Practice: "blue heavy metal boys"

 Weber ten hours into his 24-hour Burroughs reading

This morning, I travelled via bus through an ice storm from a PTA exec board meeting right to a gallery where a performance artist (?) was nearly halfway through a 24-hour Wm S. Burroughs 100th birthday tribute reading. Essentially in the space of about 30 minutes, I went from hearing language like "testing" and "fundraising" and "budget cuts," to language like "carbonic" and "penis" and "phosphorescence," "rectal mucus" and "heavy metal" (!!!) Burroughs as palate cleanser.  Something art should do from time to time.

Right?

I sat and listened to Weber read from The Soft Machine (the second of Burrough's '60s-era cut-up novels on a day that began with Nova Express), and I stood and photographed him reading for two hours in many different positions, then left to write my own stuff--ramming my tumescent knee right into a cafe table leg--ate a really good salad from a different coffee shop that now has food, checked on sick offspring, then made my way through deep puddles of slush back to the gallery where Weber was well into The Ticket That Exploded.  I sat for the end of that. Did not want to leave. I guess the gallery had become kind of sacred.  More Ginsberg than Burroughs? I don't care. Burroughs probably wouldn't appreciate the sentiment, but I'm sentimental like that.

Signed first editions. Go ahead! Touch. The reader's on break!