Man in purple glasses
reflects the twilight in his gaze.
Boys with skateboards lounge so fiercely
they are exposed
and naked as their tawny cheeks,
their swagger clinging closer than skinny jeans.

JP-

I hope you receive this fax in time. I’m still sitting in the lobby of the Citizen Hotel, just outside the Capitol building where the Governor is arguing with the Senate about how to remedy this massive fuck-stain of a deficit. I’m frozen in catatonic horror at the rumors spewing across the Capitol lawns. And I’m afraid I won’t be able to produce any coherent sort of material on deadline for this issue as commissioned. If you were to witness first-hand what I have, however, you would understand. You think this state is in the shit bath now? Wait ‘til the good Governor and his henchmen get through sucking the blood veins from California. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. We’re all turning into zombies, and the next generation will be a slum of bumbling fools and thieves. We’re doomed.

Tending rattlesnakes is a tricky business, but an important one to any man looking for answers. Grab the neck. Control the head. And urine does not kill the venom in their bites, though for some reason, the mescaline-whiskey hangover confused my mind into thinking that all slithering poisons can be cured with the antidote to a jellyfish sting.

Washington is chock-full of sociopaths, thieves, and drunks—and certainly mutant combinations of all three. But you probably wouldn’t know it by the looks of the well-dressed, old men, chatting and smiling in Statuary Hall just hours after the Inauguration. The Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies has hosted the post-inauguration luncheon for more than a century, and by the general jolly ambiance of the crowd here at noon on a Tuesday, you’d think at the very worst you were at some two-faced, slightly twisted Bradbury-manifested carnival in rural Illinois. The truth of the matter is that most of Washington is so far removed from the common folk, they’ve forgotten what it’s like to bleed. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not an anti-statesman—not officially anyway. I love this country and consider myself a true, blue-blood patriot. But when the nation is led into a war for no good damn reason that actually exists, and when bank reps hustle people into signing loans worth less than the ink of their signatures, and when some schmuck in New York with ties to the highest levels of the SEC steals 50 billion and no one bats an eye for ten years, I start to wonder about the fortitude of our free world. Perhaps that’s why I’ve bought into the crude national conception that our new Head of the Union can bring some “change” to the Capitol. It’s a long shot, but a real and decent American hope… Or maybe I’m fooling myself into some new national pipe dream after a long and wretched double-term fuck up. God knows anything seems better than the last eight years. I figured the only way to find out was to get a private moment with the newly elected president, maybe shake his and ask him a question or two, and see what sort of energy I get in person, what his eyes tell me, what his three-piece, million-dollar smile has to say up close.

Security was tight at the Republican National Concession, like it always is. But I found a way in, like I always do. I flew into Phoenix on the afternoon hilt from L.A. Popped two Vicodin and didn’t notice the plane was actually moving until we touched down under a hazy midday glow, silhouetting the high tower of Sky Harbor Int’l Airport. Not that I needed the Vicodin for a one‐hour plane flight, but I’d been up for almost 32 hours at that point, scrambling without luck to find a pass into John McCain’s predictable concession speech at the Arizona Biltmore Resort & Spa. And besides, metal detectors have always made me nervous. Upon landing, it was clear that I needed more sleep, certainly, but it was already two p.m. and there was no time for that now.