I don't speak French.  Never had any interest in doing so.  So what if it's the language of love?  I know a little bout love, I've got a language, and baby I've had enough.  And if misquoting ZZTop won't get me anywhere in France, screw it.  Not worth the effort.

I'm writing this for no good reason beyond a change of pace.  Earlier today as I was typing a chapter about a hillbilly rape victim (and how many times have I said that these past few months?), I coudn't figure out what to put in my CD player.  See, I always listen to music when I write.  Distracts my left brain.  Sometimes, if the music is loud enough, it distracts my wife's left brain too.  Then she turns it down and greatly decreases the odds that song lyrics will surface.  So back to my quandary: what kind of soundtrack does an author plug in for that kind of horror story?  I own no Kid Rock and my heavy metal collection is woefully inadequate.  Somehow, Hall & Oates feels wrong (no matter how often StoryMash advertises their Rock'n'Soul, Volume I).  I settle on Absolute Garbage and away I go.

Write what you know.  Or, in lieu of that, what someone else tells you.  Then I thought I should simply Wikipedia three random objects/people/terms and figure out a way to weave them together.  Until I wikkied - why must so many people boast of their rural villages in Eastern Europe?  Mercy!

Three-card Monte.  Ham sandwich.  Vivaldi.  Why not?

For all the celebrities I encounter, you'd think valet parking would be considered more glamorous a vocation.  Singers, actors, models, politicians - they all hand me the keys to their car.  Had I a road map, I could let myself into their houses as well, since no one singles out one key from the chain and keeps the rest.  There are a few guidelines to entice such celebrities to choose me over my coworkers (and competition), but I've found nothing works quite as well as sucking up.  "Yes, sir" doesn't get you noticed like "as you wish, your highness."  "Anything I can do for you?" achieves new connotations when I'm already polishing thousand-dollar shoes with my handkerchief.  Shameful, shamless - however you want to phrase it, it's a living.  And I like it.

Unlike Jack the Jackass.  We think his parents named him Jackass, you know, like how Michael becomes Mike or William becomes Bill.  He wants nothing more than to blow the valet stand up and "make something of his life."  Short order cook?  Fry jockey?  Custodial attendant?  The only aspiration I've seen was when he got himself a deck of cards and practiced three-card Monte.  I was only too happy to oblige him, as he hadn't yet figured out how to pocket the queen and leave no chance of the rube flipping her.  Seventy bucks in the hole, he asked me to teach him a lesson about observation.

My lesson: "Watch this" as I stuffed the bills in my wallet.  End of class.

Sure, I had a college degree, but exactly what is someone supposed to do with Psychology?  Become a psychologist?  No.  People major in psych because they want to solve their own problems.   The irony in this is most of them create more problems in college than they ever will with the cumulative total of the rest of their lives.  Who cares what Kafka or Freud or Joyce Brothers has to say about my relationship with my lunch?  Eat the damn ham sandwich and get it over with!  It doesn't mean I have a fetish for kosher meats.  I don't.  At least I don't think I do.  Maybe I should've paid better attention in my higher level classes?

No thanks.  I'm happy here.  Enjoy the weather, drive some of the finest vehicles ever to hit the streets (and many that only drive to and from our exclusive restaurant, I'm convinced).  Meet the nicest people (Jackass excepted), and collect a ten or twenty for running half a block and parallel parking.  I clear fifty bills a year and I work a job any trained monkey could perform.  Note to myself: keep monkeys away from my station.

Terry Merriweather (didn't his parents see that happening when they named him Terrence?) was no monkey.  He flipped between his Edsel and his VW Thing, but he always sought me out, tossed me his keys, offered some flippant remark about the price of gas versus the price of helium (whatever the hell that meant), and departed into the restaurant whistling something by Vivaldi.  Because the restaurant was named "The Four Seasons."  What a crackup.  And, according to the paraphernalia I found in the glovebox of his VW, a crackhead too.

Next chapters requirements: Suzy Chapstick, a metronome, and the Dewey decimal system.  (Why not?  It gets me away from horror for a spell, anyway.)  Don't forget to assign three elements to the follow up to your chapter too.

(Lastly, FYI: I wrote this to Guster's Lost and Gone Forever.  Now you know.  Yo Slick, blow.)