I needed to get out of my room, so i hopped into my car and hit the road in the driving rain at nightfall. I often do this, armed with a cigarette and an MP3 player and open road. It clears my head after hours of drawing lines.

I pulled into a gas station, went inside, and was immediately assaulted by what smelled like a mound of roadkill that had had time to become wet, bake in the sun, and decay. Trash bags littered the floor; the clerk had apparently--hopefully--been interrupted in the middle of emptying the various garbage receptacles and had left them laying around all scattershot with the most heinous odor imaginable plugging every cubic inch of the place. However, it takes a very nasty smell to discourage me from doing stuff.

I proceeded to the counter with an armful of enough caffeine to kill a lesser-evolved primate in preparation for the night ahead, and got in line behind an elderly man wearing a tan leather jacket and a black cowboy hat. He had a bushy white mustache and spoke with some kind of thick european accent that I couldn't identify. My focus drifted to a shelf full of cheap cigars while he talked on and on about atomic power and political corruption to the dredlocked white boy behind the register.

I mention this scenario because this was my only non-familial human contact outside the home today. I don't have any frame of reference for hallucinogenic drugs, so it would be difficult for me to determine the correct ingredients and dosage to reproduce the sight of some Eastern European cowboy talking at length about the power of the atom and the madness of Heetler's army while a dead-eyed young man with hair coiled like a heap of snakes looked on, and above it all the rancid odor of death. Surely there's some kind of message to be gleaned from this encounter, but i'm buggered if i know what it is.

ja, mata