My friend Eric keeps a link going. Somehow there's hope in the membrane when he calls me from lands-o'-France. You suck up to the plenty of artifice on a daily basis; like a terminal politeness while we bomb the crap out of yet another country somewhere long ways away... like the silence you self-induce when your given associates can't comprehend the erosion all around... like being a fraud for copulating with the fucking box that IS PROGRESS. So a call from Eric is a good thing. Self-made-man type: the most respectable and positive kind of force I've yet to come across. The energy rubs off in a cool way; not ridiculing you but enlightening, and making you wanna step up to the plate because there are folks like him, like yourself, that are counting on not playing limbo with the bar, but resetting its height. So it's good. And I write this with conviction and bear in mind the contradiction (referring to the paragraph below)... but that's all skindeep, so they say in mascara commerce. Point being, boxes in glowing screens and popularity-dung will never travel with you the way a good pal will. I'm remembering sailing backwards in a train across Poland last summer, staring out at beautiful rolling hills outside Krakow; all full of crop and cabbage and livestock; chugging on to the next show. Eric found a milk bar that afternoon, and then later, like a headache's joke, found a bottle of Krupnick before we played. The shows varied between dicey scenes to sound guys fucking with us to feeling like gods. After a while the toughness translated into just another night; another day of rest and walking and talking and seeing things, and another night of putting on this ancient old show we'd memorized and letting it open up into amazing new possibilities. Just letting it, just like that, and it would happen: hilarious off-shoots, tangents, improv poems, guitars singing every which way... our world. Our world, I wish you were there, but you weren't. And so it's a task to suffer through a day sometimes, while you let idiots go on about their petty reasonings/being bastards... folks just being people, I guess. Wanting a higher caliber friend around comes back to another offshoot of its own: finding peace with the day. I have the luxury of having several good pals... some ex-girlfriends, some just platonic, all impart their wisdoms for which makes life a grateful time. Those funny cathartic buds like Eric, ones which the infrequency of seeing makes a heart grow fonder, they tug atcha different. We're all part of the same stock, us madfolk who are too busy to even look up out of the dirt call ourselves artists... and those who you share the bigger battles with, well? We shit more freely, knowing that barge of manure and baggage, all that BIG crap, will haunt us less knowing that we have lived one extra second in our own feet and on our own ground. Like the fishman says, when you're singing about freedom, I pity you.