It's Deneueve! She's smiling at me from my PC monitor. Her eyes beckon and she says, "Is that an intercontinental ballistic missile in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?" I reach out for her. I touch her face and her face becomes the sun. My fingers begin to smolder and burst into flames. I'm on fire. No . . . I am fire. I fall into the sun. I am one with it. Here comes the sun. Here comes the Sun King. I am sinking in the west. I'm melting! I can feel myself breaking up into thousands of discrete puddles of molten flesh. The computer screen goes blank and suddenly all is dark . . . I am drifting though space, locked in a cocoon of metal and plastic with only the sound of my own breathing for company. I'm feeling cramped and ill-at-ease. Tiny motes of light flash intermittently around me like colorful, pesky bugs. I reach out to swat them, only to skin my knuckles on the hard surface of my enclosure. A small, oval window appears before me. Looking out, I can see what appears to be a large, space craft,...

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"When I'm drivin' in my car, And the man comes on the radio He's tellin' me more and more About some useless information Supposed to fire my imagination" .....................(Mick Jagger/Keith Richard) Where the do I want to go today? Hey, Microsoft! I want to go fishing today. I want to wade out into a stream and feel the cold rush of freezing water between my legs. I want to stumble across the gravel of a stream bed, fighting for balance against the relentless push of the current. I want to wrestle a five- pound rainbow trout to a standstill in the midst of a springtime wilderness. Can you take me there, Microsoft? I didn't think so! Yo, MS! I've got it. Florence, Italy! I want to sit down in the middle of the Ponte Vecchio with a jug of local swill and play my guitar . . . and bay at the Mediterranean moon like a drunken coyote. Can you do that for me? "Airline tickets," you say. Not really the same thing is it? Wait! I know . . . I know! I want to go down on Catherine Denueve today. I want to taste the . . . . ...

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I have an eight-track tape of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. It's in a box, in my attic, nestled among other mementos of my analog life ... a trumpet mouthpiece, a wire recording of Gene Krupa's big band that my uncle made in the early Fifties, a small, leather pouch with three New York subway tokens from when tokens were a quarter, an empty pack of Lucky Strikes ... and a whole lot of other shit rendered useless and obsolete by the passing of time. Nowhere, of course, in that box of archaic debris ... nowhere in my attic ... or in the state of Oregon ... nowhere in the entire U-S-of-fucking-A ... or the whole goddamned world, for that matter, does there exist an eight-track device into which I can insert this hunk of lifeless, black plastic and call forth the sweet, hard-on evoking sounds of my youth ... that filled my adolescent nights with the magic of ... Sheh - reeeee She - eh - eh - er - eee bay - yay - bee She - ehr - reee Won't you come out tonight (Come, come ... come out to-nye-yight!)...

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I got into this year's NAMM convention courtesy of Celia Biggs, who works at SONY up here in Eugene. Celia's an attractive, middle-aged woman who lives a couple of houses down from me. She gave me a pass to this NAMM thing, saying how she thought it might help to expand my horizons. In-fucking-deed!! Here's a woman . . . works eight hours a day, stamping out CDs in a sterile environment, telling me that MY horizons needed to expand. I felt like telling her that I had something besides "horizons" that needed expanding . . . but I didn't. I simply accepted her gift with as much graciousness as I could muster, tucked the pass in my pocket and trucked on off, with the intention of tossing it in the trash when I got home. ED FURILLO! The pass was made out to this guy, Furillo, who was, evidently, going to be too busy getting his "horizons" expanded by the succulent Celia to be representing his Japanese masters in the City of Angels that weekend. Probably told the wife that he was going and, instead, booked a room...

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It's Friday afternoon. You're home by yourself . . . as usual. The UPS guy has just dropped off a three by five foot box of God-knows-what. The return address on the shipping label reads "SteinWalk On-Line Entertainment." You scratch your foggy noggin, trying to remember what you might have ordered that could possibly be so big. You drag the box out of the front hall into the middle of the living room and hastily slit the taped parcel open. Voila! IT'S SIX MILLION PLASTIC CHEETOS! You begin to wonder, why on earth SteinWalk would be sending you all these plastic morsels when, deep down in the sub-oceanic trenches of your brain, a little light goes on . . . and, slowly, its message reaches the surface of your consciousness: Ass hole! Look in the Cheetos . . . Ass hole! It's buried under all those Cheetos . . . And so, you begin doing a tentative breast stroke through a sea of white, plastic bits, being careful not to get them all over the living room, but the little fuckers stick to the hair on your arms, adhere...

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