Sometimes when I am drinking one or the other, I will think briefly about how much I used to detest the taste of both coffee and beer. Right now, I am drinking coffee and am in heaven doing so. As a kid, I thought drinking it tasted like cigarrette ash. Sometimes I will walk by people on the street who are carrying a steaming cup of coffee, and the scent will wift up my nostrils for a brief moment, just enough to let me taste it, and for me to start craving coffee like nothing else. Coffee and I started to get along towards the end of high school. Now it is a full blown love affair.

My relationship with beer started much later. In college for my first two years, it was something I forced myself to drink, hating the taste of it, but wanting to get trashed. Then I started stealing nice beers from the grocery store with Bonnie (Newcastle, Bass, etc.), and then slowly I started to enjoy the tastes of these beers. Then I lived in Wisconsin for a summer, where good beer is cheap and in large supply, and god, now, any beer tastes good to me. That smooth cold taste of barley and hops has few competitors for things that instantly please my tongue. And now, I buy Milwaukee's Best because it is 2.99 for a six pack at Key Food, buy it way too frequently, and I love the taste of that even.

Tonight, I am going to Volume to see a free show with lots of bands I want to see (Erase Errata, Les Georges Leningrad, The Unicorns, and more). In addition, there will be free Red Stripe for two hours, which really is not a good beer, it is just imported Milwaukee's Best with a better marketing campaign, and it sort of boggles my mind that it is not 2.99 for a six pack and that still people buy it, and seem to be happy with their expensive purchase. But I will drink it and I will love it.

Today, I did laundry, which I then brought home and dumped on my bed. I then sprawled out lying on my laundry, looking at the blue sky outside my window and read from the various books I am juggling right now: the comics McSweeneys, Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, and Hank Stuever's Off Ramp. All of them quite excellent. There is a Nashville Babylon also. I have never seen it in my life. I may have to order someone's old copy off Amazon. But don't forget the warm laundry underneath my back, my legs, my head. A little mountain of laundry - my body molding to its shape, and that blue sky out my window, the fan blowing that cool breeze inside, those blue skies over me and my laundry. I love having days off and not taking the subway anywhere, not leaving my neighborhood. I thought for a moment when I was walking to the store this morning that I could smell the ocean. Then I thought it was probably just fish in someone's trash, I am not sure, but my excitement provoked by the possible scent of the ocean filled with me longings and memories that pleased me more than I think I could ever hope to explain to you.

I still have yet to fold my laundry or put the sheets back on my bed. I am not sure when I will.