I don't drink my coffee black if I can help it. Sometimes I think I should, though. It would make things easier. I could acquire a taste for it. After all, there was a time when I thought beer tasted gross, but that didn't last long. Now, I drink it instead of water, and I'm dooo�n to sickxsteeen brayn sells.

Ha ha. How droll.

I do remember one time that I drank black coffee, and it was delicious. It was two summers ago, when a bunch of us were staying at Win's summer house in upstate New York, recording a Reverend Lovejoy album. There were about twelve of us (the band plus other assorted cast members) who piled into three cars in Chicago and drove twenty-four hours straight. (Mark called it "Road Trip 2001: Fraught With Disaster," but it actually went pretty smoothly.) It helped that we had long-range walkie talkies which we used to communicate between vehicles and play Twenty Questions (the hardest round of which forced my team to correctly identify a manhole in the sidewalk on the north side of ARH on the Grinnell College campus).

Anyway, the week was one of bacchanalian revelry, air-conditioned languor, and drunken rocking out, and every day we slept till two or three in the afternoon. There were almost enough sleeping accomodations for everyone once we laid some couch cushions on the floor, dropped our reservations about personal space, and got creative with sleeping positions. Every night we held a lottery to see who got to sleep where. To expedite the process, we gave each berth a distinctive name. They were:

1) Norwood Home Retirement Community (aka Old Retire-o-tron)
2) Beware The Moist Yellow Menace (in a windowless basement room)
3) Drax Brown
4) Retro-Couch (hide-a-bed with mattress removed and reclosed)
5) Roll-Out Mattress (sleeps 2)
6) Quasi McFetal (later removed from the running due to discomfort)
7) Upstairs Guest Room Part I
8) Upstairs Guest Room Part II
9) Old Side-Win (twin bed in Win�s room)
10) Win's bed (which by default went to him, as the host)

One day, I was sleeping comfortably in Old Side-Win when he woke me up so I could record some drum parts. He brought me a cup of black coffee and gave me a lengthy lecture, in a bad British accent, about how I must drink it immediately or my body would soon be covered with scales and fur. It was some of the best coffee I ever durnk.

I would also like to introduce a new feature to my blog, tentatively entitled "Humorous and/or Absurd Excerpts from Academic Papers I May Have Authored."

"This promise of hierophany is what drives Oedipa, and nearly any other human being, to attach spiritual, cosmic significance to secular events. By sublimating our secular world in this way, we attempt to order it and block out the horrific chaos threatening to impede on our paradigm. An atheist would say this is precisely what religion does ... "

From "Pynchon's Crying Of Lot 49: Sacred and Profane Entropy"
Senior Metafiction Tutorial, May 1999

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