If there’s one thing of which I am certain, it’s that August is mine. The glorious heat has made me stupidly, disconnectedly content. Right now, things are good. I don’t even want to think about how I’m going to clean up all the shit in my life.

I feel like all of us deserve that latitude every once and a while. Don’t give a fuck about not giving a fuck.

Maybe that notion set in my mind when I decided not to send a handwritten letter, in which I expressed no remorse for trying to talk to someone hiding inside a tent at a music festival. I did, however, express some remorse for being pretty fuckin’ mangled.

At the time, the incident really bummed me out, and almost convinced me to give up on the evening. But after filling myself full of poutine and other fuel, I decided to give the party one more chance. It was this decision that led to a brief dancefloor encounter with Scott Kirkland, one half of The Crystal Method.

He thanked me for coming out.

I thanked him for playing.

However, my clearest memory of that moment is of an almost-out-of-body awareness of how astonishingly smashed I was. Taken in the context of my earlier, slurred attempts to strike up a conversation through a rain fly, I found myself with serious reason to consider my inclination toward intoxication.

It seemed unnecessary.

But that was in a rather idyllic environment.

After a few weeks back in the real world, reasons to drink are unyieldingly innumerable.

Social.

Cultural.

Psychological.

Economic.

Interpersonal.

Et al.

No. I don’t want to elaborate on them. The idea of anything even approaching reasonable discourse on the matters seems laughable at a magnitude of totality hitherto unknown to the quantitative arts.

I just wanna get drunk.

I’m sure this equation fails to balance somewhere, but I’m confident I would love living in the American south. Eating deep-fried fat and fire-grilled flesh all day. Freebasing crystal meth all night.

I wanna go fast.

And, as I am so fond of crediting Mark Knopfler with observing, “If you wanna run cool, you got to run on heavy, heavy fuel.”

This, it genuinely feels, is the most appropriate strategy for making the best of an almost-assuredly shorter life in an incomprehensibly-mercurial world.

Motivate.

Adapt.

Recycle.

Ours is a climate of chemically-induced hyperthermia.

Out at Possum Lodge, Red Green once opined on the fast and furious attitude of my generation. “The way I see it, we’re all headed for a wall,” he professed. “How hard do you want to hit it?”

Well, Red, we’ve decided the only way to hit it is as hard as we possibly can.

Do you want to be holding it up when that happens?