The taste on this Do-Si-Dos was sharp. Acrid. A taste I've encountered fairly often while smoking. If that's somehow the taste of cookies, then they're burnt cookies, made with too much baking powder. I struggle to put a name to the flavor. It is chem-y. The word fuel comes to mind but what fuel? I also though it might be ammonia. A sharp sinking taste, the flavor of absorption, of being absorbed.

As quiet as I wanna be. The Rilke has really gotten to me. And Tom Petty. Rilke in Letters to A Young Poet talks about putting a wide space around you, enforcing solitude, and admitting—allowing—that it's going to be painful but that without that space it's going to be impossible to write. A moat basically. Instead of battlements or weapons, it's space. A moat. Stay away. Let me be. Let me have myself to myself until enough work has been done such that one can emerge from that solitude with confidence, a sense of completeness, a satisfaction that will allow for a savoir faire, ease of attitude, peace of mind.

Which I still lack, both right at this moment and generally. After a couple of days out and about in New Orleans, I really didn't want to spend much time around other people. I never was myself until I'd had enough to drink and smoke. Only then would I let myself out, and who was that self, anyway? Emerging only by force after dumbfounding myself, drowning myself, smoking myself out of my own house, leaving myself nowhere else to go. OK, I would think, Here I am, I am out in the night. What is it that we do now? How does this go? All we do is sit around, stand around screw around, feel like shit tomorrow?

Socializing, too, is a drug and it can also lead to some wretched hangovers. Somehow being out and about, with people, leads me to the worst hangovers I have. Then once I begin to feel slightly un-dead again, I go out and do it all over again. That was nights three, four, and five in New Orleans this January. Going through the motions. Why, having not done this sort of trip for several years, was I any to have nights like these again?

I fear that I put this misplaced desire ahead of things that should have been more important: my writing, my reading, my home life which for nearly five months now has been lacking a dog, the presence of which I miss. We had a dog, a deaf elderly, sickly dog who I blamed for holding me back. I blamed him for preventing me from working seriously, I blamed him for keeping me from going on a trip to New Orleans with a bunch of other people. Five months he's been gone and now I've had to look in the mirror and admit that I have not been working any more diligently. If anything I have been even more adrift, less focused and less earnest in my writing discipline. And now that I've concluded this much-delayed trip to New Orleans, I have to admit it wasn't all that I had told myself it would be. So I'm feeling empty-handed, self-shot in the foot. Awake in the middle of the night writing a rambling weed strain review about Do-Si-Dos that is nothing more than a poorly disguised peregrination of lament and self-flagellation.

Do-Si-Dos!