concerned. 

You must be addicted to the blues. Happiness is so abstract; wanting so familiar, that it becomes who you are. 

Stephen Fry

"But do they bubble and froth and slobber 

and cream with joy 

at language?"

I am not alone in my admiration for Stephen Fry. And this brilliant diatribe is yet one more reason why. Yes, it is a bit long-winded, but so is he... and so is the nature of his argument. Often, sadly, I think the love of language is dead, and most who use it have no idea of its potential.

People who talk and write like Stephen Fry probably sound absurd to some, like walking antiques. But I don't care. I love it. 

The Things About Me

Lately, I've come to truly abhor the relationship I have with the things about me. The treasures and junk that have magnetized themselves to me over time swirl about my room like some kind of nest. I abhor their presence, their quantity and the petty attachments that I have for them. Pictures, ornaments, fabrics, books, seashells and house plants, heirlooms and old furniture.

Aging does this, bestows things upon us. Souvenirs of the years. Yet when it's time to move, they become dead weight. 'Oh, I cannot leave this behind!" "And what about this? I cannot get rid of it!" The familiar refrain is a psychological bore.

Me at age nine, having tea time with my grandmother.

My grandmother lived in the same house in Birmingham for nearly 40 years. She was a sophisticated Southern woman who loved art and music, and had traveled all over Europe. Consequently, her home was a virtual museum. I admired her grand nest and grew up within it. It was my solitary playground: endless books of literature and art, paintings, musical instruments and a myriad of elegant items to pour over. I dreamt one day of inheriting her style, her ability to collect and hoard beautiful things. I imagined myself, a sophisticated old man puttering about within his own gilded, ornately cluttered cage, admiring his baubles silently and proudly.

But when she died and her museum had to be disassembled, it became a maddening store of dusty loadstones, a seemingly endless pile to sort through and assess worth upon. The desire to shamelessly covet was immediately paired with the impulse to distain and wantonly discard. "This belonged to her, and she loved it, so I must keep it!" "Oh, how this makes me think of her, of my childhood, and so I must keep it!" Along with, "My God, SHE HAD SO MUCH STUFF! Get rid of it ALL!" Again, a tremendous bore. The endeavor lasted days and was a mental nightmare I swore never to repeat.

My room 32 years later, the same tea trolley beneath the window. 

Now, fully ensconced in middle age, I fight my things and my hoarding habits. The comfort of nice things and a pretty home continually contest the Buddhist shame they instill in me. The weight they place upon me and the drag they create have become debilitating anathemas. Yet each morning I sit in my bed, like some dandy Oscar Wilde, with coffee in hand and look about my pretty sarcophagus and am temporarily dazzled and hypnotized, and in some temporary way am pleased.

One solution to all this gyration is travel. During my periodic jaunts, I have found that I am most happy and content in hotel rooms and guest houses. Their sterility and simplicity immediately have me sighing with relief. To have only a bed, a dresser and a closet, a bathroom (even if it's down the hall), and my single bag of essentials, and to know that none of these things even belong to me or really even matter, is so pleasantly liberating. At these times, remarkably, I never find myself wishing for more.

I should learn from this, as it is surely one of the great lessons of travel. It is the ideal that I should strive towards. But its a journey worthy of Sisyphus: always two steps forward, then one backward.  

If At All

The curtains open and another day begins.

Up go the blinds, down go the feet, and the treadmill is presented.

Step upon it willingly, resignedly, fatally.

On go the haunting hours, speaking to none but strangers, if at all.

Muffling the internal shrieking, stifling the wooden cracking and splintering of a breaking heart,

Until a silent shell remains.

The images, the smells, the noise, the stupid audiences and stupid performers.

A bar, a film, a bit of TV, tasteless nourishment.

Sleep, if at all.

What is IT?

I’m losing it.

So much time has passed in this northern town that I’m losing it.

What is IT? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s that spark. That hit. That rush of warm sunlight on a beach lined with palms and a cozy feeling on your flesh when some warm lover is leaning against you, and all you got is the breeze, the salt air, the sun, and warm sand beneath you.

It’s a religion. An ambiance that is my Avalon. 

I sit in these dark rooms with a beer or some drink, and fall into a gauzy tone. A quicksand of longing. And I think, are these the symptoms of amnesia? You get that one taste, and you know where it first dropped on your tongue, but like a Hollywood tragedy you spend too much of the story trying to get back to that ideal, while this or that obstacle stymies your path, instead of just sticking with it in the first place.  

When I really think about it, I’m quite certain somewhere deep inside I feel I don’t deserve this victory, this attainment… that I’m working off some martyr karma. Yet if I bide my time long enough, ye ole Grim Reaper will have his way sho’ nuff! And ma’ purdy tears won’t wet a thang! Pull the sheet over my face and strike up the old Hammond. 

The beauty, the saving grace, of being a far-flung cocksucker that is so out of place on this joint of dirt, is that a revolution of continuous affairs, trysts and ensemble heart-renderings in a tropical clime is all I could ever ask for in my remaining years. I don’t give a royal damn about true love, ever-lasting love, “my love is your love”, but only the love that exists at one moment in time, neither past nor future. 

As Whitman moved amongst the sleepers, I shall move amongst the lithe brown figurines of equatorial jive and forever swim in the mist of their lanky dark hair, their kinky juice hung studs and luscious suicide-worthy lips, their bouncy gait, and the clarity of their eyes. I will hold each one as a child. But love each one as a man. 

Vicious Dichotomy

This vicious dichotomy that I carry with me these days is the prequel to some grand crack-up, I'm sure. I can feel it mounting daily. How did I get here? Why is this dilemma so profound and continuously present?

It's certainly an adult conundrum: knowing what one once loved, and was drawn to, but could not have... yet now fully capable of possessing but not having the nerve to pursue it... being a coward and worrier in the face of potential acquisition.

Holding onto a dream for so many years is exhausting. But, after a time, it becomes a habit. And then it becomes an aspect of one's personality. Yearning becomes one's raison d'être. Achievement is somehow an after-thought.

I've dreamed for nearly a full decade to return to Thailand and make it my home. After living there for two years, then visiting several times for extensive periods, I've been nearly certain in my heart that I wanted to live there once again.

Yet now, with quite enough money, and stability, and far more practical-mindednes than I did when I was in my early 30's, I am lazy, doubtful, and somehow feeling I hardly deserve such a serious stab at happiness.

Yet I'm not dead yet. I have so much more life to live.

How did I get to this place?

It's like I would prefer the comfy blanket and opiate of familiarity and routine to the zest and serendipity of adventure.

The Story of My Life

LOOK AT THIS EVERY DAY!

"Man sacrifices his health in order to make money. 

Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health.

And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present;

the result being that he does not live in the present or the future;

he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived."

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

All Things Must Pass

All things must pass. 

Yet sometimes they are most amazing in their final stages of descent. They are the rare things that acquire new meaning or new beauty in their demise. 

Sadly, this does not hold true for the edifice of living beings. As humans, we all crumble into hideous disarray. Almost as soon as we are formed in adolescence we begin to disintegrate. By mid age it is a comedy of denial that keeps us from hiding in the shadows. No one gazes inspired upon the forms of the elderly. 

But for the antiqued thing, somehow, beauty shifts and is augmented as it ages, the original voice is changed and made louder. A tarnish, or even an overt flaw can transform a prior ornament into accidental high art. 

I suppose we love the thing, revere it, because time penetrates it more elegantly, affects it more softly, and it is why we keep the thing around us, treasure it. To make us feel better (or to forget) about ourselves. 

Zero Dark Thirty

It is not my intention to elevate pop culture on this blog, but here I will make perhaps my first (and doubtably my last) exception. 

Oh what a tangled, wicked web we have woven in the Middle East! (And now North Africa.) I wonder if there will ever be a time when we are not involved so intrinsically in this region.

Of all the elements presented about this film (the complexity of the man-hunt, the valor of the Navy Seals, etc.), the one 'elephant in the room' not talked about is all the nasty shades of grey we have cloaked this involvement in. We are no longer the good guys, or the bad guys, but both. And the same can be said for the natives of the Middle East. So much pain and suffering we have all caused.. and for what?

How did we get drawn into this? I'm sure there is more to it than the passages of history. And how will we ever free ourselves from this knot? Will we ever?

It's an ugly, inglorious period in America's saga. And we've had so many already!

This is a powerful film because of the questions it asks, and answers. As Americans we should be uncomfortable with both.

Dean Martin

Another pleasant serendipitous find: a photo of "Dino" in a very casual home setting with his sons, making men out of them. I always admired Dean Martin, especially when I was a kid. He seemed the ideal father, classy, warm, handsome and someone for whom drinking made him cooler not scarier. This is the sort of scene fathers had with their sons. "Make a muscle, boy!" You just wanted to be a man.

This, That

I could have told you but you wouldn't have listened. I would have barely listened myself, honestly, and it was my own goddamned voice! Who listens? I doubt anyone. And if they do, it's not to any advantage. Out of weakness or stupidity they do it. Then they have to listen to more, which is the price one pays.

So instead I just sat there, sort-of-listening. And you just rambled on and on about that craziness in your head. I thought of things that you should have been told, but I knew if I'd said them you would have been upset. So I just shut up and drank my beer and let you go. And on you went, like the unravelling of a rubber band. I could have walked away and you would have gone right on talking.

The main thing I could have told you would have been to listen to this crap coming out of your mouth. Just listen to it. My god! Any person over the age of 30 would have known something was wrong. This, that, and all of that, and you were caught up in it like some kind of soap opera. But you were too obsessed to listen to it. You would have just struck back.

So I sat there looking at my hands beneath the table, hoping the beer would make it all smooth soon enough. So that your words wouldn't be so strong. A few more slurps and the velvet sheet would draw over everything and I could hunker down in a fine drunken blur. But you got louder.