I’m kicked back on Saturday night with a regular blue-tick hound of a buzz snoring between my ears, when Tia, painting her toes beside me, sets to painting mine, telling me, “I’m going to make you even prettier.”

“Honey,” I warn, waving my half-dead Go Cup of bourbon at her and looking up from Dog Day Afternoon on the plasma, “If I get any prettier, time itself will stop just to look.”…

Considering my mellow personality, you wouldn’t believe how often folk say it, but as I start cutting another set of lines on the CD case for Aja, here Ray Ray himself comes with, “Stagger, why don’t you give it a rest?”

“Can’t stop, won’t stop,” I shoot back, working my magic with the Black Am Ex and feeling my nerves already singing arias at the prospect of another poke of flake, and with a sniff I add,…

Memorial Day, I’m making a study of my toes through the sheets while the rest of my body absorbs Tia, tucked under my arm, so I got to wonder aloud, “Is wanting this all it comes down to, Tia sweet?”

She looks up with those eyes spilling over with the blue that Heaven’s trying to be, and she wonders back, “What’s that, Stagger?”

I wave my hand, and…

After the smoke has settled into a stink yellowing the den walls and morning comes to kick Ray Ray and I square in the nose, I realize I’m feeling a mite out of sorts, what with the better share of a Bourbon county distillery leaving my body with one bitch of a bill.

I rub the modern art piece my hair’s become, lift my face off of the floor and ask Ray Ray, “You got any Ale-8 in the icebox?”…