I walked downtown during the noon hour, an urge to get out and about, and found many of my fellow workers finishing up lunch at a beanery near the office. They looked stressed. This was enough office for the day so I wandered on to PCB and had a Guinness and a chicken Caesar. Love those chicken Caesar salads. The lettuce gives you some roughage, I suppose, but everything else is calorie riddled and satisfying. Better than a cheeseburger, I suppose, but not much. American genius here, my friends, sugar and fat disguised as a salad, the perfect solution for those who need a fig leaf to cover their cholesterol lust.

Ah, yes. The second whiskey is cooking. Actually it's the third whiskey - I'm on vacation and I'm allowed - and I remember why I once listened to All Things Must Pass. "Isn't it a pity, isn't it a shame....". Nice guitar. Not such a bad time to be listening to music, when this was new. I remember Marianne Faithful once reminiscing in an interview, talking about the Rolling Stones, a wistful comment how once, well, how once we thought we'd somehow transcended to somewhere magic. Even Marianne, Broken English gravelly voiced more than once broken (beautiful) Marianne can still remember the glimmer. There was a time when it was magic. And every low down damned mid town other thing else as well.

The votive candles, they eventually go out. Morning dawns and you're looking through the ashtrays for cigarette butts because last night you smoked every fucking cigarette in the house. Some damned fool left a stack of records on top of the amp and they look like a badly used sombrero. And you've got a headache and the rent is due and your old lady seems to have left last night with someone else. So let's be honest here, not everything was magic except for the times it was, and when it was, it was.