Name's Jack Kerouac Finnegan, though people just call me JK, on account of my folks were huge fans of the writer, obviously, in fact they met at a beat fancon, so it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that I would end up spending my adult life traveling aimlessly, hanging out with numerous marginal characters and writing interminably long rambles made up of interminably long sentences like the one you're now supposed to be enjoying although I really don't give a rat's ass whether you actually are enjoying it or not.

One of those marginal characters is a former Rennaisance Faire carny name of Carl Santini-Lewis, or at least thats the only name he ever gave me, and I first ran into him at some ungodly hour when all the normal mundane boring characters, the sort who aren't really alive but just walking zombies who secretly wish they had the balls to be like the small handful of us who told society to go bugger off their rules and conventions a long time ago are long snug in their beds, the sort of hour I like best because said boring conventional types are conspicuously absent and the rest of us crap stains upon this earth stand out and find it easier to locate each other.

I was passing through this town since that's what I do, pass through and toss out a few random pithy observations to the assembled masses who for the most part don't even realize how little I think of their squalid lives or that my pithiest comments are indeed directed at them while they let themselves believe I'm only talking about the other guy, the poor slob over there whose life really is pathetic but I got news for you that your life is pathetic too and before you accuse me of the greatest sin of all, hypocricy, let me state for the record that I'm well aware my own life doesn't amount to a hill of shit either by simple virtue of the fact that I'm ultimately just as human and thus condemned to wallow in the same dreck as the rest of you only I have the existential misfortune of being aware of my own complete irrelevance to the universe and my mission in life is to inform you of this fact so that you can share in my misery and make it seem less by comparison.

When I first blew into this nowhere town which in the final analysis isn't really any more or and any less nowhere than anyplace else I've ever been or ever expect to be it happened to be one of those aforementioned ungodly hours when I and my fellow travelers who have given up on conventional existence are most wont to locate one another, my first order of business was satisfying that craving that had been gnawing in the pit of my stomach for the last eighty some odd miles for a greasy old fashioned farm style breakfast, topped off with some apple pie just like Mom used to make before she drank herself to death to drown the abject sorrow she felt at having brought me into this wretched world, and six or eight good stiff belts of milk and vodka, a concoction which has been surprisingly hard to find on the menu considering the obvious merits of something which for centuries was given to slaves in the Polish saltmines to keep them from rising up and overthrowing the whole mess, but which can easily be made by any halfway respectable hole in the wall dive that carries both milk and vodka which most of them do once you properly explain the necessary ingredients and proportions.

Naturally this particular town like most of them at this hour had its sidewalks neatly rolled up and stacked over at city hall ready to be re-deployed just before sun up but there was this one beacon of light shining forth through the frigid January night attracting me and my none-too-kind kind like gypsy moths drawn to a blow torch in the vain hope that final immolation will end their long meaningless days of seeking out natural fiber clothing to chew holes in but in the end discovering only that the flame is just a cold neon sign and they will have to keep searching until they find the final source of the self-destruction they crave.

This particular flashing neon sign read Nighthawks, which was like putting out the welcome mat for nocturnal creatures like myself and those in whose company I can commiserate over the fact that we and we alone share the common burden of realizing that the average joe sixpack is actually to be envied for his utter lack of realization of the true hopeless and pointless nature of his existence and indeed his constitutional inability to even contemplate the questions to which we long ago found the answers and now seek desperately in booze and drugs and broads and cheap thrills not to find answers but in the desparate hope of somehow ridding ourselves of the answers we have and will regret till our dying days that we ever sought.

As was my usual M.O., I settled into a corner booth of the otherwise completely empty Nighthawk and pulled out my pad and pen to begin writing this verbal diarrhea which you are now lapping up like the bum I can see out the window right now licking the last of the empty soup tins from the dumpster behind the Nighthawk and glanced over the menu while waiting patiently because what else has anybody got to do at this hour for the lost soul with the faux vampire fangs and hair and nails dyed the same shade of blacker than the blackest black and the retro-forties dress carefully calibrated to extinguish a man's reasoning faculties just long enough to do things he's sure to regret later to come and take my order off the aforementioned menu which I was annoyed to see listed exactly everything I was craving right down to the aforementioned milk and vodka, all sold with Madison Avenue slickness using a charmingly kitschy set of themed faux-hibrow references obviously mocking the very patrons such as myself who they know full well are just as helpless to resist their psychological warfare inspired marketing ploys as Joe Sixpack is to the temptations of those kitschy theme restaurants that spout up all over disnified places like Vegas only nightowls like myself actually recognize that we are being played for suckers while simultaneously recognizing that we are just as susceptible as Joe Sixpack and that knowledge makes it so much more infuriating that we can only dull the pain of this knowledge by ordering three more milk and vodka's than we originally planned on.

As my eyes lingered over the aforementioned lost soul in the too tight retro-forties dress walk away with my order and out of my life at least for as long as it would take the kitchen to fry up some sausage and eggs I was distracted by the entrance of a man dressed in a bright silver trenchcoat, backward Pittsburg baseball cap and purple thigh-high platform boots sporting six inch stilletto heels which raised the top of his cap to approximately five foot eleven inches off the floor, a man I would soon come to know as Carl Santini-Lewis.

The new interloper waved off-handedly as the faux-fanged creature of the night in the too tight retro forties dress called from across the room to ask if Mr. Santini-Lewis would like his usual and instead strode straight up to me in the otherwise completely empty diner and announced huffily that I was in his spot, which turned out to be the particularly inauspicous beginning of my adventures with a man who would eventually become simultaneously the only man I can fully trust to have my back in a knife fight and the man I despise most in this world.

(To be continued, at some point, I hope.)