Just stringing words together, hoping for a miracle that something will come together into coherence. At a loud and somewhat annoying pub where people are yelling and laughing but I cannot distinguish specific words so I cannot grab them from the air and feed them into my hands for transmission to this page. Beautiful woman speaking what sounds like an eastern European language, bartender explaining a brace on his arm, making gratuitous and farcical references to having injured himself jerking off. The eastern European sounding woman is talking to a man who looks like Robbie Roberts, from The Band. A lot of strident conversation going about, around and around but not revolving. Slightly raining outside, tomorrow is all rain, or 80%  chance. I AM SO FULL OF RAIN. That is true according to a poet whose name eludes me right now. I thought of her today. The actual line is “YOU ARE SO FULL OF RAIN”. It is not directed at me personally, but I can think that it is. Someone still asking about the bartender’s arm brace asks “Still a little achy?” Now he commences to brag about his company’s insurance coverage, which includes personal therapy for shit like this. Don’t people know it is rude to boast of your employment priviliges to those who have none? I learned long ago not to brag about my teeth. My teeth are close to perfect. A few fillings I have were probably unnecessary, according to the last dentist I saw. If they fell out I’d be fine with never replacing them. I am good breeding stock, as the saying goes. I could get way with all those crimes I’ve wanted to commit that involve biting people and eating things, as my teethmarks would leave no clue. But first the fillings have to fall out. Once the fillings drop away I can pursue my life of crime bites. I saw a cashier at the supermarket this week sucking on a popsicle in a way that seemed to suggest she was sucking on a cock. She might have been 16 or 17. The other girl cashiers were looking at her and blushing as she jammed the popsicle into her face like she was plunging it into a stuffed up toilet. She wasn’t sucking on it. She was chewing on it. A certain part of me cringed at the unlikely possibility that she was recreating a previous night’s encounter. She had no idea what she was doing but neither did the other teenage girl cashiers watching her. They were intrigued. I played through a lot of piano music today, sticking to old standbys but venturing into unfamiliar territory. I am working on a piece called MEDITATION at the request of a friend who asked me to write something for him. I just need to get the jazz of it into my hands. Andrea Gibson is the above mentioned RAIN poet’s name. I looked it up. I have exclusive access to a global computer network that allows me to look things up like that. Have you heard of it? The WWW. It’s a bunch of Gopher and Archie servers brimming with obscure content and bet-deciding anecdotes. I believe I am the only being on earth with access to this amazing resource. It will change the world! I tell you, this time next year you’ll say you heard about it here first. WHATWHAT. I was talking to a friend a few months ago about this Internet thing. We got into the business early, taking advantage of the fact that no technical background was required or even desired in the WWW of 1994. He said he knew right from the get go that the Internet was going to be something huge. I did not think so at first. There were too many barriers to entry for elderly or handicaped, not to mention sub-brainiacs. I knew it would be something but not in the first years could I have imagined this phenomenon that threatens to take over our fucking brain cells. I remember my moment of clarity, though. It must have been 1996 or 1997. It was the first time I signed in to online banking. All I could think from the moment I logged in was “Why would anyone not want to do this?” I had similar moments of revelation in the year or so to come. Why would anyone buy a newspaper hen it is not only free online but (more importantly) fully searchable? Why would I buy CDs when Napster and Usenet made it simple to amass collections that would have taken a lifetime of lifetimes to accumulate just years earlier? To me the selling point about the Internet ended up being the infinite volume, the bottomless quantity of content that made the journalistic “column inch” irrelevant and, to me, an eventual point of nostalgia. I miss the days of content crafted to fit a physical amount of space on a printed page. I ead newspaper columns from 1991 and feel the text that had been shaved away, the sentences assuming an earnestness that approached a bad translation from one language to another. Text today comes at us like avalanches. We read more words, and less books. My weakness in publishing to the WWW is that I spew a lot of raw sewage. Much of what I post is untreated, unedited, unfiltered. It is sewage. This is textual sewage. I still cannot distinguish any single word flying around me in this noisy space. I heard “Y’know, like” then from the other side of the room “SHUTUP!” followed by laughter and the seemingly incongruous and repeated shouting of the word SHOES: “SHOES! SHOES! SHOES!”