Touch You Last

So I’ve still got this cold and it’s relentless. It keeps mutating and turning into other colds as yet unclassified by science. I knew I never should have played with that damn Outbreak monkey! I don’t get sick too often, and when I do I tend to kick it pretty quickly, but once in a blue moon I get these unbeatable colds and it gets to feeling like I’ll never be well again. I thought of that earlier today, and it reminded me of another time I had a condition that I thought I’d never shake. I’ve tried pot… well, I couldn’t say for certain how many times, but surely no more than I could count on my fingers. I’m terrible on pot; I’m the quintessential paranoid stoned guy. And once in I while I think I’m not, so then I smoke, and every time it’s Jesus everyone is looking at me and my mouth and SO DRY. I haven’t said a word in about an hour and a half and people are gonna think I’m nuts if I don’t say something, anything, right now. Okay—now! NOW! Shit, I can’t! I’ll ...

I’m in the midst of reading The Dirt: Confession of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band . This is the Mötley Crüe biography, and it’s not for your mom, and it’s not for your grandma, because it’s very likely that Vince Neil has had sex with them both. And he wants to tell you about it. I was never a Crüe fan, but I admired them from afar. Upside-down pentagrams didn’t really fly in the McLean household, so Guns N’ Roses were about as hardcore as we were allowed to get, and even that was only because we’d convinced our parents that Izzy Stradlin was from Harbour Grace. The Dirt isn’t a biography I’d normally think to buy, but lately I’d started to believe that I was the only person who hadn’t read it. Douglas Coupland read it almost as soon as it hit the stores (and describes the book as being “so brutally honest that after a while it becomes art”). A group of writers in L.A. found the book so inspirational that they began a summer of debauchery under the rallying cry “ What woul...