Last evening, I had the pleasure of seeing Of Montreal and the Ponys at a Portland art collective called The Space. The Space is nothing less than a blessing available to those interested in art, unconventional fun and alternative entertainment. Waiting for the man whose job it was to collect the cover, I sat with friends and fiddled with my camera, unintentionally over-exposing film and accidentally taking pictures of nothing. Next to a townie girl I recognized and a young twenty-something I did not sat a lovely, sat a young girl clad in a sweatshirt and topped with a fading, bleached fluff of hair which resembled the wispy, white corps of a dandy lion. She wore thick rimmed classes and had her head submerged in a stuffed Moleskine sketchbook.

"Pssst..." This is a mechanism I still use to get people's attention. I grew out of it by five but I fell back into it by sixteen when one of my first girlfriends reincorporated it into her language. "Psssst," she'd summon, her eyes squinted and hand close to her face, acting out the "come hither" motion with her index finger.

"Will you please draw me a picture," I asked.

She looked up and asked, "a picture of what?"

"A race car!" a friend suggested gleefully.

The girl stared back at us and mulled the proposition over. "I'll think about it," she settled for, grinned slightly and ducked her head back down.

When I was twelve, I invented for myself a girl dilemma. By this time, one of my friends had already had sex for the first time (as far as I can tell, from where I come, it seems many males in every generation lost their virginity to girls named Naomi while working for uncles and cousins "up North"). In my head, I assumed that two girls, one less physically and slightly sweeter than one, were interested in me. If this were the case, I'd have to make some sort of decision, of course. I brought this decision to the information source into which I had invested the most confidence; my eighteen-year-old. Marine Corps recruit neighbor.

"I don't know what to do," I explained. "There are these two girls..." and I told him about the one who was physically attractive, yet slightly disagreeable and the other girl who was less physically attractive, yet a sweetheart.

He told me it was wiser to go with the attractive girl and he left it with that. When I look back on this, my gut reaction is to feel disgusted by his advice, but when I think about everyone else I knew at the time, and what and who they all turned out to become, I realize that if anyone told me anything different, they'd probably have been lying. It never occurs to me to figure out what sort of frame of mind I was coming from at the time.

I remember being twelve-years-old and spending hours with the aforementioned neighbor. At the time, it seemed as though there was no one else. Further, he was the older kid. Every younger kid, beyond wanting to be like the older kid, wants to be the older kid.

We used to sit around for hours, watch movies, look at pornographic magazines and recycle the same, stale conversation. I soon became bored or reanimating old, mundane dialogue. If our conversations failed to go his way, the conversation would not occur. If a conversation went his way, but your opinions were not the same, the conversation was as good as dead. We talked about the same movies, the same music, the same subjects day in and day out until I could no longer provide appropriate subjects for dialogue. I wanted to talk about Oliver Stone, which was OK if we were talking about Conan the Destroyer or Natural Born Killers, but not any of his other efforts.

This is not to say he did not mean well. I am sure that in his eyes he was culturing me by exposing me to his mainstream alternative music and his favorite movies. To a great extent, I learned a lot. I was, however, often forced to lay down what I found interesting in exchange for reexamining all he was interested in. Worse, I have, in many ways, become him.

"He was the first convict I heard use the expression "the PB." He told me that sometimes he wished he had "the PB." I thought he meant "TB," short for "tuberculosis," another common affliction at the prison--common enough that I have it now.

It turned out that "PB" was short for "Parole Board," which is what convicts called AIDS.

That was when we first met, back in 1991, when he said that sometimes he wished he had the PB, and long before I myself contracted TB.

Alphabet soup!"

Hocus Pocus, a Kurt Vonnegut novel