Well, it seems my rock and roll days are over. Yup. I sold my electric guitar last night. I realized as I was driving home that I hadn't so much as glanced at it in over a year, let alone played it. Call it a moment of clarity, but I knew it wasn't going to get the love it needed from me. I used to swear I'd never be one of those guys who walks wistfully into a guitar shop and says 'I used to play an electric guitar when I was a kid'. So much for keeping my word.

So why give up that electric sound and all future possibility of the midnight blues? Why give up the option of playing in a band again like I used to do, like I loved to do, and like I've wanted to do ever since I stopped the last time? I live in a condo, that's partly to blame. People love good musicians but they don't love bad musicians trying to get good. I'm not bad at music, but I wasn't getting any better with my axe collecting dust under the bed. Other reasons? Time. Women. Realism. Priorities. Bills. Sleep. Fatigue. Laziness.

When I bought my first electric guitar at age 16 -- a black enamel Sebring -- it was so full of potential that it seemed to keep its charge even when it wasn't plugged in. Its heavy wood and wire-wound pickups contained all of the undeconstructed potential of sound and optimism that I needed to fuel and funnel that mad late-teen frenzy toward self-assertiveness, personal understanding, and experimentation. That heavy gauge neck was the cannon aimed at the mountain that would unleash an avalanche of pussy and ram me as far up the fuckhole of life as I could possibly get until I couldn't climb out again without a sheepish grin and wink. Here I am.

*grin*

*wink*

I met great people playing rock and roll. I lost good hearing to those slamming amps and somewhere in the screaming feedback howl I got as close to folks as close gets. Touching someone's mind through music is as intimate as the finest conversation. Its a type of connectivity that doesn't rely on verbiage or explanation. The moment you try to explain it, its gone.

Altogether I guess it doesn't matter much. Its just another milestone to note and nod at as it passes me by. I wouldn't have sold the thing if I cared so much about it or what it represented. I've changed and life looks different than it did when I bought it. I haven't given up music entirely. I've still got my 6 string. And even if I forget how to play all other music someday, there will always be Bob Dylan.

High Desert Dreams

So me and Jerzy B were busting through the dry arroyos and sandy bottoms just east of the main ridge of the San Bernardinos. It was early summer and he was hunched behind the wheel of a black VW Jetta. We were on a road mysteriously called Japatul whose sporadic asphalt attested to its previous place among the known roads of civilization. The farther you went, worse it got until petered out altogether and turned into a hardscrabble mezzanine of washouts and pits. Every so often someone from the county or the BLM would come through and scrape it, causing it to sink ever lower beneath the floor of the desert. Someday it will disappear forever into the sage brush and joshua trees.

To get there from L.A. you take 14 to Palmdale to the Pearblossom Highway to Main Street Hesperia to Rock Creek Road to some turnoff with a white picket fence to a road that runs beside steadily declining houses with dirt yards to Japatul itself, and from Japatul to Bowen Ranch road which runs out at the ranch and leaves you within easy hiking distance of the Deep Creek hot springs.

Deep Creek originates out of Lake Arrowhead in the high country and falls for 23 remote miles through the back canyons along steep ravines and out of the way fishing trails. At the point at which it hits the Pacific Crest Trail (which runs from Baja to Canada), it meets a small collection geothermal vents. Somebody over the years has channeled the spring water into several rough rock pools that form a gradient from scalding hot (in "The Crab Cooker") to deliciously warm to Deep Creek itself, which is either lukewarm or frigid depending on the year. I've had my share of adventures at Deep Creek, and been there with nearly every friend I ever had and some I never had but wished I did. Somebody even said the Manson family spent a summer there. Anyway, it was this legendary confluence of water that Jerzy B and I were either returning from or heading toward (I forget which) that afternoon on Japatul road.

"What do you suppose 'Japatul' means?" I said, hitting a pipe somebody had brought along. With every jounce and swerve, the flame shot dangerously close to my face.

"Its probably Indian," B said.

"India Indian, or American Indian? Japatul sounds like a place in India. Or maybe the Conquistadors named it when Coronado came through."

So far we had been going in a more or less straight line down the road, subject only to the difficulty of smoking and driving. The Jetta took the rocks and potholes in stride, an unnecessary testament to the quality of German engineering.

B turned up the stereo. "Hang on," he said.

"Hmm?" I said, flame again dangling at the end of my nose.

B wrenched the wheel sideways, sending me hard against the window. The Jetta shot out across the desert floor, somehow finding its wheels amid the softpacked dirt. Recognizing that slowing in sand was a fatal option for any subsequent motility, B smacked down the accelerator and launched us off into the scrub. After plowing thus for several minutes over boulders and cacti and the stubs of old fences, the brush opened up into a weird flat punctuated by the ruins of an ancient Mexican pueblo.

"What..?" someone articulated.

B slammed on the brakes. We stumbled out of the car to stare.

It was incredible. Broken, bullet riddled walls jutted out of sandy nothingness, smooth Moorish columns swept gracefully into the sky. Crumbled, cracked plaster had fallen intact to the desert floor, revealing brown adobe beneath. It was straight out of Revolutionary Mexico.

As we stood, stupefied, the sun made its course down the dry swale to the West. We half expected a phantom Zapata and gang to emerge from the dust, sombreros pulled low, bandoleers across the chests, shambling in line for a grim black and white photograph.

If there were clues among the broken glass and occasional bits of metal littering the earth floor, I do not recall, but eventually it became clear what we had discovered: we were among the ruins of a dead shopping center -- a pseudo-Spanish mockup strip mall. Someone with high desert dreams, sensing potential at the end of the end of the road, had built it and waited, but it had failed and fallen to ruin and been shot full of holes by desert rats, until it finally it resembled exactly what it had intended to imitate in the first place. Life mimicking art mimicking life. There's poetry in it, I'm sure, and justice, and I'm sure if Jerzy B and I hadn't made it out of that sand a few minutes later, somebody would be crossing our bleached bones one of these years, unaware that they too were about to contribute to the ever-increasing ambiance of the place.

Somehow between then and now, first grade that is, I lost the ability to shoot rays out of my eyes.

I would sit in Ms. Simm's class and stare very hard across the room, opening and closing my eyelids...very...slowly, allowing the silent rays to pulse across the room, skimming over the tops of dowel-sized pencils and oversized crayons, into the unsuspecting minds of my multiple amores. Even then I knew that love was a thing of the mind and not the heart.

[Aside: anybody have any ideas as to why the younger a kid is, the larger the crayons they give them? When I was in first grade, when my hand was no bigger than a little kids hand, they gave me the fattest, heftiest crayons on the planet. I mean, I had to lean into them just to get them properly broken.]

Anyway, those rays were how I got Tiffany Keast to be my queen in the Los Cerritos second-grade rendition of "The Nutcracker". I shot love rays at her for our entire first year together and then, upon my ascention to the throne the following year, she became my wife. Oh, how I lorded over my subjects during that production, doing whatever a dottering eight year old King does with a paper mache crown and pseudo-ermine cloak. I strutted, I puffed, I stole secret glances at my wife's powder-white hair and indominable fanny. I even had to hug her during the production and, though in brevity it rivalled the fastest hug in the entire history of hugdom, to us it represented the consummation of our everlasting and unrequitted love.

I haven't had much luck producing eye rays since then. I think when you get older you get a rheumy film coating your pupils that interferes with ray effectiveness.

(email me any thoughts at sailingacrossamerica@hotmail.com)

It came to me in a flash yesterday while I was ascending a very steep, very hot incline in the Blue Ridge mountains. Joanne was sweltering up the hill behind me, Natty was oozing up the slope in front, the 8 glasses of water I should have drunk that day were pouring out of my pores anyway. We were high above Harper's Ferry, at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Patomac Rivers, West Virginian flea-market treasure still on the mind from the morning, conversation punctuated by gulps of oxygen. With the force of an epiphany, I suddenly knew what it was I had been missing all these years. All through my twenties I had been searching for it -- that something, that nagging something that was always there at the edge of the mind to be touched upon, but never realized fully and never fully trusted as a genuine mandate or discovery. But yesterday, inspired by the potential of a great West Virginian Flea Market (you know, the sort of place where men in neon orange baseball caps hawk everything from Hummel rip-offs to plastic flowers to vintage rifles), and the rarified air of a great and historic mountain chain, there was no doubt of what it was I needed.

I needed a pith helmet.

You know, one of those great tulip-shaped caps of the late English Empire or the Vietnamese Army, of proud explorers slogging through the malarial wastes of Africa, of the doomed relief expedition of Gordon, of Doctor Livingstone, Rudyard Kipling, of Robert Clive and the Siege of Arcott (keeping that little subcontinent out of the filthy hands of the filty French and under the watchful eye of the benevolent Brits). Yes, this is what I have needed all along in my journeys but never had.

Helooo ebay...

Although you may consider it just my usual tendancy toward floccinaucinihilipilification, I must make this case:

In N' Out Burger might be the best burger around, but it is losing it.

Ok wait wait. Before you start throwing cyber shoes at me and decrying the corruption of my tastebuds at the hands of infamous East Coast Cuisine (Hogies, Utz, etc.), let me say this: California still has the best food per square mile in the nation, hands down. But I won't make that case here because it would involve a journey of thousands of miles and multiple years of culinary exploration. When I get the expense account, maybe I'll persue it. But In N' Out: for those of you not from California, or vegitarians from anywhere, In N' Out is quite simply the best hamburger on the planet. Take all of your White Castles, all of your Crysals, McShytehole's, whatever, and toss them in the trunk for a one way ride to the bottom of Lake Michegan. That In N Out Burger is the best is Indesputable Fact #1, from which all relativists can base any additional knowledge. But it is losing it. Last week I ate two different burgers from two separate locations and got limp fries and a burger with lukewarm lettuce, lukewarm meat and a soggy bun. This is not the standard I've come to expect from In N Out. Ordinarily they serve up a burger with ice cold lettuce, piping hot meat, a crispy bun, and brown, fresh fries. The sad thing is, In N Out has miles and miles to fall before it touches its nearest competition.

Howdy folks. I'm back. 11 days of High Sierra air and sultry L.A. smog have done wonders for me. I'm a new man. Well, not really. I'm still the same bastard I was before I left, just not as desperate for a vacation. I had all sorts of revalations to share with you all regarding my trip etc. etc. but I can't remember them right now. Here's the main thing:

This morning I drove to work with something in my shoe. Something hard and painful biting into the pad of my left foot. I hobbled into the office, grunted at my boss, and ripped my shoe off. I found a pistachio nut inside. Ever try walking with a pistachio in your shoe? Not recommended. It was the last vestige of an erstwhile evening spent quaffing dark german beer and eating melba toast & gorp with Nate. We fought the good fight against the dread pirate booze and managed to stay afloat long enough to sink with honor. We watched "The Drunken Master" (which turned into a drinking game -- every time Jackie Chan took a swig of his jug, so did we). J came home and took one look at us in our fighting stance (beer in hand, sea shanties not far from foam-flecked lips) and shook her head. "You good to drive?" she asked me a few minutes later when it became clear that we would have to run out on an errand. "No."

Anyway, the pistachio in the shoe reminded me of how good we have it here in America. A guy I met on Semester at Sea took a day trip to Cambodia when we were in Saigon. Folks went to go take snapshots of the "killing fields" and buy souvenir bombshell ashtrays and this guy went along. He climbed a large mound of earth somewhere outside of Pnom Penh and felt something in his shoe biting into his feet. He upturned the shoe and a tooth fell out. A human tooth. So it goes.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and alienate at least 33% of you, so be prepared. If you get pissed off, try yelling at your monitor very loudly and I might hear. (If you attempt this and I do not respond, try shaking my limb very vigorously. If I *still* do not respond, I'm probably just ignoring you because I know that I am right, as I've been collecting evidence for many years now.). Here it is:

Old movies suck.

Yes, I said it. It is now off my chest and I am now going to back it up. Take 'Octopussy'. This is a James Bond movie. James Bond movies are classics. When I was in 5th grade, 'Octopussy' was the pentultimate in moviemaking ventures -- the best of the best. Bond was the suave, effite, macho agent-god of free men everywhere.
I saw it for the first time a few weeks ago. Except for some very clever one-liners (that even put Shwartzenegger's pithy "I'll be beck" to shame), it was god-awful. The pacing was too hurried -- every scene had Bond in some disbelievable quandry: getting chased by a hunter on an elephant in India, avoiding midgets with buzzsaws, disarming a nuke in West Berlin. Secondly, the Russian villains were so cheaply two dimensional and the women so weak and helpless, that I wanted to know: are there any characters in this movie, or just cardboard peeled away from cereal boxes and pasted onto my TV?

Then I saw a Bogie movie. Bogie is a classic, right? He's the main mack from 1940 or whenever. I saw 'The Long Goodbye' or some such Raymond Chandler adaptation. Blah. Boring. Confusing. Uninspired. I saw 'The Citizen Caine' mutiny in which Bogie plays a deranged ship captain. There were a few good scenes, but Bogie, wasn't convincing.

And the soundtracks.

*shudders*

The soundtracks in old movies, from the bleating of dissonant horns to the jauntily trilling flutes in the middle of high drama, does absolutely nothing other than annoy. Henry Mancini -- the lauded padre of movie soundtracks -- should be drowned in a tub of apples.

Psycho? Saw it first two weeks ago. Except for an absolutely brilliant scene in the middle of the movie when the detective questions Norman Bates, even Psycho let me down. I pegged the ending from the get-go. I didn't even blink when the woman got slashed in the shower. (That tiny light-gray film running down the drain is supposed to be blood? The famous blood for which Hitchcock used Hershey's syrup?) Then, crime of all crimes at the end of a pretty good (but not great) movie: some yahoo psychologist whom we've never seen -- some "expert" that we are supposed to trust because he is called a doctor by a judge, comes out and unecessarily EXPLAINS THE WHOLE FRIGGIN PLOT in psychobabble. Good god. Talk about hitting the audience over the head with a board.

I saw some supposedly famous Orson Welles movie "Touch of Evil". Good idea, lousy execution. It was something of a murder mystery but in the end it didn't appantly matter whodoneit because the bad guy was offhandedly arrested offscreen. Wee. Starsky and Hutch had more existentialism than Orson Welles.

Wait, you cry. You shake your head. These movies were breakthrough movies. They were defining films. They pushed the envelope. Shee-it. I'm sure some caveman had a square wheel for awhile before he realized that a circle worked better, doesn't mean I want to haul my hay to market with one.

Oh yes, lest I forget. The reason I launched this half-assed tirade in the first place is because of the crime that flashed before my eyes (for 90 minutes) last night: "Planet of the Apes II: Under the Planet of the Apes". Wow. Another spaceman falls from the sky. Gets chased by apes. Witnesses some of the worst acting in the history of the planet of the humans as he watches the evil Ape general decry the humans in the forbidden zone, leaves, gets captured and escapes (all in 5 minutes before you even have a chance to care), and finds a bunch of mutant humans with mind-control abilities living underground. These mutants worship an atomic bomb in a ceremony that lasts even longer than *real* church, and then the good guys die and the bomb goes off. *Yawn*. The drama was so flat that I almost had to buy a Ferarri and drive very fast away from my VCR. (note: I watched the first one the night before. Except for the equally atrocious acting, and the same totally pointless, vacuous mute bombshell needing to be forever led from danger by the hand, it was a vastly superior overrated movie.)

But wait, you say, many new movies suck, too! Ever see 'Independence Day' or 'Jurrasic Park' or "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"? Yeah, well these movies don't presume to be classics. People don't rave about them for years and build entire cults around them. Sure, I like kitch as much as the next. I like kamp well enough. But kamp doesn't do much besides make me chuckle slightly and be thankful that I never got taken to the cleaners when whatever it was was supposed to be good. 'Superman'? Gag. Ick. Icky. 'Star Wars'? (Mark Hammil would be shot by any modern director.) Why did people feel that these movies were good? Modern movies, even the worst hack-job, the shallowest, superfluous, teenybopper mutant ninja power ranger flick has superior acting and dialogue and plotting.

Yes. Old movies suck. Dreadfully. Unquestionably. Except Alien.

I'll be gone all next week, into the mountains. Send your hate mail to sailingacrossamerica@hotmail.com

Here's my advice to you, whoever you are, whatever it is: get over it.

"What," you say, looking around guiltily, "Get over what?"

You know. You've been on about it for so long. Its always there, in your mind. Just forget about it. It ain't worth it. It ain't worth 5 seconds more of your time. Go outside. Take a deep breath. Its all gone.

Its 2:33. I'm still alive but I just had an epiphany: I'm far...far too lazy to be funny in this medium. What I really need is a personal recorder who wanders behind me with a pad of paper and a pen and keeps track of all of the funny shit I say. He/she would have to post it on the web or write it down in novel-format or make a movie out of it. Any takers? You'd have to have a sense of humor or you wouldn't know when I was being so damn funny, but you couldn't be so great that I had to smack you down on a regular basis. Plus, you'd have to entertain me when I was lying listlessly on the couch wishing I could change your face with a remote control. Good social skills would be a plus so when I was busy being the life of the party, people wouldnt have to pause in their laughter to ask 'why is there a smelly dwarf with a memo pad following you around?'. A car might be nice, too, in case I was ever stranded on the East Side with a hangover and a hankering for a West Side muffin.

It is 8:51 a.m. and subtlety is already out the window. This day is done, as far as I'm concerned. I'm done with it.

I shambled out of bed this morning, late, dehydrated, foggy. I made it to the kitchen with no disasterous occurances, breaking nothing. Too tired to turn the light on, I started a pot of coffee in the dark and fell into the couch while waiting for it to brew. It brewed. I smelled the delicious, invigorating aroma of hot coffee pervading my house. It smelled strong and good, like a thing wholesome, an anchor to my day.

When it was done percolating, I got up off the couch, went to the kitchen, and flipped the light on, only to behold a most unbodacious sight. Somehow the coffee had missed the pot. Entirely. The pot was off-center and that formerly strong, good liquid was now strong, bad liquid. It covered the entire (white) countertop, much of the floor and had fallen between the sink and the counter, where I found it mixing with the smelly gray ooze at the base of the trashcan. It had also fallen into a box of trashbags, filling it and saturating the flimsy box to a point of disintigration.

Faced with this scene of horror, I did what anyone would do in my place: I decided to make another pot of coffee. I got out the beans, I got out the grinder and plugged it in (risking electric shock by standing in puddled coffee in my socks), I ground the beans, I filled the pot with water. Then I realized I was out of coffee filters. All 250 of them that I had bought over a year ago. Ran out.

I debated sucking the coffee out of the towels as I cleaned, but the tempurature just wasn't right. Instead I went to Riverside Coffee andI ordered a very large cup to go.

I took it to work. I sat down. I got most of the first mouthful into my mouth and the rest onto my shirt. I moaned silently, cursing the fates, and decided to share my morning with you, my loyal reader(s). I flipped on the computer. I wrote. I spell checked. The blog program crashed. I lost everything. I cringed. I re-wrote it. Here it is.

It is 9:22. If I make it to 10:00, I'll call it a day.

Sometimes I'm not much of a conversationalist. Here's the scene:

It was a nice, lazy Sunday around 1:30 or so. J and I were sitting in the cool recesses of a nearby Japanese restaurant, munching vegitarian sushi and talking the usual lines. J isn't into wasabi, but she likes everything else. We practically have to fight over the pickled ginger.

"I like my job..." she was telling me. (She works in a library)

MeanwhiIe, I was swirling an avocado roll through the soy sauce, humming quietly to myself.

"...we've got some great old photographs of Baltimore in the 30s, and a whole collection of Peter Fonda shots from when he was an amateur at the (x) theater."

Swirling the roll betwen the blades of the chopsticks.

"We have a first edition Hemingway worth $65,000. Its in the vault," she was saying.

"That's alot of money," I said.

"Next time we're at the store, we should get some frozen edomami," she was saying. "All you have to do is heat it up in the microwave and salt it. Mmmm!"

I nodded. That sounded good."Say," I said, "what if I jammed my chopsticks into your face and plucked out an eye ate it and squeezed the jelly between my teeth?"

She looked at me with a mixture of astonishment and revulsion.

"That's gross," she said.

"Just making conversation," I muttered, popping the avocado roll into my mouth.

So I've gotten my first informal feedback from a "hedgie" (is this the term? I've seen it refer to folks who read blogs. If I'm using it incorrectly, please someone alert me at sailingacrossamerica@hotmail.com). My feedback went something like this: "liked your blog, a bit heavy on the (anti)christian theme."

Ok, point taken. Thing is, it was just a moment of irritation that got solidified into a post. Ordinarily such moods flare and dissappear with little to show for them but a few grumbled words caught in the nosey ears of my neighbors. Not with my new permanet (and instantaneous) outlet, I am like a deer caught in the headlights. Just don't ask me to justify myself fifteen minutes after I've posted something. If I haven't forgotten about it by that time, its probably because I'm trying to figure out how to erase it from my blog. (btw, this stupid blog represents an end to all of my latent political ambitions)

Anyway, the thing is, since the hedgie I am referring to also happens to be my attorney (who is a reknowned swindler and con-man with a silver tongue) he may contrive to charge me for this particular opinion. I still owe him something in the neighborhood of $87,500 + interest for all of the advice I got on our recent expedition to find Jesus. (btw we didn't find Him, though we fdid find a totally disfunctional amusement park, and a pretty kickass resort hotel in Orlando run by a cadre of large luminous fish (the Koi) who also rule the universe. But that is a different blog for a different day. What I would rather talk about is my drive home from soccer Friday night.)

Here I am, 27 and formerly fit. Sure, I'm still 'lookin good' (*shucks chin with knuckles in the mirror*), but I have spent numerous years living off of my laurels: drinking, carousing, ingesting controlled substances in the name of science, and not gaining a pound. Not so much lately, but it has taken its toll. I'm still skinny by many standards, but its a selective sort of skinny -- not uniformly present throughout my physique.

So I work out at the gym, pump iron, run on little bikes, play raquetball. But lately I've been playing soccer. I get out in an amateur county league on Friday nights and play. But this Firday was different. I spent 47 out of 55 minutes on the bench. I got five minutes to play toward the end of the first half (I took a halfhearted shot on goal) and got a big 3 minutes at the end of the second half, in which I passed the ball to our star forward (who shot the ball and missed). That was my Friday night. I recieved very little playing time for all of my bench efforts, which consisted mainly of swatting mosquitos and watching my teammates lose a soccer game. I could bitch much more about how much I might have contributed had I been given the chance, etc, or how I could have spent my Friday night doing something worthwhile, but lets be honest: I wouldn't have done shit to help my team win, and I wouldn't have done shit else with a Friday night except maybe go to a movie or make polite conversation with friends. (note to file: yeah, I'd like to pretend I go to museums and shit in my spare time. Truth is, museums are rarely worth the effort of getting there, parking, and staring at whatever for 45 minutes until you/I/we are/am bored. And jazz shows. Don't get me started about jazz.)

Point being: life is becoming very sedate.

Driving home after the game, atmosphere 10 degrees too hot for 10:30 at night, air moist and smells like an old sponge. I see a park lit up across the dark fields, hot white in the mist and I'm cruising down back lanes 10 mph slower than I used to drive because I'm too afraid of getting a speeding ticket (worried that if I go any slower I might get a parking ticket).

The old me: zooming too fast, lovin' the heat, radio blasting freedom rock (Fleetwood Mac, Eagles, U2), checkin out the honeys as I slide past in my Ford Escort, hair blowin in the wind, lights on the city remind me of old girls left behind. Any night in the old days I could have driven until sunrise and found myself in Idaho with a strange woman and a story to never tell my grandchildren.

The new me: worried about driving too fast, wishing the radio would shut the fuck up, receeding hairline blowing in the wind (please don't blow too hard, Mr. Wind), thinking about how old the lady in the car next to me looks (thinking about how old I must look to her),

The old romance is gone. Its gone from the music. Its gone from the night. Even the old staple muse of a hot summer night just leaves me weary and wishing for silence and an end to the road. Strangely enough (orperhaps oddly), I'm not sure I care. Electric nights used to be my bread and butter, but I think I've lost the mood. There may never be strange women wrapped in the night and mysterious hideaways to escape to at speeds unfit for vehicle or aircraft. It depresses me in a philosophical sort of way, but I don't really feel bad about it. That's just it, I don't feel much of anything. And going home to something comfortable after a long night on a bench seems pretty alright.

Heh. If I'm losing my flair for danger, maybe they'll revoke my secret agent license and give me a lawn chair and a basting brush to conduct some serious barbecue business with. That's the best thing about summer evenings anymore as far as I can tell. And as long as I still need to eat (and as long as I have at least two teeth in my head), I'll still be able to get sentimental over a big, juicy rib-eye, or some sizzling Polish Snausage. (for a very specialized cut of meat go to manbeef.com)

For my next entry, stay tuned for an update on my latest business idea: personal dingleberry solvent. I'm looking for testers willing to provide me with some solid feedback. (note: I said testers, not tasters)