Your body isn't anymore, doesn't ask for much. A little music and a soft touch. Why don't you let it out to play?

Your heart isn't a birdcage, singing in your chest. You want to shut it up, but give it a rest. You're gonna die one day.

It's been a while. Sorry for the long pause. Been traveling, doing crazy shit. By crazy, I just mean busy occupying.

But hey, I'm back. I left you in my senior year of college. I was in Mexico doing that, living with those people on the occupied ASEANDA.

I get back to college. It's my senior year. It's spring term. Everything's pretty much over.

I graduated after doing the typical thing you do when you've gone abroad. For the first time, I came back with all these Mexican handicrafts that I thought were my treasures from traveling far.

Turned out most of them were made of polyester. I remember giving my friend Mike. Mike was a musician. He was a musician.

I went to the same college. I went to Hobart. He was one of these guys who played five or six different instruments.

I bought him a flute, bamboo or something down in Chappas. I brought it back. This is a guy who could pick up any instrument for many where in the world.

He was playing songs on it. He could not get any sound out of this flute. He was a very calm guy, very feline character. He never really got agitated about it.

He could not get any sound out of that thing. One night we were hanging out in his apartment.

We listened to some Funkadelic. Mike was a scholar of Funkadelic. I can tell you all sorts of things about Funkadelic, Bootsy Collins, George Clinton, the whole crowd, the brides of Funkinstein, who was in which band, who backed up, whom, who got kicked out for what, which drugs were involved and which shows, all this kind of stuff.

He knew everything. He was a collector of information and obscure recordings and stuff. But anyway, we were hanging out in his apartment one night, getting high.

We used to just listen to Funkadelic records and play percussion on stuff that he had around his apartment. I can't imagine how the neighbors experienced that because we were playing.

We weren't loud about it, but we were just tapping things all over the apartment. Anyway, one of us had this flute and we were tapping and playing a beat on a frying pan or something and the flute shattered.

When we looked at it, I realized it was made of plastic. It was a plastic fucking tube that somebody had painted to look like wood.

So here I am bringing this piece of plastic tubing back, thinking it's some great artifact from the primitive people of Shia Pus.

I am walking around wearing sarapes and crazy shit. I don't know. Maybe I'll try to find a picture of myself from those days. I was a pretty bizarre looking character.

I had these army boots. I remember I always wore them. They were nambuts, like green fabric with a black leather base. The leather split at some point. So I wrapped silver duct tape around it.

I had Disney character shoelaces in them. I enjoyed the irony of the Disney characters and the nambuts. I don't know. Anyway, so after that, the few months back at school, graduated and Mike, the funk scholar, wanted to come to Alaska with me.

So the next year we were going to go up together. Now, here's a thing that happens around the time we were hanging out playing the drums and all that. I mean, his apartment with another guy, Kevin.

We're smoking bongs and listening to funk and just hanging out. The phone rings and Mike goes and gets the phone. Kevin and I listen to some more music. Mike's gone 15, 20 minutes.

...