I've got some highlights in jackassery and I've got regret

And the jackassery is funny indeed, how could dancing in a stripper cage in a felt lobster hat replete with googly eyes in a cheesy bar on Catalina not be funny, or the part about singing Welcome to the Jungle and flailing so desperately, that following an inside joke I blurted to the entire restaurant and lo, the sidewalk that I could shoot cherries out my hoohah, which for the record is unattempted and therefore unproven. Good times. Maybe someday I will tell the tale of the crashed bachelor party, but I will probably keep that little gem to myself and my girlfriends, also it's the only part of the evening not on video tape, and so, uncorroberated.

On the morning of my drive south I awoke choking back a sob, and my googly eyes were swollen and tinged with red, like don't fucking tickle me Elmo, and I was hung over as fuck all, because I had souped myself into the stratosphere, and I had misplaced my debit card, read, left it at the liquor store, and was an hour behind schedule, an hour behind putting the miles and miles and gasoline fumes and loud music fast between me and my still cooling bed. I drove hard against the bile pooling in my stomache and from guilt, south, right to and then right past the source. But that wouldn't be for hours still, I still had all of the straight two lane loneliness to contemplate what I had done, all the farm towns and prison towns gilt golden in dust and stinking of manure, sailing past wreathed in steel and feeling ambitious at 95 an hour, leaning into curves and passing with abandon, tightly insulated with the a/c sending tendrils of shiver throughout my extremities, sunglasses on. Flying past ragged stands of Eucalyptus and the sudden SoCal liquesence of the Pacific, seesaw iron horses of the inland oil fields and oil dereks on the horizon, all of us on fault lines and twelve lanes of traffic idiling on the 405 burning gas, burning time, burning patience. None of it any sort of atonement.

I did somebody wrong, because I am not as good as I thought I was, and I did him wrong probably when he needed a friend. I have been trapped in the memory vacuum, like I am listening to a song right now that was playing on the stereo some years ago somewhere between the snowcapped peaks outside of Santa Barbera and downhill grade before Buellton, if speed is my allegory and my metaphor, than I am going too fast and not nearly fast enough. I need smoking brakes and a jackknifed big rig, the raised trace of tread on black top, the deep inky viscousness of hot tar and friction.

And in that tar, sticky and conflicted, atoms and emotions collide, and I turn by turns into all that I despise, whinging harpy, shrill shrew, all because I cannot not compare apples to oranges, jesus christ apples to oranges.

And so I cut myself off from my good friend, my great ally, the one I tell the things I can barely utter to myself, I said goodbye, telling myself that it is probably best for us both, so then why does my heart ache so? Why, after so many years do I weep so?

And to you, my friend, all the wise men say - so it is and so it goes. She will be alright and the two of you will find your way, and you have and always will have my quiet good tidings. And someday when I am all grown up and have fought off the whinging harpy and the shrill shrew you and I can have a fine lunch of briny oysters and a cold bottle of muscadet. That is, if you can forgive me my trespasses.