My head hurts, My feet stink, and I don't love Jesus.

 I just like the picture... and it captures the essence of my mood.

I was startled awake by Harley's screechy beckoning for mommy comfort in the middle of the night this morning.  I was annoyingly jerked out of a strange dream about an ex of mine.  He was a sultry vile clown who enters my dreams uninvited from time to time.  He was beautiful and damaged, and I loved him as I did the others. But there was something unforgiving about him, which set him apart.  He was not welcome at my wedding.

In my dream I was helping some chicks nail his ass to the wall about some anti-social move(s) he pulled on each of them respectfully, and probably repeatedly.  So, we were just getting to the good part, where in I maneuvered stealthily over a parking valet crossing arm and slid into the little key cabana unnoticed in order to obtain some info which was vital to our sadistic plot to bring him down when our boy (Harley) cried out for momma.  Can you hear the needle ripping across the vinyl in stereophonic amplification?

After my midnight summoning, which actually occurred around 3am, all I was left with were musings about why he (evil ex) was even at my class reunion (in the dream), who these chicks were, and how I came to know them and help them, and how fucking sexy he looked all liquored up and swaggering, long hair whipping and waving like a red flag across the dance floor.  This rude awakening left me unable to get back to the soft place beyond my eyelids.  I began thinking.  Thinking and thinking of my old workplace and haunt.  The place where I met him, and countless other fuckers and friends, The Grand Finale. I remembered way way more than I ever thought I could about the events that took place in that cave, and wrote about it in my mind just the way I wanted to, with that old devil may care humor that carried me through my 20s and 30s.  That humor and my stunningly meaty breasts opened a lot of doors for me. When I was young they were greatly admired by men and women alike, (the breasts I mean), although I never really understood it.  To me they were largely embarrassing (no pun intended, but let’s roll with it), and mostly in the way. For these and a whole laundry list of reasons, I’d have preferred a more sporty variety, but I digress. 

I began to remember.... I began to remember lots and lots of things.  Things I would not be proud to tell my family about, but wouldn't trade for the world…pieces and parts of stories, flashbacks from an incredibly special place and time.  A time which will live forever in infamy for those of us who were there. It was a time of youthful exuberance and antics, humiliations and lessons.  Of fun and frivolity.  Of darkness and sorrow, budding intelligence, expansion,  grief, redemption, experimentation, the muddy reaching of very deeply deeply disturbed individuals, all congregated around a great trough of the most delectable schmorgasbord of music, drugs, alcohol, lust, distorted love, fear, mysticism, attitude, poetry, cash and yep, food. Everyone was accepted and most (but not all) behavior tolerated.  Among our cast of characters were a long parade of bar and restaurant employees & owners (we were the after hours club), musicians, career academics, law students, bums, addicts of every variety, dealers (both small and big time), hookers, hippies, Krishnas, southern-style rednecks, artists, moochers, bikers, frat boys, philosophers, writers, dancers, pirates, geeks, freaks, dorks, lost souls, gypsies, tramps and thieves. We had it all, and every now and then we’d realize it, and raise a glass.

Walking into that dungeon was like dipping a ladle into a cauldron of primordial soup.  Once you dipped that ladle and the womb part disappeared, you never knew what on earth you were going to pull up.  It could be anything… anything at all.  And that was the magic of the Grand Finale.