Around 2 Thursday night, the woman next door came home after another one of her monthly drunken binges. This is always the strangest thing, for she doesn't look like the type. If anything, she has the appearance of an aging school marm. Yet, when she is inebriated, she turns into an unholy terror. She is also extraordinarily loud with a vocabulary that "would make a mule handler blush."

She must have dropped her keys and couldn't find them. This set off a squawk of colorful adjectives that woke the cats and me. It also woke up several dogs in a nearby yard who began barking. This appeared to greatly upset her, because she began a piercing tirade directed at the canines. I must have gone back to sleep, because I don't recall anything else.

The image of this intoxicated woman howling back at the dogs is somehow perversely funny. And at the same time very sad.

I always enjoy the requests that are phoned in. Frequently, the person is calling from some place that sounds vaguely familiar. But without a reference book or two, I have no idea where anything is. London with its many neighborhoods is a total puzzle.

Along this line, the other day I looked up the meaning of "Geordie" on the net. A term that I'd heard a number of times but was not sure of the meaning. (PAUSE) The pause indicates that I ambled over to my unabridged dictionary, the one that weighs a ton or so, to see if it had the word listed. (Athena thought this would be great time to see what I was doing. So she immediately planted herself in the middle of the page.) The dictonary indeed had the term: "A resident of Newcastle-upon-Tyne."

Saturday lunch always attracts a mixed clientele. Including any number of semi-humpy guys. The only person that drew my attention was someone I'd seen several times before. Thinning hair, dark shades, tucked-in light blue tee, khaki pants, no belt, sandals. I remember seeing him there with his son, who was larger and more muscular that he was. And dad kept queezing the kid's biceps. To the point that I could tell the son was embarrassed.

There is some almost imperceptible element to the man's body language that is very off-putting. As though there is a great deal of repressed emotion below the surface waiting to explode. I could very well be wrong, but usually body language is fairly accurate.

If there is a quintessential moment in rock, it has to be Jimi Hendrix's version of Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower." "Two riders were approaching, a wildcat began to howl."

Happy Birthday, Mr. Z!

Last week Michael visited what I thought at first was a bath but turned out to be a gory hole establishment. I noticed that the initials "GH" were on the door, and I wondered what that meant. I guess I was distracted by Armistead Maupin exiting as Michael entered. I mentioned the scene to a friend at dinner who told me the significance of "GH." Duuuuuuhhhh! Dense! Dense! Dense!

PAX!