My father too, but on an even grander scale. He used to tell me that his dream was to be an astronaut. He came of age in an era when a young boy’s heroes weren’t felonious hip-hop singers or New Jersey-based reality television stars—no, they were the jet pilots, the spacemen, those with the Right Stuff who were exploring the farthest reaches of the sky. Pop would take me out on dark, clear nights to look through his telescope at the moon’s great seas or the Pleiades cluster. My mother knew that we shared a yearning to take to the skies, and for his birthday in August of 1994, she decided to indulge us a bit. She bought us two tickets to ride on a WWII-era Stearman 75 biplane.

The biplane was flown by Classic Aviators, a little aerial tour company that operates out of the grass-strip Katama Airfield on the eastern side of the island. During the summer months, the biplane can be heard (long before it’s seen) rumbling over the beaches and golf courses as its passengers take in the sights. Now, we’d be taking a turn.

The old man and I showed up at the airfield with plenty of time to spare. Upon arriving, we found out that the normal pilot was out that day, and covering for him was a gentleman that Pop knew named Mike. Given this, he said he’d give us the “special treament” and do some acrobatic maneuvers he wouldn’t normally do with his usual clients. We walked out to the strip and beheld our craft; the Stearman was gleaming in the late summer sun. Her blue fuselage was complemented by yellow main wings and a red-and-white striped rudder. Mike gassed her up and ran through his checklist, and gave us our goggles and headsets. We’d need those, he said, because when you’re in an open cockpit and there’s a nine-cylinder, 680 cubic inch Lycoming radial engine with an open exhaust and the throttle pinned swinging an eight-foot wooden prop about two feet in front of your nose, it gets a little loud and breezy. We hopped on up to the front cockpit. We couldn’t wait.

The smell of gasoline wafted over us as Mike completed his pre-flight. I imagined myself a would-be World War Two flying ace, taking his first round in the trainer on his way to becoming a hero of the sky over Berlin or the Pacific. Stepping up to the front of the plane, Mike took the propeller in hand and gently turned it over a couple times to work some oil into the rings and prime her up. Then, it was brakes on, mags hot, contact. He took a firm hold on the prop with both hands and gave it a mighty throw. The veteran radial belched a great cloud of smoke and thundered to life. Mike hopped up behind the stick, and we taxied out. I was electrified with excitement. He lined us up on the grassy runway, and eased the throttle forward. The engine snorted, cleared its throat, and roared up to takeoff power. We bounced down the strip, and before you could say “Rosie the Riveter,” we were airborne.

The mighty Stearman pulled us skyward. Even with us wearing our goggles and noise-blocking com headsets, the engine at full song was a force to be reckoned with. It put all five senses into overload. This was aviation as it was meant to be; raucous, elemental, nothing separating you from the air through which you were soaring but a bit of wood and wire. We did a pass over South Beach, and once the Stearman had stretched her legs a bit, Mike gave her the beans. He dimed the throttle and went into an impossibly steep climb, and just as it felt that the plane was going to fall out of the sky, she nosed over and executed a hair-raising stall turn. We did a few sharply-banked turns over the beach, to the delight of us and those on the ground. The old man and I were giddy. Mike stopped short of going completely inverted, as the old Lycoming might have suffered fuel starvation, and we might have suffered unintended ejection. We started following the coastline towards Gay Head. It was the perfect day for open-cockpit flying. I found myself singing the chorus to Steely Dan’s “Babylon Sisters,” the part that goes, “here come those Santa Ana winds again.”

My mother, my sisters, and practically half the island knew that Pop and I were going to be riding the biplane that day, so as we chugged our way up-island towards Lucy Vincent, Squibnocket, and Philbin, we were soon greeted by a hardy welcoming committee. Tanned, shirtless bodies took to their feet, beach towels in hand, as the Stearman’s roar approached. Mike dropped his altitude to the point that the beachgoers could feel our prop wash. Our friends waved their towels and their arms as the old 75 burbled overhead. Mike dipped the wings as Dad said, “wave!” We greeted our adoring fans. It was like we were national heroes returning from battle.

We blasted up the face of the clay cliffs, startling the overweight tourists disembarking from their stuffy buses as we crested the precipice at full chat. Mike pointed the Stearman in the direction of our house. We were close enough to the ground that we could have picked a few dandelions for my mother on the way. Pop instructed Mike over the com as to which roof was ours. I knew Mom and my two sisters would be awaiting our arrival. Sure enough, as we tore over the back yard, there they were, my mother in her sunbathing attire, and my two sisters waving towels. Mike circled our abode a few times as we waved. We gained altitude and majestically turned eastward, heading back towards Katama.

We passed over a few of Dad’s houses he’d built. Most interesting to see was Sid Knafel’s half-underground compound with its flat roof, acres of groomed lawn, and polygonal swimming pool. My perspective on the island was changing and maturing; I could now see how tiny it really was, and how all the little places I’d come to know in my ten years fit together. We trundled our way towards the airfield. On the approach, the Stearman tottered from side to side. Mike throttled her back to idle, and as the two front wheels touched the ground, I let out an elated “ALLRIGHT!” Not that I was happy to be on the ground, far from it; rather, I was overcome with joy over the previous hour’s experience. Mike echoed over the com, “allright!” The biplane jittered over the grass strip, and Mike put her back where we’d left off. He cut the engine. We were windblown, lightheaded, and half deaf, but oh boy, was it worth it.

1. FML: An acronym for “fuck my life,” usually seen at the end of self-important, histrionic facebook updates by iPhone-toting college girls and gay boys upset that the Comcast service winked out during Project Runway. Yes, fuck your cushy, well-subsidized, socially-networked, first-world life, you ungrateful shit.

2. The. Period. After. Every. Word: Used for emphasis, as if anything anyone ever says on Twitter is important. No one gives a shit about what you think of the new Cee Lo Green song. You. Are. A. Tool.

3. Improper pluralization of words ending in -us: In Latin, a masculine-gender word that ends in -us is usually pluralized by replacing the -us with an -i (the so-called “second declension”). For example: “alumnus” becomes “alumni.” When the word has an i before the -us, you double up the i. For example, “radius” becomes “radii.” You do NOT double up the i otherwise. Why people started doing this, I will never know, but in an attempt to look learnèd, you look like a dip.

4. Ellipses (…) instead of periods: Just end your sentence. You’re wasting precious calories to type those extra periods that could better be used to shovel KFC Double Downs into your face or click on pop-ups in porn sites. Plus, it makes you look non-committal and indecisive, like you haven’t fully thought out what you wrote, or that I should be expecting another phrase that never comes. Full stop.

5. lolspeak: Popularized by the abominable icanhascheezburger.com, a style of writing used by hipsters to look cute. A human interpretation of what it would look like if adorable cats (“kittehs”) had basic faculties in the English language. Notable for its tendency to make words longer than necessary (e.g., “my” becomes “mah”). I hate cats. Grow up. Shut up. Knock it off.

6. “Fail” used as a noun: Used by confirmed douchebags and facebook scenesters when passing judgment on the latest YouTube meme, Charlie Sheen debacle, or tuna sandwich they had for lunch. Often preceded by “epic” for extra retardation. Fail is a verb. Failure is a noun. Stop it.

7. Douchey corporate PR language: Normal people in normal conversation should never utter words like leveraging, paradigm, optimize, new media, synergy, and marketable. You are not your hideous job. Don’t let it suck what’s left of your soul out of you. Talk like a normal person, dick whistle.

8. Improper use of the word “electrocution”: Electrocution is a portmanteau of the words “electricity” and “execution,” coined in the days of the Tesla/Edison AC/DC “war of currents.” It means to die by electric shock, not simply to receive a shock. Sort that out.

9. Staycation: Just kill yourself.

10. Unnecessary use of the present participle: Most likely traceable to the McDonald’s “I’m lovin’ it” ad campaign, it usually consists of taking a description of one’s feelings towards something (e.g., “I like your hat”) and making it a present participial phrase (“I’m liking your hat”). I’m aware that McDonald’s is in cahoots with the Bilderberg Group and the reptilians to control our thoughts and it may be difficult to put this one to bed, but really, it’s utmost in douchery. End it.

11. Using internet abbreviations in speech: I know, you’re probably trying to be “ironic” or “clever,” but if anyone ever says “LOL” or “STFU” to me in a non-ASCII-based conversation, it’s a guaranteed haymaker to the face, you can count on that.

12. BFF: Best friend forever? Obviously the person doesn’t mean that much to you if you can’t even take the time to say “best friend forever.”

13. Green: Used by fair-weather environmentalist débutantes and marketing departments to give an image of ecological responsibility to things that are usually antithetical to it, such as houses, cars, and pretty much anything manufactured by mankind. Yeah, I know, your Toyota Prius gets 50mpg going downhill in a tailwind. Did you stop to think where it came from, what sort of processes and materials are used in its manufacture, how it was shipped to this country, so on and so forth? Let me reference the great sage Kermit T. Frog when I say, it ain’t easy being green. But it is easy to shut the hell up.

14. Indie: I suppose this is short for “independent,” but it has now been rendered meaningless in a homeopathic process of cultural dilution by the entertainment industry and tight-pantsed hipsters with MicroKorgs and a MySpace in every basement from here to Yuma. Some people even go so far as to call themselves “indie kids.” Christ. “What kind of band are they?,” you might ask the tattooed-and-mustachioed doorman at your local shithole rock club on a Tuesday night. “Oh, they’re indie,” he’ll say. “Yeah, I know they’re independent. They’re unsigned, they’re playing spraypainted guitars through crappy solid-state amplifiers covered in stickers, and no one’s here. What is their genre?” “Like I said, they’re indie. Ten bucks.”

•Vostok 4 had a show in Somerville recently. After the set, Timmy Boit started feeling a bit off. Whether this was due to the enormous burger made from a solid chunk of cow ass that he’d eaten, an excessive alcohol intake, or the steadily increasing Yah Dude contingent at the venue, we do not know. However, as a result, he decided to go take a nap in the back of his car. After an hour of this, he felt the need to visit ye olde restroome. Rather than use the plumbing at the venue, though, he went home, which was mere minutes away. Upon reaching his throne, King Timmy of Boit fell asleep. On the throne. It was only after his wife banged repeatedly on the bathroom door yelling for him to get his stupid ass up that he awoke and rejoined the party.

•Bunny recently, for the first time in about six years, set his sights on a girl. This girl was in attendance at the aforementioned show. During a subsequent set, the two of them were dancing together when she gave him the old “come hither” wag of the finger. Uh oh. He leaned in, and she told him, “I hear you have a crush on me.” Oh God dammit. How did this hit the wire service? She promptly threw Chunky Dog under the bus for spilling the beans, even though it was later revealed that her sister had told her. After many compliments, she turned Bunny down. Oh well. Guess it’s back to the old hogan.

•Further on the subject of Bunny’s love life, he has permanently extricated himself from the hideous maw of online dating. He leaves it to the teeming masses of boring yuppie cocksuckers, Family Guy-watching grad students, and fat broads, and puts his undying faith in the goddess Fortuna. It’s like they used to say on that Chef Boyardee commercial, “good meals take time.”

•The gang was out for drinks one night at the Publick House in Brookline. While we enjoyed our stouts and Pilsners, a group of serious Yah Dudes gathered outside—Brookline seemed to be overrun with Yah Dudes and hipsters that night for some reason. The Dave Matthews fans started horsing around outside our window, undoubtedly getting out their pent-up homosexual frustration while saying “no homo” to one another. The roughhousing got increasingly forceful, as the effects of the Long Island iced teas reduced their inhibitions. One of them, a fat disgusting lummox, picked up a nearby traffic cone and hurled it at another of the bros, hitting him square in the face. We all cringed. The game had changed. The victim started bleeding from his eye. The Fat Fuck, however, seemed to show no remorse and egged his opponent on further. They took the fight to the street, and just as the others hailed a cab to hightail it out of there, Bleeder threw a mighty punch at Fat Fuck. Their comrades held them away from each other. Bleeder tried to board the taxi, and so did Fat Fuck. The cab driver was having none of that, though, and promptly kicked the two of them out before speeding off. I wonder which one lost their butt-virginity that night.

•Unbeknownst to most people, Cutty is currently in space. To his crack team of spacemen, he is Col. Foster, commander of the Sidehatch 8 deep space exploration vehicle. We have recently received a video communiqué from the mission, which Chunky Dog has edited and turned into an important documentary and public service announcement on space safety. It can be viewed here.

•Bunny’s guitarist down in NYC is dating Jon Bon Jovi’s daughter.

•The Reverend and Chunky Dog’s landlord got married recently. Despite, or perhaps because of this, he continues to wither away, an empty shell of a man. He now whiles away his remaining years doing things like placing useless folding tables in the foyer which prevent our door from opening all the way, and when we move said table out of the way, he posts a passive-aggressive sign with something to the effect of “TO ALL TENANTS OF (OUR ADDRESS), THIS TABLE IS FOR PACKAGE AND DELIVERY RECEIVING. PLEASE DO NOT MOVE IT. SINCERELY, JOSEPH (OMITTED), LANDLORD.” Seriously? There are only two other apartments in this house aside from yours. You couldn’t just tell us that to our face when you’re out on the porch on a Sambuca drunk at 2am checking the emails you never receive on your iPhone and we come rolling in from Videodrome or the Kowloon all tore up? Eat a bag of dicks you mutant. Send your zombie bride’s ritalin-addled hell-spawn off to reform school while you’re at it.

•Cutty and Bunny, before he left for space, were enjoying a nice lunch from the Brookline Spa one day. They were eating it in the living room while watching Top Gear. As Bunny leaned on the couch, he felt a wetness on his right elbow. At first he thought that part of the cushion was just colder than the rest of it because it was in the shade. No, this was definitely moisture. He then remembered: someone had crashed on this couch the night before, a friend of MM+TK, our fourth roommate. Bunny immediately thought the worst, so he bent down and gave it the old whiff. Sure enough, it was urine. Piss. Peepee. Tinkle. Lemonade. Good Lord, the guy had pissed our couch. Who does that? Chunky Dog has repeatedly affirmed that in all his years of getting bodaciously soupy, never once did he wet himself while asleep or awake. So he went to MM+TK and told him the situation. He immediately felt bad about it and initiated the cleanup procedure. As of this writing (two weeks after the fact) the foam cushion is still wet from being doused with the shower head, so when the honeys come over and see the couch is short a cushion we have to make up a story about how we donated it to the local homeless shelter on our way to bring our latest book of haiku to the publisher.

As stated earlier, I was killing it. This was unusual, as I was still relatively new to the game compared to the likes of Chunks and our old friend Ross, who practically invented the game. Also, I have a terrible poker face. In any case, the chips were piling up in front of me. The stakes were high. That $6 pot was so close I could taste it. I was feeling good. Chunky, however, had other things to say. Verbatim:

“I hope you get into a non-fatal car accident on your way home.”

There are certain things you just don’t say, no matter how soundly someone may be fixing your wagon in a game of cut-throat poker. We all immediately rebuked the statement. “DUDE,” I said, “WHAT THE FUCK?” We all eventually laughed it off, and I ended up winning the game, despite (or because of) my outlandish bets on pairs of twos and sevens high. I walked out of the room six Washingtons richer. Up yours, Chunky Oaf.

I started up my mother’s obsidian-black Subaru Forester. We were, and still are, a staunchly Subaru family, and this one was important. Not only was this our first one with trappings of luxury—the “S Premium” model with CD changer (that I broke), heated seats, heated wipers, et cetera—but this car was important for me: This was the car I’d gotten my driver’s license in, the first car I’d fooled around in, the first car I’d been pulled over in. The Subie was near and dear to my heart. And tonight, it would chalk up another first for me on its fuselage.

I was cruising home with WGBH on the marconi. Jazz with Bob Parlocha. It was around 12:30 or 1am. It was a calm, clear night. The Subie’s motor pitter-pattered serenely. I rolled stealthily in my black chariot through Vineyard Haven, West Tisbury, and Chilmark. As the hour advanced, though, I grew tired. Along about Straight’s Curve, near the Chilmark/Aquinnah line, my eyes began to get heavy. I didn’t worry about it too much, as I was only a few miles from my house. I crossed the town line. The radio was playing smooth standards that lulled me even more. My mother’s car was also, as always, an automatic, which bore me to death. I passed East Pasture and the Wampanoag Tribal land. I descended the hill near Ed Silva’s old place, and…

When I awoke, I was halfway off the road doing 40 MPH and closing in fast on a locust tree. “JESUS,” I screamed. I threw the wheel hard to port. The understeer-prone Subaru’s front wheels howled and clawed for traction. My heart was about to burst out of my chest. The locust came closer. The thought flashed in my mind—was this the end? I braced for impact and held my breath, waiting for the explosion of the airbags. But the Subie was having none of that. She hunkered down and grabbed a hold of the tarmac and gravel as best she could, and adjusted her yaw angle to miss a direct hit by mere inches. I felt a terrific jolt and heard an awful bang, and the car ended up sideways in the road. I sat stunned for several seconds, making sure I was still alive. I stopped the engine. I got out and surveyed the damage. I’d avoided a head-on collision, but the car was not unscathed. It had scraped along the tree, taking out the passenger side mirror and caving in the door and rear quarter panels. The right front wheel had also slammed violently into a rut, which bent the strut and put major negative camber on the wheel. She was wounded, but she was alive.

I drove the poor heroic Subie home. She had just been in my first real accident, and saved me. I wrote a note to my parents that I left on the kitchen table: “Mom/Dad…hit a deer on my way home, did some damage to the car. I will pay for all repairs.” I didn’t have the minerals to tell them that Dummy Dog had put the hoodoo voodoo on me and I’d fallen asleep at the wheel as a result. I also didn’t anticipate that the repairs would end up costing about $4,000. Those poker winnings dried up real fast. I called up The Dog the next day and said:

“Guess who got into a non-fatal car accident last night?”

What an asshole.

He made us both chalupas, and we decided to watch something. Dexter? Always Sunny in Philadelphia? Sword in the Stone? Which, by the way, is his favorite Disney movie, and that counts for alot. Or perhaps Glee? I’d heard alot about this Glee thing, and part of me, mostly the gay 12-year-old in me who had memorized the librettos of Rent and On The Town before I hit puberty, was curious. Another part of me, the grouchy working-class Bostonian Irish Catholic warehouse manager, knew it would be a crock of shit. But like I always say, what the hell. I was still riding a high brought on by chasing a speeding bus across Boston in 40 mph winds while jacked up on corn syrup, so I went with it. Glee it was.

I didn’t hate it. Okay, so the show takes more than a cursory look into the catalogs of Madonna and Lady Gaga. And that one kid is nauseatingly gay. And they’re probably sponsored by Antares. It’s a show about a high school glee club, what do you want? The particular episode I saw dealt with the mother of Finn, a club member, moving in with the father of Kurt, the flamboyantly gay one, and as a result, the two sharing a bedroom. Much to the chagrin of Finn, Kurt decorates the room like some sort of Victorian whorehouse. Finn, also a football player, is bullied by the other jocks for his seemingly increasingly “gay” behavior, and becomes paranoid that Kurt (also bullied) is in love with him.

To make a long story short, the show dealt very frankly with the issue of being openly gay at a young age. There are not many shows on the air, even today, that deal with such subject matter. Though Kurt is certainly the Hollywood stereotype of a “gay,” and the jocks were the Hollywood stereotype of jocks, and the lip sync on the musical numbers was a bit wanting, and Auto-Tune still sucks, the message of being true to oneself and not letting the small-mindedness of others change who you are was strong and positive. And Jane Lynch is in it. That can’t be bad, can it?

To criticize the show for being lame is like criticizing a Butterfinger for being sweet. That’s in its nature. Like I said, it’s about a high school glee club, you have to take it at face value. It’s silly, it’s fun, and there’s a good message in there too. Of course there are going to be chintzy rehashings of Ke$ha songs and gay boys prancing around in gold lamé. That’s what gay boys do. Christ, I never thought I’d be sticking up for a show about a high school glee club. Well, I suppose it’s a new era. While I may not be racing to put every season in my Netflix queue, I officially declare Glee to be not a crime against humanity.

Am I getting soft?

The Aquinnah Volunteer Fire Department is a hale and hearty group of townsfolk who gather every Sunday morning to wash the trucks and test their equipment, real pastoral and old-school Americana-like. It was a point of pride in town to be counted among the volunteers; many Aquinnites had connections with the force. Indeed, my old man put in a stint on the department way back in the day driving the big brush breaker truck.

When a fire breaks out in town, the town is alerted and the firefighters are summoned to duty by the fire whistle atop the station. The whistle is a “rise-and-fall”-type rotary siren, the kind used for air raid and tornado warnings and such. It could be heard all over town. Through the course of my childhood, the town replaced the whistle a few times, eventually settling on one with a very distinctive, melancholy tone that sent chills down my spine every time it went off. Woe be unto me if there were a fire in the middle of the night; the ghostly sound of the whistle in the dark would jar me awake and leave me cowering in fear under the covers.

The house I grew up in was a ramshackle old two-story plank-and-beam hut in the woods, a few miles from the water. Between my house and Vineyard Sound was the deep tangle of locust trees, blackberry prickers and summer houses known as Pancake Hollow. Though it was literally in my backyard, it was treacherous and difficult terrain that I’d explored only a handful of times in my youth.

One night, some time in the mid- to late ’90s, I was sound asleep in the still of a typical Aquinnah night. Those of you who grew up in the city don’t know quiet like we have at night in Aquinnah. Come darkness, you can hear a blue bottle sneeze in your neighbor’s lawnmower shed. There I was, cocooned in silence and dreaming about flying pigs or something, when the siren went off. Whatever pleasant dreams I was having were immediately obliterated as the haunting cry of the fire whistle pierced the night air and reverberated over every rooftop and scrub oak for miles around. My heart fluttered in my chest at the baleful sound. Normally I would have tried to block it out, shut my eyes and go back to sleep, but tonight something was different. I turned my head to look out my window which looked out over the hollow, and saw a sight that etched itself into my memory forever. Pancake Hollow was on fire.

I was terrified in the way that only fire can terrify a creature. My eyes were like saucers. The sky was lit with a great cloud of orange sparks and smoke, which rose from the treeline and billowed over the landscape. From my vantage point, and since it was otherwise pitch-dark out, it looked like my backyard was ablaze. I didn’t know what to do. Should I wake Mom and Dad? Should I run? My old house was a tinderbox, as was the field behind it, and if a spark even came near it, it would surely be curtains. The siren continued to wail. Undoubtedly I was not the only one witnessing the inferno, and the proper authorities were on the way, but I was still petrified. I couldn’t tell if the fire was on the move and getting closer. I started making an inventory of things to take with me should I need to evacuate. Finally, the Aquinnah whistle stopped, and I could faintly hear the scream of the Chilmark whistle calling in reinforcements. I heard the distant roar of diesel engines and the bleat of truck sirens as the pumpers and tankers trode the murky and undulating terrain to get to the scene of the fire. But where was it? What was ablaze? Would the trucks be able to make it that deep into the woods? Would the flames consume my house when all was said and done? Would I have a home come morning?

I stayed awake through the night and into the dawn, watching the ominous spark clouds. I dared not avert an eye. The Aquinnah men, with help from their Chilmark brothers, got the fire under control, but it was not an easy battle. Sirens wailed all through the night. When morning rose and Mom and Dad turned on the radio, we heard that the old McDiarmid house in Pancake Hollow had suffered an electrical malfunction and gone up in a flash. Luckily, no one was home and no one suffered any injury, but the house was a total loss by the time the crews could squeeze their trucks up the narrow, muddy tractor paths of the hollow. Chilmark even had a truck get stuck on its way to the blaze. Thankfully though, they kept the fire from doing damage to any surrounding property. Our boys were few, but strong, and when the siren’s call beckoned, they saved the town once again.

I met C2 at the Phillips Academy Andover Summer Session back in the heady days 2001. It was a pre-9/11 world, when the only thing we had to be afraid of was the West Nile Virus. She was from Phoenix, AZ, a city matched only by the moon for sameness of landscape and lack of anything going on. Being stupid teenagers, we carried on a long-distance relationship during the ’01-’02 school year, and I decided to go visit her over the Christmas break.

Christina was alot of firsts for me; she was the first person I was ever sexually intimate with, my first kiss, my first tuning in Tokyo. All of this was done in her parents’ living room the week I was there. There we were one night, getting hot and heavy. Well, more like tepid and welterweight. I’ll spare you the details, but my region came rather close to her region, though we did not have intercourse at any time. In fact, my region never made skin-to-skin contact with her region. She did beg me to “take your (censored) out and (censored) me” a couple times, but due to a distinct lack of rubbers and the fact that she was actually rather unattractive and I was running at about 25% pressure, no plowing of any bean fields took place.

So I get back home a few days after New Year’s Day, and I get a call from her one night the following week. “I missed my period,” she says to me. Word. “How many days has it been?” I ask. “Three or four,” she says. I can see where this choo-choo is going, and it ain’t Chattanooga. “So…what do you think it is?” I ask. I know what she thinks it is, because a) why the hell else would a chick bring up the lateness of her period to a guy, and b) C2 is batshit, over-the-moon, McLean-hospital crazy. She thinks I done put a baby in her. I tell her that, lest she’s forgotten, we did not have sex, nor did my custard cannon even make contact with her punani. She claims that, albeit rarely, sperm can travel outside the body, miraculously find their way into the tunnel of love, traverse said tunnel with its acidity and chicanery and booby traps, and still have enough energy left to bust through the wall of an egg. Even my boys aren’t that strong.

I try to convince her that the chances of her being pregnant are about on par with Nancy Reagan showing up in the 2002 Bikes ‘n’ Babes calendar. C2, however, has already worked herself up into a fevered frenzy over it, and seems resigned to the fact that she’s knocked the fuck up. She then asks me what I think she should do if she is, in fact, running heavy. Let me repeat that: she asks me what I THINK SHE SHOULD DO if she’s pregnant. I tell her point blank what I think she should do: terminate it. I ain’t trying to raise no kid from 2000 miles away, woman. Okay, I didn’t say that last part. But I tell her in no uncertain terms that we were in no position to be having a child. And she hangs up on me. Tight.

So I ring her back, asking why she did that after she clearly asked what I THOUGHT SHE SHOULD DO. She “couldn’t believe I said that,” referring to my suggesting she get an abortion. She says she’s seen all kinds of gory and disturbing images of abortions in her health classes, and that though she was pro-choice, she couldn’t bring herself to do that. She fails to realize that an abortion at this stage of pregnancy would probably amount to her popping a pill and roughly seven cells being pissed out. C2 then decides that, since she also didn’t want to end up “like the girls in the childcare classes” at her school, she would walk out to the desert and die. So let me get this straight. You don’t want to kill whatever primordial amoeba may be growing inside you, but it’s okay to kill it and yourself? Yeah, you got that.

I get slightly hysterical. I beg her not to end herself over something that probably isn’t even there, and if it is, can be dealt with in numerous other, more rational ways. I tell her that I’ll do whatever I have to do, even if that means moving to Arizona, to make it work. For a while, she resists, saying things like “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.” This girl is 16, mind you, and let me reiterate: we did not have sex.

I’m up until about 4am that night, talking her down from the brink. She eventually relents, and promises not to off herself. I go to sleep, only to have to wake up at 6 for school. I’m a mental and physical wreck the next day, moping through Honors French and AP English, my mind fixated on the specter of a tiny Bunny running around. I’m not worried so much for myself, but for the world at having to deal with a tiny Bunny running around, talking about WWII airplane engines and imitating Randy Newman every time he gets near a piano. I could not abide the notion of foisting that upon my fellow man. One was enough.

I get home that afternoon, and the phone rings. It’s C2. She nonchalantly says, “I got my period.”

And people wonder why I’m gay.

See, hybrid cars as we know them today—vehicles with gasoline-electric powertrains, as opposed to the erstwhile meaning of a car with a European body and an American powertrain (De Tomaso Pantera, Iso Grifo, Bristol Type 603)—appeal to the smugness demographic. Why do people buy hybrid cars? It’s been done before, but let’s break it down. They’re certainly not popular because they’re inexpensive; the absolute most basic Prius starts at $24k. As for efficiency, all hybrids are rivaled or bested by modern small diesel cars (Prius: 51MPG EPA city; VW Polo TDI: 71MPG European combined cycle) or most subcompacts in general. If saving money were the number one concern, you’d buy a much less expensive (and more pleasant to drive) Ford Fiesta, which is not that much less efficient than your average hybrid in the real world, and wouldn’t have to wait years to amortize the premium of the hybrid in fuel savings. So their benefit must be environmental, right? Wrong. The processes used to produce any car, let alone a hybrid with its hundreds of pounds of toxic chemical batteries, are murder on the environment. Plus, automobile emissions account for a mere fraction of total greenhouse gas emissions; cows farting contributes up to 51% of total emissions.

In reality, if people actually wanted to save the world, they’d live closer to their work and ride their bike or walk, live less lavishly, keep their cars for more than a couple of years before buying a brand new one, maintain said cars better, buy locally-produced goods, stop listening to Justin Bieber and eating McDonald’s, and look out for people other than themselves. Then they’d take out their 1961 Jaguar E-Type on the weekend, and its 3.8 liter engine’s emissions would affect their sense of guilt just as little as it does the planet’s atmosphere. But people want easy solutions, they want their luxury lifestyles, and they want to look better than everyone else. So they buy hybrids. They’re the perfect appliance for today’s bullshit have-cake-and-eat-it-too world.

But let’s say hypothetically that hybrids end up saving the world from certain roasting. Things cool down. There’s gonna be more snow on the ground. Today’s jackwagon “drivers” that think cars are just another appliance that should operate itself as much as possible and are private vessels in which to text, eat, talk on the phone, and touch yourself have no idea how to handle a car in the snow anymore. So we’ll need to invest in more driver education like they have in Sweden. Not only that, but no matter how good of a driver you are, you’re only as good as your vehicle will let you be. Most hybrids are low-slung, skinny-tired, front-wheel drive sedans, completely useless in the snow in stock form. So people will start buying four-wheel drive monstrosities again. Which will re-destroy the Earth. And the cycle will repeat. Damn you, global warming!

There’s still hope for humanity, though. I was heartened the other day when I was out walking with one Katie Lynch during a snowstorm, and saw a driver in a maroon Crown Victoria expertly negotiating a snowy intersection by giving it the beans and letting the rear wheels do the steering that the front wheels couldn’t accomplish. Try that with a Honda Insight. Not only that, but long after that Insight’s batteries have reached the end of their life cycle and its tacky plastic interior has fallen apart or become passé, that tough old Crown Vic and its able driver will still be power sliding down the streets of Boston, its V8 singing its own song of smugness, as the hybrid drivers stay buried in the plow drifts and try to download a shoveling app.

The studio was located in Weehawken, just outside Hoboken. Super high end joint. 48-channel Neve desk, 2″ Studer machine, more vacuum tube compressors and channel strips than Carter has liver pills, a selection of B-3 organs and various electric pianos all in top shape, and the Steinway that John Lennon used to record “Imagine.” And apparently the Jonas Brothers are known to record there, whatever that’s worth. No fooling. The sessions went fantastically, and we’re all jazzed at how the EP is shaping up so far.

Patrick, his bass player PJ, and I stayed with his friend and former drummer Todd in Paramus while the sessions were going on. Todd, once employed by Patrick’s former record label, quit the music biz after the label went tits up back in ’09 and is now a private investigator. Todd, bless his heart, is also a dyed-in-the-wool party animal.

Saturday night, after a long day of tracking, we came back to Todd’s around half past midnight. No one was home, so we went in and made ourselves comfortable, eventually going to sleep around 1:30. I was on an air mattress in the living room, PJ was on a couch, and Patrick was upstairs in a guest bed. Along about 3:30, Todd and his girlfriend waltzed in the door. They immediately commenced an argument over the fact that Todd had given a copy of the key to the house to his friends so that they could all come over and crash at their leisure, forgetting that he already had three guests in the house…namely, the band. The GF demanded to know what he planned to do with them when they arrived. Todd, too wasted to form coherent thoughts, brushed her off. Eventually, they decided that they’d move PJ and me up to the master bedroom and put the party crew in the living room (they clearly didn’t want their bombed compadres anywhere near the master bedroom).

The girlfriend apologetically roused us from our slumber (though we were both awake already). She promised us a big breakfast in the morning and, explaining the situation, sent us up to the master bed with its double-super-King-sized bed and cornucopia of pillows. PJ and I crawled into the bed and tried to fall back asleep. No sooner had we closed our eyes, though, than Todd’s bevy of inebriated chums blows through the front door, and Todd gets the party started. He engages his massive stereo system, which uses PA speakers instead of normal home-audio-type speakers. These speakers are built for but one purpose, and that is to get the BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM. And that is just what Todd got, and oh did he get it. The music was not just loud, it was shockingly loud. It was disturbingly loud. It was OSHA-violatingly loud. And not just loud for 4 am either; this would have been loud for CBGB in 1979. PJ and I were incredulous. I couldn’t help but laugh. Was this really happening? I would have been furious if it weren’t so hilarious in its own way. Some things never change. This was the same Todd that, a few years back when I was staying at his old place, drunkenly belly flopped onto me at 2:30 in the morning screaming “MAX!!!!!” as I slept on his floor.

About an hour later, with the music still registering on seismographs in Taipei, Todd stumbles into the master bed to ask how we’re doing. PJ and I had managed to enter a hazy half-sleep at that point, which was immediately destroyed when Todd entered. We feigned sleep to get him to go away. Todd gazed upon the two of us in the bed together, and ecstatically proclaimed, “AW MAN, I CAN’T BELIEVE MAX N’ PJ ARE SLEEPIN IN MAH BED!!!!” With extra emphasis on the “bed.” He then turned to PJ and stated in a very drunken-uncle-at-Thanksgiving manner, “MAKE SURE THE DRUMMER’S GOOD, MAN.” He then tottered out of the room to rejoin the party, which went on until almost 6 am. PJ and I awoke around 9, having gotten maybe three hours of solid sleep if we were lucky. Surveying the scene downstairs, we found the living room transformed into a war zone of broken chairs, empty cans, and hung over partiers passed out on every piece of furniture in the room. Todd was nowhere to be found. And we never got that breakfast.

Also, this did not happen during my proper childhood. It happened in mid-2007, when I was 23 years old. However, as anyone who’s done them will tell you, mushrooms can bring the kid out in you.

So there we were, in mine and Chunks’s old apartment in Brighton, with an eighth of shrooms in hand and a whole day to ourselves. We’d tripped a couple weeks before, and it had gone swimmingly. I may or may not have tried to convince C. Dog to get naked with me (which he did not do), but all told, it was a success. This time, though, not so much. The Dog and I decided to finish off the bag. We did what we’d done last time, and use the mushrooms as garnish for peanut butter sandwiches to make them slightly more palatable. Thinking they’d gone “bad” and lost their effectiveness, however, I soon turned to popping the stems like they were Flintstones vitamins, only slightly less gross. This was a bad idea.

What started out as an enjoyable trip soon turned sour. I’d just gotten off the phone with the frontman of my band at the time, which was slated to fly to L.A. the next morning for a string of shows. He was upset that I was all fucked up on drugs the night before a big appearance. I became paranoid that I was letting them down, and quickly became agitated. Chunky Dog did his level best to calm me down, and I soon eased up. At that point, however, the toxic effects of the shrooms took hold, and I began retching. Chunks went and got the drywall bucket he kept for just such an occasion. I didn’t vomit, but came close. Then things got real ugly.

The trip went into a whole new dimension of bad. Feeling exhausted after the dry heaving and paranoia, I went to my room and laid down in bed. My mind then entered a parallel universe. What I experienced was what I believed at the time was my body dying and my consciousness passing into the afterlife. To the casual observer back on Planet Earth, it was me in my bed, swaddled in a blanket, tossing and moaning like a jonesing junkie, but to me, I was crossing over and entering previously unexplored parts of the mind. My eyes were closed, but in my field of vision was a tangled, electric-blue network of wires that I imagined was a microscopic view of my own brain, synapses sparking wildly. And every so often, a monstrous, zombie-like visage would appear and scare the holy crap out of me. As the psilocybin continued its dastardly work and I began to drift into a hallucinogenic sleep, I heard Sean talking on the phone and sirens outside, which I figured was him contacting the authorities and the ambulance coming to take me away. I later learned my parents had called multiple times and were worried, and Chunks, having come down enough to function, did the noble thing and fielded the call and told them I was just having a nap. This was a tough row to hoe, but it wasn’t over yet.

I drifted into a drug-induced slumber for God knows how long, when I suddenly jolted awake. I likened it to the orchestral crescendo at the end of The Beatles’ “A Day In the Life.” I was still tripping, but the great mushroom schooner had tacked yet again. Fully convinced that I was now in the afterlife, I was calm, serene, and completely at ease with everything around me. I was in heaven, literally. I figured that heaven was the last place you were when you died; in my case, my dingy apartment in Brighton. Feeling no connection to the terrestrial world, unbeholden to human construct, free from student loans, bills, a job, or Earthly possessions of any kind, I floated out of my bedroom on a cloud. Celeste, Chunky’s girlfriend at the time, had arrived by then, knowing we’d been up to no good and coming to check on us. I wafted into the living room. I explained to the two of them that we were in heaven, and that we were free from all constraints of mortal existence (though they would have known this already if we had actually been in heaven and not fucked up on shrooms). Humoring me, they played along. The fact that Chunky seemed to be finishing my sentences telepathically only furthered my notion that we were no longer of the flesh. I entered C. D.’s bedroom which was appreciably larger than mine, and flopped down on his also-larger bed. I splayed myself out as if to make a snow angel, and began expounding on the nature of the afterlife. I also began passing extremely loud gas. At this point, Chunks became irritated and tried to get me out of his room. “Bunny, you need to get the hell out of my room,” he said. “I DON’T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING,” I retorted, “FOR WE ARE IN THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. (FAAAAAAAAAAART) WE ARE FREE FROM OBLIGATIONS, OUR EXISTENCE (FAAAAAAAAAART) IS WHAT WE MAKE IT.” When Chunky protested further, I began calling him Winston Churchill. I then realized that I could finally fulfill my dream of building the Philly Car. At first, I demanded that Celeste bring me the Philly Car. She, of course, had no idea what the hell that was, though that didn’t stop me from demanding it over and over until she gave up and left the room. I then realized that I’d just have to build it myself. I was this close to leaving the house, going to a junkyard, and doing just that. Chunks and Celeste prevented me from doing so, much to my chagrin.

Then, I began to come down. The crash was much like the rave-up to the heavenly experience, with me in my bed whimpering and moaning and falling asleep. When I awoke, it was dark out, and my mind was like Max Yasgur’s farm after Woodstock. I was a mess. I was sore, I was bleary, I realized I was still alive. I was worried I’d missed my flight to L.A., but I hadn’t. Chunk E. recounted all the horrors for me, and I apologized for acting a fool. Hours later, I was on a 757 to LAX. That six-hour flight was probably the most unpleasant sober experience I’ve ever had. I hurt all over, I was beyond tired, and I was still coming to terms with the fact that I still didn’t have the Philly Car. I’ve yet to get over that.