It improves as it progresses, Ma.

Cold coffee with honey, icy rain in Indiana, bouncing and napping. Reading all of the bathroom stall hate mantras. Besides all the typical unimaginative "Fuck niggers" bullshit, there're some that defy explanation; "Fags are proof that Indians fucked buffalo". And the occasional glimmer of truck stop hope, a sad little cross with "All men are created equal". Amen, I'm buying a hot dog to eat while I flip through Gibran's The Prophet and look for tattoo ideas. An eyed hand, a blessed palm, with a halo of wings.

There was no toilet paper in the bar bathroom last night, so I was forced to improvise with a receipt from my wallet. I fear I may have blocked up the toilet, and I fear I may have left inverse ink statements on my asshole, which is a disgusting thought and even more foul on paper.

Last night was as a dream as they tend to be, sleepwalking lost to the car, tunnel visioned with my big parka hood and floating on frozen shoes. Henry was speechlessly drunk, but miraculously managed to lead us back to where we had parked. After returning to Tucker's tiny apartment, we stretched out with cookbooks and records and ate spicy mustard pasta with mushrooms and peas. I finally rolled myself into the blankets as day broke chilly through the window, slept a prince and woke a pauper.

Lake Michigan appeared as a mirage, a hologram, a hallucination of the winter Brahman-Atman, great frosty waves rolling and frozen in time, rippling into the horizon and into outer space, a fathomless mountain range of blue-green-white, and I'm not sure I saw it at all. On the other side of us, Chicago's shimmering mirror canyons stood in contrast to the wonderful curve of the earth beneath it, and I thought of Moloch, and I thought of stainless-steel teeth and dentist's offices, but it was all beautiful and so I couldn't really hold the fear and contempt long in my heart. The love I feel for the titanic majesty of the megaurban jungle, for the glowing Gary refineries, for the rowhouses beneath the Skyway, for the stacked train cars in miles and miles; this love is not admiration, but fear. But love is love, in all colors and tastes, and of all things I fear it's love I fear the most. You lose control, spin with your eyes closed and let go, catapulted end over end into a completely selfless beautiful violence where we are as much in control of ourselves as is a terrified leaf on the lusty wind of a brunette summer.