t's a clear day. The clouds are like, clouds in a clear sky. Like cotton. Like clouds.

My saliva is thick and stringy and voluminous. I could hardly keep it inside my mouth during kickboxing class, which stomped all over my ass, a kharmic payback for Saturday night, a pack of cigarettes in one sitting, what was I thinking? Now I'm nauseous. Nauseous in a bad way. Is anyone ever nauseous in a good way? Maybe people on X. I wouldn't know about all that.

I think I might like Sheryl Crow. That took me years to decide.

A car dealership has a sign outside. "America, It's Time to Pray." Only it's not really a car dealership. It's a church. A church that looks like a car dealership. Seems somehow appropriate.

"I get my kicks above the waistline, sunshine." That's Murray Head, from "One Night in Bangkok," his talky radio hit from the mid-80s, a song from the Broadway musical Chess and the biggest such crossover of that decade, that I can think of. Murray Head also played Judas in the London version of Jesus Christ Superstar. Some guy from Black Sabbath played Christ. I love "Jesus Christ Superstar" and I will not apologize for that.

I think if I drove with someone sitting in the car next to me, I would say funny things. I would point out funny things about the street we were driving on, say. But maybe I wouldn't. Sometimes, when people sit in the car next to me, I just get really distracted and then I get lost and I wonder if they can tell.

A teen girl on NPR is saying that usually, she is bored by the Grammys. They're for fogeys. But this year, her music is represented. This year, she's going to watch. And I wonder when that happened to the Grammys, when they got so hopelessly behind the times, and I postulate that it happened with alternative music and hip-hop in the Nineties, when mainstream music splintered so drastically, but that's just a guess and a half-hearted one at that because this spit in my mouth. You have no idea. It's almost gummy.

I get home, the first one home, the home to myself. The clouds are like, clouds in a clear sky. Like cotton. Like clouds.