I've been out walking, down past all the bars and clubs on Connecticut Avenue, on a cold Friday night, just for exercise, and to see.  You get a full eye fill walking along, people dressed to go out, spilling out onto the street.  You can stand on one side of the avenue and feel the glass of windows shake without clarity to the thumping beat, green and colored lights flashing on 3rd and 4th floors.  Dark bull-like men waiting outside, milling about, girls with short skirts and high heels... you've seen it, you don't need my description.  The loud dark noise of egos.  The cabs come through.  The lines are long.  Unhappiness everywhere.  And the wanting to fit in.

It is a good exercise, to go out walking, to feel the pull, but to see it as it is.  It's never a solution to go and do that, somehow, I don't know why, to be part of it that way.  It's never happiness.  I wish it were.  But it isn't.

The night after, I go grocery shopping.  I walk home with two bags, listening to Shane MacGowan singing Rainy Night in Soho with the Pogues, and it strikes me how far more egoless and therefore emotionally realistic it is to be musical, if that's the word.