Standing on the corner of 4th and Something, trying to decide if I want to give up and go into the Starbucks across the street or keep going towards Broadway. This is yesterday, 10 am, I need coffee. A middle-aged doughy white guy, graying hair, pulls up to the red light next to me in an SUV.

“Hi,” he calls.

People are weirdly friendly here. What the hell. “Hi,” I say.

“Do you want a ride?”

I lift my sunglasses so he can see me look him in the eye. It’s hard to hear, I just bought Heaven And Hell the day before, “Work All Week” is blaring in my head, drowning out almost everything except the memory of the first time I heard the album, and the inescapable need for caffeine. I’m not sure I heard what I heard. “Excuse me?”

“Do you want a ride?” He smiles.

I smile. “Do you want me to kick your ass for being a pervert?”

“No, no…”

“Then stop talking to me.” Lightly, almost sweetly.

The man behind the counter in Starbucks is tap dancing, an old habit of mine from my Labyrinth days. Except it turns out he’s been doing soft-shoe for 14 years, or some surprising thing. It’s a pleasant conversation, and my new apartment is about three blocks from here, but part of me just wants some coffee already. Another part says, SLOW DOWN.

The day takes me to the Denver Book Mall. The Book Fair. Mutiny Now. Sputnik. That’s actually all I had time for, lingering for hours at each one. Found a copy of Mother Night for Kat, the tiny mass market one with the really sweet-ass cover. And The White Album for me, because I feel I am on the edge now of a very deep obsession with Didion’s voice, her neat, economical, unmerciful perceptiveness. At Mutiny Now I found a book of critical essays on Thomas Pynchon, but I’d bought too much already and so I had to leave it. I almost cried with joy skimming the first few pages of one about “trying to read Gravity’s Rainbow.” It was brilliant, stating basically what I’ve suspected and hoped all along: The reason you don’t get it is because you’re not supposed to. There is no coherence, no point, no nothing. And fuck you, by the way, for feeling entitled to one and getting caught up in the whole stupid game. I’m kind of pissed I don’t remember the author’s name, because I’m in love, I’m in love.