But don't let it linger, because it will drive you mad.

"There is no room at the inn."

I'd been hearing that all day. From inn to inn as we inched our way down the crowded Gotica area of Barcelona. I was surprised, because I knew this area as the tourist section with hostels, hotels catering to a crowd with limit currency.

And Spain's overall economy being what it was, I was confused. If Chester Cheeto was in "Less than Zero" which character would he have played? This ran through my mind all day, and at every stop, I'd ring the bell, be allowed to enter and first ask the inns keep this very question.

Sometimes I'd deliver the line while holding a large bag of cheetos against my chest as display, with the other hand stretched out, a single cheese snack club held between my fingers ready to bop the peoples on their noses.

In one case, the inns keep rose and bellowed, "There is no room at the inn!" Mostly they say it quietly, so I was taken aback by the venomous retort from said inns keep.

"Keep it down," I said in Castilian (it even kept the identical rhyme in translation). "People are sleeping." I went in behind his desk, helped myself to the clean white towels, returned to my side by the entrance, faced in, turned up my nose, dropped the towels and ran up the stairs giggling. He gave chase, caught me in the corner. My friends were left wondering down the stairs, probably going through the shampoos. But up on the third floor I was alone with the burly man inching closer.

I brandished another cheeto, held it up high in the air. "Don't get any closer!" But he kept coming and a thought occurred to me that I'd never actually used one of these outside of the practice range. Hell, I'd never even eaten one outside of elementary school systems of the Northwest, where I was packed and shipped every year to follow my father in his base stations through a failed military career.

No. I was in trouble and that was a fact. But it was do or die and I didn't ask why when the inns keep was in reach. I just faked left and then dove headlong into him, cheeto swinging, felling its victim.

Have you ever seen the neon orange of a cheeto covered in blood? Imagine that. But don't let it linger, because it will drive you mad.

No, it is the end rhyme.

We lost everything in order to save time. But now where are we? Back to our ancient civilization starting again.

The grain needs harvesting, I don't know what to do?

The clean water is in retreat, where to begin collecting, purifying, storing?

The neighbors are eyeing my wares and its their advantage to just take. They have more children on the way. Its not about needs, its about one growing tribe, and with whom shall I invest my early loyalties and strength in numbers? If proven honest and true to them now, maybe in my wizened years, their grown boys will at least deputize me, give me some clout over the others fallen, as the community attempts to rebuild. For every collective effort, there are those who fall out of line, those who's behaviors don't jibe, those who ask for too much. We're expected to survive, make it through another day, another prodigy on the way. At least in various circles within circles. This tribe I'm interested in. They are loyal to themselves and have a moral imperative to grow strong throughout what is not of the tribe. They are a collective Self. And Other will be harnessed to engrossify their kind.

The broader overlapping circle includes all those living in the 4th Ward, post-flood, post-starvation years, post rise and fall of the last with ammunition, and in the here and now. We have a moral imperative based on a loose connection, an idea of humanity, to move forward. To beget. To forget and beget and forget and beget. And to rebuild. As the circle grows larger, the connectivity looses its hold, and inner turmoil brews. The strength is in numbers, but how the numbers hold. Within the folds, there is more strength (or will) within a smaller number that can move through the larger, less committed.

Anyway, I'm teasing something out I can't get to. But I'm throwing in my lot here.

Read aloud, "I'm smoking like a joker. Something like a small girl."

They don't rhyme, do they? But they do. Maybe just the way I pronounce things. Its not the end rhyme, but the run-up to the end that does something.

No, it is the end rhyme.

And then we can do the dance

Something in the air in the last weekend of July. Happens every year. People realize

one more month of summer fun, and the stickiest of months, the least pleasant. Better make something happen.

It feels at first like a good natured collusion, people calling people, reaching out, no desperation in their voices (yet), still hope because technically its still July.

But when August hits, ho boy. Things are going to get kooky. The itch to make good on promises promised every time thinking about summer when off-season. What to do, so that we can all leave the sweet months behind with a memory or two, a downhill bike ride, a kayak trip, a leave-it-to-Beaver montage. A laurel wreath constructed solely from other people's merit. A fictitious ferret like creature climbs around the bar, sniffing at drinks, paws and claws in people's spaces, an inching around, an anxious hunt for fun. There's more than one. Again, people seem good natured starting the night, hopeful to find their summer love, but it can turn ugly.

Its turned ugly in me, twice. I get short-tempered. I get tankard. I need a lanyard that says "don't get too close" or, the way things have been as of late; "if you can read this sign, my eyes are up here."

Ladies, I know you need a little summer thrill, but I'm not the type, necessarily. And the more you ogle my torso, the more I feel inclined to go somewhere else with my wares and withdraw from public. I'm not a piece of luggage for you to store your emotional needs. I'm not a physical play gym for the worldy-despondants who think me the angel incarnate for a one time orgiastic fling.

I could be. But woo me softly. No onslaught of the genial towards a quick seduction. Keep it light at first. Make me laugh. Buy me a drink. It helps me relax. I want to have fun, too, with you and your friends, in the bedroom, feathers and french ticklers and the cat o' nine tails. But I have my own baggage, luggage, I lug around, and I can't just jump into your sensual world without first entering the neutral head/ heart space of friendship. I need to see myself transcendent of my past hurts and hurrahs.

And then we can do the dance.

maybe I should. Maybe I should.

The contestants lined up, engines purring and as the clock reached to half-past midnight, those purrs turned to roars. Those roars turned to shrieks as half-past midnight stretched on into a temporal suspension. Those shrieks turned to signs of relief as two past half-past midnight came and went.

There was no flag, no girl in white twirling a banner. There would be no race through the flood gates. There would be no honor at stake, no pride won or lost, nothing but the comfort in turning off the engines, putting down the remote controls, putting the suped-up matchbox cars back into the contestants dark trench coats, and back into the dark we all went.

I caught up with Gary on 4th and Baldingder. We ducked into the deli for a couple beers in brown paper. I hadn't noticed too good in the light what he was rolling with at the canceled race. I asked him about it. He pulled out a retro-fitted two-fist knuckle sandwich that I eagerly dodged. I shook my finger at him. I wouldn't get instigated into his fight. He knew this too well, and in hindsight I wondered at him trying to hit me with two fists at the same time, an awkward and slow attack. Almost no attack at all.

How's that? Lucien. Lucien first hipped me to an idea that you could weave letters together to form words. They could be words you learned in school, but they could be from the street. Lucien was the devil. He's since retired and in the tedium of retirement, took me on as a shipmate as he set sail through the twilight of his life.

Now, when I say "weave letters together" and "the devil" I don't mean to say there is sorcery going on. Just language. But language can have power, if we give it credence. By credence, I don't mean the band, but maybe I should. Maybe I should.

Timer's up.

Me with me "yee-haws" and they with their "cay-jun".

The only thing that really matters is that there is the finite. No. Wait. I can't grasp that. Too abstract.

The only thing that really matters is to keep moving, and let some sort of rhythm take place as the type, type, type goes. Something stirs inside me, a combination of key strokes and the sound of the words in my head, and a summoning of the dead...(no, not the dead, that was for the rhyme).

No, but it is something in the combination of rhythm and meaning of words, how one pushes the other along that can generate something new. Not something odd for the sake of odd, but careful foot paths along the river bank while walking in reverse can give direction in which way to turn, if at all needed, and in this one can then choose to drown or make it back to the bungalow....

....there were three of us staying at the family owned bungalow. It had been my uncle's, back when I called him Munca', back thirty years he signed the papers, for I was almost two. You do the math.

It was charming, this cabin, run down like our friendship; me, Leroy, and Labeouf. In cajun country, children grow together like kettle a' corn, both sweet and savory and tough. Not too popular in the rest of America, indicative with its pop culture matinees and movie theaters popping corn with its extra salt and butter smothered.

We were of a different cloth. A simple folk growing up, tossing the football, playing our fiddle and accordion and all said with a lovely dialect and pronunciation I lost when moving west.

It was part of the problem at hand. They still called me names behind my back, "The Wild One" "Kentucky Grass" "Shoot 'Em Up." There had been opportunities post high school in Lexington for all of us to pursue our goals in applied science with metallurgy. As a child, even spending summers in this very same wood framed house by the river, I dreamt of American industry, a return to glory of manufacturing solid products. The other boys had drum sticks and board games. I pretended to solder with my hair brush on the benches under the spruce trees.

I met Leroy and Labeouf young, but we never knew our shared love till we were older, by chance coming upon a Fernand Léger's "The Discs in the City" in a downtown red-light shop, snuck off from our field trip class to the dentist.

All through shop class and part time work at Thibodeaux's Body Shop, we dreamed of what we knew. Stories about going west, of a clay colored blue, like our own river's silt deposit but with a possible strength to strip out the alloy.

And when I got to Poly-tech in Lexington, I didn't turn back. I quickly lost my Cajun accent for the urban inflections. I brought my fiddle from my shoulder to rest under my chin. I met a girl who shared the love of metallurgy. We seduced each other with existential bent poems themed on the morning moments;

"Like liquid alloy in the morning, molten, unable to take a shape, the coffee whistles but still can't cool me the summer sun is no match until I'm poured into my vessel, a substance, a soul that takes me aches and all, as I withdraw and into being shapeless shape shifter knows no place to linger but I would gladly still in this blue clay for you simple soil with no alloy yet, yet you'd allow me to be as such as we twirl together."

And so we had problems, going back to the present, me and my two friends in the bungalow, the run-down cabin of my youth. But we worked in out. Me with me "yee-haws" and they with their "cay-jun".