You want to swim like a porpoise?

The temptation had been so strong this time I was shook up. Then when I shook it off I went to my friend, to confront her.

"Do you know that in your life one bad turn is going to be fatal?"

"It's God and it's prayer when I'm alone," she said.

"Are you talking to your sponsor?" I demanded.

"She's learning to be a yogi. She's down in Mexico for six weeks learning to be a yogi!"

"Because listen, there's no slipping, god-dammit, there's only a long fall for you now. You won't be a bag lady, you'll be dead. Do you remember that you almost died?"

"Yes, I do."

"Do you know in two years you're still not OK? It's two years, you might forget. In a split second you might forget."

"It's God and prayer," she told me again.

"What if you forget to pray?"

"I don't know. I can't forget for very long I'm sure."

"You've been suffering. You're in bad shape!"


I didn't realize it at the time, but I know now that I went to the club to shoot Quilty a dirty look.

I'll tell you now. This is how he is.

A singular man of 45 ---singular in these Ozark parts anyhow---he is a former Shakespearean actor with a Master Of Fine Arts degree from Yale, and now owns a small auto repair business, where he works day and night to stay ahead.

He is not tall, but handsome, with thick brown hair just long enough to be uncombed and to obscure the reliable old sun-glasses that sit on top his head. He stands straight enough, with a sort of childhood slump I suppose, and wears a grease stained, decade old, whitish t-shirt advertising an Alfa Romeo. Then faded checkered shorts and his Working-Roman's sandals --- no socks, just hairy, cut up legs.

He arrives always late and on cue. He stands before us unconscious of any special attention, I believe, even though the show is his if he likes (and we hope).

Appraising the seating arrangements, stirring his cup with a thin black straw which he then stabs into his mouth to chew.

Sometimes he appears to be very sleepy, squinting near-sighted... maybe affecting the visage of some long ago actor-hero...some slack-jawed, lobotomized rebel, maybe himself, stoned. But it's eight years since he quit drinking and using heroin, eight years since he arrived here from Manhattan and Baltimore and New Haven, all these parts of him.

Girls giggle when his darting eyes land and probe, just that one half a moment longer than expected, teasing; the women grin or glower, unless they are missed.

"Giovani," he says, passing by with his eyes now focused on some spectacular beauty. John Wilkes Boothe, where is your cloak.

"Quilty," I'll say, not as a reply.

It's not that I overlooked that seat beside her. I don't think anyone could have overlooked it. But we are ordinary men and not pushing it. Some of us not even toeing the line.
____
I worry his worst nightmare might be to be accused of playing the sticks. I worry about Quilty having any nightmares at all, actually. His descriptions of hell and drugular horrors can almost lead him to jump up like Marley's ghost and shriek and shake his lifelong links of chains. But hell and horrors are not his usual focus. Quilty is a comedian. He laughs much too loud and notably off-beat.

His acting is too fine to be dismissed as false or "phony". We regard it as a performance and that is different, not only forgiveable but praise-worthy.

"Do you know who we are, as a people?

You do know we are a people? I mean here we are meeting in secret after all, we are set apart.

Set aside? Set Asides.

Do you know who we always were, as a people?
We were the last to know.

This is what I mean.

Myself, I was always the last to know that the hosts were tired and the party was over and it was time to go home. That's one for-instance, and an early sign. I became the last to know about a lot of things.

I was the last to know she left me for someone else.

I was the last to know that I was not a charming, entertaining inebriate but a boorish, loud, drunken fool who repeated himself over and over.

I was the last person to know my father was sick and dying.

No.

No! They wouldn't tell me. My family.

You see, I would have been the emotional one. No, wait again...not the emotional one, not really the emotional one but the weeping, wailing, lamenting , helpless, demanding ...burden on everyone else who was actually feeling what people , normal, sober people feel, when there is tragedy.

We are The Last To Know. And you know it's because we're stupid, in ways. Or if you like, insane. Aren't we? Didn't we cry, didn't we mourn having to give up something that was killing us, one absurd humiliating experience at a time? I don't know, maybe we're not the last to know but the last to confess. Anyway that's all I got.

_
Nicole is enterprisingly young, happy at high volume, crazy-making until he arrives.

She studies at the univeristy for a degree as a "personal trainer" and hopes to live in Hollywood. Her bare caramel shoulders---her skin is, how did my lucid friend Jo say, "Rio dey-oh". A summer dress...She dresses for men, and I feel I'm beleaguering her if I allow my eyes to pass over her just one more time, after our initial eye contact and her eye bulging helll-oH, quiet man.

Yesterday she said, "This is my last year as a teenager!"

"what are you doing?"
nothing
"well, what do you think you're doing?"
let's have a smoke
"sure."
__

Everything is preliminary, I'm going preliminary my whole life.

Ah, you should have took up acting or become a musician. Or a cook! Quilty told me.

Talk is the preliminary so really, and I don't talk, so not even preliminary.

I was mumbling and not even getting my words in the right order.

You talk very well, Giovani.

It's a logic thing, I can't translate my yes-no questions into open ended...

It can be a yes or no question. Say, 'you love this town, don't you?' and she'll say yes or no but she'll keep talking then.

**

***
Baxter relapsed, just short of two years, but he was back now after a week.

Nicole spoke of the importance of loving yourself.

"My problem is scherzo effective mental illness." Baxter said. "I have a messianic complex."

I waited for him to add: ' I love myself plenty', for the laugh. But no, he'd now fallen flat, hungover and remorseful. Late one night he called me all jovial and surprised sounding, "Hello John, How Are you??" as if I'd called him. "Me, I've had a pretty rough day!"

I asked how, or why --- like that, short.

He said he was having thoughts he was certain were not his own.

"Even though I've been off the internet for two years. Now I guess it's Wi-fi, John, and I'm pretty sure that...Well I just have to accept that some people can be cruel. I think these are some old girlfriends of mine."

I asked where they lived. He said, oh, in another state. He wasn't sure where they lived anymore, I was glad to hear.

I asked what he could do about it. He said , accept what he couldn't change.
___
I am going swimming. I like the weightlessness, I enjoy doing somersaults and then springing to the surface and finding the people in the light have moved around or changed. There is a bathing beauty, now I come back up and she has a friend. There are kids running around, I come back up and they're taking a nap. It's refreshing to me. I could go on.

Hi, Hum

Take this right on Country Lane, (curb-stone 1948, well-kept lawns and respectable grandmotherly houses) (it goes only one block, Country Lane)--- then left on Worley-Worley (the drive-by street, dangerous even in daylight) seven blocks, a right turn, a u-turn on Mexican Gravel Road (leads to Mexico, Mo.) since I drove too far on Worley-Worley. Back one block to the Oak Wilt apartments, left, (which would have been a right, correct) and there's a city truck with a wood-chipper parked and shooting fresh golden wood chips into the street. I drive through, and down the street are two fire trucks, and men opening and testing the fire hydrants. It's refreshing to your ears, driving across the thickish, white foamy stream.

Two miles. I slide into the gravel parking of The Dead End Club, where there are about 15 cars and trucks baking in the sun. The summer heat enforces its menacing silence here.

A black Ford Cherokee has a bumper-sticker that reads "Higher Powered". Someone else, another AA conventioneer, has a sticker that makes me blush even more: "Screw Guilt" it says.

Attending a meeting feels like a surrender again. That's just as well, perhaps.

It felt better back in the days I was simply lonesome and lascivious. On the look-out. Now, recently, I've stopped thinking of these people as "alcoholics" and more as "confused, emotional fuck-ups" like me, who didn't grow up and were out-smarted in their bluff, given away by their tall, thin shadows at dawn.

They're unattractive and I belong. The joke is about being a quitter, but I was a quitter before I quit. My last few months stoned, I'd watched everything go. I did nothing so something would finally happen.

I'm not looking for answers, and I'm not able to provide any, not even to the newcomer. There's a spirit here I need. Something inside of me turns around toward new life again, during most AA meetings. There is a reminder of something important and impossible to actually remember for more than a few days at a time.

Oh. Here it is. What I have to remember: That we're free now, and growing again, and it's easier together but it's hard. And fair.

There's hope. We might pass for normal, the world might not get its revenge if we stay together and have these services. The preamble, the reading of "How It Works", the 12 traditions (a masterpiece of Anarchism), evolved over twenty years and finally written down, and then the "Promises", which I find believable, without mysticism, full of contractual Ifs and Thens.

There's dread. The world might pass us by all right. Every year sober is another year older, too.

That's what's been crawling down my neck and my back lately, something else that makes me want to drink and gamble this paycheck. There have been moments on the assembly line, with too much time to think, I become certain that if I sat down at a bar and had a drink, suddenly everything would make sense again. Suddenly I would remember myself and god help me, be almost tearfully happy.

In mid-sentence.... "...You may understand me, Quilty, but thank god I don't understand you..."

This sobriety, unlike one previous, has been an angry, wriggling like a bug stuck on a pin sobriety; two years now, after being put down, staying put down. Allowing this has --at times--shamed me. Sometimes it shames me I haven't gone criminal at last; by now I should have the brains, the initiative -- just the initiative!-- to try and get myself some government or insurance money misdirected into my account.

I can't work. I've worked, don't you see, so I know this. I can't work. I have to get by.

I'm safe but condemned. I'm loved, possibly, but I don't love back, except in agape or by obsession, an attempt to do right or being helplessly infatuated ...either way, all resentful affairs, doomed from the start.

What did I want. I would remember, I think, in a barrel going over the falls.

Waking Before The Nighmare's Over

This morning I woke up as if I'd been worked over all night by the most exacting demon surgeons that my subconscious could conjure up.

I became conscious, or came to, a little bit ahead of my simple hopes for the day and I wondered, before opening my eyes, is this all there is, and then hell?

I imagined myself on a flat dusty plain, overlooking a bluff that looked down into foggy swirls of white, and purple and blue. Down, not up.

I saw a robed angel without wings, I think. Anyway, plainly we weren't going anywhere.

This was about two minutes, maybe less, and I didn't move because I thought it would stir something unpleasant in me, something emotional, not dead weight but living, liable to float up.

I knew if I prayed, so I prayed. I knew if I wrote a letter, so I wrote a letter. It was to my brother, I'm worried about. Work was two hours off.

I felt much better, except now I remembered again what we each have to face sometimes.
____
I miss sitting at the bars, I miss the entertaining possibility of finding some sweet, drunken trollop with an English degree and a family fortune.
_____
Once I went home with a daughter or niece of the Tone Spice family; me, her, and her drunken lawyer, who passed out on the couch.

She and I went to bed with our clothes on and she kissed me good night first thing and rolled over to sleep. So there I was, but I couldn't sleep. I remember the room, the light after midnight in the tall windows. Sheer curtains lifted by a September breeze. Shadows of the window sash. I remember thinking this drunken lawyer in the living room might not be my friend in the morning. Anyway, I had to get up.

In her bathroom there were 1500 million little glass bottles of beauty products, crowded on a tall set of white wicker shelves. I thought to open her medicine cabinet and see if she had any hydrocodone for headaches, but I didn't dare because with all the tinkling little bottles already before me, what might be crowded in that little secret space behind the gilded mirror?

I was within walking distance of home so I let myself out, careful not to wake her lawyer, who was her boyfriend too,I imagined. I walked,leaving my car for when I was sober. More sober.

The next day I couldn't remember which apartment complex. So my car was lost for a few days (really, my not wanting or needing to make any special effort...I'd wait for a friend to help me look). I couldn't remember her first name, or which EST. 1889 it was where we met. One of those on Ingersol, of course.

I wasn't trying very hard. Not at anything, is my point.

What did I ever want. In my formative years I drank and day-dreamed of being Billy Shears or someone. Dad told my very first psychiatrist that I lived in a dream world and I was flabber-gasted, it couldn't be true because how the hell could he know?

Music fell away. I wanted to be alone, but alone with someone, seeing and hearing whatever the present medium allowed. To talk, to drink, to go out--- she had to be beautiful and smart---and be seen talking, or be seen being talked to.

No, not heard, seen.
___
I'd lost my last bookstore job and unemployment benefits were running out. My apartment building was full of people who got government checks. I traded Serax for little bottles of methadone, until the guy got mad at me once and sort of roughed me up, yelling his head off and shaking me and dragging me around my room because I owed him ten dollars and didn't realize it was such an immediate big deal to him. I was so high I had to pretend being scared or he might not stop, he might actually punch me or kick me in the head. He was just out of prison, and looked it.
___
I only had a radio to listen to, and I loved it at night, getting the BBC and falling asleep for a few hours at a time, then waking up and drinking a little more to get that especially warm spine-sleepy kind of nod.

That night, or one of those summer nights, Princess Di was suddenly WHAT! killed in a car crash. I was bolt upright, crying. I couldn't believe it, the news or that I was crying. Then I walked down Bright, Quiet 3 A.M. Ingersol to get the paper, but I was of course way too early.

I don't know why but the memory of walking down Ingersol that night, looking for someone, anyone to share the news with, is so vivid and colorful to me, it's somehow pleasant. Just one shock that wasn't my own private trauma, I suppose. I enjoyed the walk back too, empty handed. I went into one of my neighbor's---the door was ajar as usual--- where the TV was on and he was passed out in his chair. I sat and drank and watched the news coverage. That was another good thing about that apartment building, besides the methadone: there was round the clock visiting. Everyone was crippled, finished. (There was even a young man dying of AIDS, wandering the halls stoned on his medicines, starving too, within weeks of dying.) Most were kind and generous.

I was known not to open my door sometimes. I was known to answer it and yell in your face to go away. I was asleep, a dreamless sleep I'm sure.

"Some of these memories
you can learn to live with,
and some of 'em you can't"

-dylan ("sugar baby" from Love and Theft)

Dad-gone Joe

It was time for another six month employee review. I had no idea.

Big Mike, the supe I'll be calling Irving from now on, motioned for me come down off the main feed. I removed my earplugs and then he thumb-signaled over his shoulder, "Joe's back there--he's got your appraisal."

I walked to the office, where the slim venician blinds, neat and gray, were drawn tight.

For some reason I wanted to bust in there like an angry man, then sit down and be full of silence. But that's hard when you have to pull the door open.

I stepped in, didn't nod, didn't say hello. I took a seat. He didn't say anything either.

Joe is a shortish, plump, bald with red freckling on his forearms. He's gruff, 60 years old, appeallingly ornery. He likes an audience, he likes to talk. Lately though he seems abashed and guilty about something, and it's been long enough I can't help starting to dislike him.

I know he misses certain people who used to work here. There were better days for him, when everyone knew him well.

He hasn't supervised me for a year, but this was the second time he was giving me my review. Last time he refused me a raise, citing absenteeism. The Boxx corrected that, explaining there was a glitch in some paperwork somewhere.

Now there were three pages. I didn't read them as I should have, but just made sure that all the boxes were checked that I "meet standards". No matter what, I was prepared to argue even though I am a slacker and any criticism would probably have been true.

There was one hand-written comment, written in a cursive script that may have been learned in a one-room country schoolhouse. "Stays out of trouble," it read. (To me this signaled some leeway but I couldn't think for what.)

I signed the paper where there was yellow highlighting and an "X". Then I slid it back across the table to him, without comment. Quiet was my weapon but I couldn't say why I was being cruel.

Joe holding the front page at arms length and looking over the top of his eye glasses. Arched brows, checking for news-worthiness.

"You got a raise..." he said, mistakenly, as if in answer to a complaint.

I felt like a mean peasent, almost surly. My resentment wasn't about his denying my raise last November. It was something I could only note to myself.

I always wanted for this man to notice that I liked him, that I hung on to every word when he spoke. I enjoyed his stories about fork-lift mishaps, Dui's, tornados, ex-wives and their low down lawyers.

But what did I expect in return?

I used to expect men this age to notice something about me and make sport of me, a spectacle even; I wanted to be pushed , I wanted to be impeached so I could argue and defend myself, laughing. Everyone laughing.

But old men are getting to be nearly my age.

That's what I hate. This is why I miss my dad's friends. No one plays this role anymore.

Dad-gone, dadgone. Somedays, it's really poor me, and I get mad, like crazy, like angry.

My Birthday In Our Town

(click to see)


I got in line to one of my parties but then gave it up, realizing, "I don't know these people. Not really."

This is where I used to test-drive martinis with ...no, she'd kill me if I let on.

I have pics of Renee taking pictures. She must have some of me taking pictures too.

The 'gates. That's Stinky on bass. I liked greeting him "Hiya Stinky!" because he is always calling me "jackasson" on the local political message board.
"Pa Kettle" leads, on guitar. He's "stoney broke" on the message board. Stoney Broke.It sounds like a subdivision in one of the hobo tent cities we have here.


Actually this was several days before my birthday. To be perfectly honest. But it's the thought that counts, you know. The dream, that's what matters!

Sneak Peak

We were reading the newspaper under a street-light at the Country Kitchen on Pittosporum Drive, out near the interstate mixmaster. It was a quarter after ten, a warm week-night in this spare neighborhood of bright-lighted, dazzlingly colored signs over darkened businesses.

"Police were called just after 1:30 a.m. Saturday to a disturbance at the Break Time at 1000 Quaking Aspin Lane, where about 200 people were gathered before the convenience store was required to stop selling liquor for the night."

There were "multiple fights and multiple shooters".

Afterwards, there was a body.
____

We'd stepped out while our food was being prepared so I could have a smoke, and so we could escape a happy-go-wiry, stoned little man sitting at the booth behind us.

He'd asked us if we were there for breakfast or dinner. Then he held two identical, full dinner plates over the back of the seat by D.'s shoulder, to show us what he and his neighbor had. We were friendly, as is wise.
(Later thought if I'd have said 'stay on your side of the booth or I'll kick you in the head after my little girlfriend here lays you out'.)
___
Now I kept exclaiming, "200 people?!" and everytime D. would answer in awe, "Someone got shot."

She looked down to the ground and tried to step on a creeping bug.

"200 people got stupid all at once and ran out of beer at closing time?? Incredible!"

"Amatuers. But no, really! Someone got shot!" She stepped forward again, absently, and tried to squash the bug again but missed and gave up.

"Can you imagine 200 people at a Breaktime! I'd have liked to have seen that."

"They still haven't caught the guy."

"What guy?"

"The guy who shot the guy! Somebody got shot. There was a body. How terrible."

"Imagine. Two or three clerks there maybe?"

I finally stepped around her and stepped on the bug and D. went "AAAAAAAA! How could you do that , that poor thing!!"

I was astonished. "God dammit, D.!" She shook with quiet laughing.

A purse snatcher walked past us, from out of the darkness behind the restuarant, then turned around and headed towards us, asking for a light. I got up and met him with my Bic, sticking it out under his nose. He cupped his hand over the flame and said thanks and moved on.

I went back to sit with her on on the landscaping rails. "He wanted your purse."

Still reading. "Oh if he'd tried that, and if I had a bazooka, and if my hands were steady..."

Two weeks ago, D. stopped smoking. She says she's not cranky but more like impulsively murderous. It's why I don't let her drive the car.

I think if she'd had a bazooka she'd have aimed at the purse-snatcher and then changed her mind and shot at the gas station instead. Just for the more satisfying Ka-boom, Ka-BOOM!.
____
We started back toward the front door of the dine-and-dash.

"Hey, oh look what I did," she showed me two front pages. "I took two papers instead of one!"

"My Gaawd, what is wrong with me, my world, my world is just like wave after wave of this mental , this mental and emotional, my god the world the last ten days like 'oh,I know! I just need a cigarette!!'... this committee in my mind, this sub-committee in my fingers, I'm so clumsy and uncoordinated and this, this heedless lessness! "

I held open the door.

"...And there's SO much I have to do, things that need to be done that I have to do but all I do is work, and sleep, work and sleep and eat and I don't smoke and I'm gaining weight and look I took two papers out of the machine!"

The people at the adjacent booth acted relieved to see us. "Oh! We thought we'd scared you two away!"

"No, no we just went out for a smoke," I said. "Ha ha. No, no." We don't mind strangers leaning in between us and putting their food under our noses.

"I'm in a black hole!" D. exclaimed.

They became silent and we didn't hear from them again.

We sat back down and our food was waiting. Salad for her, country fried steak for me.

"How long have you been feeling this way, honey?"
"Since I stopped smoking," she said without a trace of agitation now. It was a ridiculous question.
"You know, that's terrific. You're my hero. Really."

"Did you smoke a cigarette out there?" she asked. "I didn't see you smoke."
"Yes, I did."

Prepping her salad with dressing and crutons, she told me, "Today when I was at that seminar with Angela and it was over I told her "we've got to hurry to the car so you can smoke!' Haha. I'm crazy!"

"Yes you are! And you know it's an important achievment!"

(Thank gawdawmighty she likes people to smoke. At this stage anyway. Naturally I've secretly been resentful because ...well what can we call this, she's doing? I call it "self-will run riot", her stopping smoking on me. Without warning. I mean gdmt, this means I'm going to have to stop too, I know it does.)

"I love cigarettes. I hate cigarettes," she said her mantra quietly to herself.

I leaned in, then.

"Did you know I'm in charge of Returns at the newspaper, and your stealing that paper from the rack will reflect in my paperwork tomorrow?" I leaned back. "...And make me think of you, darling?"

"Really?" she said sweetly, not faking boredom.

"Yes. A man named Ghandi will claim 8 out of 10 papers sold from that rack, but he'll present me with only one return. I'll have to demand where the other paper is."

"Can you take it with you? Why don't you take it with you to work tomorrow?"

"You don't understand!" I said sternly, biting into a dinner-roll. "Never mind."

Our neighbors left us, we finished our meal and pushed our plates at one another to the center of the table, making quite a racket.

I read some more, aloud:

"Officers responded at 12:26 a.m. to Toromiro Tree Road Car Wash, 1722 Toromiro Tree Road, Columbia police said in a news release.

An unidentified 27-year-old man told police he was vacuuming his car when he saw a man standing at the edge of the parking lot. The suspect fired several shots at the victim, who was not injured, the news release said.

Officers found damage to the victim’s car and several spent cartridges in the area where the suspect was described as standing, the news release said."

"Holy Chi-taki! That's where you washed your car that one time you washed your car. That's where I washed your car that one time I washed your car!"

"Just a shout away but I'm never hearing any shouting like that." Dodging bullets while cowering behind your car causes a unique sort of shout. I tried to imagine if I could remain so cool, and concluded that yes, I could. I wouldn't remain standing. I'd have that certain presence of mind.
____
On the way home I asked D. about personality types, since she's been a counselor and met a lot of people when she wasn't a counselor too. Then I asked her about herself.

"My friends consider me loud. I am loud. I'll be telling a story and they'll yell 'I'm right here!'

She's not loud at all, not since I've known her, about two years ago. But I guess you don't know anyone until you see how they react in situations.

We are in for a long hot summer here.

Boss, what a musical

I turned it all over to God. A day passed and

!

>:- ((

I realized I had nothing to write. So now I've taken it all back again and I'm very troubled about Thursday next, say.

The calm I'd achieved was novel but nothing.

I spent Saturday at work, with the nice spongy earplugs in place, so every sound was as if underwater. A magical solitude then, amongst the newspaper factory workers, with all the machines suddenly, softly, pocka-pockity-shhh (repeat).

It's like underground headquarters for International SPECTRE there, a cavern lit up after the raid, less evil of course but more glum than gleamimg. Instead of preparing to launch a satellite of bedazzling jewels to beblind the guards at Fort Knox, we were hand-assembling and preparing to launch some random, previous version of The Sunday Times.

Still busy and efficient. Half a dozen shriner-size, orange Toyota lorries beeping around, 40 GMA-2000 press operators in their new blue uniforms and bill caps running up and down the ladders of that three story tall, Olympic length press. (The rest of us dress alike too: just rolled out of bed in yesterday's clothes. Standing around. Never running.)

As I stood waiting for secondary stitcher to start, one of my bubba bosses came over within ear shot to ask another bubba boss about an Irving Berlin song.

"How does it go?"

"Lit-tle girl-ie don't you know...?"

"OH, yeah. 'Smile And Show Your Dimples', you mean."

Lit-tle girl-ie don't you know,
That your pearl-y teeth will show;
(together, then, tuneless) "If you start smil-ing..."

"Yeah, haha. That's it." He walked back down the line then, and pushed the green button which starts the entire plant shaking.

I thought they were putting me on for a second. I thought to surprise them and shout Jesus what are you guys, a couple of pansies?! Then I thought better. Hhhha - ha. No, no no.

The short scene kept standing back up before my mind's eye; an hour later, suddenly I'd be laughing again.

I've been here almost two years and have never witnessed anything like that. These two didn't graduate, they were paroled. They talk cars and motorcycles, they hunt and fish at Hooters.

Then I thought, geez, ...I don't know any Irving Berlin, who am I to talk..?

I'm such a, sucha, you know, low browed high-brow (or,switch that). From Iowa, and I don't even know the Cherry Sisters. Really, who do I think I am , anyway!?

Throw down my bill cap. Arms akimbo, looking around for True North, or a fight.

This town is mixed up. People need to form into lines and give me time to find where I'm in front.