So, while folks are getting it on all over the Bay Area this weekend under a perfect sun enjoying Blue Angels and bad bluegrass and Bear football and A's hangover rollin' benders, I'm stuck in a house where illness hangs its hat. We have the bronchial, the sinus, the ear, and the throat. But worst of all, we have the self-pity. I just stared wistfully at a church. My grass is dying and I don't care. I graded papers for two hours while a warm sun beat gently on my neck and I was afraid. I listened to the new KK & BBQ record with indifference. I was instructed on a message board to take the cock out of my eye. A deference to my gargantula, I'm sure, but discomforting nonetheless.

The Tigers beat the Yankees. The A's beat the Twins. Cop cars are rolled and burned. Naked burning bodies in the street in full flaming coitus. Photos show faces alive, saturated with the satisfaction of vicarious victory, regular life selling short for most on that account. I sip a Duvel, golden blond, 8.5%, blow out a wad of venomous green phlegm, and ponder Adam in the garden, naked, lacking self-consciousness, doing as beasts do, when that bitch Eve couldn't think her way through an obvious trap. Bring free will to this species? I shudder at our own incapacity for it. Self-consciousness, one differentiating human element and what does it get us- shame. And guilt. Evolutionarily useful perhaps and yet, so painful. And I ain't down with the suffering is educative jive. I don't need to learn that I can't do it myself and that submission to the omnipotent sky daddy is what that suffering teaches. What I need is a stack of ribs so high you couldn't see the hooters on that new waitress if you leaned down and pushed the lesbians next door off their chairs. Yes, a big slab of beef and some thin glasses filled with Moylan's Hopsickles clocking in at 9.2 on the buzzgun, and some decent, thick-skinned conversation.

It don't sound like much.