More News You've Probably Already Heard

(image credit: nhc.noaa.gov)

But if you haven't, there's another hurricane hitting land near Puerto Castilla right now. (If you're reading this, i am fairly sure it's safe to say you care/are interested/have any idea where that is.) The airport in La Ceiba is closed, and eastern Nicaragua is getting whacked. No photos yet this time, though. But isn't that a nice pretty graphic?

Sudden And Unrelated Weird Al Yankovic Flashbacks, Pt. 4

Then Bernie ran away with my brand new Instamatic
But at least we've got our memories

(The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota)

The Gods Walk Among Us

Caught Over The Rhine at Wheaton College again last night. What a show. Any time i'm just starting to feel like i've written something halfway decent, along comes another one of their albums and immediately i am shamed, contrite, vowing never to touch my Tacoma again. Never fails. Kim Taylor opened the evening and, in fact, may soon be headed for the same category as far as i'm concerned.

Nice atmosphere, too. Coray Gym was virtually unrecognizable from my days of 4 a.m. ROTC calisthenics. The college decided to remodel it a year or two ago, and it turned out so nice, they decided not to use it for athletics anymore. For the show last night CU put up some tables with white linen tablecloths and pillar candles in between the rows of padded seats. There were more candles burning on stage, and Caribou coffee for fifty cents in the back. Kinda fun to be back on campus for a bit.

I like concerts with lots of people on their feet and dancing, but i love most the ones where people are rock-still with listening, every hair of their bodies rapt in alignment with the sound. Last night they were dead silent until the last echo of the last note of each song died away, till that magic collective exhale is past and as one the crowd leaps to its feet cheering. Musicians like these were put on the earth so that we mere mortals could learn proper humility. I love watching the downstage eyespeak at a show like that - a grin when someone else is ripping a particularly fine solo; a flash of secret humor unknown to the audience; the sheer enjoyment of a climactic point in the music. It's just another gig in another city, but they are loving it.

Music like that can be listened to in a car, in a house, but that's not really enough. You have to be there in the moment, in the wavering candlelight. Your job is irrelevant, your unpaid bills forgotten, your whole erstwhile life on hold while for one brief night you exist solely in that wash of sound. You can feel nothing outside, only inside, your heart expanding like slow-motion TNT until your breath catches on its way out and you realize with wonder that for the last two hours, you've hardly been breathing at all. It's good to have your heart expanded, time to time.

Signs Of A Fine Establishment, Pt. 22 (Fine, Just Take ALL The Fun Out Of Life)

(Ludwigsburg, Germany. 01 Oct)

Profanity Monday (Literary Edition)

[a recurring feature incorporating slightly naughty but estimably relevant quotes of a probably inapproriate nature]

"Easy reading is damn hard writing."

--Nathaniel Hawthorne

Funny; easy reading is not something i ever associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne. Of course, this is the same man who said "The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash." And also: "A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats." So. Um. Moving right along--

Signs Of A Fine Establishment, Pt. 21

(Zierikzee, The Netherlands. 29 Sept)

For The Interest of 2003-04 CBMers (Remember This Hammock?)

(21 Oct. Credit: AP.org/Ginnette Riquelme)

Looks like our friends in Honduras got a little wet yesterday. Not as wet as our passing acquaintances in Cozumel are getting right now, but then i guess 40 inches of possible rain is hard to beat. Anyway, it appears that the AP has somehow gotten a photographer - of all places - into Puerto Castilla. See here for the rest.

p.p.p.p.p.p.s.

Wanna buy it? You know you do.

Zen And The Art Of Obtaining A Motorcycle License The Easy Way

There are two ways to get your motorcycle license in Wisconsin. Well, actually three. The first one is to buy a motorcycle and ride it around - on your farm, presumably, or any other personal expanse of non-public roads you may own - until you're ready to pass the road test, which involves someone following you around in a car with a two-way radio and watching your every move. Note: This also involves spending a fair amount of your day with the usual representative cross-section of society at the DMV.

The second way is to take a Motorcycle Safety Foundation basic skills class, which is usually around eighty bucks and five nights at your local community college. With this option, all you have to do at the DMV is hand over your diploma and twenty bucks. These classes are always jammed, as you might expect, because most people choose this option. Except for those who go with option three, which is to get your six-month temps and then renew it every May for thirty years.

I chose option two. Ironically, i am actually trying to sell my motorcycle at the moment. This is because we're moving to Florida in two weeks and we need the money. Anyone you know need a CB750 Nighthawk? But i digress. In any case, i spent last night riding in circles around orange traffic cones, developing my state-sanctioned cornering skills. It's great fun, and for several reasons. Not just because you get to ride in circles around orange traffic cones, but because it's such a perfect study in gender-affected group dynamics as well. If you're male, you almost feel the need to swagger a bit, spread your shoulders a little, on your first day of a motorcycle class. No matter that you're in a classroom. You have to establish that you belong in the cult.

You'd think this would be negated by the fact that everyone in the room should be a beginner (theoretically, that is, except for the two-thirds of us who have already been owning and riding on the downhill side of legal for several years). But no. I think it's because the ability to ride a motorcycle is one of those things that seems almost a native skill of manhood. Like throwing a spiral, or changing your spark plugs. If you have to learn, well, it's way too late for you. Funny. There were women in the room, too, but in contrast to the rest of us, they seemed totally at ease. You have to appreciate the irony. Susan Faludi was way ahead of us.


p.s. Faludi's "Stiffed" is one of the most amazing books i've read, since you asked. "Tour de force" does not do that book justice. John Gray is an idiot.

p.p.s. John Gray was an idiot even before.

p.p.p.s. One of my more entertaining psych professors used to wonder aloud which planet John Gray was from if Mars and Venus were already taken.

p.p.p.p.s. Hint: It's close to Neptune.

p.p.p.p.p.s. Heh heh.

Signs Of A Fine Establishment, Pt. 20

(London, England. 02 Oct)

A Night At The Movies (With Accompanying Polemic)

(photo credit: www.hotelrwanda.com)

Hotel Rwanda.

It's been a few weeks since i saw it. I wanted to wait awhile, wanted a week or two and a few thousand miles of perspective. In the meantime, i've been thinking.

I first watched it with friends in a cozy Dutch farmhouse. The resulting absurdity of contrast reminded me a little of when i was in college with a guy who'd grown up in Rwanda, whose parents were still missionaries there when the genocide erupted. His mother and sister escaped the country. His father stayed behind. Wheaton was often called The Bubble even in normal times, and most non-Africans in the world had no reason to know which dot on the map Rwanda was. And so my first reference point for the tragedy of 1994 was that the whole year afterward, though he was eight thousand miles away in a cheerful cocoon of normalcy, i never once saw this guy smile.

I should back up a bit. Rwanda, 1994. Nearly a million people were shot to death, burned to death, or hacked to death with machetes by their fellow citizens and neighbors down the street. The UN did essentially nothing. The US, led by a wary Bill Clinton unwilling to risk another Somalia-style opinion-poll debacle, did even less. The slaughter would likely have continued until there were no victims left to kill, had not an expatriate rebel group overthrown the government and put an end to that phase of the violence.

As the murderous warlord laughs in last winter's otherwise forgettable thriller Sahara: "This is Africa. Nobody cares about Africa."

But back to the hotel. The film covers the efforts of the hotel's Hutu manager to protect as many Tutsi victims as he could, a la Oskar Schindler, from the savage mobs that ruled the streets. I don't think anyone but the most PlayStation-jaded could watch it and not come out grieving deeply. But i didn't cry.

Why not? It took effort not to - i've seen few things more deserving of grief - but that's the thing: Everyone cries. Everyone is deeply moved when they're shown such awful things happening in their world. And then, they go out for pizza. It just didn't seem like a fitting response - to have a moment of orchestrated vicarious caring, and then forget all about it in an hour. I can't think of anything more disrespectful. I'd rather sit stoic through the entire bloody awful thing - and then carry it with me, burned into my brain, for the rest of my life.

But you can't feel that bad all the time, you say; you can't live like that. Well, of course not. Even the people who have actually been through it don't walk around thinking only of that pain all the time. But what was the point of your grief then? Sure, it's cathartic to feel someone else's pain. Especially if it's someone safely on the other side of the world. You get to feel all warm and fuzzy for a minute with sorrow and righteous wrath over such injustice. But i don't think that's why this film was made. Because that's just entertainment. Cheap entertainment, at that.

Matthew 21:31: "Which of the two sons did what the father asked?" The one who felt like doing it, or the one who went and did it?

The thin salve of civilization we've pasted over our communities may feel thicker in your town than it was in Kigali. But sixty years ago my grandparents' generation, in the heart of European civilization, was faced with even worse. The day after we watched Hotel Rwanda, we walked through the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam. It didn't feel like coincidence to me. This is the ordinary house on the ordinary street where, like Corrie ten Boom, ordinary Dutch people hid their Jewish neighbors from their own government. When the secret room was betrayed, Otto Frank and his wife and and children all went to the camps. Otto was the only one to survive. They never thought it could happen in their city. But it did. Seem like a long time ago and too far away? It's happening all over the world as we speak.

Scenario: Next Thursday, a powerful earthquake destroys half of your city. (Unlikely? Think again.) Your neighborhood is plunged into fear and chaos when outnumbered National Guard units are helpless to prevent mobs of armed looters from running wild in the streets. Fires rage through the area. Your home is one of the few left with running water and some modicum of safety, but so far, your family has been unmolested. And then, an old beat-up car full of total strangers from a bad neighborhood pulls up your driveway. They are pursued by six young men with baseball bats and handguns. They beg you to open your door. What do you do?

If mine were a small country in that predicament, i'd hope a big country - any country, anyone - would step in to help. In Rwanda, no one did. You can always debate international responsibility vs. national sovereignty, but it does raise a few questions. For instance: The Allies fought Hitler, but only because he wanted to rule Europe, not because he was murdering Jews. Nobody invaded Cambodia in the seventies when Pol Pot killed a full twenty percent of his country's population. Or Russia or China when Stalin and Mao murdered still-unknown millions of theirs. Nobody "intervened" in South Africa during the abuses of apartheid. Nobody is intervening in North Korea - today, right now - while Kim Jong Il continues to slowly starve his nation's children on a diet of field grass and American-donated rice. Indeed, the world cries foul the moment the US so much as speaks harshly of such a regime. But then, the US is the imperialist aggressor. Except in retrospect, after it tries diplomacy instead, in which case it's solely to blame for not taking action.

And anyway, in foreign policy there are nothing but mitigating circumstances wherever one looks, from Saudi Arabia to the Sudan. Even with people of high morals in power, politics will always be politics. It's all so big, so hopeless-feeling, so far away. So we watch movies about genocides and holocausts, and we feel genuinely sad for a few minutes. We think, If that happened here, to my people, i'd sure stand up against it. But the stuff on the screen is halfway around the world, and we're so busy, and really, what can we do from here? Right?

But these are your people - especially if you're a Christian. And governments aren't the only agents of change in the world. There's World Relief. Food for the Hungry. Voice of the Martyrs. International Justice Mission. There are any number of agencies standing up for the weak and helpless where no one else will. And it's not the hopeless black hole of corruption you get with government aid, either. Fifty bucks to Opportunity International will give a family the means to feed themselves for the rest of their lives. You don't have to mail a check to someone in Rwanda - or wherever the latest movie was made - to make a difference. You can find and fight the same injustice anywhere. It's a large enough target.

So anyway....If you've already seen the film, you could make Beyond Rangoon your next stop. But if you haven't yet seen Hotel Rwanda, go watch it. Let it move you. And then, let it move you to act.

* * * * *

Links:

• Read this brief Guardian article for more recent Rwandan history, as well as a remarkably frank discussion....
• See the real hotel from the movie (open for business as usual)....
  
• ...and for a truly surreal experience, read the hotel's Yahoo! traveler reviews.

Inexpensive Cures For Boredom, #3

Visit the pet section at your local Wal-Mart. Did you know they have a pet section? It's back by the garden supplies. Find the aquariums and count the dead fish stuck to the filters. Remember the number and compare it to the next Wal-Mart you're in. My own current single-store record, personally, is sixty-four. Must be a long trip from China.

And I Thought Life In One Place Might Be Boring

Still in Wisconsin at my parents' place, all enjoying a visit from my sister, nephew, & dog-in-law (brother-in-law had to work). The nephew and the dog provide most of the entertainment. I think time spent with them can best be summed up in small snapshots. Like this routine morning: the nephew (17 mos.) taunting the longsuffering dog with its leash, hanging on throughout the resulting tug-of-war, and refusing to let go even after the dog wearies of the game and simply departs, hauling him across the floor face down. My sister, seeing his legs slide past horizontally, sighs and says, "Timothy, stop bothering the dog."

The dog did have its little revenge while we were all out. This is a very good dog while you're around, but then when you leave it figures no one will ever know what it's doing as long as it hears you coming back in time to get off the couch. The problem with this belief is the evidence sometimes left behind, like the little shreds of plastic on the floor today that used to be wrapped around a whole pound of turkey on the counter. Turkey, you understand, being the one meat that causes this dog to emit the most amazingly foul varieties of flatulence you have ever been around. I mean like in the old episodes of All Creatures Great And Small where the dog would lurk under the buffet table at a party and clear the entire room. Even the whole pound of butter she consumed last time - wrappers and all - didn't do anything like that. (Didn't do much of anything at all, really.) Years from now, i suspect, this dog might be even more legendary than my wife's old dog in New York, the vomiting epileptic one, where all their relatives eventually just stopped coming over cuz the dog bit them all the time. So all in all, today was a pretty good day for staving off boredom. Not that i've ever really had time to be bored around here.

A Subsequent Apology

I'm sorry; i seem to have misplaced my medications again. It's just that sometimes i get the little green ones and the little yellow ones confused....

Ill-Considered Filterless Reaction Of The Day

"Western governments rushed to step up their pledges for the earthquake relief effort after their initial response to the disaster was condemned as slow-moving and financially inadequate. The United States, which was under pressure to increase a pledge of $500,000 (£280,000) considered almost derisory by many Pakistanis when it was made over the weekend, announced it intended to give $50 million in emergency aid...."

--The Independent Online Edition, 11 October

The spread of American culture is now complete. We, on this ever-shrinking planet, have now moved beyond blaming our own governments for not being both omniscient and omnipotent (now there's a scary thought) and have begun blaming random governments on the other side of the world?

But why stop there? Personally, i think that if the Bush administration had any compassion or concern for humanity whatsoever, they would have prevented the Pakistani earthquake from happening at all. Obviously the only reason they didn't was out of deep racial and religious hatred. Just like when Federal troops occupied New Orleans under the flimsy guise of "rescuing" people and "providing food and water." I mean, we spend all that money on the military and still they can't control the earth's tectonic forces? There's just no excuse. This is clearly a matter for the World Court. In fact, i think they should clear their entire docket especially for it, just as soon as they've finished acquitting those nice freedom fighters from Sierra Leone.

See if i vote Bushco in '08.

Signs Of A Fine Establishment, Pt. 19

(Southampton, England. 9 Sept)

Bored At Work? I Mean, Really Bored?

You could always watch the photos from our last month or so of European friendspotting. Link is in the right margin of this page, under Tiny Photo Shows. For pics of the abovementioned friends we got to see, check yesterday's posts below. For more pics of us, you can always try the post office wall.

Entertainment Is Where You Find It

Number sixty-seven on the list of things i never thought i'd be: Wedding photographer.

This list, admittedly, has lengthened considerably - or shortened, depending how you look at it - since i started talking my first longsuffering Chicago boss (there were two) into letting me take unpaid time off to sneak away and travel the world. I mean, like a week and a half at a time, almost every month. I still shake my head at that. Mercy Ships was also good for interesting new resume entries (helmsman, outreach leader, optical clinic staff, dental sterilizer....), although the nature of that work did pretty much remove the need to actually take time off in order to see the world. For most crewmembers, Mercy Ships was just one stop on their global itineraries anyway. But home in Brookfield was not a place i thought i'd be hauling out hidden talents. So yesterday was kind of a novelty. My parents' new pastor's son decided a week ago to get married, and since their family had just moved here the weekend before and was still living out of their boxes, my mom (who relishes this kind of challenge, in an interesting and rather sick kind of way) volunteered to completely orchestrate, cater, and serve the wedding and reception.

Now, this wasn't completely new territory for her; she did personally plot and execute an incredible entire wedding reception for, oh, a hundred and twenty or so last November for Katie and me. But she had less notice for this one - approximately four days, in fact - and, also, fewer staff. Katie was videographer, dishwasher, and appetizer table attendant; this left me with photographer, pasta chef, and wine steward, more or less. My mother, of course, masterminded these and everything else, right down to baking the wedding cake. It was all a smashing success. I'd show you a photo, but i'm a little unsure of the family's feelings about having their occasion up all over the internet. But if you're ever bored with the monotony of your everyday life, i would highly recommend checking out the whole wedding gig thing. It's worth a look.

We Are The Luckiest People In The World

(Southampton, England)

(Shipston-on-Stour, England)

(Liverpool, England)

(Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England)

(Edinburgh, Scotland)

(Odense, Denmark)

(Prague, Czech Republic)

(Stuttgart, Germany)

(Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

(Camden Town/London, England)

(London, England)

(Charlotte, NC)

I feel so lucky. Would use that b-word, but...yeah...six months in the Deep South...a little burned out.

Recognize anyone? If you've been on the Caribbean Mercy anytime in the last three years, you should. It may appear that we were wearing the same clothes every day. This is because we were. But all that in three and a half weeks! Seven countries and twenty-two Mercy Shippers - not counting the rest of the Africa Mercy crew, that is - plus some more good friends and a couple relatives for good measure. I only wish we could have seen some long-lost Wheaton friends too. Of course, most of them are scattered all over the world as well. So. We have to go get jobs now, but if you don't see yourself up there, be warned. You're on our list.

Ehh. As Sledge Hammer would say - Enough warmth.

---------------
(update: Will fix the missing photos whenever Blogger fixes its latest bug.)

Signs Of A Fine Establishment, Pt. 18

(Edinburgh, Scotland. 19 Sept)

A Note On The Preceding Post

I challenge you to find the phrases "implicit lumping" and "tickle my fancy" together anywhere else on the internet.

Go on. Try it.

Earth From Right Here

Caught the "Earth From The Air" exhibit in London on Sunday afternoon. Liz and Jules were kind enough to take us around a bit, so we wandered here and there between the rows of four-foot photos next to the Thames.

The photographer (who's French, but we'll forgive him for that) spent eight thousand hours in rented helicopters taking pictures of fairly ordinary things from above. Some were unusual natural phenomena - deserts, glaciers, the sea - while most were of scenes you walk through ten times a day, just from a different perspective. The photos were beautifully composed and strikingly attractive to the eye. It was the captions that got a little old.

The overall theme was of environmental concern, a plea for sustainability, but something about it really rubbed me wrong. Now, i have a degree in environmental science sitting around somewhere - i used to read books on sustainable agriculture for fun, back before i lost all those IQ points as a deckhand - so if this bothered me, it must have been pretty bad. There was just such a uniform tone of disapproving, almost scolding, concern throughout. In general the captions were worded with such earnest solemnity as only those associated with universities can normally muster for any length of time without falling on the floor helpless with laughter at their own self-importance. (If you think the words "pious" and "secular" are opposites, you've been out of school for too long.)

And it was all such good material, too. Only a few figures of dubious origin, and so many fine hard facts on the harm we're doing ourselves via the harm we're doing our surroundings (the surroundings, surprisingly enough to many, that sustain us). But he was concerned about everything. It was like he couldn't help himself once he got into that handwringing frame of mind. He took a photo of a shipwreck and ended the caption with a solemn instructive about how several crewmembers are harmed every single year in the shipping industry. It was actually very similar to the caption under the preceding photo, which i think was of a volcano destroying a town. Paternalism annoys me in general, but this was just funny. Among the other mild absurdities that tickled my fancy was his implicit lumping of natural disasters in with the ones caused by human beings. Aside from the action-oriented problems this creates - e.g., how exactly should we go about eliminating volcanoes and earthquakes? - i think something in it offends my sense of history. I mean all of history, not the last six or seven hundred years that come most immediately to mind.

See, i realized the other day that i'd always thought of history in terms of the Renaissance onwards. Most of us do, i think. We like to believe we're on this constant ascent, getting more advanced and civilized all the time. The problem with this is a little thing called reversion to the mean. Case in point: the fall of the Roman Empire. What happened to them anyway? Was it the lead pipes? Or did they just get fat and lazy and stop caring about anything but their bread and circuses while the Visigoths came in and set off bombs in their subways, er, i mean, sacked their cities?

Admittedly, the division between barbaric and civilized sounds a bit un-PC. But it's not a discriminatory thing at all. In the Middle Ages, the Muslims built the most civilized society on earth. Math, science, astronomy, you name it, while illiterate northern Europe was wallowing around in the mud. But the Muslim empires crumbled as well, edged out by the benighted forces of the barbarian Christians. Tables turn, and i think that's the thing: Stuff happens. The pendulum swings. Reversion to the mean. Put simply, the barbarians will always win in the end.

This weekend i'm rereading "Fight Club," Chuck Palahniuk's little anarchist manifesto, and it is the perfect counterpoint to "Earth From The Air." They need each other. To me, anarchy is kind of like socialism without the idealism, so it's funny how they end up going opposite directions in practice. Pure socialism assumes human nature is basically good, strives to fix the problems created because it's actually not, and fails for the same reason. As it is, i'd really like to be a pure socialist, except that human nature isn't good. But if it were, i'd definitely be an anarchist, because things would work a lot better.

But they wouldn't. So here we are having to look out for each other and recycle and reduce our CO2 emissions, all for the good of the human race, and it's all so good and so truly necessary, and it's all going to look so ridiculously hopeless in five hundred years when we're hunting elk with Tyler Durden in the vine-covered ruins of Manhattan. So what do you do? You recycle. And you should. What can we ever do in anything but work on our little beach regardless of what the ocean's doing? And the really strange part is, that might be more than okay. Maybe it's the best thing to do. Jesus didn't want to be king, right? He didn't deal much with numbers or empires or trying to change the world. It was through his faithfulness in doing his own almost totally ignored little thing, off in the backwater Roman equivalent of Namibia or somewhere, that the world was changed beyond what anyone - including his own followers - had any capacity to imagine. It shouldn't have worked. But maybe that's the only way things do work. Dunno.

Okay, now that i've talked myself into a corner and i'm too lazy to get out, my attention is wandering. Used to be, i could pay twenty large a year to waste time like this. Don't you miss college sometimes?

The Fourth Cup Of Coffee Makes You A Little Too Verbal When You're Not Sure What Time Zone You're In

Back in the States.

I don't like a lot of the directions my mind starts to head when i'm home. We've only been in the country about twenty hours now - yesterday morning we were riding the Tube to Heathrow in the early dark - but i'm already noticing a change. This place, this Carolina city, is not really home either. But for all the differences i love to discover between the American states, they're starting to seem increasingly the same.

Out traveling, out in places not your own, life shrinks to simpler things. The smaller things - the larger ones, really. A place to sleep for the night. Clean water. Your next meal. Though some do, it's hard to sustain an off-the-grid existence like that for long. But there are elements of such life a that i will fight hard to drag with me, kicking and screaming, wherever we end up. For one, i want to keep that hard-won effortless freedom from stuff. You know those little half-conscious thoughts you find yourself thinking, your brain's little self-entertainment in idle moments? I'm sitting here at this sidewalk cafe in Charlotte and realizing more and more of mine are already about things i'd like to buy. Things i'd like to have. It's not that i want these thoughts, or that i'll necessarily give in to them; no, what bothers me is how much of me enjoys them, and that i know i'll have to work all the harder to think the way i want to while i'm here. Not "here" in Charlotte, but here, at "home." Travel can give you more perspective than you'd like sometimes. But sometimes i think there's nothing more needed, really, in my whole life.

Except maybe more coffee. Mmmmm. Coffee.

It's Profanity Monday Again!

[a recurring feature incorporating slightly naughty but estimably relevant quotes of a probably inapproriate nature]

Dispensing with the attempts at irony....

Our selection today is from a Jewel song. There--i said it. Right out loud.

We fly out of London again today. Going back.

When i first learned the words to this one i was working in an winter-gray Chicago cubicle, dreaming of getting out. When i first learned to play it i was sitting shirtless in The Gambia's humid evening warmth, relaxing on the floor of our DTS house each night to soak in the cool. Poetry it ain’t, but it says some things. All the louder, as ever, when you read between the lines. As a more subtle not-poet has put it, you can get what's second best, but it's hard to get enough....

Plus, if you add up the first letters of every seventh word, it spells out a really funny vulgar acrostic.

...Till We Run Out Of Road

It’s leaving time again. I’m
Headed out with all my friends
It’s a roll of the dice - i’ve never
Thought twice about the way i’ve been spending my time
Drying my guts out for every dime
Working in an office building tall, don’t know
Who’s next to you at all, but
Being out here, the blood, the guts, the beer,
Is a test. Only time will tell.
It brings you close, man, closer than hell
We’re leaving, leaving again. Can’t recall where all we’ve been
I guess we’ll just go, till we get too old or we run out of road
The other day i talked to Luke.
He quit back in ’92
Says he misses the band, those were
The best times he ever had
He said, give ’em hell till the end,
Cuz once you quit, you can’t get back again….
Expensive cabs and shitty food washed down with canceled flights
Can’t make up those missed holidays; you miss your boy and wife
And oh, the late night drives, they cause dawn to strike you like a knife--
Hey, man.
This is a beautiful life.

About the acrostic: just kidding.

Signs Of A Fine Establishment, Pt. 17

(Prague, Czech Republic. 24 Sept)