It’s 6.30 am. I got up two hours ago.

I haven’t been up this early since I had a “normal” job. Come to think of it, I haven’t been up at 4.30 am since I was head of the human resource department at a small stock brokerage firm over a decade ago. But I’m laggin’ man, as in Jet Lag, cause I’m back on home soil after my grand tour of France and Belgium.

What does a pornographer do on vacation? Perhaps the same shit you do: in Paris, I rode around the city in one of those open air tour buses with my headphones securely fastened while a pre-recorded voice told me all about everything I was looking at; I scoured the second-hand dealers that set up along with River Seine, looking for weird books and ephemera (scores include 2 copies of Jazz Journal from 1960 with great cover shots of Miles Davis and Julian “Cannonball” Adderley); I hit a few smut shops on Rue Denis and visited all my old friends whose faces are plastered on all the American Porno that seems to dominate the Parisian adult book stores; I ate a whole lot, too; in Normandy I took the D-Day tour and saw old German guns in old German bunkers while I ate a whole lot; in Bayeux, which is near Normandy, I walked around a medieval town and looked at super old churches and ate a whole lot; in Brugge, Belgium, I walked around a medieval town and looked at super old churches and ate a whole lot; in Leuven, Belgium, I walked around a medieval town and looked at super old churches and ate a whole lot; in Brussels, Belgium, I walked around a big old city and looked at super old churches and ate a whole lot.

Man there’s a lot of old churches in France and Belgium, and the food is really good there, too. Except, I think, the French have figured out food better than the Flemish have…although the chocolate and beer in Belgium kicks a whole lot of ass.

But there’s more to life than chocolate and beer.

Maybe not.

I think I’ll go clean my tiny little bachelor pad. It’s filthy, and what else to do at half past six in the morning but clean? And take my first listen to Sky Blue Sky, the brand new Wilco record; I’m quite sure it will be the highlight of my June.

Listening to Jeff Tweedy and his band mates, that is…not cleaning my house.