Percy, Certain critics have always claimed to see some naïve idealism in your poems, but you’re right— if America had any idealism left, we wouldn’t be stuck like a charred steak in the meat grinder we’re in now. I think about this, I think about the drowning exercise you did to prepare for your encounter with Mr. Friends-with-the-Super-Conformists, I think about the fact that you enjoyed guitars and guitar music, and I come to no pertinent conclusions. The Fugazi Fighters came into the Grind today and I was forced to do my work within earshot of them. Their whole dish is that the Internet has not only destroyed their capacity to sell records, it’s made touring impossible because nothing’s broken down by region anymore— their fan-base is atopic. I’ve been watching these guys operate, with some limited success, for ten years— but it’s always with the restraining impulse that nothing remarkable has happened yet, no bounds have been broken, no rivers crossed. How can I describe their music— it’s like the noise a cat makes when heaved into a bathtub, amplified a hundred times. Not, of course, that I’ve ever heaved a cat into a bathtub. In other news, on these oppressively hot days I’m driven to drink; the impulse is escapist, transcendental, and practical. I can walk into a liquor store and buy several hours of obliviousness. I’ve been drinking Black Velvet whiskey, which is cheap, but there’s an elegance to the packaging that gives me confidence— a black label, lettered in gold. I think, without, I hope, degenerating too much towards the maudlin, of all the girls in my past, how I romanticized everything about them, turned them into archetypes, figured out their equations. I wound up spawning empty flasks, blackened but with gold lettering, stitched into poetry journals, libraries, and homes around the world. Yes, where crass hype is concerned, I’m commensurate with the Fugazi Fighters. I’d like to hope that a transcendentalist bent can redeem a he-man’s cravings and exploits, but it’s not for me to determine.