Well, the Hot Rod is just that cliché. A post has, more or less, been missed.

Blame it on my shitty job. Blame it on the shitty weather. Blame it on the shitty tequila and the surprisingly-unshitty beer.

Personally, I blame it on the remarkable coziness of my bed and the fascinating nature of my dreams.

I can’t really remember what most of them were about, but the most interesting one featured a prominent character from my days in grade school.

It wouldn’t be entirely accurate to describe him as a jock. The connotations surrounding the term All-American fit much better, except that he’s (assumedly) not American. But I can’t say for certain.

Now I know what all—like, what?—six of you who are reading this are thinking: Was it a mercilessly visceral homage to the platonic ideal of male homoeroticism? Sadly, no. That would make too much sense, and probably be far less disturbing.

We had our clothes on. I believe we were in the blue hallway beside the main gym in our junior high school. My companion towered over me, as he always did, and beamed out his trademark positivity, as though his happiness core had reached a critical mass and was now killing everyone else in the school with its uncontainable radiation.

I’m pretty sure he said something, but I can’t remember the details. He was either going to help me achieve something or was proud of something I had achieved. And this made me feel phenomenal.

Have you ever ingested a shit ton of codeine?

Well his approval felt better than that.

And that’s when I woke up. And that’s as much as I remembered, before I laid back down to hopelessly chase the praise of someone with whom I’ve had no interaction in the last ten years. Besides, whatever it was about me that impressed him more than likely didn’t actually occur.

And a very large part of me suspects that anything my friend would’ve been proud of me for is not something that would likely make me proud of myself.

Perhaps most disturbing of all is this chain of bizarre encounters we must have had with each other in our dreams. It will have totally coloured our perceptions of one another based on chance meetings with brainwaves.

That, I suspect, is why we’ll most likely keep the smalltalk to a minimum if we ever see each other again.

Or maybe I’ll start keeping a dream journal and press my luck.

I definitely have a few regrets. Most of the specifics are stories for another time. Some of them are off topic in a hopelessly-irrelevant fashion while others might single me out of a police line-up.

Anonymity is a problematic issue. Those of us aspiring to honesty are inclined to surrender it. However, if we lack the patience for the unduly-continual process of scrutiny and censure—boards, panels, committees, reports, reviews, diagnoses, citations, tickets, courts, rulings, prisons and permanent records—the willful omission of questionably-relevant details can be regrettably prudent.

It is an unfortunate corner in which we find ourselves.

The case of Andrew Feldmar has never sat well with me. He’s a psychologist who employed LSD in some select treatments, and lacked enough foresight to write an article about it. US Customs Agents read it on the internet, and now Feldmar can’t visit his grandchildren.

As near as I can figure, the only sensible lesson we can learn from this is not to incriminate ourselves on Google. At least insofar as we can help it.

I am left standing here holding truths that may put me at odds with one authority or another—the actual police or maybe just my mom’s church friends. Either force can make my life extremely unpleasant. Having previously declared my intention to distill spirits without a permit, the only license in which I place any faith is artistic.

My experiences may or may not be legitimate. My intentions may or may not be serious. My persona may or may not be real. That uncertainty is more personal than any of my uniquely-identifying particulars.

After all, what is objective truth but the dismissal of subjective experience?

We can bleach our character with countless white lies or just take the label off the waistband and forget about the stains. But until the winds change, which I sincerely and earnestly believe they will, I can’t argue against bundling up.

Don’t you just love it when people establish the relevance of their positions with phrases like, “There’s been a lot of talk about my topic lately” or “Don’t you just love it when people establish the relevance of their positions with some circularly-logical premise”?

It makes me wonder whether or not Andy Rooney is still alive.

Since X-Files left the airwaves I haven’t had cause to crowd around the TV on Sunday nights, and I miss the comfortably-challenging insights of that meanderingly-ponderous complainant. I would be lying if I said he wasn’t deserving of a citation somewhere in my pantheon of personal heroes. And I don’t fancy myself a liar.

I imagine Andy Rooney to be the triumphant revitalization of Atticus Finch after he suffered a uniquely-curious brain injury in a particularly-disturbing motor vehicle collision. The other driver was obviously at fault. Atticus Finch had a sterling driver’s abstract. And I don’t think Andy Rooney ever got his license back.

Brain injury is no laughing matter. Unless that’s exactly what it happens to be. It’s funny that way.

But it seems to me that when Andy Rooney dies—if he hasn’t already—he will part with fewer regrets than Atticus Finch.